The Jon Boat We Took to His Mother

“The water’s not going to wait two hours,” I said.

“No,” he said. “It’s not.”

We looked at each other for about three seconds. We had been married fourteen years. We did not need to say any more than that.

We have an old green jon boat, fourteen feet long, flat-bottomed and dented, with a fifteen-horse outboard that Gage keeps running mostly out of stubbornness.

We use it on the river for catfish in the summer, when there is a river.

We had two good ones and one old orange one that smelled like a basement. I took all three. I put the yellow one on right over my gray sweatshirt and buckled it.

Then he went into the house and came back out with his orange county cap on, the one he wears every working day.

I almost laughed. He looked like he was going to grade a road.

“I feel better in it,” he said, when he saw my face.

I called Ferris again from the truck. Voicemail again. I left a second message, shorter: “Ferris, it’s Tamsin. The river is over your mother’s road. Gage and I are going in with the boat. Call us.”

The gravel road down to the bottom runs a mile and a half from the blacktop.

About halfway down, it dips toward the river field, and that is where the water had come up over it. It was a brown, flat sheet, moving slowly from right to left.

A deputy’s car was parked across the road at the top of the dip, lights going. I knew the deputy.

His name is Merle, and he went to school with Gage. He got out when he saw the boat trailer behind us.

“Gage, I can’t let you drive down there,” he said.

“I’m not going to drive,” Gage said. “I’m going to boat.”

Merle looked at the water. He looked at the sky, which had gone gray again, low and heavy. He looked at me in my yellow vest.

“Oleta’s still in there,” he said. “I’ve been calling her on the loudspeaker from the edge. I saw her on the porch, I think. She waved. She won’t come down. I couldn’t get closer than this in the car.”

“Then we’ll go get her,” I said.

Merle took his hat off and put it back on. Then he moved his car.

He helped Gage back the trailer down to the edge of the water, standing in it up to his shins, waving him back with one hand.

Gage climbed in and dropped the outboard. It took four pulls to start. I have never in my life wanted to hear an engine so badly.

On the fifth pull it caught and coughed and settled into its old steady rattle.

I climbed in over the bow. Merle held the boat steady for me with one hand on the gunwale. His hand was shaking, I noticed, or maybe the boat was.

“I’ll be right here,” he said. “If you’re not back in forty-five minutes, I’m calling everybody in the county.”

“Call them now,” Gage said. “In case.”

Merle nodded and went for his radio. Gage turned us around in the water and pointed the bow toward the house.

From the dip in the road to Oleta’s porch was about a quarter mile, straight across Ferris’s hayfield.

On a dry day you could walk it in five minutes. That afternoon it looked like an ocean.

The water was the color of coffee with too much milk in it, and it was moving.