The Lights
I did not call my son. I want to be clear about that, because it is the question people ask.
I did not call that night or the next day. I do not know whether I will. The number is in the cash drawer, and the card is in my shirt pocket, soft at the corners, and every morning I take it out and read it once.
I get up at four too.
He has not forgiven me. I have never asked him to, and I would not know how to say it if I did. What I have now is smaller, and I find that I can live inside it.
My son carried a card for a day. He gave it back through a stranger. He wrote six words. I have turned those six words over a thousand times, and the thing I keep arriving at is this: a boy who gets up at four is a boy who is still awake.
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The Saturday after the fish fry, at ten minutes to four, I stood on my porch in the dark and warmed the padlock with a lighter, and the stars were out over Tamarack Lake as sharp as nail heads.
I got the door open. I switched on the lights over the counter. The tackle wall came up out of the dark, and the rod hung in its two brass hooks, cork grip dark and smooth.
At six Roscoe came in with his paper. At seven a truck from Midland pulled in for minnows. At eight Verna Haskell called to say the first twelve jackets had been ordered, and that Lowell had come to the hall on his own to hand her his check.
In the spring they will hang by the public dock, bright orange, forty of them, with two names on a board above them. Some boy will take one down on a cold May morning, and his father will check the buckles twice.
I did not do that to be forgiven. I did it because I finally understood what the sentence cost, and a man ought to pay what a sentence costs.
I still open at four. People ask. They say, Doss, why not sleep in? I tell them the lights were for Junia once, who knew me better than I knew myself. I tell them they are for a boy who gets up at four too.
A dreamer does not drown everybody in the boat. That was the lie, and I carried it more than forty years, and it cost me nearly everyone I loved. The truth is that a boat is only as safe as the man on the dock who will hold the line, check the weather with you, and be there when you come back in.
I hold the line now. The lights are on.