PART 6 – My Nephew Sold Hunting Rights to My Late Husband’s 80 Acres—So I Was Waiting in the Deer Stand When His First Customers Arrived

I took a pen out of my purse. I turned his paper placemat over to the blank side and slid it across the table to him, along with the pen.

“Then write it down. Every name you can remember, and how many days. Take your time. I’ve got nowhere to be.”

It took him a quarter of an hour.

I drank my coffee and watched him write. His hand was shaking. He crossed things out and wrote them again.

Last fall, the first season after the funeral. Two men from Grand Island. Eight days between them.

This fall, bowhunters in October. Six days.

And for the rifle season, fourteen days already paid for. That was Mark and Ben, and the man from Fremont, and the two brothers from Lincoln.

Twenty-eight days.

He did the multiplying himself at the bottom of the placemat, and he drew a line under it.

$4,200.

He sat there and looked at that number for a long time. Like he’d never seen it all in one place before. Like he didn’t believe it either.

“Where is it?” I asked.

“It’s gone.” His voice had gotten very small. “The elevator cut my hours after harvest last year. I got two months behind on rent. Then the transmission went out on the truck and that was twenty-nine hundred dollars by itself, and I can’t get to work without the truck.”

He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.

“A fella at the gas station in Columbus saw my rifle rack and asked did I know any ground. And I said yes before I even thought about it. I said it was mine. It just came out of my mouth. And then he handed me cash. And after that, I didn’t know how to stop.”

“You could have asked me.”

“For what? Money?”

“For the hunting, Cody. For yourself. For a friend. For anything.”

I kept my voice down. It was hard to do. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

“Wes would have handed you that eighty any Saturday you asked. So would I. You’ve had a key in your pocket since you were sixteen years old. You never once had to tell a soul it was yours. All you ever had to do was tell them it was his.”

His shoulders went. All at once, like something holding them up had snapped.

He put his face in his hands right there at the round table, in front of half the county, and he cried the way he did when he was nine years old and his daddy’s truck was driving away.

I let him.

I did not reach across the table. I wanted to. Every part of me wanted to. But he needed to do that by himself.

When he was done, I told him how it was going to be.

“First. You’re going to call the man from Fremont and the two brothers from Lincoln. Today. From that chair, right now. And you’re going to tell them the truth. All of it, out of your own mouth. Then you’re going to hand me the phone. Those men paid in good faith for something I didn’t even know I was selling. If they still want to come, they’ll come as my guests, and I’ll meet them at the gate myself.”

He nodded.

“Second. That sign comes down today. And you’re the one who takes it down.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Third.” I tapped the placemat with my finger. “You sold twenty-eight days of something that wasn’t yours to sell. I don’t want your money. You don’t have it, and I won’t have you borrowing it from your mother.”

He looked up at me then, for the first time.

“You owe that eighty twenty-eight days. The cedars have gotten into the grass on the north end something terrible. Wes meant to cut them the spring he died. He talked about it all that winter. You’ll cut them. Saturdays, and Sundays after church, starting the weekend after season closes. Eight hours a day, until you’ve given back every single day you sold. And I’ll be out there working beside you. So I’ll know.”

“Aunt Marlene—”

“I’m not finished. There’s a man and a boy sitting at that counter who are out six hundred dollars.”

“I’ll pay them back. I’ll pay it out of my check. Fifty a week.”

“Then go and tell them so.”

He got up.

It was the longest walk of his life. Twelve feet across that cafe floor, with every single eye in the room on him. Nobody pretended to look away. Nobody went back to their pie.

He stood in front of Mark with his cap in his hands.

“I lied to you,” he said. “And I lied to your boy. I’ll pay back every dollar. It’ll be fifty a week. I’m sorry it can’t be faster.”

Mark looked at him for a good long while. Long enough that I thought he might say something hard after all.

“Pay him first,” Mark said finally, and nodded at Ben. “He worked for his.”

Then Cody turned to Ben. A fifteen-year-old boy, sitting on a stool at the counter with a cup of hot chocolate somebody had bought him.

