The Deer Camp I Opened For Him

There wasn’t one. Not once. Fourteen men said yes, counting Mason and counting Dennis, if he would come. One cousin from down by Stevens Point said, “About time,” and hung up before I could ask him what he meant.

I called Kurt and Tony last. I did not want them to hear it from somebody else, and I also, if I am honest, did not want to give them time to talk me out of it.

Tony was quiet a long time, which for Tony is something. “Does Dad know?” he said.

“He gave me the key.”

“He gave you the key,” Tony repeated. Then he laughed, short. “Well. Okay. Okay then.”

Kurt didn’t say anything at all when I told him. I thought the call had dropped. Then he said, “What do you need?”

“Kindling,” I said. “And somebody to help me carry mattresses.”

“Friday at noon,” he said, and hung up.

Amber found the thermos the Sunday before. She had gone over to her dad’s to put up his storm windows, which he could not do on a ladder that year, and she went down to the basement for the screen door hardware and came back up with it in both hands.

It was a plain silver stainless steel Stanley, the old kind with the handle on the side, dented on the bottom from forty years of being dropped on frozen ground.

There was still a curl of masking tape on the lid, gone brown, with nothing left of the writing on it but a smudge.

“Mom packed his coffee in this every opener,” Amber said at our kitchen table. “Every single one, from the year they got married. Black, one sugar, so hot you couldn’t drink it till nine o’clock. And she’d put a piece of tape on the lid with a note.”

“What did the note say?”

“Same thing every year.” She smiled a little. “Be careful, D. Come home.”

She peeled the old tape off with her thumbnail and washed the thermos in the sink and dried it with a dish towel for a long time, longer than it needed.

“I’ll fill it Friday night,” she said. “You take it up in the morning.”

I drove up Wednesday after my shift with the new mattresses tied down in the truck bed and a cooler of groceries, and I slept in the cabin alone that night for the first time.

It was nine degrees. I kept the stove going and lay in the bottom bunk listening to the logs tick and the owls out in the pines.

Lyle came Thursday with the Ranger on a trailer. It was a dark green Polaris, older, with a cargo bed on the back and a bench seat, and he had put a boat cushion on the passenger side.

He did not say anything about the cushion, and I didn’t either.

Friday I cooked. I made chili, because Amber said her mother sent a roaster of it up with the boys every opener, and they still talked about it.

I made it in three electric roasters at home Thursday night, and I hauled them up and set them on the wood stove to keep warm.

Kurt came at noon like he said, with a pickup load of kindling and a new chainsaw chain he gave me without a word.

He walked in the door and stopped and looked around at the clean floor, the new mattresses, the wood stacked to the ceiling on the back porch, and the pump at the sink.