My Nephew Charged Hunters $150 a Day to Hunt My Late Husband’s 80 Acres So I Was Waiting in the Deer Stand on Opening Morning
“Tell Cody his hunters left my gate open again.”
That was how I found out. Not a letter. Not a phone call. Don said it to me across a pallet of water softener salt at the co-op in Albion on a Thursday afternoon, two days before rifle season opened. He said it the same way he might have told me it looked like rain.
I had a forty-pound bag of sunflower seed on my hip. I set it down on the pallet.
“His hunters?” I said.
Don has farmed across the road from our eighty since before I married into it. He hays the twenty acres of grass on the north end for me on shares, and he runs heifers on his side of the county road.
He is not a man who carries tales. Not ever. In all the years I have known him I have never once heard him say a bad word about a neighbor.
He took his seed corn cap off, looked down into it like the answer might be in there, and put it back on.
“Marlene,” he said. “I figured you knew.”
“Knew what, Don?”
“I had eleven heifers out on the road Sunday before last. Your gate was standing wide open and so was mine, because whoever went through yours turned around in my drive.
I caught a fella loading a bow into a pickup with Douglas County plates, and I asked him what he thought he was doing.”
He rubbed the back of his neck.
“He was polite about it. Said he was sorry about the gate. Said he was hunting with permission. Said he pays Cody a hundred and fifty dollars a day.”
I did not say anything. I could feel my heart going in my ears.
“I said, pays Cody for what. And he said for the hunting. He said the place came to Cody from his uncle.”
His uncle was Wes.
Wes was my husband for thirty-six years. He had been gone twenty months that week. He went out to the shop on a Tuesday in March to sharpen mower blades, and an hour later I found him sitting on an overturned bucket with his glasses still on his face, like he had only stopped for a minute to think something over.
He never got up.
The eighty was his father’s before it was his. His dad bought it in 1961.
Sixty acres of timber and creek bottom along Beaver Creek, and twenty acres of grass, seven miles out of town. It never made anybody a dime to speak of. It was not that kind of land. It was where the men in that family went to be quiet.
Wes ran a road grader for the county for thirty-one years. He spent his whole working life fixing roads other people drove on, and fixing machines that broke every winter, and fixing whatever went wrong in our house on the weekends.
That eighty was the only thing he ever owned that he did not have to fix.
It came to me when he died. I paid the taxes on it in April, the same as I had the April before, out of the same checking account I pay the light bill from.
“Don,” I said. “Are you sure he said Cody?”
“He showed me the number in his phone.”
Don looked sorry clear down to his boots. “I should have come to the house. I kept thinking it wasn’t my business. And then I kept thinking Wes would’ve wanted me to say.”
“You said it,” I told him. “Thank you.”
I need to tell you who Cody is, or none of the rest of this will make sense.
Cody is my sister Janet’s boy. He was twenty-seven that fall. His own father left when he was nine. Drove off to a job in Texas and never sent for them. Never sent much of anything, not even birthday cards after the first two years.
It was Wes who took that boy. Wes put a fishing pole in his hand the first summer, and showed him how to bait a hook without crying over the worm. Later it was a .22, and later still a deer rifle. Wes taught him to shoot out of the stand above the creek crossing on the eighty.
That stand was built for one man. Wes made it that way on purpose. But the fall Cody turned eleven, Wes tore the old bench out and built it back wide enough for two.
He never said a word about why. He just did it.
Cody stood next to me at the funeral. He carried the casket. I remember his hand on my elbow at the graveside, steadying me, and I remember thinking, at least I still have this boy.
I sat in the co-op parking lot with the engine off for a long time after Don told me. The bag of sunflower seed was still sitting on that pallet inside. I never did go back for it.
I want to be plain about what I could have done, because I know how it sounds that I didn’t.
I could have called the game warden. Hunting somebody’s land without the owner’s permission is against the law in Nebraska, sign on the fence or not.
And taking money from people for it, under a lie, is something worse than that. I could have called Deputy Schmitt, who stood up at our wedding and has known Cody since he was in diapers.
Either one of them would have been at that gate Saturday morning in a marked truck with the lights going.
I did not send them. Not yet.
What I did do was call Schmitt at home Friday at noon. I did not give him Cody’s name. I told him I had reason to think strangers were hunting the eighty.
I told him I would be sitting in Wes’s stand before daylight on opening morning to see who they were, and that he would hear my voice on his telephone by nine o’clock.
“And if I don’t?” he said.
“Then you come. And you come quick.”
He was quiet on the line. “I could just be there, Marlene.”
“I know you could. I want to look at them myself first. Let me have that.”
He did not like it. I could hear it in his breathing. But he said he would be parked at the corner a mile north with his radio on, and I did not argue with him about that.
I could have called Cody too. That was the one I thought about hardest. I sat at my kitchen table Thursday night with the phone in my hand and his name right there on the screen.
But I have known that boy his whole life. If I called him, he would have a story ready before I hung up. And a better story by the time he got to my kitchen.
He would call his hunters off, and he would cry, and I would never know how long it had been going on or how many people he had taken money from.
And there was something else.
Strangers had been walking Wes’s ground for I did not know how long. Sitting on his bench. Looking at his creek. I wanted to see them with my own eyes.
I wanted to know what kind of men they were before I decided what kind of trouble this was.
So instead of calling anybody, I drove out there.
It was four o’clock in the afternoon and the light was already going long and yellow across the stubble fields.
The gate was shut. The chain was looped around the post the way it should be, and the padlock was snapped.
It was the same padlock that had always been on that gate. Wes kept three keys to it. One was on my ring. One hung on a nail in the shop. And one he had given to Cody on his sixteenth birthday, tucked inside a card.
I had not been out to the eighty four times since the funeral. I will own that. I would drive as far as the gate and see the two-track going down into the trees, and my hands would start shaking on the steering wheel, and I would turn the pickup around and go home.
This time I got out and unlocked the gate and drove down.
The first thing I saw was the sign.
It was a square of plywood wired to the big cottonwood where the two-track forks. Painted white, with black letters done carefully with a brush. Somebody had taken time on those letters.
PRIVATE GROUND. HUNTING BY RESERVATION ONLY. CALL CODY.
And under that, his telephone number.
I stood and read it three times. Then I walked the creek.
Down at the bend there was a new metal ladder stand strapped to an ash tree. The store tag was still zip-tied to the rail. There were truck tracks cut deep into the soft ground along the bottom. Deeper than anything Wes ever left. Wes walked in. He always walked in.
Then I went to Wes’s stand.
It sits eight feet up in a bur oak above the crossing, where the deer come down off the hill to water.
He built it out of treated lumber in 1998, and he replaced the boards every few years whether they needed it or not. The ladder is two-by-fours.
The bench is a single plank. The rail across the front is a two-by-six he ran his hand along so many seasons that the top of it has gone smooth and dark, like the arm of an old church pew.
I climbed up.
Under the bench somebody had left a hand warmer packet and a candy wrapper.
I sat down where he used to sit. And I looked at the rail.
Wes kept his tally there, cut in with his pocketknife.
A notch for every deer that stand ever gave him. Twenty-some of them, small and neat and even, the way he did everything.
And then, next to the notches, a bigger cut. Deeper. In a boy’s uneven letters.
CODY. AGE 12.
And next to that, small, in Wes’s hand:
PROUD OF YOU.
I had never seen it. In thirty-six years of marriage, I had never once climbed that ladder. I had always figured it was his place, his and the boy’s, and I left them to it.
I put my hand on those letters.
I did my crying up there, where nobody was looking. Then I climbed down and drove home, and I did not sleep that night.
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.
“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.”
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.
“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.
