“I didn’t come out here either,” I said. “Four times in twenty months. I couldn’t stand to. I locked that gate and left his place sitting empty. And I never once picked up the phone and said, Cody, go sit in his stand. He’d want you to.”
He looked at me.
“You were grieving him too,” I said. “And I never asked. Not once. I was so busy with my own grief I forgot you had any.”
I took hold of his sleeve.
“That doesn’t make what you did right. It was wrong, and you’re paying for it, and you’ll keep paying until it’s done. But I left that place lonesome. And somebody was going to fill it.”
He stood there with sawdust in his eyelashes. Twenty-seven years old. And then he put his arms around me, chaps and all, and I held on to my sister’s boy in the middle of a field of cedar stumps while the chainsaw ticked on the ground as it cooled.
“He was proud of you,” I said into his coat. “He cut it into a board so you could never lose it. You don’t get to decide he was wrong.”
He cried into my shoulder. I let him. This time I held on.
The twenty-eighth day fell on a Sunday in March. Almost two years to the week since the shop and the bucket and the mower blades.
Cody cut the last tree on the north end at half past three in the afternoon. I watched it fall. Then I took the placemat out of my coat pocket and crossed off the last line in pencil.
Twenty-eight days. Every one of them given back.
He shut off the saw. Then he took the key off his ring and held it out to me in his gloved hand.
I looked at it lying there. Small and silver and worn. Wes had put that key inside a birthday card, and written something in the card I never got to read, and handed it to a sixteen-year-old boy at our kitchen table.
“Put it back on your ring,” I said.
He didn’t move.
“It was never mine to take. But you ask first. Every time. And you bring nobody I haven’t met.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
He was back out the very next Saturday anyway, without being asked. There were still cedars on the hill. He said he figured Wes would want those gone too.
Mark’s last fifty dollars went in the mail in the middle of February.
They came back the next November. The two of them, in the same pickup with the Douglas County plates. Ben had grown three inches and his voice had dropped. Mark’s wife sent an apple pie in a carrier and a note I still keep in my Bible. They stayed in my spare room, and on Friday night Cody came for supper. The four of us sat at my kitchen table and ate pot roast and argued about football, and for the first time in two and a half years that table felt full.
Opening morning, Ben and I climbed the eleven rungs in the dark. Mark took the cottonwood at the fork. Cody sat down at the bend in the creek.
The buck came at ten minutes after seven.
On our side of the creek this time.
He came down off the hill to the crossing exactly the way Wes always said they would, if a person just had the patience to wait for them.
Ben made one clean shot. I won’t tell more about it than a person needs to hear. Except that he did it exactly the way he had been taught. And afterward he sat perfectly still for a full minute with the rifle across his knees. And then he said “Thank you” out loud.
I don’t think he was talking to me.
Cody came running up the creek bank, slipping on the frost. And the two of them dragged that deer up the two-track together. The young man who had taken the boy’s money, and the boy he had taken it from. The whole way up the hill they argued about which one of them had the heavy end.
I stood at the bottom of the bur oak and listened to them, and I laughed until I had to wipe my eyes.
Before we left the stand that morning, I reached into the pocket of Wes’s coat and took out his pocketknife. The one he’d used to cut every notch on that rail. I’d been carrying it all season without telling anybody.
I held it out to Ben.
“There’s room on the rail,” I said.
He looked at me to make sure I meant it. I nodded.
Then he bent over the rail and cut it in. Slowly. Carefully. In a boy’s uneven letters, right alongside the other ones.
BEN. AGE 16.
He folded the knife and tried to hand it back. I closed his fingers around it.
“Keep it,” I said. “He’d want it used.”
Then I unscrewed the green thermos and poured the coffee.
Four cups this time. I lined them up along the rail, right next to the place where a man once cut the words proud of you, so a twelve-year-old boy would never be able to lose them.
And the steam went up through the bare limbs of the bur oak, into the first of the morning sun.
