My daughter, Maddie, who is ten, asked at supper in the first week of October why Uncle Dwain had not been for Sunday dinner since September. Tamra looked at me. I said he was busy. Maddie said, “He is never busy on Sunday.” She went on eating her potatoes. A child that age can set a table with the truth and walk off without waiting for anyone to sit down.
On Saturday the twenty-fourth of October I drove out to County Road 211 at about eleven in the morning, and I did not know why I had gone. Hap Lundy had told the man at the lumberyard that the camp was meeting at Dwain’s, and the man at the lumberyard told Tamra, who did not tell me, but I heard it anyway, the way you hear everything in a town of two thousand.
I parked on the county road at the end of the field, a hundred yards from the orchard, and rolled my window down.
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There was a canvas wall tent between two apple trees with the stovepipe smoking straight up, and nine trucks parked in the stubble, and nine men moving around it in canvas coats and orange caps. I could smell oak smoke. Granddad was sitting at the open flap in a lawn chair in the red cap, with a plaid blanket over his knees and a cup in his hands, and my uncle was crouched beside him with a coffeepot, pouring. Hap was telling something. His hands went up, the way they have always gone up when he tells the one about the ten-point in the lane. I saw the whole camp laugh at once. I could not hear it, but I could see the shoulders go.
It looked exactly like the camp. I want you to see that, because it was the worst thing I saw all fall. For seven Novembers I had been afraid that if the cabin was gone, the camp would be gone too. I had sold the cabin partly believing that. And there it was in a field, with canvas and a stove and nine old men, doing fine without me or the cabin or any deed. The camp had never been the hillside. It had always been the people who came, and they had come to my uncle instead, and I had made that necessary.
I drove away after ten minutes. I did not get out of the truck.
Hap Lundy, who held me at my christening party, was at the next pump at the Casey’s on Thursday the twenty-ninth, and he looked at the nozzle in his hand and not at me. He is seventy-nine and he has never in his life been rude to anyone. I understood that was the loudest thing he knew how to say.