“Walk with me, Wilda,” said Leonard, and his hand on my shoulder was not rough or threatening but heavy and old and trembling, like the hand of a man who has carried a stone too far. I turned around slowly. His face in the light of the funeral home was gray, and his brown suit was damp where he had been weeping.
Behind him stood the line of deer camp men in their flannel and their good boots, and Ray Lehto beside me, tall and quiet in his red coat. “I will tell it all,” Leonard said. “Right now, in front of everybody.”
I should have been afraid. For a moment my heart beat so hard that I felt it in my teeth. But I looked at that face I had known for fifty years, the face that had sat at my table every Thanksgiving and held my son at the font, and I saw something I had not expected. I saw relief. It was the face of a man who has finally been told he may put down a weight. I nodded, and he took his hand from my shoulder.
He stood in front of the casket of my husband, in the middle of the Lutheran church basement where the ham sandwiches were still on trays, and he said it plainly. On the fifteenth of November in 1979, he had been drunk. He had argued with Toivo Lehto the night before over a fence line and a hundred dollars, and in the morning he had gone into the woods angry and hurting. When he saw Toivo across the clearing, he fired a shot meant only to frighten him. It was not a stray. It was not a deer.
A lie told to protect one friend can build a church for fifty years, and still it cannot hold the weight of a man who lies awake.
Nobody moved. The coffee urn ticked. A woman near the door covered her mouth. Leonard said that Arvo had found him standing over the body, and that Arvo had been the one to say, “Go home to your children.” He said that was the worst thing anyone ever did for him, and the kindest. He had let Arvo carry his sin for forty six years. He had let a widow think the woods had simply taken her husband. He turned to Ray and said, in a voice like torn paper, “I am so sorry, son.”
Ray stood for a long time with his big hands closed. I thought he might strike him. I think he thought so too. Then he took a long breath and said that his mother had known. She had known for forty years that someone had fired the shot, and every year, when that deer hung on her porch, she had said the same thing at the kitchen window. She had said, “Somebody is paying a debt.” She had never asked who. She had forgiven the deer, she told Ray, and she had forgiven the man.
Leonard drove himself to the office of the sheriff in Escanaba the very next morning, with Ray in the seat beside him, and with our pastor in the back. He was seventy six years old. He told the whole story again to a young deputy who had to ask him twice to slow down. The prosecutor reviewed it for a month. In the end, Leonard pleaded to manslaughter, and the judge, a woman with silver hair and wet eyes, gave him eighteen months, which he served at a county facility near Marquette.
I wrote him every week. So did Ray. In the second month, Ray sent a note to say that his mother had kept a drawer of photographs, and that Toivo and Leonard appeared in half of them, grinning in the snow with their rifles and their coffee cups. “They were friends,” Ray wrote. “I forgot that.” Leonard read that line to a guard, and the guard told me later that the old man put his head on the table and could not stop shaking.
When Leonard came home, the following summer, we were waiting at the end of his driveway, Ray and I and about forty men from deer camp. Nobody made a speech. Someone brought a casserole. Someone had cut the grass. He stood there with a paper bag in his hand and could not find a thing to say, and Ray stepped forward and offered his hand, and the two men held on to one another in the sun for a long, long time.
This November fifteenth, opening day, I got up before light and made coffee in the thermos of Arvo. At the edge of the woods, three men met in the half dark, Ray Lehto, my son, and Leonard Saari. They were gone until noon. I do not know who fired first, and I did not ask. But at one in the afternoon, a truck pulled up to the farmhouse of the widow, now the home of Ray, and a buck was hung on the porch hook, in full view, and somebody knocked.