The Widow in the Deer Stand

Cody stood next to me at the funeral. He carried the casket.

I sat in the co-op parking lot with the engine off for a good while.

I want to say plainly what I could have done, because I know how it sounds. I could have called the game warden. Hunting a person’s land without the owner’s say-so is against the law in Nebraska whether there is a sign on the fence or not, and taking money for it under a lie is something worse. 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.

I did not send them. Not yet.

What I did do, Friday noon, was call Schmitt at home. I did not give him Cody’s name. I told him I had reason to think strangers were hunting the eighty, that 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. “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. He said he would be parked at the corner a mile north with his radio on, and I did not argue.

I could have called Cody, too, and that was the one I thought about hardest. But I have known that boy his whole life. If I called him he would have a story ready before I hung up the phone, and a better one by the time he got to my kitchen, and I would never know how long it had been going on or how many people he had taken money from. He would call his hunters off and that would be the end of what I could find out.

And there was this. Strangers had been walking Wes’s ground for I did not know how long, sitting on his bench, and I wanted to look at them. I wanted to see what kind of men they were with my own eyes before I decided what kind of trouble this was.

So I drove out there instead.

It was four o’clock and the light was already going long and yellow. The gate was shut, with the chain looped around the post the way it should be and the padlock snapped. It was the same padlock that had always been on it. Wes kept three keys. One was on my ring, one was on a nail in the shop, and one he had given Cody on his sixteenth birthday, in a card.

I had not been out there four times since the funeral. I will own that. I would get as far as the gate and see the two-track going down into the trees, and I would turn the pickup around.

I 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.

PRIVATE GROUND. HUNTING BY RESERVATION ONLY. CALL CODY.

And his telephone number.

I walked the creek. Down at the bend there was a new metal ladder stand strapped to an ash tree with the store tag still zip-tied to the rail. There were truck tracks cut into the soft ground along the bottom, deeper than anything Wes ever left.