I stood up from my lawn chair. My back cracked like a dry branch. The man in the Orvis vest was holding the pintail so carefully that you would have thought it was alive, and his hands, I noticed, were shaking a little. “Sir,” he said, “my name is Paul Hargrove. I buy for a national outdoor retailer, and last month I signed a purchase order for twenty thousand decoys from a man named Clyde Brandt, of the Platte River, whom I have not yet met in person. The designer is a recluse, my boss tells me. He does not answer email.” I said, “I do not own a computer.” Paul laughed, in disbelief.
Brett had come across the driveway at a fast walk, with his cash box under his arm and a smile fixed on his face like a decal. “Dad,” he said, “who is this?” I said, “This is the man who is going to make me rich, Brett.” I said it gently. Gently was the only way I knew to say it. “Seven million eight hundred thousand dollars. For the designs. Contract signed in July.” The smile of Brett fell off. Shawna, behind him, dropped a stack of paper plates, which fluttered across the driveway like startled birds. “Seven point eight million,” she said. “For wooden ducks.”
“For wooden ducks, Shawna,” I said. “For forty years of Saturdays.” I took the pawn receipt out of my shirt pocket and unfolded it on the table, between a canvasback and a mallard. “And for the Browning,” I added, “which my father gave me in 1958. Pawned in July by a Brett Brandt for nine hundred dollars.” I did not raise my voice. “It was worth eight thousand. It had the initials of my father on the stock.” The yard had gone silent. A meadowlark sang across the road, bright and unbothered, as if nothing in the world had changed.
A pintail decoy turned over at a yard sale brought a purchase order and a pawn receipt into the open and gave one old carver the morning to bring his son back to the blind.
Brett looked at the receipt. His throat moved. For a long moment he looked like the boy he had been at nine, standing on the bank of the Platte with a rod that was too big for him, waiting for a bite that would not come. “Dad,” he said, “I was going to get it back.” I said, “I know you were.” He said, “I was behind. The restaurant. The truck.” His voice cracked. “I did not want to ask you. I thought you would say, I told you so.” I said, “When have I ever said that?” He thought. He said, “Never.” I said, “Then why did you not ask?”
He did not answer, and I did not make him. The man in the Orvis vest had stepped quietly to the far end of the table, with the courtesy of a stranger who knows when he is in the way. Shawna was weeping into her sleeve. Neighbors at the edge of the driveway pretended to examine the decoys, a man with a Husker cap turning a mallard over and over. I sat down on the cooler. I was tired. “Brett,” I said, “come sit.” He did. We sat side by side, two men on a beer cooler, looking at forty wooden ducks lined up in the sun.
“I carved my first decoy the winter my father taught me to hunt,” I said. “He said, Clyde, a duck does not care what a decoy costs. It only cares whether it looks alive.” I picked up a canvasback and turned it in my hands. “I never did it for the money. I did it because carving was the only time I felt close to him.” I looked at my son. “You are not a bad man, Brett. You are a frightened one. And you are my boy. Both of those things I know.” He put his face in his hands and shook.
We went to the pawn shop on O Street on Monday morning. Brett carried the cash, which came from selling his own truck. The owner, a gray bearded man named Hank, wiped his glasses and brought the Browning out from a locked case in the back. It lay in my hands the way it had lain at nine years old, balanced and warm, the oil still bright along the barrel. I ran my thumb over the stock, over the faint initials. “Thank you,” I said. Hank said, “Your boy came in here on Saturday, crying. He asked me to hold it.” I looked at Brett. He was looking at the floor.
That November, I took Brett to the blind on the Platte. We went before dawn, in the dark, with a thermos and a Lab named Duke. The cold was an ache in the jaw. We set the decoys, forty wooden ducks, painted by my own hand, bobbing on the black water. We sat in silence. Then the first wings came, a whistle in the dark, and Brett lifted the Browning, and I put my hand on his shoulder. “Wait,” I said. “Let them settle.” And they settled, a dozen mallards, dropping out of the gray sky into the decoys, trusting the lie.
He took the shot clean. Duke went in after the bird, ears flapping, and came back with a drake mallard in his jaws. Brett knelt in the reeds and took it from the dog. He held it up to the first light, green head shining, and I saw his lip tremble. “Dad,” he said, “I am sorry about all of it.” I said, “I know.” He said, “It is a good gun.” I said, “It is a good gun in good hands.” He looked at me. The sun came up over the Platte, pink and gold, and the whole river caught fire.
The decoys went into stores that spring, boxed in green and tan, each with a little tag that said, Carved on the Platte River. Brett helped me pack the first shipment, and when we were done, he asked if I would teach him to carve. We started with a block of basswood. His first duck looked like a loaf of bread. His tenth looked like a duck. On the day he finished his twentieth, he set it on the windowsill and stepped back, squinting at it, with my chin and the eyes of my father. “Dad,” he said, “does it look alive?” I said, “Son, it looks like yours.”
