The Jon Boat We Took to His Mother

“He was a hard man in some ways,” she said. “So is his son. But he carried me over that puddle, and I never forgot it. I think about it every time it rains.”

I leaned out and called the posts again, and he threaded us through the gap. Neither of us said anything for a minute.

“The whole way home that day,” Oleta went on, “the rain came down so hard you couldn’t see the road. And we sang. All the way home in that old car, we sang ‘Shall We Gather at the River.’ I don’t know why that one. It just came to us.”

She hummed a little of it, under her breath. Her voice was thin and wavery and perfectly on pitch. I could not sing along. My throat had closed up.

Ahead of us, I could see Merle standing at the edge of the water by his car, with two more trucks pulled up behind him now. Neighbors. Word travels fast on a scanner.

Gage brought us in to the road. Merle waded out in his uniform pants and caught the bow, and a man from up the road, an old friend of Oleta’s husband, came in after him and took the cat carrier.

Then Merle and Gage lifted Oleta out of the boat between them, as gently as if she were made of glass, and set her on her feet on the gravel.

Someone had brought a blanket. They put it around her shoulders over the raincoat.

She stood there in her wet slippers on that county road and looked back across the water at her house. It looked very small from there. The water had reached the porch steps.

Then she turned to me. She looked at me a long, long time, with those pale blue eyes that do not miss much.

“He charged you for that water,” she said. “Didn’t he.”

It was not a question. I did not answer it. I did not trust myself to say anything that would not sound like gloating, and I would not do that to her, standing in her wet slippers on that road.

But I did not answer, and that was answer enough for her. She nodded once, slowly, and pulled the blanket tighter.

“Well,” she said. “We’ll see about that.”

Merle offered to take her into town to his sister’s, or to the church, where they were setting up cots.

But Oleta said she would like to come home with us, if we would have her.

“I don’t want to sleep on a cot with the whole county looking at my curlers,” she said.

So we loaded the boat back on the trailer, and I put Oleta in the front seat of the truck with the heater turned all the way up, and the cats rode on the floor at her feet, still growling. Gage drove slow all the way home.

At home I ran her a warm bath and found her a flannel nightgown of mine that was too long for her.

I let the cats out in the spare room, where they promptly disappeared under the bed and stayed there.

I made her a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup, because that is what my mother made when anybody had a bad day.

She ate every bite and asked for a second cup of tea.

She called Ferris from our kitchen phone. I left the room. I heard her voice through the wall, low and steady.

She did not raise it. I do not know what she said, and I never asked.