The boy who came crashing through the cedars was my grandson Tanner, his earbuds dangling from his collar and his face as white as milk, and right behind him, red faced and breathing hard, came a man in the green uniform of the Game Commission. I knew him in a heartbeat. Peter Kelso, forty one years old, who rode my school bus every morning in 1991 and once sat behind me for a whole winter eating cheese crackers. He had his hand on his holster and his eyes on the cedar line, and he shouted my name.
“Mrs. Dietz!” he called. “Stay down! Stay right where you are!” I stayed down. On the platform, in my thermal shirt, with the cold boards pressing through the cloth, I held my rifle pointed at the sky and said nothing. I heard Kelso speak to someone through his radio in short quiet bursts. I heard boots in the leaves. I heard a man in the cedars say a very bad word, and then a rifle falling, and then the unmistakable snap of a handcuff.
They had Shane Ebersole flat on his stomach in the needles before I had moved a muscle. He was twenty three years old, a skinny boy with a thin mustache, and he was crying. He said it was all Kurt. He said Kurt had told him the old lady would never know, that it was only a deer rifle and a little white lie. A trooper pulled him up by the elbow. His camouflage jacket had a gash in the sleeve, and I thought, absurdly, that I could mend it.
A grandson who stays calm for ten minutes in a cold forest may save a grandmother for the next twenty years.
I climbed down the ladder that Ervin welded, one rung at a time, with my rifle slung across my back and my knees complaining. At the bottom, Tanner crashed into me so hard that he almost knocked me flat. He was shaking. He held on to my coat with both fists and said, over and over, “Grandma, Grandma, I am sorry, I am so sorry.” I held him for a long time. I said that there was nothing to be sorry for. He said, “Yes there is. I almost did not listen.”
He told me the rest in pieces, with his face against my shoulder. At four that morning, his father had given him a hunting radio and a cheerful speech about family tradition. Tanner had felt uneasy and had left the earbuds in his pocket. At five forty, he heard the voice of his father through the radio on his belt, tuned to channel four, just as mine had been. He heard Shane. He heard the number, three hundred thousand. He stood in the dark by the creek with his heart in his throat and did the one thing he could think of.
He called Peter Kelso. Every hunter in the county knows the number of the warden, and Tanner had it on the back of his license. Kelso answered on the second ring, from his truck on the ridge road, and said four words. “Stay on the line.” He drove up the logging trail with his lights off. By the time they reached the creek, Tanner told me, they could hear me on the radio saying Kurt, honey, tell Shane I can see him too. They had both started to run.
They found Kurt in the south stand, calmly eating a sandwich, with a thermos beside him and a rifle across his lap. When the warden climbed up and told him to put it down, he did not argue. He looked down at his son at the foot of the tree, and his face did something I had never seen on it. It folded. He said, “Tanner. Why?” And my grandson, nineteen years old, in the first light of a cold morning, said clearly, “Because she is my grandmother.”
The prosecutor in Coudersport charged Kurt with conspiracy to commit murder and Shane with attempted murder, and they were each given long sentences. Kurt pleaded guilty in the spring, after hearing the recording that Tanner had made on his phone. He wrote me a letter from the state prison at Rockview, three pages of apologies and excuses. I read it once. I put it in a drawer. Someday, perhaps, I will read it again. The wounds a child gives you are the last ones to close.
Tanner moved into the house in December, into the room where Kurt had slept as a boy. He enrolled at the community college in Wellsboro, in the criminal justice program, and works nights at the sawmill. He cooks supper on Sundays, badly. He has taken to wearing the orange vest of his grandfather to the barn, which hangs on him like a tent. Whenever I look at him bending over the woodstove with his tongue between his teeth, I feel the sorrow in my chest turn slowly into something else.
On the Saturday after Thanksgiving the next year, at four thirty in the morning, in the pitch dark and twenty degrees, my grandson held the ladder of the north stand while I climbed up. He clipped the radio to my coat, and then he climbed up behind me and sat beside me on the seat of Ervin, the two of us squeezed together under one blanket. We waited for light with a thermos between us. When the first deer stepped from the cedars, a fine young buck, neither of us lifted a rifle. We only watched.