The Blind I Built on Our Farm Pond

My brother-in-law said it in his machine shed on the Friday morning before duck opener, with the big door rolled up and the September sun lying across the concrete floor in a long yellow square.

We had driven over to help load decoys, the way we had every year for as long as I had been married to his sister.

Grady rolled in behind me with a mesh sack of mallard decoys across his lap.

Ronnie Pech was sixty years old and had run the family duck hunt on his marsh every opener for thirty-one years.

He was standing by the trailer with a coil of decoy cord in his hand, and he did not look at my son.

He looked at me instead. “Lyman,” he said, “I’ve been thinking about it all week, and I don’t see how it works. The boats won’t take a chair. You know they won’t.”

I started to say something about the boats, and he lifted the coil of cord a little, the way a man does when he has already decided and would like you to stop before you start.

Then he turned and looked at Grady for the first time that morning. “You’d only slow the whole hunt down, Grady. You’d be sitting on the bank all day anyhow. It’s no kind of a hunt for you.”

My son was twenty-six years old. He had hunted that marsh since he was nine, when Ronnie himself had handed him a single-shot twenty gauge and shown him how to lead a teal.

Grady set the sack of decoys down on the concrete very carefully, so the heads would not crack. He said, “Sure. Okay, Uncle Ronnie.” That was all he said, and he backed his chair out into the sun.

I stood there with my hands hanging. Ronnie’s two boys were on the other side of the trailer, untangling anchor lines and pretending very hard not to have heard any of it.

“He’s been home four months,” I said to Ronnie. My voice came out quieter than I meant it to. “Four months, Ronnie. This is the first thing he’s asked to do.”

Ronnie looked down at the cord in his hands. “I know it,” he said. “I’m sorry, Lyman. I just don’t see how it works out there. I’m not going to have him go in the water.”

I want to be fair to my brother-in-law, because I have known him thirty-four years and he is not a mean man.

He has pulled my truck out of the ditch more than once and never mentioned it after.

I think he was scared. I think the idea of Grady tipping out of a jon boat into four feet of cold marsh water and weeds had kept him up at night, and he did not know what to do with that fear.

And I think, too, that he did not know how to talk to Grady anymore.

Since Grady came home, Ronnie had said maybe a dozen words to him, and most of those were about the weather.

None of that made what he said all right. A man can be scared and still be wrong.

You can love somebody and still tell him, in front of his cousins, that he would only slow everybody down.

I picked up the sack of decoys Grady had set down and put it on the trailer, because that was what we had come to do.

Then I walked out to the truck where my son was waiting.