The Week in March Nobody Wanted

The second week of March

Scott and I drove up on the Saturday before Bobby’s group arrived. It was a bright cold day, fifteen degrees, with the sun so hard on the snow that I had to wear sunglasses in the truck.

We opened the cabin. We turned the furnace up to sixty-eight and built a fire in the wood stove. I put clean sheets on every bed and towels in the bathroom and a pan of scotcheroos on the counter, because that is what Mom would have done.

Then I stood at the picture window and looked out at the lake. It was white and flat and quiet, just like every March of my childhood. Out on the ice, a quarter mile off, somebody had a portable shelter set up, a little blue box with a tiny plume of smoke coming out of the chimney.

“You okay?” Scott asked.

“I’m okay.”

He went out to check the propane tank and came back in stamping snow off his boots.

“Nic,” he said. “You know your dad’s fish house is still out there in the trees?”

I did know. It had been sitting behind the woodshed on its oak runners since the last time Dad used it, with a tarp over the roof and snow drifted halfway up the door. Nobody had touched it in years. Mark had said something once about burning it.

“I know,” I said.

“Runners look solid,” Scott said. “Somebody could haul it out.”

“Not this year,” I said.

Bobby pulled in at four o’clock with a three-quarter ton pickup and a trailer with a tracked side-by-side on it, and right behind him came a Suburban with Iowa plates and six men in Carhartt bibs. They were polite to the point of being shy. One of them, a retired farmer named Jim with hands like oven mitts, took off his cap when he came in the door.

“Ma’am,” he said. “This is a real nice place.”

He looked around at the log walls, the pine table, Mom’s curtains, the photo on the wall of Dad holding up a stringer of perch with me beside him at ten years old in his enormous mittens.

“That your dad?”

“That’s my dad.”

“He built this?”

“Most of it.”

Jim nodded slowly. “You can tell,” he said.

Bobby was standing by the window, and I saw him looking out back toward the woodshed.

“Is that a homemade fish house back there?”

“My dad’s.”

He went out in his boots without a coat and walked around it, and came back in red-cheeked.

“Oak runners,” he said. “Plywood on a two by four frame. Barn red. Was your dad Arne?”

I stared at him.

“Arne Brandvold,” Bobby said. “Big Norwegian, wore a red plaid hat. He used to come into the bait shop in Bigfork when I was a kid working the counter. He tipped me a dollar every single time for scooping his minnows. Nobody else ever tipped. He told me to fish the drop off on the east end for perch.”

I had to sit down at the table.

“That’s him,” I said.

“Well, I’ll be,” Bobby said. “I’ve been fishing that drop off for twenty years.”

Scott and I drove home to Duluth that night. Bobby texted me on Tuesday a picture of the six men around Dad’s table with a big pile of cleaned perch and a cribbage board. Jim was laughing so hard his eyes were shut.

“Best week they’ve had in six years,” Bobby wrote. “Hope that’s okay to say.”