Three Veterans on Grandpa’s Eighty

Some people have asked me since then why I didn’t call the sheriff, or a lawyer, or sue Brad for the money.

The honest answer is that I didn’t need any of them. The land was in my name alone.

In Wisconsin, a landowner keeps people off her own ground by posting it and telling them so. That is all it takes. I did not need a deputy to keep my own gate.

I drove to Fleet Farm in Menomonie the next Saturday and bought a box of posted signs, the yellow metal kind, eleven inches square, the size the law asks for.

I bought a box of roofing nails and a pair of good leather gloves.

Ron Hanson helped me put them up. We walked every fence line on the eighty, two whole evenings, and put up a sign every couple of hundred feet along the road and the ridge line, more than the law requires, so nobody could ever say they missed one.

“Your grandpa would have liked this,” Ron said, pounding a nail into a corner post. “He never posted it in his life. But he’d have liked you doing it.”

Then I sat down at Grandpa’s kitchen table and wrote one letter.

I wrote it by hand first and then typed it, so it would be clear and plain, and I mailed it to Brad’s house in Durand, certified, with a return receipt.

It said that any permission he had to hunt or enter the property was revoked as of that date, for himself and for anyone he had told they could hunt there.

It asked him to remove his stands and his blind by October 31. It did not mention the money.

I signed it Amy Lindqvist. I had gone back to my maiden name the year before. It felt like signing it for Grandpa, too.

The green card came back signed four days later. Brad never called. Within a week, the trail cameras his buddies had strapped to the oaks were gone. Nobody said a word to me about it.

His stands stayed up. I figured that was his last word on the subject.

I would like to tell you I had a plan. I didn’t.

I had eighty acres of the best deer ground in Buffalo County, a ridge full of white oaks dropping acorns, and nobody to hunt it.

In September our church held its fall potluck in the basement fellowship hall.

Hot dish in roasters, three kinds of bars, and Jell-O with the fruit suspended in it the way only women over seventy can manage.

I sat at the end of a long table across from Dale Moody. I knew Dale a little.

He drove a milk truck for the cooperative and sang bass in the choir, and he kept his gray beard trimmed short, like a man who had been told to keep it that way for a long time.

Dale was Army. He went to the Gulf in 1991 and came home and never talked about it, which is how most of the Army men I know handle it.

He was fifty-eight and had the biggest, quietest hands I have ever seen on a man.

The talk at the table turned to deer season, the way it always does in Buffalo County in September.

Somebody’s nephew had a trail camera picture of a ten-point. Somebody else’s husband was already sighting in his rifle.