The Stand We Built on Grandma’s Forty

Carter thought about that. I could see him thinking. He is a fair kid. He gets it from his mother.

“That’s okay, Uncle Brad,” he said. “Do you want to help us drag him out? He’s really heavy.”

I saw Brad’s face when Carter said that. I’m not going to describe it. I’ll just say that he had to stand up and look at the woods for a second, and then he said, “Yeah, bud. I’d like that a lot.”

So the three of us dragged that buck across Grandma’s pasture to the gate, Carter on the front of the rope with both hands, Brad and me on either side, and Jenna walking behind with the thermos taking pictures of all of it. Nobody said much. We didn’t need to.

At the gate Brad helped me get the deer in the bed of my pickup. Then he stood there a while with his hands in his pockets.

Grandma had gone back to her own truck and was sitting in it with the door open, drinking her coffee and pretending not to watch us.

“Noel’s still up on the ridge,” Brad said. “He hasn’t seen a thing. Not a doe, not a squirrel. He got there late and the wind was wrong.”

He shook his head. “He’s going to ask me what happened when he hears about this.”

“Tell him the truth,” I said. “He seems like a decent man.”

“He is a decent man,” Brad said. “That’s the worst part. I never even told him you’d had the ridge twelve years. I didn’t tell him about Carter. I just said yes, because he was doing me a favor, and I didn’t want to give him any reason to back out.”

I didn’t say anything to that. There wasn’t anything to say that he didn’t already know.

A man has to stand in front of what he did, and nobody else can stand there for him.

Noel sat on the oak ridge all weekend, Saturday morning and evening and again Sunday morning, and he never saw a deer.

I don’t say that to be glad about it. I’d have been happy for him to get one. It’s just what happened.

Sunday afternoon, after church, a car pulled into our driveway. It was Noel. He got out with a bag from the bakery in Pierz and came to the door, and when Jenna let him in he walked right over to Carter, who was sitting at the kitchen table looking at the pictures on her phone for the hundredth time.

“I hear you’re the only one in the family who got a deer this weekend,” he said, and he shook Carter’s hand like a grown man’s.

Then he looked at me. “Brad told me everything last night. About the ridge and about your boy. I didn’t know, Travis. I want you to know that. If I had known, I’d never have asked.”

“I believe you,” I said.

“The ridge is yours next weekend,” Noel said. “Yours and Carter’s. Brad says so too. I’ll sit in the truck.”

He grinned a little when he said it. “Somebody has to keep the heater going.”

Carter looked at me. I looked at Carter. I let him answer.

“Thank you,” he said. “But I like our stand. We built it. Can I just show you a picture of it?”