The Jon Boat We Took to His Mother

“You did it because you dug that pond,” Gage said. “And you figured everybody else should have dug one too.”

Ferris looked at the ground.

“That’s about right,” he said. “That’s about all of it. And I said things in the church lot I had no business saying. About you two. Mother heard about it. Somebody told her, after.”

“I didn’t tell her,” Gage said.

“I know you didn’t,” Ferris said. “That’s the worst part. You didn’t tell anybody. You just paid me and went and got her.”

He was still holding the envelope out. His hand was not steady.

“Take it, Gage,” he said. “Please. I can’t sleep with it in the house.”

Gage looked over at me on the porch. I did not nod or shake my head. I just looked back at him. It was his cousin. It was his call.

Gage took the envelope. He did not open it or count it.

He put it in his shirt pocket, the same pocket Ferris had folded our check into on the first of August, and he buttoned the pocket.

“All right,” he said.

Then he held out his hand, and Ferris took it, and the two of them stood there by the corral shaking hands for longer than men usually do.

Neither one said anything else. I picked my beans back up so they would not see me crying.

Ferris walked back past the porch. This time he stopped at the bottom step and took off his cap.

“Tamsin,” he said. “Thank you for my mother.”

“You’re welcome, Ferris,” I said.

That was all. He put his cap back on and got in his truck and drove away.

We used that twenty-four hundred dollars for the property taxes, the way we had always meant to.

It came in a week before they were due. Gage said the Lord has a sense of timing, and I did not argue with him.

The next spring was dry again. Not as bad as the year before, but by July our stock dam was low and getting lower, and I was starting to write the little numbers on the calendar again.

One morning in the middle of July, I drove down the road past Ferris’s place on my way to check our rented pasture, and I saw it.

The gate on his pond lane was standing wide open, propped back with a big rock so the wind would not swing it shut.

There was nobody around. No note. No phone call. Just the gate, open, and the water shining down at the bottom of the lane.

I went home and told Gage. He drove down to look at it himself.

When he came back, he sat down at the kitchen table and took his orange cap off and turned it around in his hands for a while.

“Well,” he said. “I guess we’d better move the cows.”

Oleta is eighty-five now. She still lives in the white house on the rise, with a new furnace and a new bottom step and two cats who have never forgiven anybody for that carrier. She calls me every Sunday afternoon.

When it rains, she says, she thinks about two things. A man in good shoes carrying her over a mud puddle in 1961, and a girl in a yellow life vest holding her hand across a flooded hayfield.

I am hardly a girl. But I let her say it.

Our cows drink from his pond for free now, and he never said a word about it, he just left the gate open.