The Fish House Twenty Two Men Rebuilt

I never asked for it. I would have given him the next three hundred without being asked, if he had come and sat at my kitchen table and said, Dan, I am drowning.

He did not come. He took a chain and a truck and a spare key I had cut for him, and he took a thing a boy had built with his hands.

That night Gavin would not eat the egg sandwich. He sat at the table with it in front of him, and Emma, who is ten and has never once let a silence go by without a question, sat down across from him and did not say anything at all.

She watched him a long time. Then she got up and went upstairs, and I heard her rummaging in her closet, and she came back down with a sandwich bag held in both hands as if it were full of water.

Inside was $23 in ones and quarters and one dime. She set it in front of him.

“It’s for the heater,” she said. “It’s what I’ve got.”

Gavin looked at the bag for a second. Then he picked it up and put it in the pocket of his flannel shirt, and kept his hand over the pocket like it might blow away.

“Thanks, Em,” he said, and that was when his voice finally cracked, just a little, and Jen turned to the sink so he would not see her face.

I will tell you what was taken. Gavin drew that house on graph paper the winter he turned twelve and built it in our pole shed over the fall, one Saturday at a time. I helped with the heavy cuts. He did the rest.

He painted the outside a plain bright red so he could find it from the shore, and he put his name and our address along the side in black block letters, because the law said so and because he wanted every man on that lake to know whose it was.

And inside, on the back of the door, in pencil, he did a thing I did not notice until the week before we set it out. It was a list.

I came into the shed one night in early December to shut off the lights, and Gavin was standing at the door with a carpenter’s pencil, writing very small.

I looked over his shoulder. It was every lawn he had mowed. Thirty-four of them, with the name of each owner and what the job paid, and a total at the bottom.

“Mrs. Aaland, $25,” it said. “The Lutheran church, $60. The Petersons on Third, $25. Old Mr. Dahl, no charge, he was sick.”

“What’s that for?” I asked.

He shrugged without turning around. “I just want to remember where it all came from,” he said.

On the twentieth of December we dragged it out. Twelve men came, which at the time I thought was a crowd. Walt Haugen brought the big auger and cut the holes.

Marv Lindahl, who is seventy-nine and retired from the mail route, sat in the door and told us we had the runners backwards. Rick drove the Ram, and he eased the trailer down the access ramp with two fingers on the wheel.