The Blind I Built on Our Farm Pond

It has a ring of cattails, some willows on the north side, and an old cottonwood that fell over in a storm years ago and lies half in the water. The mallards and wood ducks use it every fall.

Nobody had ever hunted it seriously. It was too close to the house, and we always went to Ronnie’s marsh, where the big water is and where there is room for eight or nine of us in three blinds.

But the ducks came. I had watched them all September from the kitchen window, little bunches of mallards dropping into the cattails in the evening and leaving off it in the morning.

“Because I’m going to build you a blind on it,” I said. “With a ramp you can push up on your own. And tomorrow morning you and I are going to hunt it.”

Grady laughed, but not like anything was funny. “Dad. Opener’s tomorrow. It’s ten in the morning. You can’t build a blind in a day.”

“I spent thirty-seven years building things on top of poles in the wind,” I said. “I can build a box on the ground in an afternoon.”

I want to explain one thing here, because people have asked me since.

Why didn’t I just go back to Ronnie’s shed and have it out with him? Why didn’t I make him find a way?

The plain answer is that it was Ronnie’s marsh and Ronnie’s boats. I could have argued with him all day, and it would not have put a wheelchair into a sixteen-foot jon boat by morning.

And I did not want my son to sit on Ronnie’s bank all day as a favor somebody had been shamed into.

Grady had been a favor to enough people for one year. I did not have a marsh. But I had a pond.

So I went in the house and got my keys and my wallet and told Marcy where I was going.

She was at the sink. She turned around with her hands wet and looked at my face for a long moment.

“He said it, didn’t he,” she said. Not a question. “Ronnie said he couldn’t come.”

“He said Grady would only slow the hunt down,” I told her. “In front of the boys.”

Marcy dried her hands very slowly on the towel. She is fifty-six and she has been Ronnie’s little sister her whole life, and I watched it go across her face, all of it at once.

“I’ll call him,” she said.

“Don’t,” I said. “Not today. I’m going to the lumberyard. I’m going to build Grady a blind on our pond, and we’re going to hunt it in the morning. If you want to help, put your gloves on.”

She stood there a second longer. Then she hung the towel on the oven door and went to the mudroom for her work gloves, and she never did pick up that phone. Not that day.

The lumberyard in town is twenty minutes on the blacktop. I knew exactly what I wanted, because I had been drawing it in my head the whole drive home from Ronnie’s, without knowing I was doing it.

Six treated four-by-sixes for the posts. Treated two-by-sixes for the frame and joists. Four sheets of three-quarter treated plywood for the floor and the ramp deck. Two-by-fours for the walls and rails.

A box of three-inch deck screws, a box of lag bolts, a roll of camouflage burlap, and a bundle of cedar lath.

The young man at the counter added it up twice. It came to $640 and change.