The Widow in the Deer Stand

“Then go down and 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. 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.

“Why would you do that?” he said.

“Because my husband would have,” I said. “And because you’re not who I’m upset with.”

The sun came up red through the bare limbs and turned the frost to smoke. A pair of does came down off the hill about seven and drank at the crossing, close enough that I could see their ears turn. Ben did not raise his rifle. He had a buck permit and he knew it, and 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. He stood broadside in the willows across the creek, sixty yards off, with the light on him.

I felt the boy go still. He brought the rifle up slowly and settled it on the rail, right on top of Wes’s notches. I held my breath.

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 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 and then walked up into Don’s corn stubble and was gone.

The boy let his breath out. His hands were shaking.

“That’s all right,” he said, mostly to himself.

I had to look away. Here was a child who had been lied onto my land, who had every excuse in the world, and nobody was watching him but an old woman in a dead man’s coat. He asked whose side it was.

That was when I knew what I was going to say to Cody. Up to then I had not known.

On the way down the ladder Ben stopped with his hand on the rail.

“Who’s Cody, age twelve?” he said. Then he heard himself. “Oh.”

“That’s him,” I said. “That’s who took your money. My husband cut the little letters.”

He read them. He did not say anything, and I thought well of him for it.

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 fine, and that the rest was family business I meant to handle myself. Then I told Don to stand down. He had his coat on and his keys in his hand.

Mark and Ben followed my pickup into town. It was ten minutes to noon when we parked on the main street.

A small-town cafe at noon on opening day is orange at every table, three generations to a booth, and the windows steamed. Half of Boone County was in there, and I knew most of them.

Cody was at the big round table in the middle with five or six others. He had a plate of eggs in front of him and he was telling a story with his hands.

He saw Mark first. He lifted his chin and grinned and started to get up.

“There they are. You fellas see anything?”

Then he saw me come in behind them, wearing his uncle’s coat.