The Blind I Built on Our Farm Pond

“I know,” I said.

“He’s not a bad man,” she said. “He’s scared. He has been since Grady came home. He told me in August he didn’t know what to say to him. He said every time he looks at him he wants to cry.”

I did not know that. I sat there with that for a while.

I thought about Ronnie standing in his shed with that coil of cord in his hand, lifting it a little so I would stop talking.

“Then he should have said that,” I said. “Instead of what he said.”

“Yes,” Marcy said. “He should have.” She took my hand on the bench, which she does not do in front of people very often. “But you didn’t let it stand. I love you for that. You built him something.”

Elam had gotten into telling stories by then, about Grady in basic training, about some sergeant who used to make Grady sing, and the whole blind was laughing, Ronnie’s boys loudest of all.

I looked over at my son in the middle of all of it.

He was sitting in his chair in the corner of the blind with a coffee cup in one hand and Dovie’s head on his knee, laughing at himself.

He looked like he did before. That is the only way I know how to say it.

For the first time in fourteen months he looked like himself, sitting in a blind in the sun with people who loved him.

The phone buzzed one more time about eleven. Grady picked it up and read it, and his face changed a little. He read it again. Then he handed it to me without a word.

It was from Ronnie. It was the first thing Ronnie had sent him since he came home. It said, Nice shooting. I heard it from the marsh. Is there room for one more.

I handed the phone back. Grady sat looking at it for a long time. Marcy was watching him. Everyone in the blind had gotten quiet without knowing why.

Then Grady typed something with his thumb and sent it. He did not show me what he wrote. He put the phone in his jacket and went back to watching the sky over the cottonwood.

About a quarter to twelve the boys on the bank went quiet again. One of them stood up off his bucket.

Dovie lifted her head off Grady’s knee and looked past me up the slope, and her tail started going.

I turned around on my bucket. Up at the top of the bank, where the field road comes over the rise, a man was walking toward us through the stubble, alone, at a slow and steady pace.

He was not carrying a gun. He had a big old canvas sack over his shoulder, the kind with the drawstring top, and I knew that sack. Everyone in our family knew that sack.

It was his father’s decoys. Hand-carved cork mallards, painted by the old man in his basement sixty years ago.

Ronnie kept them on a shelf in his shed and never let anybody set them out. Not even his own boys.

Marcy put her hand over her mouth. Grady set his coffee cup down on the bench and took hold of his wheels and backed his chair up, slow, to make room in the front of the blind.

My brother-in-law came down the bank toward the ramp with his father’s decoys over his shoulder, walking over to us in the noon sun.