The Stand We Built on Grandma’s Forty

The first Saturday in October we hauled everything down to Grandma’s in my pickup: lumber from the yard in town, a box of lag bolts, a sack of deck screws, my cordless drill, a level, and a five-gallon bucket of hand tools.

Carter rode with one hand on the lumber the whole mile and a half, like it might jump out.

We picked the spot together. I walked him along the fence line where her pasture meets the oak woods, and I showed him the trails coming out of the trees, three of them, worn down to dirt from deer using them every morning.

He knelt and put his fingers in a track like it was holy.

“They come right through here?” he whispered, even though there wasn’t a deer for a mile in the middle of the day.

“Every morning,” I said. “Your great-grandpa knew it. We just never sat here, because we had the ridge.”

We set the stand back against a big white oak at the very edge of the woods, facing out over the pasture, so the trees would be behind us and the sun would come up on our left.

A deer coming out of the oaks would cross in front of us, sixty or seventy yards out, in the open.

That first Saturday all we got done was the ladder. I cut, Carter held, and I drove the screws. He held every single board, and when his arms got tired he switched hands and did not say a word about it.

I kept looking over at him. I had never seen him work at anything like that.

Around noon Grandma Ingrid came down the field lane in her old pickup, slow, in first gear the whole way, and parked at the gate.

She had egg salad sandwiches in waxed paper, a jar of pickles, and a thermos of coffee for me and a thermos of hot chocolate for Carter.

She sat on the tailgate in her quilted barn coat while we ate, and she asked Carter question after question. What gun was he using.

How far could he shoot. Was he going to be scared. He answered every one of them, and to the last one he said, “Maybe a little.”

“Good,” she said. “Your great-grandpa said a man who isn’t a little scared his first year isn’t paying attention.”

When we packed up, she walked over to the ladder lying in the grass and ran her hand down one of the rails.

Then she said a short prayer over it, right there in the pasture, the same table prayer she says before every meal, just changed a little: Bless this wood and the boy who’ll sit on it. Amen.

Carter took his hat off for it without being told.

The second Saturday I got called out at five in the morning. A wind came through the night before and laid a pine across the line east of Royalton, and three hundred members were out.

I worked until two in the afternoon. When I got home Carter was sitting on the front step in his boots, waiting, with the drill in his lap.

“We can still do some,” he said. “It’s light until almost six-thirty.”

So we did. We went down to Grandma’s at three and set the platform on the ladder and braced it to the oak with two straps and a pair of lag bolts into the trunk, and we raised it as the sun went down orange behind the pasture.

When it stood up straight against that tree, Carter whooped so loud Grandma’s dog barked at us from up at the house.