Three Veterans on Grandpa’s Eighty

We spent two Saturdays in October on the ridge. I wore Grandpa’s old canvas coat, the tan one with the corduroy collar, because it was the warmest thing in the house and it still smelled a little like him.

Grandpa’s three oak ladder stands were still standing, but nobody had touched them in years.

The bottom rungs were soft with moss on one of them, and a shooting rail had rotted clean through on another.

Dale brought a chainsaw and a cooler. Wes brought his truck, a load of treated lumber, a box of lag bolts and a ratchet strap for every stand.

Tim brought nothing but his hands and a pair of work gloves that had seen a lot of use.

They did not talk much. Men like that don’t. Wes measured and cut. Dale held boards.

Tim climbed each stand, tested every rung with his full weight, and pointed at what needed replacing. They worked like they had been doing it together for twenty years.

At noon we sat on the tailgate and ate egg salad sandwiches I’d made that morning.

Dale looked up the ridge at Brad’s steel stands, still chained to the oaks, the box blind sitting on its legs like a little gray shed.

“Those are good stands,” Dale said. “He put some work into that blind. Insulated it, looks like.”

“He did,” I said. “Brad was always handy.”

Dale nodded slowly. “A man puts work into something, he starts to feel like it’s his. That’s not right. But it’s human.”

I didn’t answer him. I wasn’t ready to be fair to Brad yet. But I thought about it all that night.

By the second Saturday, Grandpa’s three chairs were solid again. Each one had new rungs, a new rail, a ratchet strap around the oak, and Grandpa’s old boards wherever the old boards were still good.

Tim insisted on keeping as many of the old boards as he could.

“These were his,” he said, running his glove over a gray oak plank with Grandpa’s pencil marks still faint on it. “You don’t throw that away.”

In Wisconsin, the nine-day gun deer season opens the Saturday before Thanksgiving. Last year that was November 22.

Every school in Buffalo County might as well close for it. Half the men in church that Sunday would be missing.

I was up at four-thirty. I made a pot of coffee strong enough to stand a spoon in and filled Grandpa’s steel thermos to the top.

It is dented on one side from the time he dropped it off a hay wagon in 1974. It still keeps coffee hot for twelve hours.

I put on long underwear, two pairs of wool socks, Grandpa’s tan canvas coat, and a blaze-orange knit hat. I pulled my auburn hair back in a low ponytail so it would fit under the hat.

In Wisconsin, a gun deer hunter has to wear blaze orange or blaze pink on at least half of everything above the waist, hat included if you wear one.

I wasn’t hunting. But I was walking a field edge in the dark on opening morning, and I wanted every man with a rifle within a mile to see me.

They pulled into the drive at a quarter to six, one truck with all three of them in it.

Dale with his short gray beard, Wes stocky as a stove, Tim lean and clean-shaven, all three in blaze-orange vests and hats, their rifles slung on their shoulders. Nobody loaded a gun in my yard. Dale had told them that was how it would be.