Gary Sutton read the page by the light of the citronella torches, and I watched his lips move. He is a stout, sunburned man of seventy four who has sold insurance in Richland County for forty five years, and he has the voice of a man who has read the fine print on everything. “Ten million, nine hundred thousand dollars,” he said, and his hand with the paper shook a little. “Orville. That is an excavating company. Your excavating company.” I said that it had been. Behind him, on the lawn of the cottage, forty people had stopped with their plates in the air, and the string lights over the water hummed.
Jeff Sutton was standing on the grass near the dump truck that was parked beside the road. He is thirty seven, and has the round face of his father and none of his confidence. He had come to the party straight from the yard, with the keys still in his pocket, and now he took them out and looked at them as if they belonged to someone else. “Orville,” he said. “It was only temporary.” I said, “Jeff, the Komatsu on the trailer is on the list. So is the mini excavator. So is the dump truck you drove up in.” I held up the page. “I counted them on Wednesday with Lonnie. Three machines. And a sign in your window that says Sutton Site Works.”
Gary turned to his son. It was not a pleasant look. “You took machines,” he said. “From a man who has been family for forty three years. At the birthday of my own wife.” Jeff said that Dad had told him Orville was just a ditch man who got lucky. That the business would be sold off for scrap and nobody would care. “You told me to get in before the vultures,” Jeff said, in a rising voice. “You said it at Easter. You said, take what you can, son, because nobody in that family is going to stand up for it.” Gary went white around the mouth.
A coil of dock line and a folded contract were laid on a lake cottage lawn and gave one excavator the night to bring his nephew back to honest work.
Barbara came across the lawn in her party dress. She was sixty, and the guest of honor, with a paper crown that someone had put on her head, and she stopped in front of her husband and her son and looked from one to the other. My sister in law is not a loud woman. She taught Sunday school for thirty years. “Gary,” she said. “I have asked you for forty years why you could not be kind to the husband of my sister. And every time, you said you were only joking.” She took off the paper crown and held it against her chest. “I would like you to tell this party the joke, now. Please.”
Gary could not do it. He opened his mouth and nothing came out. Finally he said, to the grass, “I was jealous.” It was a small voice, and in the quiet it carried across the whole lawn. “Orville built a company with his hands, and I sold paper. Every year I watched him get a little bit richer, and every year somebody said, you should be more like Orville. And I could not stand it.” He pressed the heel of his hand into his eye. “So I called him the dirt mover. Because it made me feel taller.” He looked at me. “It never did, Orville. Not once.”
Joan took my arm. My wife is not a woman who needs to speak to be heard. She just stood there, with her gray head against my shoulder, and I felt the weight of fifty one years in that one small touch. I took a long breath of the cold lake air. “Gary,” I said, “I am not going to humiliate you. I have seen enough of that tonight. But the machines go back to the yard in the morning, and Jeff is going to drive each one himself. And you, my friend, are going to pay for the cottage this weekend.” He looked up, confused. “All of it,” I said. “The food. The cake. The boat gas.”
I turned to Jeff. He had sat down on the edge of the dock, with his shoes in the water, and his shoulders were shaking. I lowered myself beside him, which took a while, because of my knees. “Son,” I said, “I started with one used backhoe and a bank loan I thought would kill me. Nobody gave me anything. But nobody in this family ever told me no, either, when I asked to borrow a hand.” I put the dock line from the pontoon boat in his lap, the one I had tied at four in the afternoon. “Tie me a bowline,” I said. “If you can do it right, you can start Monday.”
He tied it badly. It slipped. I handed it back. He tied it again, and this time it held, and he looked at it as if he had made a bridge. “Again,” I said. He did it five times. By the fifth, the party had begun to move around us, someone had turned the radio on low, and Barbara had taken the paper crown and put it, very gently, on the head of her husband.
He wore it all evening. Nobody laughed. At nine, when the fireworks started over the water, Gary Sutton stood with his arm around his son, in a paper crown, crying openly, and for once he did not say a single smart thing.
Jeff worked for me the whole next summer, and the one after that. He learned to run the Komatsu. He learned to read grade stakes and cut a clean slope. In June, he came to the lake cottage with the new owner of the company, a good man from Columbus, who wanted to see him. They talked on the dock for half an hour. When they were done the man shook his hand and said, “Mr. Sutton, I need a foreman on the north crew.” Jeff looked at me. I looked at the water. “The knot,” I said, “is the part that holds.” And he laughed, and I did too.
