Three Veterans on Grandpa’s Eighty

“He would have,” I said. And for the first time since August, something in my chest let go a little.

Brad went back to his truck for his tools. He had brought them with him. He had known what he was going to ask before he ever pulled in.

The screen door opened behind me, and Dale came out onto the porch, pulling his work gloves on.

“Those steel stands are a two-man job coming down,” Dale said to nobody in particular. “Ladder sections are heavy. And that blind’s not coming off its legs with one guy.”

Brad stopped walking. He turned around and looked at Dale for a long moment. They had never met. Dale was the man his buddy had shaken hands with that morning at the field edge.

“You don’t have to do that,” Brad said.

“I know I don’t,” Dale said. He came down the porch steps. “I’m Dale.”

“Brad.”

They shook hands too. Then the two of them walked up the ridge together, Brad carrying a socket set and Dale carrying a long pry bar over his shoulder, and I stood on the porch with my arms folded inside Grandpa’s coat and watched them go.

It took them the rest of the afternoon. I could hear them up there, the clank of steel ladder sections, the whine of Brad’s cordless drill, every so often the low rumble of men’s voices. Once I heard Brad laugh.

Wes and Tim went back out to their chairs for the evening hunt. They walked right past Brad and Dale working on the ridge, and Wes lifted a hand, and Brad lifted a hand back.

At dusk, Brad and Dale carried the last of the steel down to Brad’s truck and loaded it into the bed.

The box blind came down in pieces, the panels stacked flat. The ridge looked bare without them. It looked the way it looked when I was a girl.

Brad stood at his truck door for a minute before he got in.

The sun was down and the sky over Ron’s cornfield had gone a deep pink, and the cold was coming up out of the ground.

“I don’t have anywhere to hunt now,” he said. He didn’t say it like a complaint. He said it like a man admitting something.

Dale was wiping his hands on a rag. He looked at Brad for a second, and then he said, “You know the county forest, up past Augusta?”

“Some.”

“I know a spot up there,” Dale said. “Back in off a logging road. The guys who walk in on people don’t walk that far. I’ll show you Thursday morning, if you want. After Thanksgiving dinner settles.”

Brad looked at him like he didn’t know what to say. Then he nodded. “I’d like that.”

He looked up at me on the porch. I thought about Grandpa, about land being for somebody who needs it, and about how maybe that went for other things, too. Second chances, for one.

“Ron Hanson’s got a hundred and twenty acres across the road,” I said. “Nobody’s hunting it since his boys moved to the Cities. You could ask him. Ask him yourself. I’m not going to ask for you.”

Brad was quiet for a moment. “You think he’d say yes? After everything?”

“I think he might,” I said. “If you go over there and tell him the truth. That’s what worked for me.”