The letter in the handwriting of Herb was mailed by my son Jerry, and I know because Wendell Kremer drove me to the storage unit in Galena himself and opened it in front of me with the key Jerry had left at the front office by mistake. Inside the unit were sixteen boxes of my husband things that I had been told were thrown away: his uniform shirts, his charts of the river, his reading glasses and a stack of letters, all in his big loopy hand. Jerry had taken them the week of the service and kept them from me for two years because he said he could not bear for me to cry again.
One letter was missing from the stack. Jerry had mailed it last week from the post office in Galena, in an envelope he had saved. It was the letter that Herb wrote in 2019, when we pre planned the stone, addressed “To Geraldine, for the day the stone is set.” Jerry had kept it all this time and had not read it. Then, a week ago, he read it, and he sat in his car outside the storage unit for an hour, and he mailed it to the one place he knew I would eventually be told the truth. Wendell had held it for me at the monument yard. I opened it beside the granite stone with the tugboat.
It was one page. “Geraldine, if you are reading this the stone is up, and I am steady as she goes. A few things. First, Jerry will want more than he has, because he is my son, and I was the same at his age. Do not be too hard on him. Second, there is a lock box at the Dubuque Bank and Trust in your name, and it is yours. Third, I loved you for fifty four years and every barge I passed was a wave to you. Hang my bell on the porch, and when it rings by itself, say good night.” I did not cry. I laughed so hard that Wendell had to sit down.
A letter in loopy handwriting gave one son the length of a river afternoon to bring his mother back to the truth in Dubuque.
I gave my terms to Jerry at the top of the Fenelon Place Elevator, on the little deck over the town, because it is the place Herb and I went on our first date, and because I wanted a high place with a view of the river. I brought Wendell and a lawyer from Dubuque named Ruth Ann Kessel, and I handed Jerry a folder. I said the money would be repaid, that the stone would be set on Saturday, and that the boxes in Galena would come home to my porch. I said he could stay for the service, if he stood where I could see him.
Jerry stood at the rail with his hands in his coat pockets, looking at the barges. He said he had cancelled the order for the stone because he needed forty two hundred dollars for a hole in his business, a note on a combine he could not pay, and he told himself he would pay it back before I noticed. He said that every Sunday I went to the little plastic marker, he drove past the cemetery and could not go in. “Mom, I read his letter in the car,” he said. “I could not mail it fast enough. I wanted to be caught.” I said, “Then you have been caught, and you have been loved, and both are true.”
Then Jerry did something I did not expect. He snatched the folder out of my hand, not to run with the papers but to run with the shame, meaning to throw it all over the rail and be done with himself, and he bolted down the steps of the observation deck toward the street, with the folder held out in front of him like a man trying to hand off a baton. Wendell said, “Mrs. Voss, do you want me to follow?” I said, “No. He runs downhill. It is the only way he knows.”
At the bottom of the hill, the little cable car of the elevator was just pulling out of the station, packed with a church choir from Dyersville in matching green sweaters, and Jerry jumped in through the open gate as it started to rise. He wanted to disappear. Instead, forty choir members closed around him with great kindness. A large woman handed him a hymnal. A tenor said, “Sir, we are one short for the second verse.” Jerry, caught in the cable car with forty singers and a folder, sang the entire second verse in a trembling baritone. The car carried him straight back up the hill to me.
Jerry returned the forty two hundred dollars within the month, borrowing from a friend at the church. The stone was set on Saturday, with a small crowd of tugboat men and their wives, and a lockmaster from Lock and Dam 11 who drove up in his dress uniform to blow a long note on a horn. I opened the lock box at Dubuque Bank and Trust. It held a little stack of savings bonds and one more letter, which I read by myself. Jerry brought the boxes home from Galena, one by one, and set each in the front room. He carried them carefully, like a man carrying a child.
In the name of Herb, who passed in 2023, I started the Herb Voss Tugboat Fund. It pays for granite headstones for families who cannot afford one, in Dubuque, Jackson and Clayton counties. In the first year we set fourteen stones, and the first was for a retired towboat deckhand from Bellevue named Mr. Lund, who had lain under a plastic marker for eleven years. Wendell Kremer cuts the stones at cost and engraves the line the family wants. The most popular line, to my surprise, is Steady As She Goes. Herb would have been pleased and a little embarrassed.
On Sunday after Mass, Jerry drove me to Mount Olivet. The stone stood in the autumn sun, gray and polished, with the little tugboat etched in the corner and the line below. We stood side by side for a long time. A real tow was pushing a line of barges up the river below the bluff, and the pilot gave two short blasts on the horn. Jerry took my hand. The brass bell on my porch was ringing in my head, though it was miles away. I said, “Good night, Herb,” in the middle of the afternoon, and Jerry said it too.
