“Tell Cody his hunters left my gate open again.”

That was how I found out. Not a letter. Not a phone call. Don said it to me across a pallet of water softener salt at the co-op in Albion on a Thursday afternoon, two days before rifle season opened. He said it the same way he might have told me it looked like rain.I had a forty-pound bag of sunflower seed on my hip. I set it down on the pallet.

“His hunters?” I said.

Don has farmed across the road from our eighty since before I married into it. He hays the twenty acres of grass on the north end for me on shares, and he runs heifers on his side of the county road. He is not a man who carries tales. Not ever. In all the years I have known him I have never once heard him say a bad word about a neighbor.

He took his seed corn cap off, looked down into it like the answer might be in there, and put it back on.

“Marlene,” he said. “I figured you knew.”

“Knew what, Don?”

“I had eleven heifers out on the road Sunday before last. Your gate was standing wide open and so was mine, because whoever went through yours turned around in my drive. I caught a fella loading a bow into a pickup with Douglas County plates, and I asked him what he thought he was doing.”

He rubbed the back of his neck.

“He was polite about it. Said he was sorry about the gate. Said he was hunting with permission. Said he pays Cody a hundred and fifty dollars a day.”

I did not say anything. I could feel my heart going in my ears.

“I said, pays Cody for what. And he said for the hunting. He said the place came to Cody from his uncle.”

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.

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