Dad’s pickup was parked crooked at the field gate when I came over the hill on Friday afternoon, the old white Ford with the creamery decal still ghosting through the paint on the door.
He was standing at the gate with both hands on the top rail.
Nailed to the corner post beside him was a yellow sign, bright and new, the kind you buy in a three pack at the farm store.
No Trespassing. Hunting, Fishing or Trapping Without Written Permission Prohibited. There was another one on the next post down the line, and another past that, all the way to the willows.
I pulled in behind him and shut off the engine.
I sat there a second with my hands on the wheel, because I already knew what the signs meant and I did not want to know it yet.
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Dad did not turn around when my door shut. He was looking down across the pasture at the line of willows and the bend of the creek, and the one big bur oak leaning out over the water.
“They went up this morning,” he said. “Dustin was out here with the post driver at seven. I saw his truck from the road. I thought maybe he was fixing fence.”
“Did he say anything to you?”
“He didn’t see me. I didn’t stop.” Dad took off his bucket hat, the green one Mom bought him at the county fair, turned it once in his hands, and put it back on. “Season opens in the morning.”
“I know it does, Dad.”
“Seventy six years,” he said. He said it quietly, like he was adding a column of numbers and did not much like the total. “I was eleven the first time. Your grandpa brought me right through that gate.”
I stood beside him at the rail. Down in the valley the creek ran clear and fast between its banks, the way the spring creeks run in Vernon County, cold enough to ache your hands even in July.
My name is Halsey Engstrom. I am fifty eight years old and I have been foreman at the sawmill outside Viroqua for nineteen years.
I am not a man who says much, and my father says even less.
So we stood there. A red winged blackbird was hollering in the cattails by the road ditch. The sun was warm on the back of my neck.
It was the first Friday in May, and it was the prettiest day of the year so far.
“Well,” Dad said finally. “It’s his land now.”
“It’s Kenna’s land too.”
“Then it’s her husband’s business.” He tapped the top rail twice with his knuckles, the way he used to tap the side of the tanker when he finished loading at a dairy barn. “I’m not going to be the cause of anything, Halsey. You hear me?”
I heard him. I just did not answer him.
You have to understand about the creek, or none of this will make sense.
My grandfather milked thirty head on the ridge above that valley.
When Dad was eleven, in the spring of 1950, Grandpa walked him down through that same gate on opening morning and showed him the deep hole under the bur oak.
The oak was big then. It is enormous now. Its roots reach out over the water like the fingers of a hand, and the current has dug a hole under them that a man cannot see the bottom of.