I need to tell you who Cody is, or none of the rest of this will make sense.
Cody is my sister Janet’s boy. He was twenty-seven that fall. His own father left when he was nine. Drove off to a job in Texas and never sent for them. Never sent much of anything, not even birthday cards after the first two years.
It was Wes who took that boy. Wes put a fishing pole in his hand the first summer, and showed him how to bait a hook without crying over the worm. Later it was a .22, and later still a deer rifle. Wes taught him to shoot out of the stand above the creek crossing on the eighty.
That stand was built for one man. Wes made it that way on purpose. But the fall Cody turned eleven, Wes tore the old bench out and built it back wide enough for two.
He never said a word about why. He just did it.
Cody stood next to me at the funeral. He carried the casket. I remember his hand on my elbow at the graveside, steadying me, and I remember thinking, at least I still have this boy.
I sat in the co-op parking lot with the engine off for a long time after Don told me. The bag of sunflower seed was still sitting on that pallet inside. I never did go back for it.
I want to be plain about what I could have done, because I know how it sounds that I didn’t.
I could have called the game warden. Hunting somebody’s land without the owner’s permission is against the law in Nebraska, sign on the fence or not. And taking money from people for it, under a lie, is something worse than that. I could have called Deputy Schmitt, who stood up at our wedding and has known Cody since he was in diapers. Either one of them would have been at that gate Saturday morning in a marked truck with the lights going.
I did not send them. Not yet.
What I did do was call Schmitt at home Friday at noon. I did not give him Cody’s name. I told him I had reason to think strangers were hunting the eighty. I told him I would be sitting in Wes’s stand before daylight on opening morning to see who they were, and that he would hear my voice on his telephone by nine o’clock.
“And if I don’t?” he said.
“Then you come. And you come quick.”
He was quiet on the line. “I could just be there, Marlene.”
“I know you could. I want to look at them myself first. Let me have that.”
He did not like it. I could hear it in his breathing. But he said he would be parked at the corner a mile north with his radio on, and I did not argue with him about that.
I could have called Cody too. That was the one I thought about hardest. I sat at my kitchen table Thursday night with the phone in my hand and his name right there on the screen.
But I have known that boy his whole life. If I called him, he would have a story ready before I hung up. And a better story by the time he got to my kitchen. He would call his hunters off, and he would cry, and I would never know how long it had been going on or how many people he had taken money from.
And there was something else.
Strangers had been walking Wes’s ground for I did not know how long. Sitting on his bench. Looking at his creek. I wanted to see them with my own eyes. I wanted to know what kind of men they were before I decided what kind of trouble this was.
So instead of calling anybody, I drove out there.
It was four o’clock in the afternoon and the light was already going long and yellow across the stubble fields.
The gate was shut. The chain was looped around the post the way it should be, and the padlock was snapped. It was the same padlock that had always been on that gate. Wes kept three keys to it. One was on my ring. One hung on a nail in the shop. And one he had given to Cody on his sixteenth birthday, tucked inside a card.
I had not been out to the eighty four times since the funeral. I will own that. I would drive as far as the gate and see the two-track going down into the trees, and my hands would start shaking on the steering wheel, and I would turn the pickup around and go home.
This time I got out and unlocked the gate and drove down.
The first thing I saw was the sign.
It was a square of plywood wired to the big cottonwood where the two-track forks. Painted white, with black letters done carefully with a brush. Somebody had taken time on those letters.
PRIVATE GROUND. HUNTING BY RESERVATION ONLY. CALL CODY.
And under that, his telephone number.
I stood and read it three times. Then I walked the creek.
Down at the bend there was a new metal ladder stand strapped to an ash tree. The store tag was still zip-tied to the rail. There were truck tracks cut deep into the soft ground along the bottom. Deeper than anything Wes ever left. Wes walked in. He always walked in.
Then I went to Wes’s stand.
It sits eight feet up in a bur oak above the crossing, where the deer come down off the hill to water. He built it out of treated lumber in 1998, and he replaced the boards every few years whether they needed it or not. The ladder is two-by-fours. The bench is a single plank. The rail across the front is a two-by-six he ran his hand along so many seasons that the top of it has gone smooth and dark, like the arm of an old church pew.
I climbed up.
Under the bench somebody had left a hand warmer packet and a candy wrapper.
I sat down where he used to sit. And I looked at the rail.
Wes kept his tally there, cut in with his pocketknife. A notch for every deer that stand ever gave him. Twenty-some of them, small and neat and even, the way he did everything.
And then, next to the notches, a bigger cut. Deeper. In a boy’s uneven letters.
CODY. AGE 12.
And next to that, small, in Wes’s hand:
PROUD OF YOU.
I had never seen it. In thirty-six years of marriage, I had never once climbed that ladder. I had always figured it was his place, his and the boy’s, and I left them to it.
I put my hand on those letters.
I did my crying up there, where nobody was looking. Then I climbed down and drove home, and I did not sleep that night.