Three Veterans on Grandpa’s Eighty

Dale came down from his chair at noon with nothing but a story about a spike buck that walked under him at forty feet while he was pouring coffee.

He said the deer looked right up at him like it knew. Wes laughed so hard he had to set his fork down.

At a little after two in the afternoon, Brad’s truck pulled into my drive.

I saw it from the kitchen window. My stomach went cold. The three men were sitting at Grandpa’s table eating a second round of sandwiches, and they all saw it too. Dale set his sandwich down.

“You want us out there?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “Let me.”

I put on Grandpa’s coat and went out on the porch. Brad got out of his truck slowly and stood at the bottom of the steps with his hands in his jacket pockets.

He looked older than he had in August. He looked like he hadn’t slept.

“Kurt called me,” he said.

“I figured he would.”

He looked at the doe, which was hanging now from Grandpa’s old buck pole by the machine shed. He looked at Wes’s truck parked by the house. Then he looked at me.

“He told me who they were,” Brad said. “He told me he shook the one fella’s hand and left. He said he felt like dirt, Amy. He said all three of them did. They want their money back.”

“That’s between you and them.”

“I know it.” He took his hands out of his pockets and rubbed his face. “I’m paying it back. All of it. Out of my own pocket. I already told them.”

I didn’t say anything. I waited, the way Grandpa used to wait for a deer.

“Can I take my stands down?” Brad asked. “Myself. Today. I don’t want your guys having to do it. And I don’t want Ron Hanson having to look at them all winter.”

I asked him the question then. I hadn’t planned to, but it came out of me before I could stop it.

“Why, Brad? Not the stands. The money. You had a good job. You had the house. Why would you sell my grandpa’s ridge to your friends?”

He was quiet for a long time. A blue jay was screaming in the oaks behind the house, and somewhere down the road a dog was barking at gunfire.

“After we split,” he said, “those guys were about all I had. Everybody else picked a side, and they picked yours. Our church friends. Your cousins. Even Ron.” He laughed, but it wasn’t really a laugh. “Kurt and Mike and Russ, they stuck. They came over and watched the Packers. They called me on Sundays.”

He looked at the ground.

“The first fall after, they asked if we could still hunt the eighty. I didn’t want to tell them no. I didn’t want to lose that, too. And then Kurt said they’d pay, and I told myself I built the stands, so it was half mine. I told myself you didn’t care.”

“I cared,” I said.

“I know. I know you did.” He looked up at me, and his eyes were red. “I’m sorry, Amy. I’m sorry I said that about it being wasted on you. That was a rotten thing to say. Your grandpa would have taken me out behind the shed for it.”