What someone brought up from my sunken boat was a gray steel box, the size of a lunch pail, wrapped in a plastic tarp and sealed with duct tape, and Mike Dorsey held it on his desk at the Camdenton office with both hands, as if it might wake up. I knew that box at once. In 1987, on a cold night in March, Darlene and I rowed out to the cove at Ha Ha Tonka in the dark and sank our own boat on purpose, with that box bolted under the stern seat, because my brother Wade was suing me for half of the bait business, and the box held the papers that proved he was wrong.
Wade passed in 2012. His son Jared, who does not know a bait hook from a crochet needle, found letters in the old desk of his father that mentioned a box and a boat. He told a diver he knows, a buddy from the dealership in Camdenton, that there was a Chris Craft with a treasure in it. The diver went down last month and brought the box up. They wanted a legal title in my name so that the box would belong to the boat and the boat would belong to a salvage claim, and the claim would belong to a nephew. That was the registration. Jared planned for me to sign the lake house and the box over at the same dinner.
Mike opened the lid. Inside, dry as a bone, in a plastic sleeve, was the original partnership agreement of 1971 that showed that the five bait shops were mine and Darlene alone, a signed release from Wade of any claim to them, and a small blue velvet pouch. In the pouch was the first fishing lure I ever sold, a red and white Daredevil, and a note in the handwriting of Darlene. “Buck, if you ever need to be reminded what you built, here it is. Love, D.” I put my hand over my mouth. Mike pretended to look out the window.
A dive log gave one nephew the length of a lake supper to bring his uncle back to the truth at the Lake of the Ozarks.
I gave my terms to Jared and Kristal on the dock of the lake house on Saturday evening, with a lantern between us, a thermos of coffee and the steel box open on a folding table. I told them I knew about the diver, the log and the false title. I said the lake house would not be signed over, now or ever, until I was gone, and then only to whoever Darlene and I decided. I said I would not file a complaint if Jared apologized to the sergeant and repaid the diver his fee. I said it quietly, because sound carries over water.
Jared looked at the box for a long time. He said his dealership had lost the Honda line in the spring, that he owed the bank sixty thousand dollars on boats he could not sell, and that when he found the letters in the desk of his father, he thought of me as a rich old man with a lake house and a boat full of gold. “Uncle Buck, I never knew Dad did this to you,” he said. “I read the release. I read it three times.” His voice shook. Kristal had her arm through his. She said, “The gift card was my idea. I thought it was funny. I am sorry.”
Then Jared did the thing that runs in the family. He snatched the steel box from the folding table, meaning to run with it down the dock to his bass boat and throw it back into the cove where it came from, and he bolted down the planks with the box under his arm like a fullback. Kristal shouted. The lantern swung. I did not stand, because I am seventy seven, and the dock is a long way from my chair, but I did lift my arm and point to the water, the way a man points at a good fish.
It was the first Saturday of December, and the lighted Christmas boat parade was passing the cove right then, thirty boats strung with colored lights and inflatable reindeer, a big pontoon full of carolers in the lead. Jared reached the end of the dock just as a pontoon with Santa on the bow pulled alongside and tied up to give the carolers a rest. Santa, who was my old friend Gil from the marina, reached out a gloved hand and said, “Merry Christmas, son. Whatcha got there?” Jared handed him the box. It seemed polite.
Santa Gil returned the box to me with a bow and a ho ho, and thirty boats full of carolers sang a slow carol to Jared on the end of the dock, which he said afterward was the longest three minutes of his life. He apologized to Sergeant Dorsey on Monday and repaid the diver. He sold three boats at a loss and paid down the bank. The registration was voided by the state. The partnership paper was filed with the county recorder in Camden County, where it can no longer be lost. Jared works for a marina now, and takes the early shift.
In the name of Darlene, who passed in 2020, I started the Darlene Crenshaw Nightcrawler Fund. It pays for title searches, document recovery and lawyer hours for small bait shop, marina and cabin owners whose family businesses are being challenged by relatives, in Camden, Miller and Morgan counties. In the first year we helped eleven owners, and the first was a woman named Mrs. Pruett, who ran a tackle store near Osage Beach for forty years, and whose own partnership papers had gone missing after a flood. Mike Dorsey delivers the applications himself, in uniform, on the lake patrol boat.
On Christmas Eve, Jared and Kristal came to the lake house with a casserole and the red and white Daredevil lure in a little frame. Jared had asked to buy it from me, and I told him it was not for sale, but I would hang it on the wall of his marina, on the condition that he tell every customer where it came from. We ate on the screened porch, and the lake lay black and still beyond the glass. I pointed out the cove where the boat lay. “That is where we kept our best secret, son,” I said. He laughed, and then so did I.