The Fish House Twenty Two Men Rebuilt

The light was already going orange when I pulled the truck onto the ice at the public access, and I knew something was wrong before I could say what it was.

Gavin knew first. He had slept against the passenger window since Garrison, his basketball bag in his lap, still wearing the tournament shirt under his coat, and he sat straight up as if somebody had said his name.

“Dad,” he said. “Where’s my house?”

From the access you can see the whole Isle Bay flats of Mille Lacs on a clear afternoon, a few hundred little houses scattered across the white like dropped dice.

Ours sits on the north edge, close to the reef, where the perch run in February. Tonight there was a gap where it should have been.

I drove out to the spot anyway, and I had not got it wrong. There were four long scars in the snow where the runners had been, a pile of sawdust from the floor Gavin had swept out last weekend, and one orange work glove lying on its side as if somebody had dropped it in a hurry.

Gavin got out before the truck stopped rolling. He walked to the middle of the bare patch and turned a slow circle, looking at the ice, the sky, the other houses, the way you look for a lost dog.

“Maybe Walt moved it,” he said.

Walt Haugen had not moved it. Walt was sixty-eight, and he came across the ice from two hundred yards off with his hood pushed back, walking the way a man walks when he has bad news.

“Dan,” he said. He looked at Gavin and his face changed. “Son, I’m sorry. I figured you folks knew.”

“Knew what?” I said.

“Your brother pulled it out of here at nine this morning. Chain on the back of the Ram, nice and slow, down the ice road toward the east shore. I waved at him. He waved back.” Walt rubbed his mouth. “I thought you’d sold it.”

I did not say anything for a while. Behind me I could hear Gavin breathing through his nose, the way he does when he is trying very hard to keep a thing inside.

“He had a key?” Walt asked quietly.

He did. That was the part that turned my stomach over. In December, the day we dragged the house out, Rick had been the first man in the door.

He sat down on the new bench, tapped the wall with his knuckles, and said, “Not bad, bud. Not bad at all.” Then he asked if he could have a spare key, in case he was out that way and wanted to check that the heater was off.

I cut him one on the spot and hung the original back on its nail.

A fish house is a small insulated shed on runners, eight feet by twelve or smaller, with a heater, a few holes cut through the floor and two benches.

It goes onto the lake in December and stays until the state’s March deadline. In our part of Minnesota, a boy’s first house is a rite of passage.

You build it yourself, you put your name and address on the outside the way the law requires, and you drag it onto the lake in front of men who have done it for fifty years and find out whether they will nod at you.