The Jon Boat We Took to His Mother

“The car wouldn’t make it through the yard by the time I heard him,” she said. “And I wasn’t leaving without my girls.”

She nodded down at the carrier. Inside it were her two cats, a big orange one and a little gray one, crammed in together, both of them glaring at me through the wire door and growling like a pair of hornets in a jar.

“I couldn’t get the second carrier down off the closet shelf,” she said. “So they’re sharing. They are not happy about it.”

I laughed. I could not help it. Something about that old woman standing on a porch in a flood, worried about her cats getting along, broke something loose in my chest that had been tight since August.

“Is there anything else you need from the house?” Gage asked. “Pills? Glasses?”

“My pills are in my raincoat pocket,” she said, and patted it. “My glasses are on my face. My Bible is in the other pocket. I’ve got everything that matters.”

Gage climbed up onto the porch beside her. He picked up the cat carrier and handed it down to me. The cats complained bitterly. I set the carrier on the middle seat.

Then he took Oleta by one elbow, and I reached up and took both of her hands from below, and between us we brought her down those steps.

She stepped off the bottom step into the boat the way you would step into a church pew, careful and dignified, like she had done it every Sunday of her life. The boat rocked a little and settled.

She sat down on the middle seat and pulled the carrier onto her lap and held it with both arms.

I helped her into the old orange life vest and buckled it under her raincoat, over that pink housecoat.

“I look a sight,” she said.

“You look fine,” I told her.

Gage untied us and climbed back in the stern and started the motor. It caught on the second pull this time.

I got back up in the bow on my knees, and I reached one arm back and set my hand on Oleta’s shoulder.

I did not plan to keep it there. I just did. And she reached up with one hand off the carrier and put her hand over mine and held it.

We started back across the field.

The current was with us going back, which made it easier and harder at the same time.

Gage had to keep the bow pointed a little upstream to hold our line toward the gap in the fence. The bales went by, one after another, dark with water.

Oleta looked at them for a long time. She did not say anything about them. Then she looked up at me.

“Did I ever tell you about my wedding day?” she asked.

“No, ma’am,” I said. “I don’t think you ever did.”

“June the tenth, 1961,” she said. “It rained. Not like this, but it rained all afternoon. My dress was borrowed from my cousin in Canton, and I was so scared of getting mud on it I wouldn’t get out of the car at the church.”

She smiled down at the cats.

“Ferris’s daddy came out with an umbrella, and he looked at that mud puddle between the car and the church steps, and he just picked me up and carried me through it. In his good Sunday shoes. Ruined them. He never bought another pair that nice.”

I kept my hand on her shoulder. Her fingers were cold over mine, and thin, and she held on tight.