The Widow in the Deer Stand

I walked down the two-track in the dark with the frost crackling under my boots. I climbed the ladder, eleven rungs. I sat down on Wes’s bench with the thermos in my lap and I turned off the flashlight and waited.

It is a long time, waiting for light in November. The creek was skimmed with ice along the edges and running in the middle. The cold came up through the plank.

I talked to Wes some. I am not ashamed of that. I told him I was sorry I had left his place alone so long.

It was gray enough to see my own breath when I heard the gate chain rattle.

Then nothing, for a few minutes. Then boots on the frozen two-track, and low voices, and two shapes coming through the bare trees with orange vests on and rifles slung over their shoulders, muzzles up.

One was a man of about forty-five, heavyset, with glasses. The other was a boy. He was all arms and legs, and he could not have been more than fifteen.

The boy was carrying a brown paper sack with the top rolled down. A sack lunch.

I do not know why that was the thing that got to me, but it was. Somebody had packed that for him. He had been looking forward to this.

I knew enough not to let them walk up on me. When they were still forty yards out I turned the flashlight on, pointed it at the ground, and said “Good morning” good and loud.

They both stopped dead.

“Morning,” the man said, after a second. Careful. He put a hand out flat toward the boy without looking at him, and the boy stood still.

“Come on ahead,” I said. “It’s all right.”

They came on. The man walked to the foot of the ladder and looked up at me. He looked at the cap, and the coat, and the thermos, and I watched him try to work out what 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 at his boots.

“Who did you pay?” I said.

“The owner. Young fella named Cody. He was going to meet us at the gate, 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.”

“His uncle did build it,” I said.

I had meant to do my talking from up there. But I looked at that boy standing in the frost with his sack lunch, and I was not going to ask a child up a ladder to sit beside a stranger, and I was not going to talk down to his father from a tree.

I buttoned the thermos inside Wes’s coat and climbed down the eleven rungs to them.

There is an oak stump at the foot of that tree where Wes used to sit to lace his boots. I set three cups on it in a row.

“Lean your rifles against that cottonwood,” I said. “I brought coffee.”

The man did not move.

“Ma’am,” he said. “Who are you?”