The Jon Boat We Took to His Mother

Not fast in the field, but steady, pushing everything a little to the left. Bits of corn stalks and grass and an empty feed sack floated past.

And there were the bales. Ferris’s round bales, the ones he had been so proud of, sat in their long rows across the field with the brown water halfway up their sides. Row after row of them, like stones in a creek.

I did not feel glad about it. I want to say that plainly.

I looked at those bales and thought about Ferris driving past them slow, and all I felt was a kind of tired sorrow.

Gage kept the motor low, barely above an idle. He stood at the stern with the tiller in one hand and his eyes on the water ahead.

“Watch for fence,” he said. “There’s a five-wire fence along the old lane, and a crossfence somewhere in here. If we catch the prop on barbwire, we’re paddling.”

So I knelt in the bow on the wet aluminum with my knees aching and leaned out and watched the water. Every ripple looked like a post. Every swirl looked like wire.

“Post,” I said, and pointed. Gage eased us left. “Another one. There’s the line.” I could see the tops of the posts now, a row of gray stubs barely sticking out, and the top wire glinting just under the surface.

Gage ran us along the fence until he found the gap where the old lane gate stood open.

Ferris always left that gate open for the hay trucks. I have never been so thankful for a man’s habit.

We slid through the gap with a foot to spare on each side. The water got a little deeper past the fence, and the current pulled harder. Gage gave the motor a little more.

The house sat on its rise ahead of us, white and square, the way it had sat for a hundred years.

The water had come up the yard to within a few feet of the porch steps. Another foot and it would be in the house.

Then I saw her.

Oleta was standing on the porch, right at the top of the steps, like she was waiting for somebody to pull into the yard for coffee.

She had on a pink housecoat, the quilted kind, and over that a blue rain jacket zipped all the way up.

Her white hair was pinned back the way she always wore it. At her feet sat a plastic cat carrier.

When she saw us, she lifted one hand and waved, the way you would wave at a neighbor going by on the road.

“Oleta,” I called across the water. “We’re coming to get you.”

“I know you are,” she called back. “I’ve been watching you come.”

Gage brought us in slow toward the steps. The yard was full of floating things, a plastic bucket, a garden hose uncoiling, her tomato cages tipped over and bobbing.

He had to work the motor back and forth to keep the boat from turning sideways.

“Grab the porch post when you can,” he said.

I reached and missed, and reached again and got it, and held on with both hands while Gage shut the motor down and tied us off to the railing with the rope.

“Why didn’t you go when the deputy called?” I asked her. I did not mean it as a scolding, and she did not take it as one.