The Fish House Twenty Two Men Rebuilt

He said nothing about Rick’s name. In a town the size of Isle, the silence did the saying.

Saturday, the fourteenth of February, came in cold and bright. The thermometer on Walt’s truck read 9 at sunrise, and the sky was a hard, clean blue with not a cloud anywhere, the kind of morning where your breath hangs in front of your face like a sentence you forgot to finish.

They were lined up along the shore, nose to tail, pickups with trailers and four-wheelers on flatbeds and a couple of old sleds with plywood stacked behind.

“Dad,” Gavin said. “Who are all these guys?” “I think they’re here for you.”

Walt came down the line counting heads. “Twenty-two,” he said. “I counted twice.” He had cut the roof trusses in his pole barn that week, and they were stacked on a trailer behind his truck.

There were men from the Anglers, and there were men who had never fished with the Anglers. Hank Soderberg and three guys from my line crew had come on their one free Saturday of the month, and Marv Lindahl, seventy-nine, had come with a thermos and his own hammer.

Coach Bergstrom brought two fathers from the tournament, and one of them, a big quiet man I had never met, shook Gavin’s hand and said, “I’m Jake’s dad. You played a heck of a game.”

I gathered them on the ice before we started, all twenty-two, in a loose circle with the wind at our backs.

“I want to thank you all,” I said. “I’m going to ask one thing. Gavin builds this house. Not me, and not you. He drives the screws. You hold, you lift, you carry, and when he asks for something, you hand it to him. If he says no, it’s no. Okay?”

A couple of the old men nodded. Walt did not need to.

“And one more thing,” I said. “Nobody says a word to Ron Pelletier. Not one. He’s going to see us out here. He’s going to see what we’re doing. And he is going to have to decide for himself what he thinks about it.”

Nobody asked why. I think they understood. “All right,” Walt said. He pointed at Gavin. “Young man, where do you want the floor?”

Gavin stood there in his red coat with his hands in his pockets and looked out at the flats, and I saw him measure it with his eyes the way I had seen him measure a board.

Then he walked forty feet out from the shore and thirty feet from Ron’s rental row, and he stopped, and he pointed at the ice.

“Here,” he said. “Right in front of the window?” “Yes, sir.” “All right,” said Walt, grinning like a boy. “Let’s go get it.”

We laid the floor frame on two oak skids Walt had pulled from his own shed. “They’ve got a lot of miles left in them,” he said, and Gavin ran a hand along them and said, “Thank you.”

He did the first screw himself. He set the bit, leaned on the gun, and drove it through the joist and into the skid, and then he straightened up and looked around at all of us standing there in a ring in the cold.