I dug it out, and the second I saw what my wife had hidden in there, I had to sit down on the shed step, because it was a roll of papers in a sandwich bag, and the top one had a bush plane on the letterhead.
Kettle Falls Outfitters. Wabigoon Lake, Ontario.
Cabin four, the second week of June, paid in full — deposit in November, balance the fourteenth of March, four hundred and some dollars a night for six nights, two guests. Under GUESTS she had written it out herself in that round handwriting: Emmett Boyd Whitaker, and Emmett Boyd Whitaker II.
Me and the boy. My grandson. He’s ten.
I have talked about Wabigoon since 1988, when a fellow at the plant came back from up there with pictures of walleye you couldn’t get your hand around. I have talked about it the way a man talks about a thing he has quietly decided he is never going to do. Ruthie heard me say it a thousand times and she never once said we should go, because she knew if she said it I’d have found a reason we couldn’t.
Rolled up with the confirmation was a passport application, filled out in pen, everything done but my signature, with a sticky note on it that said the post office in Cadiz does the pictures on Thursdays. And a Canadian fishing license form. And a little index card with a list on it: rain gear, the green tackle bag, thermos, Dramamine for E. because he gets carsick, do not take the good rod, take this one.
Do not take the good rod. Take this one.
It’s a cane rod. Nine foot, faded, guides half gone to rust, and I said real generous, Ruthie, and let the sarcasm sit there in front of her.
Her note was rolled in the middle, so it’d be the last thing out.
This rod belonged to my daddy and it caught more fish than anything you own. It’s not much to look at and neither was he. Take the boy to that lake before you talk yourself out of it one more year, and let him use this one, and tell him where it came from. The trip’s paid. You can’t argue with paid. — Ruthie
Her daddy’s rod. Carl Setliff, dead in 2003, who taught me to tie a blood knot in his driveway the week before our wedding and never once called me son but never once called me anything else either.
She dug it out of her sister’s garage and cleaned it up and put it in my hands and I looked at the rust on the guides.
A month later she was gone in her sleep, and that rod stood in the corner of the shed for eleven months while a paid trip to Ontario expired in the cork handle of it.
I called Kettle Falls the same afternoon. A woman named Sandra found the reservation, listened to the whole thing without saying a word, and then told me they’d honor every dollar of it whenever I wanted to come, and that she’d put us in cabin four.
We go the second week of June. He’ll use the cane rod. I’ll tell him about a man in a driveway in 1991, and about his great-grandmother, who paid for the whole thing and let me be ugly about it and never said one word in her own defense.