Bought an old aluminum fishing boat off a fella who was moving out of the area, fourteen-footer, old Mercury on the back, perfect for chasing walleye around the lake on weekends. Gave him five hundred bucks and figured I had gotten the better of the deal, because for its age that boat was in beautiful shape. Up here in Brainerd every other man is a fisherman, and a good running boat for that money does not come along on the side of the road. He seemed in a hurry to be gone, that fella, but folks move for all kinds of reasons and I did not think twice.
Spent a Saturday getting her ready. Under the front bench seat there is a storage box, and the lid sat funny, up too high, would not close all the way. So I got in there to see what was binding it. Down in the bottom of that box, under a false floor somebody had fitted by hand, there was a hidden compartment. Now, nobody builds a false bottom into a fourteen-foot fishing boat to keep his nightcrawlers in. I pried that floor up with a crowbar and put my flashlight down into the space beneath it. And I set the crowbar down in the bottom of the boat.
Down in that compartment, wrapped in plastic against the damp, was a cigar box. Inside it, a bundle of cash, more than the boat cost me many times over. A set of military medals, a Purple Heart among them. And a letter, sealed, addressed in an old hand to a name I did not know.
The name was not the fella I bought the boat from. It took me some asking, but I pieced it together. The man who sold me that boat in such a hurry had inherited it from his father, who had passed, and the son was broke, going under, selling off everything his daddy owned for whatever cash he could get and getting out of town ahead of his troubles. He never knew. His father, a quiet old veteran, had hidden the family savings and his own war medals in the false bottom of the boat he loved best, meaning to leave it to his son, and died before he ever told him where.
That son sold his fathers boat for five hundred desperate dollars, never knowing a small fortune and his daddy Purple Heart were riding in the bottom of it.
I could have kept it. It was mine, bought and paid for. But that letter was a father last words to a son, and the cash was that boy way out of the hole he was drowning in.
I tracked him down two states away, and I drove out, and I put his father cigar box in his hands.
I sold everything he had because I had nothing left. I never knew he left me this. I thought he left me broke. He was taking care of me the whole time, and I almost let a stranger crush it.
That money got him back on his feet. His father medals are framed on his wall now, and that unsent letter, he finally got to read. A father reached past his own grave to catch a falling son. I just carried the message the last mile.