The Stand We Built on Grandma’s Forty

“Travis, I’m eighty-eight. I’m sure about almost everything now.” She almost smiled. “The deer cross my pasture every morning coming off the oaks. Floyd used to say that ridge only works because my woods push them up there.”

I thanked her. I didn’t know what else to say, so I said it twice. She waved me off and sent me home with a dozen cinnamon rolls in an ice cream pail, and told me to bring the boy Saturday so she could look at him.

That night Jenna called her mother, not her brother, and that is how we learned the reason. Brad’s old grain dryer had caught fire the fall before, right in the middle of harvest, and he had dried corn at the elevator in town all year for a price that about killed him.

A new dryer was more money than Brad had or the bank would give him on a young farm. Noel, the dentist, had golfed with Brad on Thursday nights for six years.

He had offered to lend Brad the money for the down payment at no interest, as a friend.

“He’s scared,” Jenna’s mom told her on the phone. “He’s thirty-eight, he’s got Dad’s whole farm on his back, and that dryer is everything. Noel asked about the ridge, and Brad didn’t feel like he could say no to anything Noel asked.”

I understood that. I’ve stood on a pole at two in the morning with the whole township dark below me and known that if I got it wrong, it was on me.

Fear makes a man grab the nearest thing he can give away.

What I did not understand was the truck. Brad could have said, “Sorry, Travis, I’m stuck, here’s why.” He could have taken my boy aside and told him next year for sure.

Instead he said wait in the truck, in front of the porch, and went back to his ratchet.

The next morning, before my shift, I went into Carter’s room and sat on the end of his bed. The sticky note on his door still said 54. He had not crossed it off.

“Grandma Ingrid says we can hunt her forty,” I told him. “We’d have to build our own stand. Two-man ladder stand, so I’m right next to you. It’s going to be a lot of work, and it’s going to take every Saturday until the opener.”

He sat up so fast he hit his head on the shelf over his bed. “Our own stand? Like we build it? With tools?”

“With tools,” I said. “You’re going to hold boards until your arms fall off.”

He got up and crossed off the 54 and wrote 53.

Minnesota lets a kid under ten hunt deer through its mentored youth program, as long as a parent or guardian stays within arm’s reach of him the whole time.

That’s the rule, and I liked the rule. I signed Carter up for the mentored youth program at the hardware store in Pierz that week. The lady behind the counter asked if it was his first year, and he told her the whole story of the stand, the version where we were already finished building it.

I had seen enough homemade stands come apart to know I was not going to wing it. I drew it out on graph paper at the kitchen table: a twelve-foot ladder of treated two-by-fours, a platform four feet wide, a bench seat for two, and shooting rails on three sides, all of it lag-bolted and braced.