The Blind I Built on Our Farm Pond

“Building a deer stand?” he asked me, loading the plywood with the forklift.

“Duck blind,” I said. “For my son. He’s in a chair.”

He stopped the forklift for a second and looked at me. Then he went back in the store, and when he came out he threw in a second box of screws and would not let me pay for it.

That was the first kindness of the day. I did not know yet how many more were coming, and I am not sure I would have believed it if someone had told me.

When I got home, Marcy had the post-hole digger and my good level and the circular saw already down at the pond, laid out on a tarp in the grass. Grady was sitting at the top of the bank.

He had his arms folded across his chest and his jaw set the way he sets it when he is trying not to want something too much.

He had a cap on and the sun was full on his face.

“You don’t have to do this, Dad,” he said.

“I know it,” I said, and started walking out the spot.

The bank on the west side of the pond runs down gentle for about twenty feet, then drops off sharp into maybe two feet of water at the edge. That was the spot. Open water in front, cattails both sides.

I figured the blind floor ought to sit right at the water’s edge, level, about sixteen inches above the ground where the ramp would start. Sixteen inches of rise needed sixteen feet of ramp.

That is the rule they use for wheelchair ramps. One inch of rise for every foot of run. Any steeper and a man has to fight it going up and ride the brakes coming down.

I knew that rule because the therapists at the hospital gave us a sheet of paper about it before Grady came home, and I had followed it on the porch ramp to the inch.

I dug the first post hole myself, three feet down in black dirt and then gray clay.

The ground near the pond was soft, so I tamped gravel in the bottom before I set the post and plumbed it.

Marcy held each post straight while I tamped. She did not say much. Every once in a while she looked up the bank at Grady, and then she looked back down at the post.

Around noon our neighbor to the south came down the field road in his pickup.

He had seen us from the road and wondered what we were doing digging at the pond the day before opener.

I told him. He stood there with his hands in his pockets looking at the one post and the stack of lumber, and then he looked up the bank at Grady and nodded to him.

“I’ve got an auger on the skid steer,” he said. “You’ll be digging all day with that thing.” He was back in half an hour, and he put in the other five holes in about ten minutes.

He did not stay. He said he had beans to check. But before he left he walked up the bank and shook Grady’s hand, and said, “Good luck tomorrow,” like it was any opener at all.

That was the second kindness. I noticed Grady watched him all the way back up the field road to the gravel.

By two o’clock the posts were in and I was setting the frame. A lineman learns to think about loads. Everything I build, I build like somebody is going to hang his life on it.