I took my hand out of my apron pocket and laid the gold watch of my grandfather on the porch rail, where everyone could see the little train engraved on the case. “Brianna did not tell you where this was,” I said to the man in the fleece vest. “It was in a pawn shop in Virginia, Minnesota, for nineteen hundred dollars, and I redeemed it with my own money this morning.” I picked up the bent shaft paddle he still held. “I made this one in nineteen seventy nine. There are fourteen patterns in your contract, and I signed it in the spring. I am Thora Aasen, and I carved every one of them.”
The man set the paddle down as gently as a newborn. “Mrs. Aasen, it is an honor,” he said. “We have been trying to reach you for weeks. Your grandson told our lawyers you had passed on and that the family was clearing out the shed. We assumed the estate would contact us.” Erik went the color of the lake ice. “I only said you were not well, Grandma,” he stammered. “You said I had passed on,” I said, “in front of a lawyer, in writing, so you could sell what was left. That is how it looks on paper, Erik, and paper does not forgive.”
Brianna stepped forward with her hands raised. “Thora, this is a misunderstanding. The paddles were clutter. We were only helping.” “Forty paddles for five dollars apiece,” I said. “And a watch that your great grandfather carried through the logging camps, pledged for a loan.” A woman in the driveway, holding a cherry ottertail, quietly put it back against the garage door and stepped away. Out on Shagawa Lake the loon called again, long and wavering. Brianna looked at the paddles, at the cardboard sign she had lettered herself, and for the first time that morning she had no words at all.
A hand carved paddle with a burned loon on the grip gave one grandson the weekend to bring his grandmother back to the shed in Ely.
I laid out my terms on the porch steps, in front of the neighbors. “By supper, every paddle that was sold today comes back, and Erik pays the buyers their five dollars from his own wallet. Brianna returns the pawn money to the shop, and she gives me every ticket she has signed. The sign comes down. And the two of you will move out of my house by the end of the summer, because it is my house, and I would like to enjoy it. You will have a fair month to find a place. I am not cruel. I am only finished.” Erik nodded. Brianna sat down hard on a lawn chair.
The surprise came that afternoon. The man in the fleece vest, whose name was Daniel, called his company, and by evening a truck had pulled into the driveway with six staff from the outdoor company. They helped me gather the paddles, and they knocked on every door in the neighborhood to retrieve the ones that had been sold. The man who had bought the cherry ottertail from nineteen eighty one drove back with it on his own, shame faced, and refused to take his five dollars back. “Madam,” he said, “I carried this in my truck bed like firewood. I would like to carry it better.”
The money consequences came without delay. Erik and Brianna had been counting on selling the house, and they had put a deposit down on a condominium in Duluth. When the truth came out, the seller canceled the contract, and the deposit was lost. Brianna had borrowed against her credit to cover the pawn loan, and the bank called it in. The finance company that had advanced her a car loan asked questions. By the end of the week, the couple were sitting at the kitchen table with a pile of bills and a calculator, and nobody was laughing at anything.
I could have turned my back, but my grandfather would not have approved. With part of the licensing money, I started a program that I called the Loon Fund. It pays for the paddles, life jackets and canoe lessons for any child in St. Louis County who has never been on the water. Each paddle has a little loon burned into the grip, just as mine always have. We held the first class on a Saturday in June. Thirty children lined up on the dock in orange vests, and a girl named Ingrid stroked her first perfect stroke and shrieked so loudly that a heron lifted off the shore.
Erik came to the shed on a cool evening, alone, with his hands in his pockets. I was sanding a new blank of ash. He stood in the doorway for a long time before he spoke. He said he had never known how many hours I had spent out there, and that he was ashamed he had treated it like junk. I handed him a piece of sandpaper and showed him how to follow the grain. We worked in silence for an hour, and the sawdust drifted in the lamplight, and I remembered teaching Lars to carve in the very same spot.
Brianna was slower to change, and she did it quietly. One morning I found a plate of blueberry muffins on the porch and a note that said, I was wrong. I took the note inside and put it in the drawer with the watch of my grandfather. A week later, she asked if she could help paint the sign for the Loon Fund class, and I said yes. She painted it carefully, in dark green and white, with a small loon in one corner. She still lives in town. We are not close, but we are civil, and I have learned that civil is a good beginning.
In September, I sat on the end of the dock at dusk with the gold watch in my hand and a new ottertail across my knees. The lake was glass. A canoe slid by with a father and a small girl, and she dipped one of my paddles with all her little might. The loon on the grip flashed once in the last light. Erik sat down beside me. “Grandma,” he said, “do you think Great Grandpa would approve?” I wound the watch, and the little train ticked in my palm. “I think,” I said, “he would say that a good paddle always finds its way home.”
