Three Veterans on Grandpa’s Eighty

Kurt Fischer told me at the Kwik Trip pumps in Mondovi on a hot Saturday in August, with the nozzle still in his tank and a grin on his face, like he was telling me the weather.

“We’re all paid up with Brad through this season,” he said. “Four grand, cash, same as last year. Tell him the boys want to get in there and hang cameras by Labor Day.”

I stood there holding a gas cap in one hand and my debit card in the other.

I had lived on Grandpa’s land for four months by then. Nobody had paid me a dime for anything.

“Paid Brad for what, Kurt?”

He stopped grinning. He was a big man with a sunburned neck, and I watched him work it out slowly, the way you do when you realize you have stepped in something and the smell is coming up off your own boot.

“The hunting,” he said. “Your grandpa’s eighty. Brad said you two had it worked out. He said you didn’t care, you don’t hunt.”

I finished pumping my gas. I paid at the pump. I got in my car and drove the eleven miles home on County H with both hands on the wheel, and I did not cry until I was sitting on Grandpa’s porch steps.

My grandpa was Arvid Lindqvist. He farmed eighty acres in Buffalo County, Wisconsin, for sixty-one years, and when he died in the spring of 2022, at ninety-one, he left every acre of it to me.

It is not a big farm by any measure. About thirty acres of tillable ground on the flat, which our neighbor Ron Hanson rents and plants in corn or beans.

The rest is an oak ridge that climbs up behind the house, with a creek bottom and a stand of old white oaks Grandpa would never cut.

He hunted that ridge every November of his life until he was eighty-eight.

He built his own ladder stands out of rough oak boards from his own trees, heavy enough that it took two men and a tractor to set one. He called them his chairs.

When I was a girl he walked me out to the field edge before daylight and sat me in one of those chairs with a thermos of cocoa and told me not to wiggle.

I never shot anything. I just loved the dark turning gray, and his hand on my knee when a doe came out of the oaks.

“Land’s for somebody who needs it, Amy,” he told me once, when a man from Minneapolis offered him a fortune for the hunting rights. “Not somebody who wants it. There is a difference, and the Lord knows it.”

I married Brad Kessler when I was twenty-four. He sold farm insurance out of an office in Durand, and he was good at it, because he was good at talking to old farmers. Grandpa liked him. They hunted together for years.

Brad and his buddies hunted the eighty with Grandpa’s blessing all through our marriage. Kurt, Mike Weber, Russ Olson, a couple of others.

Brad put up three steel ladder stands of his own and a box blind on the ridge. Grandpa didn’t mind. He liked the company in deer camp.

What I did not know until that day at the Kwik Trip was that sometime after Grandpa died, Brad had started charging them for it.