The Van I Bought for Dad

“We’ve floated with you twenty-one years,” Gil said. “I wasn’t going to float with anybody else. You know that.”

Dad could not answer. He nodded.

The scouts loaded up. I climbed in, and the sliding door thumped shut, and I started the engine. From the back bench, a boy of about nine, small for his age with a cowlick, leaned forward between the seats.

“Mister,” he said to Dad. “Is it true there’s a cave on this river?”

I held my breath. Dad had not spoken a full sentence in six weeks.

My father turned his head, very slowly, until he could see the boy. He took a breath. And then, one word at a time, with a space between each, he said:

“Round… Spring. Big… cave. I’ll… show you.”

By the time we reached Pulltite that afternoon, my father had spoken more words than he had in a month.

He did not tell the story well. It came out in pieces, with long gaps, and half the time I finished the sentence for him from the driver’s seat. But the nine scouts listened to every piece. They hung over the seat backs and waited for each word to arrive.

He told them the Current is one of the cleanest rivers in the country because springs feed it, cold from deep underground. He told them the cave at Round Spring was a mile of dark rock and that he had gone in with a candle when he was twelve.

The boy with the cowlick was named Micah. When we stopped at Pulltite, Micah climbed out and walked around to Dad’s window.

“Mister Hollis,” he said. “Can I ride with you on the way back?”

“Always,” Dad said. It was the clearest word he had said all day.

I took the van back up for the second load, and Dad rode up front the whole way, and when I pulled into the lot at five o’clock he was asleep with his cap tipped over his eyes. I sat beside him with the engine off for ten minutes, because I could not stand to wake him.

That was the first trip. By the end of the first week, I had done eleven.

I will be honest that those first summer weeks were hard.

I got up at four. I worked clinic shifts when I could, and when I couldn’t I drove shuttles from seven in the morning until the last float came off the river at dusk. Dwayne spent his off days loading canoes. My daughter Brooke, sixteen, who had planned to spend the summer at the pool, took the phone and learned to write a reservation in pencil.

Dad rode every single trip.

Some days he rode two trips. Some days he fell asleep before Pulltite and I let him. At his checkup in Poplar Bluff, a young doctor told me his speech was better than they had projected for ten weeks out. “Whatever he’s doing,” he said, “he can keep doing it.”

A word came back every few days. In June it was “Pulltite,” and “bluff,” and “gravel bar.” In early July it was “Jodi, you’re going the wrong way,” which I will treasure all my life, because I was in fact going the wrong way, and I had not heard him correct me since April.