Chapter 6
BUD
I was standing in front of a wall of it trying to remember whether the loaf she gets is the brown bag or the white bag when somebody said my name.
"Bud. Look at you, out in daylight."
Pauline. Harv's Pauline, in a windbreaker, four bags of ice in her cart in the middle of September, which is about right for Pauline.
"Getting your stuff together?"
"Working on it."
"Harv's been in that garage since the eighth.
He's got the generator in pieces on a tarp.
I asked him if it was broke and he said no, he just likes it in pieces.
" She laughed at her own husband, easy, the way a woman does after forty years.
"Is Lois coming up for the middle weekend? I keep telling her."
"She's not."
"Well. Tell her the offer's permanent."
She started to push off and then stopped, because Pauline never leaves on the first try.
"Now don't let Harv talk you into that generator. The one he had in '19 was a disaster. That's the year the furnace went, you remember. Middle of your week."
"I remember the furnace."
"I called right through to the lodge." She was pleased with herself about it. "Middle of the night, practically. Well. Nine o'clock. That old phone up there rang about a dozen times and I thought, nobody's going to pick that up, and then Dutch answered it with his mouth full."
I stood there with a loaf of bread in my hand.
"You called the lodge."
"That landline's been there since Nixon." She was already looking down the aisle at something else. "It's on the corkboard, big blue marker. Harv wrote it out for me the first year we were married, when I worried about everything. Never used it but the once."
She said something else and I don't know what it was. She went off toward the dairy with her four bags of ice.
I stayed in that aisle a while, thinking about a corkboard. I have looked at it every October of my adult life. Hunting license from 1988. Picture of Dutch's dad. Card for a septic outfit in Alpena. And a phone number in blue marker on an index card gone the color of weak tea.
I have known that number was up there since I was twenty-six years old.
I never once lied to my wife.
That's what I told myself in the truck going home, and I got about four miles out of it. I never said there is no phone at that camp. What I said, every year, in the garage, with my hand on the cooler, was you know there's no signal up there.
Which is true. There's no signal up there.
And every year she'd say okay, and every year I'd drive north, and that index card sat on that corkboard where anybody could see it, me included.
I didn't unplug it. I didn't hide it. I let the true thing stand in for the whole thing, thirty-one years running, and I never once caught myself at it.
I sat in my own driveway ten minutes before I went in.
She was at the sink. This time of year the evening light comes in over the neighbor's roof and puts her whole head in gold. I have watched her stand in it for three decades, and that's the moment I picked to open my mouth.
"There's a phone at the lodge," I said.
She turned the tap off.
"There's a landline at the lodge. There always has been. It's on the corkboard in the main room, on a card, blue marker. Harv wrote it out for Pauline the year they got married. She called it in '19 when their furnace went. Dutch answered."
Lois didn't turn around.
"Say the rest," she said.
"I knew it was there."
"All thirty-one years."
"All thirty-one years."
She put both hands on the edge of the sink.
"Why."
So I had to stand in my kitchen and find the answer, because she'd earned it, and because I had never once gone looking for it.
"Because reachable means leavable."
She turned around then.
"If you can get me, then there's a version of that week where I have to come home.
And once there's a version where I have to come home, every year I'm up there deciding not to.
Every day of it. That's not a week off, that's seven days of a man choosing.
" I still had my keys in my hand. Standing in my own house holding my keys like I might need them.
"So I let it be that there's no signal. And there isn't. I never said the other part, and every year it got easier not to say it, and after about ten years I'd have had to make a whole announcement to say it. So I didn't."
"Nine years ago," she said.
"I know."
"There was a phone."
"There was a phone." My voice came out wrong. "Dutch would have answered it with his mouth full, Lois, and I'd have been home Tuesday night."
She didn't cry. I halfway wish she had, because I can put my arms around a crying woman. She stood against the sink and looked at me the way you look at a wall where a door should have been the whole time.
"Okay," she said finally.
"That's the whole thing. There's nothing else under it."
"There's something else under it." No heat in it at all, like she was reading a gauge. "I don't know what it is yet. Neither do you. But a man doesn't build a wall that specific over a bunkhouse."
Then she went back to the dishes, and I went out to the garage, and that was Thursday.
I drove north Saturday at four in the morning, which I have done thirty-one times.
It was the best drive of the year. Even that year. The dark, the coffee, the road going two-lane at Standish, the sky coming up gray over the cut, the last bar dropping off the phone six miles past the bridge. My chest opens up on that stretch and has since I was twenty-six.
Spruce Run at ten past eight. Dutch had the stove going. Harv had the generator in the bed of his truck, in one piece, defeated. We unloaded and did the same jokes we do. Dutch said well, look who could make it, which he has said every year since 1995.
Then I stood in the main room with a duffel in each hand, looking at the card on that corkboard. Blue marker, ten digits, a little box drawn around the last four for no reason anybody remembers.
"Before we get into it," I said.
Dutch looked up from the stove.
"I want to say a thing and then never say it again."
Harv sat down on the arm of the couch. In that room we have talked about weather, meat, trucks, the Lions, and one time in 2011, for about four minutes, Dutch's prostate.
"That number's been on that board thirty years," I said. "Pauline's used it. Cheryl's used it. My wife has never used it once, and the reason is me."
Nobody said anything.
"Nine years ago Lois's mother died on the Tuesday of this week. She handled the coroner, the funeral home, the phone tree, all of it, and she buried her mother on the Friday with a hole beside her where I should have been standing. I found out Sunday in the lot at the Marathon."
Harv looked at the floor. Dutch had the stove door open and didn't move.
"Nobody up here did that. That was me. I ran a story at home about being unreachable and I never corrected it, because I liked being unreachable. This is the last year that story runs."
I took the card off the corkboard and held it up.
"Anything happens at home this week, she calls this number, somebody picks it up, and I go. I'm not asking for a vote."
Dutch shut the stove door.
"Nobody's voting," he said.
"Say it back to me, Dutch."
He looked up at that.
It's a thing my wife does. Say it back to me. It came out of my mouth in a deer camp at ten past eight in the morning before I knew it was coming.
Dutch is sixty-four and he has never in his life said a soft sentence.
"She calls, we get you," he said. "I'll pick it up myself."
"Harv."
"Bud, I'll pick it up. Jesus. Sit down."
That was the whole thing. Ten minutes, maybe. Then Harv said something about the generator and Dutch put more wood in, and we walked the north line before the day got warm. Good day. I shot nothing and slept like a dead man.
After supper Harv got on that landline and called Pauline, the way he does every night of the week, which I did not know he did. Through the wall I heard him say my name twice.
I lay in that bunk in the dark and understood it was already moving. By nine-thirty in the morning it'd be in a kitchen in our county, and from there it would find my wife sideways, out of somebody else's mouth, before I ever got home to tell her.
What went through me was relief. I wanted her to know. I did not want to be standing in that kitchen when she found out.
Then I went to sleep like a man with a clear conscience.