The Stand We Built on Grandma’s Forty

On the third Saturday, while we were putting on the shooting rails, Brad drove past on the county road. I knew his truck.

He slowed down at Grandma’s field lane. I saw his face turn toward us through the window. Then he sped up and went on.

Carter saw it too. He didn’t say anything. He just held the next rail up for me a little straighter.

That same week Jenna ran into Noel at the grocery store in town. He was buying a new blaze orange vest. He was pleasant to her, the way he is, and told her he was excited about the ridge, that Brad had told him it was the best stand in the county.

Jenna said, “It is,” and pushed her cart on. She told me later she did not trust herself to say one more word.

I had no quarrel with Noel. I didn’t know him well, and nothing about it was his idea. He had asked a friend for a favor, and the friend had said yes.

If I’d been him, I suppose I’d have said thank you too.

The fourth Saturday we finished. We put on the bench seat and a piece of outdoor carpet so our boots wouldn’t knock on the boards, and a burlap skirt around the rails so the deer wouldn’t see our legs move.

Then I climbed up, jumped on the platform as hard as I could, and grabbed every rail and shook it.

Nothing moved. Not a creak. I had built a lot of things in my life, mostly for other people. I don’t think I was ever prouder of anything.

“Your turn,” I said. Carter climbed up the ladder with me right behind him, one hand on his belt, and he sat on the bench and looked out over Grandma’s pasture with his hands on the rail like a ship captain.

“Dad,” he said, “this is better than the ridge. Isn’t it? You can see everything.”

“You can see everything,” I said.

We sighted in at the farm that afternoon. Carter was shooting a youth model .243 with a short stock, the same rifle I learned on, cut down for him by a gunsmith in Little Falls.

I set a paper plate on a straw bale at sixty yards in Grandma’s pasture, and he put five shots in it, then five more, until the plate was nothing but holes and we had to staple up a new one.

Grandma came down and watched from the tailgate with her coffee. When Carter put three shots in a circle smaller than a pop can lid, she clapped her mittens together and said, “There. That’s Floyd’s eye. I’d know it anywhere.”

Carter talked about that for a week.

We went to church the Sunday before the opener, the way we always did, at the Lutheran church out on the county road where Grandma Ingrid had sung in the choir since Eisenhower.

Brad and his wife sat two pews ahead of us. He nodded at me. I nodded back. That was the whole conversation.

During the last hymn, Carter leaned over and whispered, “Is Uncle Brad mad at us?”

“No,” I whispered. “Uncle Brad’s got a lot on his mind.”

“Is he mad that we built a stand?”

“I don’t think he knows what to think about the stand,” I said. And that was the honest truth.