The Cabin We Built Next Door

My son stood against it in his socks. I took a pencil from my coverall pocket and a carpenter’s square from my father’s toolbox.

“What are you doing?” Cody said.

“Hold still.”

I laid the square across the top of his head and made a mark, a clean one, level, and wrote the date beside it. Not a day older than eighteen. Five feet eleven and a half inches.

My father came up behind us and looked at the board for a long time. His eyes were red. He cleared his throat twice and walked out into the clearing to look at the sky.

We set the wood stove that afternoon, a little steel box bought used in Hillman for three hundred and eighty dollars, with a rain cap my father made from a pie tin. Cody lit the first fire at four o’clock with newspaper and dry red oak.

The smoke went straight up. Through the new window you could see it rise and spread against the bare trees, and the first thin snow, a handful of flakes, floating down into the clearing.

It was the twenty-sixth of October. The first snow of the year, a day ahead of the forecast.

The whole thing came to fourteen thousand and thirty dollars when I added it up at the kitchen table: nine thousand for the land, eleven hundred in closing, the rest in lumber, roofing and the stove.

I asked Cody, that night, if he was angry.

He was sitting at my kitchen table with the old level in front of him, polishing the brass cap with a cloth. He thought about it a long time.

“I was,” he said. “I’m not now. Not really. I just feel like he’s somebody I used to know.” He turned the level over in his hand. “Is that bad?”

“No.”

“Do you think he’ll ever call?”

“I think,” I said, “he will call when he’s ready to say the real thing. And I think you can decide then what to do with it. But you do not have to wait by the phone.”

Opening day came on a Saturday, and it was cold and clear, nineteen degrees at five in the morning with a skin of frost on the grass and not a breath of wind.

The school district, as it has since before I was a girl, closed for the day. The buses sat quiet in the yard.

We were up at four. My father made coffee on the camp stove and fried eggs in a skillet, and Cody ate standing up, in blaze orange from head to boot, his license in his pocket and his tag pinned to his back. He had taken hunter safety two years before.

At five-fifteen, with the stars still out, the three of us stepped out of the little cabin together and locked the new door.

My father went to the blind on the north edge of the clearing. Cody went to the oak on the ridge. I sat in the pickup with a thermos, because my job is to be there when somebody comes back. By seven-thirty it sounded like a war all around us, the long rolling thunder of opening morning.

I did not hear anything from my own boy’s stand.