“I’m sorry,” Cody said. “My uncle would have liked you. That part was true. And he’d have been ashamed of me. That’s true too.”

Ben didn’t know what to do with that. I didn’t blame him. Grown men wouldn’t have known what to do with that.

“Okay,” he said.

Then, after a second, he stuck his hand out.

Cody shook it.

Cody made his three phone calls from the round table with me sitting right across from him, listening to every word. The man from Fremont said he would find someplace else to hunt, and he hung up kind of short. But the two brothers from Lincoln asked to talk to me. They came out on Wednesday and Thursday as my guests, and on Thursday evening they knocked on my back door and handed me a sack of pheasants already cleaned and bagged.

The sign was down by two o’clock that afternoon. Cody carried it up to my pickup himself and laid it in the bed, face down, so nobody could read it on the drive home.

I told my sister Janet that same night. I drove to her house and told her in her own kitchen, so she would hear it from me before she heard it from anybody else at church.

She was angry at me first. The way a mother is.

“How could you embarrass him like that? In front of everybody?”

“I didn’t give Schmitt his name, Janet,” I said. “I want you to know I could have. I want you to know I had every right to.”

She sat down at her kitchen table then, and all the fight went out of her at once.

“He’s not a thief, Marlene.”

“He stole,” I said. “But no. I don’t think that’s all he is. That’s why he’s going to be cutting cedar instead of sitting in a cell.”

Mark and Ben hunted Sunday morning too. Their second day. I sat in the stand with Ben again. We saw the does come down to drink. We did not see the buck.

At the gate when they were leaving, I told Ben, “Next year. You come back next year, and you won’t owe anybody a dime. You’ll be my guests.”

“You mean that?” Mark said. He looked like he didn’t believe it.

“I carried three cups out here,” I said. “I guess I must have.”

Cody was at the gate at seven o’clock in the morning the first Saturday in December. He had his own chainsaw, his chaps, and a jug of bar oil. I had Wes’s loppers, a pair of leather gloves, and the green thermos.

If you don’t know about red cedar, I’ll tell you. It comes into grass the way gray comes into hair. Slow at first, and then all at once, and then it’s everywhere. The only mercy in it is that a cedar will not grow back from the stump if you cut it below the last green branch.

So he got down on the ground with the saw and cut them low, right down to the dirt. And I dragged them. We stacked the piles out in the open, to be burned once there was snow on the ground and the fire chief had signed the permit.

We didn’t talk much that first day. He worked like a man who wanted to be worn out. Like a man who wanted to hurt. At noon we sat on the tailgate and I poured the coffee, and he held that cup in his hand and looked at it a long time before he drank any.

It went on like that into January. Eight hours a day. Every Saturday, every Sunday after church. I kept the count in pencil on the back of that same placemat, and I kept the placemat in the glove box of the pickup.

He never once asked me to call it even. Not once. Not even on the days the wind was coming straight down out of the Dakotas and his fingers were too cold to work the saw.

On Fridays he drove to the post office and mailed fifty dollars to Omaha. The first six envelopes were addressed to Ben.

It was the ninth day, I think, when he shut the saw off in the middle of a tree and just stood there.

The quiet came down all around us. Just the wind in the oaks.

“I came out here after the funeral,” he said. He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking up the creek, toward the stand. “That same night. I had the key. I climbed up in the stand in my good clothes and I sat there until it got dark.”

I let go of the cedar I was dragging.

“I kept thinking it was the only thing of his I had left. Mom’s got pictures. You’ve got the house, and his coat, and everything he ever touched. I had a key to a gate.”

He wiped his nose on the back of his glove.

“And then I sold it for a hundred and fifty dollars a day. I sat right on top of where he wrote he was proud of me, and I took money from strangers. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Aunt Marlene.”

I walked over to him through the stumps.

I had been angry for seven weeks. I had every right to be. But I had also had seven weeks of dragging brush in the cold to think. And there was a thing I hadn’t said to anybody. Not to Janet. Not to Don. Not even to Wes, sitting up in that tree in the dark.