“Don, set the rifle down and open the bag,” I said. “And please do not shout at an old woman who is holding your granddaughter.” I was in my recliner with Kinsley asleep on my chest and my hip throbbing under a heating pad, and I spoke the way I speak to a calf that has to be talked down from a fence. Behind him I could hear the crackle of a campfire and the quiet shuffle of men who had stopped telling stories. At four in the morning, I had unzipped that camouflage bag and removed his orange vest, his thermos and his binoculars.
Inside, I had packed a soft baby carrier, a pack of diapers, two bottles, a tub of oatmeal cereal and a pink hat with a bow. Beside them lay my own pain pills, counted into a small plastic case, and a handwritten card. It read, Elk season is every night at two. The little elk is fourteen months old, and she wants a bottle. Please carry her up the basement stairs in the dark, on one hip, while holding a cane. I will be at the top of the stairs, waiting, if you decide to come. I heard Don take in a long, ragged breath. “Carol, for the love of heaven, I am standing in a lodge full of men.”
His brother Gene, who had driven him to Montana, was sitting beside him at the table. I heard Gene say, quietly, “Don, let me see that card.” There was a rustling of paper. Then Gene said, in the voice of a man who had just been struck, “Brother, you left her with the baby and a broken hip? Our mother would have taken a switch to you.” Don did not answer. After a while, I heard a chair scrape. “Carol,” he said, hoarsely, “I will be home by morning. Please do not try to go down the stairs.” “I have already done that, Don,” I said. “It took me fifteen minutes.”
A hunting bag opened in a Montana lodge gave one husband the weekend to bring his wife back to the recliner in Rapid City.
He rode through the night in the truck of his brother, with the rifle case across his knees and the empty camouflage bag at his feet, and he did not speak for three hundred miles. At the Wyoming line, Gene pulled over for gas, and Don stayed in the cab with his head in his hands. When they reached Rapid City at dawn, he walked into the house in his boots, found me in the recliner with Kinsley, and stopped. The baby woke, saw him, and reached up with both arms, and my husband, a big man, crumpled onto the couch and took her.
I told him my terms that evening, with the baby on the rug between us, chewing a wooden spoon. He would take the night duties, all of them, until I could manage the stairs. He would drive me to every therapy appointment, and he would learn the exercises so that he could help me at home. He would sleep upstairs in our bed, not in the basement recliner. The seven thousand dollars, which could not be refunded, would be earned back with the sale of his camper. And next fall, if the Lord and my hip allowed, we would go up to the hills together, with Kinsley in the carrier.
His mother, Lorraine, who is eighty four, drove over from three miles down the road in her old Buick. She walked into the kitchen with a casserole under one arm and her cane under the other, and she looked at her son with eyes like flint. “Donald,” she said. “I had five children and a broken leg and a house full of sisters, and I never once left a baby alone with a hurt woman. Who told you that I did?” Don stared at his boots. “Nobody, Mama.” “Then you made it up,” said Lorraine, “and a man who makes up his mother has a lot to answer for.”
Our neighbors along the road arrived by Sunday, all of them, in the manner of country people who know without being told. Ed from the ranch brought a side of beef. The girls from the farm down the road came to sit with Kinsley in the afternoons. Pastor Mike built a ramp at the front steps from lumber he had in his shed, and he refused any payment but a slice of pie. Every one of them looked at Don, and none of them said a word, and he understood the whole of it. By the end of the week, our porch had been swept by three different women.
The money consequences were just. The guide kept the seven thousand dollars, the four year wait was lost, and Don did not argue. He sold his camper and a set of antique decoys he had kept in the garage, and he took a weekend job at the feed store to make up the difference. When his name came up again for the elk waiting list, four years later, he called me into the kitchen, held the letter in both hands and tore it in half. “I will hunt in the Black Hills,” he said, “where I can be home by supper.”
My mother, Ida, who passed twelve years ago, raised us in a two room house on the prairie and never once let a neighbor go hungry. In her name, I started the Ida Fund. It pays for home help, hot meals and rides to appointments for grandparents in Pennington County who are raising grandchildren on their own. We held the first lunch in the church basement. Twenty two grandparents came, many of them with a child on a lap. A woman of seventy, who had not sat down at a restaurant in three years, wiped her eyes and said, “Nobody ever asks us how we are.”
On a crisp morning the following October, we drove up to the Black Hills in the truck of my husband, with Kinsley buckled in her car seat in the back, wearing a pink hat with a bow. We found a ridge above a quiet meadow, and Don set up a folding chair for me, with a blanket, a thermos and a footstool. He did not carry his rifle. He carried the baby in the front carrier, humming. When a bull elk finally stepped out of the trees, enormous and golden in the low sun, Don knelt beside me and whispered, “Carol, look.” We watched him together until he was gone.
