The Float
After Ingvald paid us and the totes went into his cooler and Pete went home to sleep, I went back aboard the tug alone.
The cedar float was still sitting on the wheelhouse ledge where I had set it Wednesday. Arne’s initials were dry now, and the cedar had gone a soft gray.
I got a piece of tarred twine and a screw out of Arne’s toolbox. And I hung that float on the outside of the wheelhouse, right by the door, where you can see it when you come down the ramp.
Toivo came back down an hour later to check the lines. He saw it hanging there and stopped.
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“Good place for it,” he said.
“It’s where he’d want it,” I said. “Where he can see the lake.”
Toivo nodded. Then he said something I have thought about every day since.
“It’s also where Lyle can read it,” he said. “From the lot. Every time he drives by.”
I had not thought of it that way. But I did not take it down.
Since Then
We fished the rest of that summer without any more trouble. Not one cut line, not one missing staff. Whatever Lyle had planned, he gave up on it after that Friday.
Pete is talking about getting his captain’s papers. Toivo says he will retire when he is dead, which I believe. And I am still out there five days a week, in my yellow bibs, pulling nets.
I think about selling sometimes. I am not young. But every time I do, I come down that ramp in the morning and I see that cedar float hanging by the wheelhouse door, with A.L. burned into it.
And I think, not this year.
Arne said keep it if you can. So far, I can.
Solveig says I mend nets better than she does now. That is a lie, and a kind one, and I let her tell it.
The lake has been good to us this year. The whitefish are running strong. Ingvald says the price might even go up in the fall.
Every so often, when I am the last one off the dock in the late afternoon light, I reach up and touch that float before I go home.
It is a small thing. But it is ours, and we brought it back from the bottom of the lake ourselves, all of us together, and nobody can cut it loose again.