The Stand We Built on Grandma’s Forty

“Noel’s taking the oak ridge this year,” Brad said. He said it to the hood of his pickup, where he had a socket set laid out on a shop towel, and he did not look up at either of us.

It was the second Sunday in September, a little after two in the afternoon. We had come out from church dinner at the Lindstrom place, the way we did most Sundays, and Carter had run ahead of me across the yard to his uncle.

Carter was nine that summer. He had been shooting practice rounds with me since the Fourth of July, and every night since June he had asked me how many days were left until the opener.

He kept the number on a sticky note on his bedroom door.

“Uncle Brad,” he said, “Dad says this year I get to sit up on the ridge with him.”

He said it so proud that a couple of the men on the porch turned around to look.

Brad pulled a socket off the ratchet and set it down. “Noel’s got the ridge,” he said again. “You can wait in the truck, bud. Keep the heater going for us. Next year, maybe.”

I watched my son take that. He didn’t cry. He didn’t argue. He just looked down at the gravel between his shoes, and his ears went red, the way they do when a teacher calls on him and he doesn’t know the answer.

My name is Travis Holm. I’m thirty-four, and I’ve been a lineman for the rural electric co-op out of Little Falls for eleven years.

I’m not a talker. Jenna says I’d rather climb a pole in sleet than say three sentences at a family dinner.

I had hunted that oak-ridge stand on the Lindstrom farm every November for twelve years. Jenna’s dad walked me out to it the fall after our wedding, handed me the key to the gate, and said a son-in-law ought to have a place to sit.

It was a plain box blind on four posts, built by Jenna’s grandpa back in the seventies, looking down a long ridge of red and white oaks toward a swamp the deer used every morning.

I had fixed the roof on it twice. I had replaced the ladder rungs myself.

I knew I had no claim on it. It was never mine. I just thought, the way you think about the sun coming up, that when my boy was old enough he would sit up there with me and see what I had seen.

“Brad,” I said. “He’s been waiting on this a long time.”

“And I’ve got a guy who’s helping me out,” Brad said. He finally looked at me, and he looked tired more than mean.

“Noel asked about the ridge. I said yes. That’s it, Travis. It’s done.”

Jenna came out of the house about then with a pan of bars wrapped in foil. She saw Carter’s face before she saw anything else. Mothers do.

She looked at her brother and then at me, and I gave my head one small shake.

It was Brad’s land now. Jenna’s dad had signed the farm over to him that March and moved into a townhouse by the clinic with Jenna’s mom.

There was nothing to argue, and nobody to appeal to. A man can say who sits in his own deer stand.

And the truth was, I already knew where else we could go. Grandma Ingrid’s forty sat a mile and a half down the county road, woods on one side and pasture on the other, and nobody had hunted it in years.