“I read two point oh on Pond One at three o’clock,” he said finally. His voice was rough. “Two point oh. I thought about last year. I thought about all of it floating again. I didn’t think. I just went and got them.”
“You went and got your son’s,” Thurman said. “In the dark. And you didn’t call.”
“I know it.”
“Marnie read one point one at daylight,” Thurman said. “Your grandson was on that bank at six o’clock in the morning pulling dead fish out of the water. That’s what your never again cost.”
Orrin did not argue. That was the thing I remember most. For all the years I had known him, Orrin Whitlock had argued every single thing.
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The price of feed, the rain, the preacher’s sermon. He did not argue this.
He turned to Boone. “Son.”
Boone waited.
“I’ll bring them back,” Orrin said. “All three. Today.”
“I know you will, Daddy,” Boone said quietly. “You’ll bring them back and hook them up yourself.”
Orrin nodded. He looked at me then, finally, sitting up on the tractor, and I looked back at him.
I did not say anything. I did not have anything I needed to say. Everything that needed saying had already been said, and not by me.
He walked back to his truck and drove off north.
I want to tell you that I felt triumphant, but I did not. I felt tired, and hot, and sad for him, a little.
Being shown up in front of your son and your oldest friend and the whole feed mill is a hard thing for a proud man.
But he had earned every bit of it, and I was not going to take any of it away from him by being soft.
The men from the mill had started drifting back by four. The man from Isola came back with more diesel nobody needed.
The father and his boy came back with a bag of ice.
The old man in the straw hat came back and sat in his pickup at the end of the levee with the windows down and the radio on low, just watching.
At 4:40, we heard a tractor coming down the section road.
It was Orrin, on his own big tractor, dragging the first aerator behind him on a chain. It slid along the gravel on its skids, its orange float bouncing.
Behind him came his hired man on a second tractor with the next one. Orrin came back for the third himself.
He did not ask for help. Boone started toward him once, and Orrin held up his hand, and Boone stopped.
It was something he needed to do himself, and every man on that levee understood it, even if none of them said so.
He dragged each aerator to its flat spot in the grass. He set each one by hand, squaring it to the water, checking the paddle depth with a stick the way he had taught Boone to do when Boone was twelve. He chained each one off to the anchor post.