About eight-fifteen, Grady’s phone buzzed in his jacket pocket. He took it out and read it and then held it up so I could see. It was from Ronnie’s older boy.
Was that you guys at 7:05? First shot of the morning?
Grady took a picture of the two drakes laid on the plywood floor with Dovie sitting behind them, and sent it back. He did not write anything with it. He did not need to.
Ten minutes later his phone buzzed again. Then again. Then it started buzzing so much he put it face down on the bench.
Marcy picked it up and read the messages and then put it down again.
The word had gone around the whole family hunt in about a quarter of an hour.
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The first duck of the opener had come off the Ackerman pond. And the man who shot it was the one who had been told to stay home.
I want to be clear about one thing. Nobody in our blind said a single word against Ronnie that whole morning.
Not me, not Marcy, not Grady, not Elam. It was not that kind of morning.
But you could not stop people from hearing a shot, and you could not stop them from knowing what it meant. And you could not stop them from doing what they did next.
About nine o’clock a pickup came down our field road and stopped at the top of the bank.
It was Ronnie’s younger boy and two of Marcy’s cousins, still in their waders, with mud to the knees.
They had left the marsh. They had pulled their boat out and loaded it and driven the two miles over on the gravel, and they came down the bank with their guns cased and their faces red.
“Morning, Grady,” the younger boy said. He stood at the top of the ramp like he was not sure he had a right to come down it. “That’s a nice blind. Mind if we sit with you a while?”
Grady looked at him for a long second. Then he said, “Come on down. There’s caramel rolls.” And the boy came down the ramp, and he put his hand out, and Grady shook it.
The boy said, very quietly, so only Grady and I could hear, “I should’ve said something yesterday. In the shed. I’m sorry I didn’t.” Grady said, “You’re here now.” That was all.
By ten o’clock there were nine of us in and around that blind. We had to sit some of them on buckets along the bank. Marcy went up to the house twice more for coffee.
Ronnie’s older boy came too, in the end, with his wife. That left Ronnie on his own marsh with one blind and one boat and nobody to hunt with.
I want to say I was glad about that, but I wasn’t, not exactly. I kept looking west across the section. I kept thinking about my brother-in-law sitting alone out there in his blind.
He was sixty years old. He had run that hunt for thirty-one years. His father ran it before him.
And on this opening morning his whole family had picked up and gone to somebody else’s pond.
Not because anybody told them to. Nobody said a word. They just heard one shot at sunup and knew where they wanted to be.
Marcy sat down on the bench beside me with her coffee about ten-thirty. She was looking west too. “He’s out there by himself,” she said. “I can’t stand it, Lyman. He’s my brother.”