“I have a receipt,” Mark said.
He got his billfold out with his gloves still on, fumbling, and found it. A sheet torn off a feed store notepad, folded in four. He handed it to me.
I unfolded it.
Rec’d of Mark, $600, 2 hunters, 2 days, opening weekend, my place on Beaver Creek. Cody.
My place.
It was the same careful hand as the sign. The same letters he used to write his name on birthday cards to his Uncle Wes.
“I’d like to keep this a while,” I said.
“You keep it. Ma’am, I’d like to know where that cafe is.”
“I’ll show you. But not yet.”
I screwed the lid back on the thermos.
“Season opened ten minutes ago. That boy has been waiting on this since the first lawn he mowed in May. And you’ve paid for a day of hunting. Right now you are standing on this ground with the owner’s permission, and that’s all the law asks of you. So I’d say you ought to hunt.”
Mark shook his head hard. “I’m not hunting your place on a lie.”
“It isn’t a lie now. I just told you the truth, and then I asked you to stay.” I looked at the boy. “Did you pass your hunter safety?”
“Yes, ma’am. In April.”
“Then go get your rifle and bring it up on the rope, unloaded, the way they taught you. Your dad can sit against that cottonwood down at the fork, where he can see the hill. And I’ll sit up here with you. If you’ll have me. I’ve never done this before either.”
Mark stood there with his coffee going cold in his hand.
“Why would you do that?” he asked.
“Because my husband would have,” I said. “And because you’re not who I’m upset with.”
So that’s how it went.
The sun came up red through the bare limbs and turned the frost on the grass to smoke. I sat on that plank with a fifteen-year-old boy I had known for forty minutes, and neither of us said much. He sat very still. Stiller than I could.
A pair of does came down off the hill about seven o’clock and drank at the crossing. They were close enough that I could see their ears turn and twitch. Ben didn’t raise his rifle. He had a buck permit and he knew it. He just watched them. And I watched him watch them.
About eight o’clock, a buck stepped out on the far bank.
He was a good one. Even I could see that, and I don’t know a thing about deer. He stood broadside in the willows across the creek, maybe sixty yards off, with the morning light on him so his whole body seemed to glow.
I felt the boy go still beside me. Stiller than still.
He brought the rifle up slowly and settled it on the rail. Right on top of Wes’s notches.
I held my breath. My heart was going so hard I was afraid he’d feel it through the bench.
Then he lifted his cheek off the stock.
“Mrs. Marlene,” he whispered. “Is that side yours?”
The creek is the line down there. The willows on the far bank belong to Don.
“No,” I whispered back. “It isn’t.”
He took his finger out of the trigger guard and laid the rifle across his knees.
The buck stood there another half a minute, like he was giving the boy one more chance. Then he turned and walked up into Don’s corn stubble and was gone.
The boy let his breath out all at once. His hands were shaking.
“That’s all right,” he said. Mostly to himself.
I had to look away from him.
Here was a child who had been lied onto my land. He had paid good money he worked all summer for. He had every excuse in the world. And nobody was watching him but an old woman in a dead man’s coat. Nobody would ever have known.
And he asked whose side it was.
That was when I knew what I was going to say to Cody. Up until that moment, sitting on that plank, I had not known.
On the way down the ladder, Ben stopped with his hand on the rail. He was looking at the letters.
“Who’s Cody, age twelve?” he said. Then he heard himself say it. “Oh.”
“That’s him,” I said. “That’s who took your money. My husband cut those little letters.”
Ben read them. Proud of you. He didn’t say anything about it. I thought well of him for that. A lot of grown men would have said something.
At a quarter to nine, I walked across the road and used Don’s kitchen telephone to call Schmitt. I told him they were decent people and I was just fine. I told him the rest was family business and I meant to handle it myself.
“You sure, Marlene?”
“I’m sure.”
Then I told Don to stand down. He already had his coat on and his keys in his hand. I don’t know where he thought he was going, but he looked ready to go there.
Mark and Ben followed my pickup into town. It was ten minutes to noon when we parked on the main street of Albion.
If you’ve never been in a small-town cafe at noon on opening day, I can tell you what it’s like. Orange at every table. Three generations to a booth. Grandfathers and fathers and boys, all telling the same stories. The windows steamed so thick you can’t see out. Plates of hash browns and eggs and pie. Half of Boone County was in there, and I knew most of them by name.
Cody was at the big round table in the middle with five or six other young men. He had a plate of eggs in front of him and he was telling some story with his hands, the way he does. Big gestures. Everybody laughing.
He saw Mark first. He lifted his chin and grinned and started to get up out of his chair.
“There they are! You fellas see anything?”
Then he saw me come through the door behind them.
Wearing his uncle’s coat.
I have watched that boy’s face since the day he was born. I held him in the hospital when he was an hour old. I have seen that face happy and sad and scared and sick with fever.
I have never seen the color leave it that way.
Mark did not raise his voice. I will give him that. I had asked him in the truck not to, and he kept his word. He walked up to the round table and laid one hand flat on it.
“We saw a real nice buck,” he said. “And I had coffee with the lady who owns your place.”
The table went quiet.
Then the table next to it went quiet. Then the next booth. It moved across that cafe like a wind crossing a wheat field, booth by booth, table by table, until the only sound left in the whole room was the bacon on the grill.
“I paid you six hundred dollars,” Mark said. “Three hundred of it was his.”
He put his other hand on Ben’s shoulder.
“He’s fifteen. You shook his hand.”
Cody opened his mouth. Nothing came out.
An old man at the next table turned all the way around in his chair. That was Jeff. He ran the grader shift opposite Wes for twenty years. The two of them used to trade off plowing the same roads in the same blizzards.
“What place?” Jeff said. “Wes’s eighty?”
“He’s been selling hunts on it,” said a voice from the doorway.
It was Don. I hadn’t known he followed us into town. He was standing just inside the door with his cap in his hands.
“Hundred and fifty a day,” Don said. “Told folks it was his.”
“Wes has been in the ground twenty months,” Jeff said.
He said it to Cody. He didn’t say it loud.
“That man taught you everything you know, son.”
That was all anybody said. Nobody shouted. Nobody threw anything. Nobody needed to. Forty people who had known Wes, who had stood in his yard, who had eaten at his table, who had gone to his funeral, looked at Cody.
And Cody looked at his eggs.
Mark had more in him. I could see it coming up in his chest. He drew a breath to say it, and I put my hand on his arm.
“That’s enough,” I said quietly. “He’s heard it. He’s my sister’s boy, and I’ll take it from here.”
Mark looked at me. Then he nodded once and stepped back. He and Ben went and sat at the counter.
I pulled out the chair across from Cody and sat down.
The young men at that table suddenly found reasons to carry their plates somewhere else. One by one they got up and left. The waitress, a woman named Carol who went to school with my sister, set a cup of coffee in front of me without being asked. On her way by, she laid her hand on my shoulder for just a second.
Cody would not look up at me.
“Aunt Marlene,” he said. “I can explain.”
“I expect you can. I’d like you to start with how much.”
“It wasn’t supposed to be like—”
“How much, Cody.”
He swallowed. “I don’t know exactly.”
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