The Fish House Twenty Two Men Rebuilt

Nobody clapped. A few of the older men just nodded, slow, the way you nod at a boy who has done a thing right.

“Next,” Gavin said, and held out his hand for another screw.

By nine they had the floor on. By ten they had the walls going up, tilting the framed panels up off the ice, four men to a panel, and Gavin running along the base with a level, calling plumb or not plumb in a voice that was getting steadier by the minute.

Mr. Dahl called Gavin over to the truck around eleven.

I could not hear what the old man said, but I could see his hands, which shook, and Gavin leaning down to the window with his head tilted.

The old man was reaching into his coat. He came out with something and pressed it into Gavin’s palm and closed the boy’s fingers around it.

By noon the walls were up, and the roof trusses were on by twelve forty, and the first sheet of tin went down at one. Somebody passed around sandwiches wrapped in foil.

At ten to two I heard a four-wheeler coming across the ice, and everybody stopped.

Ron Pelletier shut the engine off about fifteen feet from the circle. For a moment he just sat there with his gloved hands on the handlebars and his breath going up in the cold.

He looked at the walls. He looked at the half-finished roof, the tin shining where the sun hit it, and at twenty-two men standing around a boy in a red coat, all of them with their hands full of tools and not one of them speaking to him.

Walt Haugen walked over alone, took his time about it, and stopped by the four-wheeler. Ron said something short.

Then Walt answered him, very low, and pointed with his chin toward the third house in the rental row.

I could not hear a word. I have asked Walt since what he said, and he will only tell me it was eight words long and he has never regretted any of them.

Ron got off the four-wheeler slowly. He stood for a moment with his hand on the seat.

Then he walked across the ice, not toward us but toward the old house, the red one with the tag still hanging on the handle, and he stood in front of it as if it were something he had never seen before.

He tore the tag off the handle and put it in his pocket. Then he opened the door.

Everyone on the ice stopped working. The screw guns went quiet one by one. I heard the wind in the tin.

Gavin had stopped with a board in his hands. He did not look at Ron. He looked at the door, and I saw him understand what Ron was going to read, and I saw him lower the board slowly to the ice.

Ron stepped inside and pulled the door shut behind him.

We waited. It was three minutes by my watch, though it felt like thirty, and I know what he saw in there because I have stood in that house since.

The back of the door is bare pine, smoothed by hand. Down the length of it, in pencil, in a fourteen-year-old’s careful capitals, runs the list.

Thirty-four lawns. Mrs. Aaland, $25. The Lutheran church, $60. The Petersons on Third. Old Mr. Dahl, no charge, he was sick.