I held out the sticky note and read the name aloud. The man on the dock took off his cap and let out a long breath, the sound of someone setting down a heavy sack. “Gene Rudd,” he said. “Well, I will be.” His name was Cletus Barlow, he told me, and he repossessed boats for a living, mostly bass boats, mostly from men who had stopped answering the telephone. He did not own any lien. He was only hired. “Madam, the man who hired me is the father of your daughter in law. And he told me you knew all about it.” I looked down at my hands, and I sat on the bench at the end of the dock.
Under the name, the girl at the counter had written one more line, and I read it to him slowly, because I wanted to be sure. He is also the notary on the power of attorney. Cletus whistled low. “Mrs. Tate, that is why the lien got filed so quiet. A man cannot notarize his own loan, not and keep his commission.” He sat down beside me, and the dock creaked under his boots, and he told me what he knew. Gene Rudd had lent Dwayne twenty two thousand five hundred dollars in March, at a rate that would make a pawnbroker blush. The collateral was the boat of Wendell.
“Do you know what the money was for?” Cletus asked. I shook my head. “A lake house on Greers Ferry, with a boat slip. Your daughter in law sent your son the listing, and your son sent her father a promise.” I thought of the picture with the three little hearts. I thought of the pegboard of Wendell, and the envelopes counted out one at a time over five years, and a man who saved a lure for thirty years because it was good enough. “Mr. Barlow,” I said, “you will not be touching that boat today. I would like you to wait here. I have a telephone call to make.”
A yellow sticky note and a metal flake blue boat gave one widow the length of a long Friday to bring her son back to the truth in Hot Springs.
I gave my terms to Dwayne over the telephone, in the voice I used on a boy who tracked mud across my clean floor. He would be at my dock by six that evening, with Kristi, and with her father, Gene Rudd, in the same truck. Nobody would argue and nobody would hang up. Dwayne said he had a closing. I said he had a closing at six o clock and it was at my dock. Then I made a pitcher of tea and put out five glasses, one of them for Cletus, who had agreed, with surprising dignity, to stay and be a witness.
They came at six, three in a row, like boys sent to the principal. Gene Rudd was a short red faced man in a pressed fishing shirt that had never seen water. He did not wait to be asked. “Lorene, it was a loan, plain as that,” he said. “Dwayne came to me in February. He was behind on his house, behind on his cards, behind on everything. I thought if I held the boat, he would pay me back, and nobody would be hurt.” Dwayne stood with his hands in his pockets. “Mom,” he said, “I forged the power of attorney. Gene stamped it. I thought you would never find out. I thought Dad would have understood.”
“Your father,” I said, “would have taken you out to this very dock and made you fish until you told the truth.” I laid the title and the bill of sale on the bench between us, with the dollar bill still paper clipped to the corner. Dwayne snatched them. He snatched the title, meaning to tear it in half and say there had never been a lien, and he ran up the sloping yard toward his truck with the pages in his fist. He ran straight into the bumper of a white Silverado with a trailer hitch, which Cletus had backed across the driveway while we were talking.
Dwayne stood with his hand on the hot hood of the truck. Cletus leaned out the window with his cigarette behind his ear and said, mildly, “Son, I have chased bass boats across three states. You are going to have to be a lot faster than that.” Kristi, who had not said one word, finally began to cry. “Dwayne, stop,” she said. “Please. I just wanted a house.” He turned around. All the fight went out of him, the way the air goes out of a dock float. He walked back down the lawn and laid the title in my hands, smoothed flat, with one corner torn.
The next Monday, I paid Gene Rudd every penny of the loan, twenty two thousand five hundred dollars, and a hundred more for his trouble, because I wanted that lien gone before it could touch the name of Wendell. Then Gene lost his notary commission, and the state of Arkansas asked him a number of questions. Dwayne took a second job at a tire shop in Hot Springs and signed a paper to pay me back, a little each month, for as long as it takes. Kristi deleted the listing from her phone and went to stay with her mother for a while.
In the name of Wendell, who passed in 2021, I started the Wendell Tate Fund. It pays for fishing rods, tackle, boat rides and life jackets for children and widows who have never had a day on the water, in Garland, Hot Spring and Saline counties. In the first year we took out two hundred forty one people in eleven borrowed boats, with retired anglers at the wheel. A seven year old boy named Eli caught a bass the size of his forearm and held it up to the sun and screamed so loud that a heron left the cove. I wrote it all down for Wendell, in his old tackle box.
On Sunday evenings I take the Ranger out onto Lake Hamilton with Dwayne at the wheel. He is a poor fisherman, and that is the best part. He tangles his line and he laughs, and I see the face of Wendell in the way he squints at the water. The blue metal flake shines like it did in 1998. Last week he shut off the motor in the middle of the cove, and we sat in the quiet with a lure of three dollars and ninety seven cents on the end of his line. He said, “Mom, I would like to do this every Sunday.” I told him he had better.