The old man smoothed the newspaper clipping on his knee with a hand that shook like a leaf. His name was Wendell Shaw, he told me, and in July of 1979 he was twenty nine years old, a lifeguard at the Lake Ozark Lodge beach, with a Korean War veteran father he idolized. “I was on my break at the public dock when I saw you go off the end,” he said. “You were five. You went under without a sound.” He looked at his knuckles. “It was not my beach. It was not my chair. I left my post, and I went in after you in my work boots.”
He had dragged me out and pushed the water from my chest with his hands. He had hurt his back in the dive, he said, on a piling under the surface, and he never fully stood straight again. The lodge fired him the next week for leaving his post, and he lost his job, and the savings, and then the apartment. For fifteen years he drifted from town to town along the lake, working odd jobs, a stooped man with a cane who could no longer lift a boat. “I never regretted it, son,” he said. “Not once. But I could not bear to be thanked. Not by a boy who did not know what it cost.”
“Your grandfather found me in 1994,” Wendell said. “He had read this clipping in the courthouse in Camdenton, and he spent a year looking for the man in the waders. He found me on this bench.” He lifted his chin toward the shop. “Earl said, I owe you a grandson. And I said, you owe me nothing. So he found a way I could not refuse. Every Friday, he bought two buckets of minnows, and he gave me one. Under the lid, there was an envelope. Fifty dollars. Twenty nine years. He told me never to tell you, because I made him swear.” I could not see the old man through my tears.
A second bucket of minnows left on a bait shop bench gave one grandson the Friday to bring the man who saved him in from the highway in Osage Beach.
I gave my terms on that bench, in the early light, with a bucket of minnows between us. “Mr. Shaw, you are going to hear me say thank you,” I said. “You are going to hear it today, and tomorrow, and for as long as you will let me. And you are going to take this money, because my grandfather meant for you to have it.” The old man shook his head, his eyes wet. “Son, I have never taken a cent that was not earned.” I smiled. “Sir, you earned it in July of 1979, with your boots on.” He put his hand over his face. His shoulders shook, and I held him.
A pickup pulled into the gravel lot with a crunch. It was Uncle Dale, in his good jacket, with Sherry beside him in the passenger seat, and a manila folder on the dash. They had followed me, I realized, to see who would sit down at the bench. Dale got out slowly. He stood looking at the two of us, the old man in the Korean War cap and his nephew with his arm around him, and the clipping on the bench between us. “Kyle, what is this?” he asked. His voice had lost its edge. I held out the paper. “Read it, Uncle Dale. Read the date. Then read the name.”
Dale read it standing in the gravel, in the cold morning, with his lips moving. I watched the color change in his face, from red to gray. He looked at the old man, then at the bench, then at the second bucket. “Dad was paying him,” he said, very slowly. “Every Friday. For twenty nine years.” His eyes filled. “And I called him a bum. I stood up in the office of a lawyer and called this man a bum.” He took off his cap and held it against his chest. “Sir, I am ashamed. I do not know how to say how ashamed I am.” Wendell only nodded, kindly, as if to a child.
Sherry did not share the feeling. She snatched the folder off the dash of the truck, with a copy of the will and the letter of the lawyer in it, and started for the road at a trot, perhaps to put it where it would never be found. But Pete Junior, the owner of the shop, had come out onto the porch with a long handled minnow net in his hand, and he swung it across her path like a gate. “Madam, you will want to stop,” he said politely. “This is private property.” Sherry stood still, her mouth working, and then she dropped the folder in the dirt and burst into tears.
The money consequences were simple. Dale withdrew the challenge that same day and apologized, in writing, to the estate. The lawyer transferred the two hundred eighty thousand dollars to Wendell, who used a part of it to buy a small house with a ramp near Camdenton, and put the rest in a fund. Dale and I split the boat of my grandfather, and I have never seen him so quiet. Sherry did not come to the lake for a year. When she did, she sat on the porch, and she brought a casserole, and she asked Wendell, in a very small voice, how he took his coffee.
In the name of my grandfather, Earl Harmon, who passed in August and who delivered the mail and a second bucket for twenty nine years, I started the Second Bucket Fund. It pays for medical care, legal help and a monthly envelope for retired lifeguards, rescuers and veterans in Camden, Miller and Morgan counties who gave up everything for a stranger. In the first year, we helped thirty one people. A retired deputy of seventy eight, in a flannel shirt, sat on the bench outside the shop and said, “Nobody ever asked what happened to me.” I sat down beside him, and I asked.
On Friday mornings now, I buy two buckets of minnows at six, and I take Wendell fishing from the dock behind his new house. He never fished, he says, because his back would not allow it. So I rig the pole, and I put it in his hands, and he holds it like a baby. Last week the line went tight. His whole face opened. He reeled in a fat white bass, with my hand over his, and he laughed out loud. I showed him how to tie a clinch knot. “Your grandfather taught you well,” he said, and the sun came up over the lake.
