Friday I went back out in the daylight with Wes’s cordless drill and a box of deck screws.
I am fifty-eight years old. I was not about to sit eight feet up a tree in the dark on a ladder I had not checked with my own hands. I put my full weight on every rung. The fourth one gave a little, so I went back to the shop and cut a new one from a board Wes had left leaning against the wall, and I screwed it on myself. Four screws each side. I shook the rail. I stood up on the bench and bounced a little.
It was as sound as the day he built it.
I left the sign where it was. I left the metal stand alone. I did not want anything to look different when they came.
Saturday morning I was up at four.
I filled Wes’s steel thermos. The dented green one that rode in the cab of a county road grader for thirty-one winters, rolling around on the floorboards every time he hit a drift. I put on long underwear and two pairs of socks. Then I took his brown chore coat off the hook by the back door, where it still hangs, where I have not washed it, because it still smells like him. Diesel and cold air and that soap he used.
I put on an orange stocking cap. I was not hunting, and the law does not make a person wear orange just to sit in a tree. But on opening morning there are rifles in every draw in Boone County, and I was not going to give anybody a reason to mistake me for anything but a woman.
I did not take a rifle. I had no use for one.
I took three cups.
I don’t know exactly why I took three. I just thought of Wes, who never in his whole life let a man stand in his yard without offering him something. A cup of coffee. A cold beer. A seat on the tailgate. That was who he was.
I left the pickup in Don’s yard, behind his machine shed, so there would be no truck sitting at my gate to warn anybody off. His kitchen light was on. He came out onto the step in his sock feet with a cup in his hand.
“Schmitt’s at the corner,” I told him. “If you hear anything you don’t like, you call him. Don’t wait for nine.”
He nodded slowly. “It’s twenty-two degrees, Marlene.”
“I’ve got his coat on.”
He didn’t say anything else. He just stood on the step and watched me go.
I crossed the road with a flashlight. And when I got to my gate, I stopped.
The chain was hanging loose. The padlock was open, hooked through one link of the chain, the way you’d leave it for somebody coming behind you.
Somebody had already been by. That morning, or the night before. Somebody with a key had come and opened my husband’s gate for strangers.
I knew there was only one person that could be.
I walked down the two-track in the dark with the frost crackling under my boots. I climbed the ladder. Eleven rungs. I counted them. I sat down on Wes’s bench with the thermos in my lap and turned off the flashlight and waited.
It is a long time, waiting for light in November.
The creek below me was skimmed with ice along the edges and running black in the middle. I could hear it. The cold came up through the plank and into my bones. Somewhere off to the west a great horned owl was calling, and another one answered.
I talked to Wes some. I am not ashamed to say that. I told him I was sorry. I told him I was sorry I had left his place alone for so long. I told him I didn’t know what I was doing out here, but I was doing it.
It was just gray enough to see my own breath when I heard the gate chain rattle.
Then nothing for a few minutes. Just the creek.
Then boots on the frozen two-track. Low voices. And two shapes coming through the bare trees, orange vests on, rifles slung over their shoulders with the muzzles pointed up.
One was a man of about forty-five. Heavyset, with glasses. The other was a boy. All arms and legs. He could not have been more than fifteen years old.
The boy was carrying a brown paper sack with the top rolled down.
A sack lunch.
I don’t know why that was the thing that got to me. But it was. Somebody had packed that lunch for him at a kitchen counter somewhere. A sandwich, probably. Maybe a cookie. He had been looking forward to this day. Maybe for months.
I knew enough not to let them walk right up on me in the dark. When they were still forty yards out, I turned the flashlight on, pointed it down at the ground, and called out loud and clear.
“Good morning!”
They both stopped dead in their tracks.
“Morning,” the man said after a second. Careful. He put his hand out flat toward the boy without looking at him, and the boy froze.
“Come on ahead,” I said. “It’s all right.”
They came on slowly. The man walked to the foot of the ladder and looked up at me. He looked at the orange cap. Then at the brown coat. Then at the green thermos. And I watched him try to work out what in the world he was seeing.
“Ma’am,” he said. “I think there’s been a mix-up.”
“Could be,” I said.
“We’ve got this stand today. We paid for it.”
“Both of you?”
“A hundred and fifty apiece. Two days.”
“Six hundred dollars,” I said.
“Yes, ma’am.” He tipped his head at the boy. “He mowed lawns all summer for his half. I told him if he wanted to hunt private ground, he could help pay for it.”
The boy looked down at his boots.
“Who did you pay?” I asked.
“The owner. Young fella named Cody. He was supposed to meet us at the gate this morning, but he texted last night and said go on in, first stand past the crossing, and he’d catch up with us at the cafe at noon.”
“He told you it was his?”
“Said his uncle left it to him. Said his uncle built this stand.”
I looked at the rail under my hand. At the little notches.
“His uncle did build it,” I said.
I had meant to do all my talking from up there. I had planned it that way, lying awake in bed. But I looked down at that boy standing in the frost with his sack lunch and his cheeks red from the cold, and I knew I was not going to ask a child to climb up a ladder and sit next to a strange old woman. And I was not going to talk down to his father from a tree like some kind of judge.
So I buttoned the thermos inside Wes’s coat and climbed down the eleven rungs to them.
There’s an oak stump at the foot of that tree where Wes used to sit to lace up his boots. I set three cups on it in a row.
“Lean your rifles against that cottonwood,” I said. “I brought coffee.”
The man didn’t move.
“Ma’am,” he said. “Who are you?”
“My name is Marlene. The man who built this stand was my husband. He died a year ago last March, and he left this eighty to me. I pay the taxes on it. Cody is my nephew.”
I poured the first cup.
“He does not own one foot of it. And until Thursday afternoon, I did not know there was a single soul hunting out here.”
Nobody said anything. The creek ran on below us.
The man took his glasses off and wiped them on his sleeve and put them back on. I could see his jaw working.
“Ben,” he said quietly. “Open your action.”
The boy unslung his rifle and worked the bolt back. The man did the same with his own rifle, and he leaned them both against the cottonwood, a good long ways from the ladder.
“Ma’am, I am sorry,” he said. “My name is Mark. I would never have set foot out here. I want you to know that. I’ve hunted thirty years, and I have never once been on a man’s ground without his say-so.”
“I believe you.”
“We’ll go. We’ll go right now.”
“You’ll have a cup of coffee first,” I said. “It’s twenty-two degrees and I carried three cups all this way.”
He looked at me a long moment. Then he nodded. And the three of us stood around that stump in the gray light like people at a church coffee hour after the early service.
I handed the cups around. The boy held his in both hands, his fingers wrapped all the way around it for the warmth.
“Do you drink coffee, Ben?”
“No, ma’am,” he said. “But I’m going to.”
I laughed. Out loud. Right there in the cold. And I realized it was the first time I had laughed out loud in I could not tell you how long. Maybe since before the shop. Maybe since before the bucket.
Mark didn’t laugh. Mark was getting angrier by the minute, in the quiet way of a man doing arithmetic in his head.
“How long has he been doing this?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I was hoping you could tell me.”
“He told me he had a fella from Fremont coming Monday. And two brothers out of Lincoln the back half of the week. He told me he ran bowhunters in October.” Mark set his cup down on the stump harder than he needed to. “He told me he had people out here last year too. I found him through a man I work with. I handed him my boy’s lawn mowing money in a parking lot in Columbus. And he shook Ben’s hand and told him his uncle would have liked him.”
I looked out at the timber for a while after that. I couldn’t look at either one of them.
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