The Fish House Twenty Two Men Rebuilt

We finished at ten minutes after three. Gavin drove the last screw on the last sheet of tin, and then he set down the gun and climbed down the ladder and stood with the rest of us looking at what we had made.

Gavin stood before it with his hands in his pockets for a long time. Then he took the carpenter’s pencil from behind his ear, opened the new door, and wrote on the back of it, very small, one line.

I did not read it until later. I waited until the men had gone. It was only three words. “Twenty-two men.”

And under it, over the next hour, while the sun slid down toward the tree line and the men packed up their trailers and shook his hand one by one, he asked each of them for their name.

He wrote them in a column, in pencil, each in his own careful letters, down the whole length of the door. Walt Haugen. Marv Lindahl. Hank Soderberg. Jake’s dad. The pastor from Wahkon. The nineteen-year-old framer. Ron Pelletier.

It took him the whole page. Sunday afternoon, after church, we towed the old house back.

Ron brought three of his own men and a four-wheeler, and I brought both of my straps, and we pulled it out of the rental row at a walking pace across the ice. Gavin walked beside it with one hand on the red siding.

We set it down on the ice about ten feet from the new one, and Ron stood back and squinted and said, “A little to the left,” and we moved it a little to the left.

Gavin pulled the last bit of zip tie off the handle and put it in his pocket.

When he finished, the red house and the pale new one were standing side by side on the ice like a pair of boots, and he stepped back and looked at them.

“They match,” he said. “They do not match,” said Walt. “They match enough,” said Gavin.

Ron told me the rest the following Saturday, standing on the ice at the edge of the rental row with his hands in his vest and his eyes on the horizon.

“I went to see your brother Sunday night,” he said. “Walt drove. Marv came along.”

“Where was he?”

“A rented trailer outside Onamia. He was sitting on the step in the dark with a cigarette, and he knew why we were there before we got the doors shut.” Ron shook his head.

“He didn’t stand up. He said he’d needed the money for a month. The plant had cut him, he was three payments behind on the truck, and Kayla’s mother was threatening to take him to court. He said he meant to tell you.”

I did not say anything.

“I told him I didn’t need his reasons,” Ron said. “I told him there were three thousand of them, and every one was in my till, and I would be at his step Friday with a tow strap for his truck if the money was not in my hand. Marv did not say anything. Marv just looked at him.”

“Did he pay?”

“He brought it Friday, in an envelope, in twenties and tens. All three thousand.” Ron looked out across the ice at the two houses.