I let Penny out. She came to heel without being asked. I took Dad’s gun out of the case, broke it open, and laid it over my left arm, and the two of us walked across the yard.
The talking stopped about halfway there.
I have thought about that walk a hundred times since. It was perhaps sixty steps. It felt like walking down the aisle at church, except nobody was smiling, and the only music was a meadowlark somewhere off in the grass.
I stopped a few feet from Duane. Penny sat at my left knee and looked up at him with her tongue out.
Duane looked at the dog. He looked at the gun. Then he looked at me, and his face did not change at all.
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“House is that way, Kelsey,” he said.
I did not move. I did not say anything. I just stood there with my dad’s gun on my arm and my dog at my knee and let him look.
It was so quiet I could hear the corn leaves ticking in the wind out in the next field.
Then my husband set his coffee cup down on the tailgate.
Tanner looked at his father for a long second. I have known that man since we were twenty-two years old, and I had never once seen him look at his dad like that. Not angry. Just done.
He unzipped his own blaze orange vest and took it off and held it out to me.
“She walks next to me, Dad,” he said. “With her dog.”
Duane did not answer him. Tanner kept holding out the vest.
I took it. It was still warm from him. I put it on over my brown coat and zipped it up, and he reached behind the seat of his pickup and pulled out the ratty old one he kept for fencing and put that on instead.
Nobody argued. That was the thing I remember most. Conrad looked at the ground, then at Merritt, and Merritt shrugged one shoulder, and the two of them stepped apart to leave a gap between them on the line.
Roger, who was seventy if he was a day, gave me a little nod. Keith said, “Morning, Kelsey,” like it was any morning at all.
Duane looked at his watch. It was 9:52.
He did not say yes. He did not say no. He snapped his gun closed, settled his cap, and started walking toward the corn.
“Duke,” he said. “Come on, boy.”
The old dog got up. It took him two tries. He limped after Duane across the yard, and I had to look away.
We lined out along the edge of the picked corn, facing the long strip of Conservation Reserve grass. The grass was taller than my waist, gold and red in the sun, with the frost just starting to come off it. The sky was so blue it hurt to look at.
Duane walked the far end, the way he always did, with Duke at his heel. Then Roger, then Conrad. Then me and Penny. Then Tanner, then Merritt, then Keith on the near end by the fence.
Duane looked down the line at ten o’clock exactly and raised his hand. We stepped into the grass.
I let Penny off her lead.
“Hunt ’em up,” I said, the way my dad used to say it.
She went. She went the way she had been going all summer in the ditches, out twenty yards in front of me, across, back, across, her nose working, her tail up like a flag. She stayed in range. She checked back over her shoulder every few seconds, the way I had taught her.