The Blind I Built on Our Farm Pond

That was when I heard a voice from up on the bank behind us, calling Grady’s name.

I knew the voice, but I could not place it. It was not Marcy and it was not Ronnie.

I turned around on the bucket, and there was a big young man coming down the slope through the wet grass.

He had a shotgun case in one hand and a box of donuts in the other, and he was grinning all over his face.

Grady turned his chair around so fast he nearly took my knee off.

“Elam,” he said. “You came.”

Elam had been in Grady’s squad for three years. He was in the truck that rolled, too, up front, and walked away with a broken arm.

He had called Grady every Sunday since the accident, without missing one.

Grady had texted him Friday afternoon, it turned out, while I was setting posts. He had sent him a picture of the frame of the blind and four words. Opener tomorrow, Dad’s pond.

Elam had gotten off his shift at the plant at two o’clock Saturday morning and driven down from up north, five hours, and pulled into our yard just as the sun came up.

“I heard the shot from your driveway,” Elam said. He came down the ramp and grabbed Grady around the shoulders, donut box and all. “Sergeant. You didn’t wait for me.”

“You were late,” Grady said. “Legal was six-thirty-five.” And both of them laughed, and I sat there on my bucket and held the wet dog and wiped my face on my sleeve.

Elam stood in the corner of the blind with his shotgun across his arm, and for the next hour the two of them hunted that pond the way they must have talked about doing a hundred times.

The ducks kept coming. Not a lot, but enough. A pair of wood ducks. A little bunch of teal that came through like bullets and that nobody touched. Another pair of mallards.

Grady got his second drake about eight o’clock, and Elam missed one clean and Grady never let him hear the end of it. Dovie went out every time and came back proud as a queen.

Marcy took one picture of the two of us at the front of the blind, me down on one knee beside Grady’s chair with my gray beard full of cattail fluff, and Dovie coming up the ramp with that first drake in her mouth.

About seven-thirty I heard the screen door slam up at the house. Marcy came down the field with a big thermos in one hand and a pan wrapped in a dish towel in the other.

She had made caramel rolls. She must have gotten up at three to start the dough, and I never heard her.

She came down the ramp and set the pan on the bench and kissed Grady on the top of his head.

“I heard it from the kitchen,” she said. “I was standing at the sink and I heard one shot, and I knew it was you.” She poured him a cup of coffee and put it in his hand.

Then she looked at Elam. “You must be Elam. Grady told me you might come. Have a roll.” She did not say anything else, but her eyes were wet the whole time she poured the coffee.

Across the section, the shooting on Ronnie’s marsh had finally started a few minutes after ours. But it was scattered, and it was not much, and by eight it had mostly gone quiet.