The Deer Camp I Opened For Him

I drove him up the two-track at five. I went slower than a man could walk, with the headlights picking out the frost on the popple stumps, because every bump in that trail went straight up through his new knee.

He held onto the roll bar with one hand and the thermos with the other and did not say a word.

Mason walked ahead of us with a flashlight to watch for rocks. We stopped twice so Dennis could straighten the leg out.

By the time we came out on the far side of the clearing, the sky behind the pines had gone from black to gray, and you could see the snow and frost on every needle.

Dennis looked at the stand. He looked at the new ladder, the wide steps and the two handrails, and the lag bolts still bright where I had set them. He looked a long time.

I came around and got him out of the Ranger with his cane in one hand and my arm in the other. The thermos was in my free hand.

Mason was already at the bottom of the ladder with his rifle slung, waiting, because last year he had sat up there with his grandpa all opening morning.

He put his boot on the first step. Dennis stopped him.

“Go sit with Lyle this morning,” Dennis said. “He’s at the rock stand. He’s expecting you.”

Mason looked at me. I didn’t know anything about it. Then Dennis turned and looked at me.

“You’re with me,” he said.

We climbed. Him first, one step at a time with both hands on the rails, me right behind with one hand on his belt and the other on the rail.

Twelve feet took four minutes. At the top he sat down hard on the bench and let out his breath, and I sat down beside him and handed him the thermos.

He turned it over in his hands and saw the tape. Amber had written on it in marker, in her printing, which looks more like her mother’s every year. Be careful, Dad. Come home.

He didn’t open it. He set it on the shooting rail and looked out at the clearing for a long time, with the light coming up gray and blue on the snow.

“Ryan,” he said. “You need to know what happened at this camp in 1979.”

I waited.

“I was nineteen,” he said. “My sister Joan had married a man from Rhinelander that summer. Rick. My dad liked him. Everybody liked Rick. Dad brought him up to camp that fall because that’s what you did. A man marries your daughter, he’s family.”

He was quiet a minute.

“Rick drank,” he said. “We didn’t know how bad. He drank all Friday night and he was still drunk on opening morning, and about four in the afternoon he shot at something moving in the brush by the cabin. It was Lyle’s dog. A yellow Lab, Sadie. She was two. Lyle was twenty-three and he carried her up to the porch himself.”

The light was coming. A blue jay started somewhere off to the left.

“My dad never got over it,” Dennis said. “He’d brought that man in. He thought it was his fault. Joan left Rick two years later for other reasons, but Dad never brought anybody to camp again who wasn’t blood, and when he passed, I kept it the same. I told myself it was to keep everybody safe. Blood only. You know who you’ve got.”

“You never told anybody,” I said.