The Blind I Built on Our Farm Pond

The floor frame was eight feet by ten, two-by-six joists on sixteen-inch centers, lagged to the posts. Then the three-quarter plywood on top, screwed every six inches. I could have parked a tractor on it.

The ramp frame ran up from the floor to the top of the bank.

I set two short posts at the midpoint so it would not flex under the chair. Then plywood decking, and two-by-four rails both sides.

Grady sat up on the bank for most of that. He watched me with his arms folded.

I did not ask him to help, because I knew how he was about being asked to help with things.

Around four o’clock I heard the chair coming down the slope. He rolled himself down the grass as far as he could and sat by the tarp with the screws on it.

“You’re doing the rail wrong,” he said. “It’s too low. If I’m going to grab it pushing up, it needs to be higher than that.”

He was right. I moved it up four inches. He started handing me screws after that, one at a time, without either one of us saying anything about it.

Marcy went up to the house about five and came back with sandwiches and a jug of iced tea.

The three of us ate sitting on the plywood deck of the blind, with our legs over the edge.

Well, Marcy and I had our legs over the edge. Grady sat in his chair at the edge of the floor, and he looked out across the water while he ate, and I saw something in his face then.

It was the look he used to get as a boy, sitting in Ronnie’s blind before light, watching the sky to the north. I had not seen that look on him in fourteen months.

“Mallards came in here last night,” he said, “about seven-thirty. I saw them from my window. Three bunches. They come in from the northwest, over the cottonwood.”

“I know,” I said. “I’ve been watching them too.”

He nodded, and finished his sandwich, and then he said, “We should put the opening on this side, then. So I can swing left. I shoot better swinging left.”

So we did. We built the front wall of the blind with the shooting opening facing the cottonwood, low enough that a man sitting in a chair could rest a gun across it and swing to his left.

The side walls were low, plywood over two-by-four frames, with burlap and cedar lath along the top. Then we cut cattails and willow switches and stood them thick all around the outside until the whole thing blended in.

The roof was a plain sloped plank roof, to keep the sun out of his eyes and the rain off the gun.

I left the back open so the chair could come in and turn around.

Marcy cut cattails with a corn knife, wading out in her knee boots. She carried armloads of them up to the blind and handed them to Grady, and Grady wove them in from inside.

I put the last few screws in the overhang about seven o’clock, with the sun going down red behind the shelterbelt.

Then I sat down on the ramp and did not get up for a long while.

My hands hurt. My back hurt. I am fifty-eight years old and I had been retired from climbing poles for three years, and I felt every one of my years and a few extra ones besides.