The Fish House Twenty Two Men Rebuilt

When we got the house to the spot on the north edge, Gavin stood in front of it a while without saying anything.

Then Walt came over and clapped him on the back so hard he staggered, and said, “Well, young man, that’s a house.”

That was the whole speech. It was the best day of Gavin’s life, and I can still see him in his red coat, trying not to smile.

Seven weeks later it was gone.

I could not sleep that night. Around midnight I heard the stairs, and Gavin came down in his socks and sat across from me in the dark kitchen. The refrigerator hummed.

“I keep thinking about the heater,” he said. “I had it on low. Is it stupid that I’m worried it’s cold in there?”

“It’s not stupid.” “The list is on the door,” he said. “The lawns.” “I know it is.”

He nodded slowly, and then he did something I did not expect. He put his head down on his folded arms and laughed, one short sound with no air in it.

“Whoever has it is going to read it,” he said. “They’ll see Mr. Dahl, no charge.”

I did not know what to say, so I said nothing. I reached across the table and put my hand on the back of his neck, the way I used to when he was four, and we sat there like that until the furnace kicked on.

Sunday morning, after church, I took Gavin to see the man who had bought it.

There is one place on the east shore that buys houses off the ice and sets them in a rental row, and I had known its owner all my life.

Ron Pelletier is sixty-three and has run his resort on the east shore for thirty-one winters, with eleven cabins, a bait shop, and a rental row of ice houses out on the flats.

He is not a cruel man. I want to say that now, because I was ready to think he was.

“There,” he said.

It sat at the end of the rental row, the third house from the shore, as red as the day he painted it.

Somebody had zip-tied a laminated tag to the door handle, and the tag had a number on it in marker.

$85 a day. I read it twice.

I parked and Gavin did not get out right away. He just looked at it through the windshield, his hands flat on his knees, and I let him look.

Then he opened the door and walked across the ice to his own house and put his hand flat on the wall, like you would with a horse.

“They put a tag on it,” he said, over his shoulder. “I see it.” “It still has my name on the side.” “I know, bud.”

Ron came out of the bait shop wiping his hands on a rag.

He saw me and he saw Gavin, and I watched the whole thing arrive on his face one piece at a time.

“Dan,” he said. “Ron.”

He stopped about ten feet short of me. He was a big man in an insulated vest, a gray mustache, a Twins cap.

He looked at the house, and at the name on the side, and then he reached into his vest and took out a folded sheet of paper.