The Widow in the Deer Stand

The sign was down by two o’clock. Cody carried it up to my pickup himself and laid it in the bed, face down.

I told Janet that night, in her kitchen, so she would have it from me before she had it from anybody else. She was angry at me first, the way a mother is.

“I didn’t give Schmitt his name, Janet,” I said. “I want you to know I could have.”

She sat down at her table then, and the fight went out of her.

“He’s not a thief, Marlene.”

“He stole. But no. I don’t think that’s all he is. That’s why he’s cutting cedar instead.”

Mark and Ben hunted Sunday morning, their second day. I sat in the stand with Ben again. We saw the does. We did not see the buck.

“Next year,” I told him at the gate. “You come back next year and you won’t owe anybody a dime. You’ll be my guests.”

“You mean that?” Mark said.

“I carried three cups out here,” I said. “I guess I must have.”

Cody was at the gate at seven o’clock the first Saturday in December with his own chainsaw, his chaps, and a jug of bar oil. I had Wes’s loppers, a pair of leather gloves, and the thermos.

Red cedar comes into grass the way gray comes into hair. The only mercy in it is that a cedar will not come 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, and I dragged. We stacked the piles in the open, to be burned once there was snow on the ground and the fire chief had signed the permit.

We did not talk much that first day. He worked like a man who wanted to be worn out. At noon we sat on the tailgate and I poured the coffee, and he looked at the cup in his hand a long time before he drank it.

It went on like that into January, eight hours a day, and I kept the count in pencil on the back of that placemat. He never once asked me to call it even. 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.

“I came out here after the funeral,” he said. He was not looking at me. “That same night. I had the key. I climbed up in the stand in my good clothes and I sat there till it got dark.”

I let go of the cedar I was dragging.

“I kept thinking it was the only thing of his I had. 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, and I had a right to be. But I had also had seven weeks of dragging brush to think, and there was a thing I had not said to anybody.