The Fish House Twenty Two Men Rebuilt

It was a receipt. It was written in ballpoint on a feed store notepad, the kind with the carbon, and I knew Rick’s handwriting from thirty years of birthday cards.

It said, “Sold: one 8×12 fish house with contents, heater, auger, two rods. $3,000 cash. R. Kessler.” And a date, and a signature.

“Three thousand cash, Dan,” Ron said. “House and everything in it. He pulled up Saturday morning with it behind his truck and said it was his. Said his nephew had borrowed his name for the side.” He shook his head.

“I figured, family, same last name, you know. Who steals a house with their own name on it? I did not think.”

“It’s my son’s,” I said. “He built it. He paid for every board.”

Ron looked at Gavin. Gavin was standing by the wall with his hand still on the siding, and Ron looked at him for a long second, and then he looked at the ice.

“I believe you,” Ron said. “I do. I’m sorry. But I’m out three thousand either way, Dan. I counted it out of the till. That was the money I had set aside for the winter’s fuel and the new augers.”

He was not wrong, and I felt the old heat coming up in my chest. But my son was standing there watching what I did with it.

I have been a lineman for nineteen years. I know a little about live wire. You do not grab it just because you can see it.

You stand back, you work out where the current is going, and you decide what you are going to touch and what you are going to leave alone.

“I’m not here to take it from you, Ron,” I said. “I just wanted you to know whose it is.”

Ron nodded slowly. His eyes were wet, which I had not expected. “I’ll tell you this,” he said. “I don’t want anybody’s kid’s house. I never did. Let me think about it. Let me talk to a couple of people.”

“You do what you think is right,” I said. “That’s all I’d ask.”

We drove the first mile in silence. Then, very quietly, Gavin said, “Dad, can I just build another one?”

I looked over at him. He was not crying. He was staring through the windshield with his chin up, fourteen years old, and it was not anger on his face and it was not hope.

It was the look of a boy who has decided what happens next.

“It would take a whole fall,” I said. “The lumber alone is twelve hundred dollars.”

“I don’t want his money, Dad. I don’t want yours either. I just want to build it where everybody can see.”

That night I called Walt Haugen. I did not ask him for anything. I told him what the boy had said in the truck, and where he wanted to build it, on the flats in front of the resort.

“It’s a public lake,” Walt said slowly. “Nobody owns the ice. Saturday, seven o’clock. I’ll make some calls.”

I said one more thing. “He builds it. Not you. Not me. Nobody buys it for him. I want that understood.”

He hung up before I could thank him.

In four days Walt called every man in the Isle Bay Ice Anglers, about sixty fellows who fish the north flats, and told each one the same thing: a boy built a house, his uncle sold it, and Saturday at seven we build him another.