The Deer Camp I Opened For Him

He did his therapy exercises like chores, grimly and on time, and he hated the walker so much he graduated himself to a cane two weeks early.

The surgeon was clear at the six-week appointment. Amber drove him and told me afterward. Walking on flat ground, yes, as much as he could stand.

Stairs with a handrail, yes, one at a time. The half-mile trail back to his stand, over the creek on a log bridge, through deadfall, in the dark, in snow? No. Not this year.

“He just sat there,” Amber said. “He didn’t argue. That’s how I knew it got him.”

A week later, Kurt and Tony came over for Sunday dinner at our place, which they did maybe twice a year. We had pork roast. Dennis was at the head of the table with his cane hooked on the chair back.

Tony brought it up over pie. He had clearly been chosen to do it, because Kurt kept his eyes on his plate.

“Kurt and I talked it over,” Tony said. “We think we skip camp this year.”

Dennis put his fork down.

“Forty years we’ve never missed,” Tony said. “I know that. But Dad, you can’t get back to the stand, and none of us want to go up there and leave you sitting in the cabin by yourself all day listening to everybody else shoot. It’d kill you. It’d kill us to watch it.”

“I’d be fine,” Dennis said.

“You wouldn’t,” Kurt said quietly. It was the only thing he said all night. “You’d hate it. We’d hate it. We’ll go next year, all of us, when you’re walking good.”

I want to be fair to those two, because they were not wrong and they were not being cruel. They loved their father.

They looked at that knee and that cane and they could not stand the picture of him stuck on the porch while the shooting started. They thought they were sparing him.

Dennis looked at his pie a long time. Then he picked up his fork.

“Suit yourselves,” he said. “It’s just one year.”

Across the table, Amber looked at me. We have been married fourteen years. I know that look. It is the look she gave me in the delivery room when the nurse handed me Mason, and it means, I know you, so do it.

That night, after everybody left, she stood at the sink and I dried.

“He’ll sit in that recliner the whole week of Thanksgiving,” she said. “He’ll sit in the house where my mother died and listen to the radio say how many deer they’re registering. Forty years, Ryan. He never missed one. Not the year he broke his wrist, not the year Grandpa died.”

“I know.”

“Kurt and Tony mean well. They always mean well.”

“I know they do.”

She put a plate in the rack and looked at me. “You could open it,” she said.

“It’s not my camp, Amber.”

“It’s not anybody’s camp this year. That’s the point. Somebody has to open it or it just sits there with the mice in it.”

I had thought the same thing at the dinner table, the minute Tony said the word skip. I want to say I thought it for noble reasons. Some of it was.

Some of it, I’m not proud to say, was that I had wanted to see the inside of that cabin for twelve years, and here was a door with nobody standing in it.