The preacher’s wife brought both of hers back wrapped in a bath towel, and a plate of bars.
The Albers boy, who is forty, left his pintail with a note that said only: Your dad taught me to scull a boat. I never thanked him.
Some came in sacks. One came in a shoebox with tissue paper. One was sitting on the porch rail at daylight with nothing at all, just sitting there facing the street as if he’d flown in.
Every note had a story on the back. I had sent out twenty-seven of my father’s winters, and they came home with the other half written on them. The time he walked a mile of levee in the dark to tell a farmer the water was coming. The spring he caught a little girl’s kitten in a dip net below the dam. A casserole he had brought to a house with a death in it, in 1981, that the woman still remembered was tuna.
I had lived three hours away for thirty years. I learned more about my father in those two weeks than I had in the ten years before them.
Not everybody brought theirs back, and I want to be plain that I was glad.
Jeff and Kim came to the door together on a Saturday, holding the mallard pair. I’d written them that Dad carved the two in the winter of 1992 for my parents’ twenty-fifth anniversary, the drake first and then the hen, and that his book said: Jean says the hen is prettier. She is right.
“We put them on the shelf over the TV,” Kim said. “We’ve been married six months. We’d like to keep them, if that isn’t wrong. We’d like to get to twenty-five.”
“It isn’t wrong,” I said. “Keep them together.”
Donna wrote that the pintail was on her husband’s side of the dresser. He had hunted with Dad for fifteen seasons, and he’d been gone four years, and the bird was the first thing on that side of the dresser she’d been able to stand looking at. Staying, I wrote.
And then there was the one I’d been waiting on and telling myself I wasn’t.
It came in the regular mail, addressed in pencil. One sheet of wide-ruled notebook paper.
Dear Mrs. Patty. My grandma read me your letter two times. I did not know he was made the year you got born. You can have him back if you want. But could I keep him till I learn how to make one. I am trying on a bar of soap. Jacob Reed, age 9.
I read that one on the porch steps, and I’ll tell you the truth, I was no use for the rest of the morning.
I wrote him back that he could keep the teal as long as he needed, and that soap was exactly how my father would have told him to start.
By the second Thursday, I added up the book. Thirty-three home. Eleven staying where they were, each with a reason I wouldn’t have argued with for anything. One with Mr. Tucker. Two gone to Missouri. Thirty-three and eleven and one and two is forty-seven.
It balanced. I checked it twice.
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