Kendra pulled the contract out of the manila envelope and unfolded it on the table, and the red clasp rattled across the wood. She is a bookkeeper by trade, and she read the way bookkeepers read, from the bottom up. Her eyes stopped on the figure near the signature. “Eugene,” she said, “this says eleven million nine hundred thousand dollars.” I said, “That is the price they paid for the Hollow Shad, Kendra. The lure I carved in my garage in 1991.” She looked up. “The one in the tackle box in the shed?” I said, “The very same.” Travis, across from her, had stopped folding his piece of paper.
“Dad,” Travis said, and his voice cracked in the middle, “why did you not tell me?” I said, “Son, I wanted to know who you would be when you thought I had nothing. I have my answer.” Kendra set the contract down. She took the printout in her other hand. “Account ending in 5560,” she read. “Travis. That is the account you opened last year at the credit union. The one you said was for the boat fund.” Travis closed his eyes. “Kendra,” he said, “I can explain.” She said, “I hope you can. Because I have been explaining that account to my mother for two years.”
Travis rose and walked to the window and stood with his back to us, looking at the RV at the edge of the driveway, white and square in the late light. For a while he did not say anything. Then, to the glass, he said, “It started with the truck. I fell behind on the payment, and the retirement papers were sitting in the mail, and I thought, he does not even use it. I told myself I would stop after one month.” His shoulders began to shake. “I did not stop. I kept telling myself the next month would be the last.” Kendra whispered, “Thirty one months, Travis.”
A manila envelope hidden in an oven held a lure contract and a bank record, and gave one retired brakeman the afternoon to bring his son back to the river.
I got up from the table and stood beside my son at the window. I am not a talker. Thirty two years on the railroad will wear the talk out of a man. But I put my hand on his shoulder, and I said what I had rehearsed on a hundred lonely nights in that camper. “When your mother died, I thought I had lost everything. Then you said I could park in your driveway, and I thought, there is my boy. I held on to that for two years. I would have given you every penny of that check, Travis, if you had asked me. All you had to do was knock.”
He turned and wrapped his arms around me, an old man and a grown man, and we stood there in the kitchen with Kendra crying quietly at the table. “I am so sorry, Dad,” he said into my shirt. “I am so sorry.” His tears soaked right through the good Western shirt that June had ironed. I patted his back the way I used to when he was small and had woken from a nightmare. “I know it,” I said. “I know you are.” But I also said, because it needed saying, “Sorry is where it starts. It is not where it ends.”
The terms were simple. The account would be closed on Monday, and every payment redirected to me. Travis would repay what he had taken, out of his own wages, a set amount every month, and he would sell the bass boat he had bought with part of it. The lawyer I hired, a quiet man from Signal Mountain, drew up the papers. Kendra insisted on signing as a witness. And I had one more condition. “You will come fishing with me,” I told Travis. “Every Saturday, from now until the first frost, no phone. We will see what a man can learn on the river in a year.”
The boat sold within the week. Travis stood in the driveway with his hands in his pockets while the buyer, a retired schoolteacher, hitched it to his truck. Nobody said a word. The Railroad Retirement Board restored my annuity, with all the back payments, and I put down a deposit on a lake house on the Hiwassee. Small. Two bedrooms, a screened porch, and a dock. I told Travis he could keep the RV, since he seemed so fond of the driveway. He laughed for the first time in weeks, an awful rusty laugh, and I knew we had turned some small corner.
On the first Saturday, we put in at dawn. The mist lay on the water like cotton. Travis sat in the bow with a rod he did not know how to hold, and I sat in the stern and said nothing, which is the way my father taught me. For three hours, he caught nothing. Then something hit his line hard enough to bend the rod double, and he whooped, and I netted a four pound largemouth, and he held it up with both hands, grinning, wet to the elbows. “Dad,” he said, “I did that.” I said, “You did.” It was the first thing in two years that he had truly earned.
That winter, I taught him to carve. We sat at my old workbench, which I had moved to the lake house, with a block of basswood and a pocketknife. His first lure looked like a potato with eyes. His fifth looked like a fish. By spring, he had carved a Hollow Shad of his own, a little crooked, with a dent in the tail, and he painted it silver with a stripe of red. “Put your name on the bottom,” I told him. He wrote it in tiny letters with a fine brush. Travis Hale. I turned it over in my hand. It swam better than mine did.
The company that bought the Hollow Shad sent me a plaque in June, along with a case of the first production run, boxed in blue and white, with my face on the label. I hung the plaque in the screened porch. Under it, on a nail, I hung the lure my son had carved. Kendra visits on Sundays now, with a casserole and a stack of bookkeeping she does not need to do. Last week, I caught her on the dock, holding the lure that Travis carved up to the light. She said, “Eugene, do you think it would sell?” I said, “Child, it already did.”