The Bait Shop on the First Day of Deer Season

The Stool

There was one thing I noticed about halfway through the morning, and I have thought about it more than anything else from that day.

Nobody sat on the stool.

It was the only seat behind the counter. Jake was on his feet at the register for five hours straight. Tori and I never sat down once. And a couple of the old men who came around the end of the counter to talk to us, men with bad hips of their own, stood there leaning on the counter for twenty minutes rather than sit on it.

A big man named Herb, who’d worked at the paper mill until it closed, came around behind the counter at one point to help Tori lift a full coffee urn. When he was done he set his own cup down on the counter beside the stool, looked at the stool, and then picked his cup back up and went and stood by the minnow tanks to drink it.

It was the strangest, quietest thing. Nobody said a word about it. They just would not sit in Gus’s seat.

Tori saw it too. When I looked over at her she was pressing the back of her wrist against her eyes, holding a doughnut box in the other hand.

Seven O’Clock, and the Phone

It was a few minutes past seven when I decided to call him. I knew he’d be awake. Grandpa had been up at four every day of his life, rehab or no rehab.

He answered on the first ring. “Well?”

“Grandpa,” I said. “Listen.”

I held the phone up toward the room. I didn’t say anything else. Just the bell over the door, and the register drawer, and forty people in orange talking all at once over coffee.

He was quiet for so long I thought the call had dropped.

Then a voice next to me said, “Is that Gus?”

It was the older Petersen brother, who had come back for a second cup. He held out his hand. I put my phone in it.

“Gus,” he said loudly, the way old men talk on phones. “It’s Rudy. We came at a quarter after. Same as always. Your granddaughter had the coffee on.” He listened a minute. “No, it’s not as good as yours. Don’t you tell her I said that.”

He handed it to the man behind him. That man said, “Gus, it’s Kip Hovland. Pete’s on my stand right now. I come in for hand warmers. You’re about out, you know that? You’re plum out of the big ones.”

And then the phone just kept going.

Nobody organized it. Nobody asked them to. My phone went down that counter hand to hand, from one orange coat to the next, and every man said something to Grandpa before he passed it on.

“Gus, you sold me my first box of slugs in 1979. I’ve never bought a shell anywhere else.”

“Gus, it’s Tommy Brekke. My dad’s been gone four years. I still come here first because he did.”

“Gus, I brought my grandson. He’s twelve. It’s his first year with a gun. I wanted him to meet you. Here, say hi to Mr. Ostrom.”

That boy took the phone in both hands and said, “Hi, Mr. Ostrom,” in a small voice, and then listened, and nodded, and said, “Yes sir. I will, sir,” and handed it back to his grandfather with his ears red.

I asked him later what Grandpa told him. He said, “He told me to keep my safety on until I’m sure, and to say a prayer for the deer.”