I untied the string on the brown envelope slowly, loop by loop, because my hands shake some now and I did not want to tear anything. Out came the contract. Eighty one pages, bound at the top, with a clear plastic cover. I laid it on the kitchen table beside the cold bacon and let Doug read the first page. Then he looked up at me with his mouth open. “Clarence,” he said, “this says five million, one hundred thousand dollars.” Linda made a small sound. I said, “It is sixty one duck designs, son. Drawn on butcher paper. The ones you told your daughter nobody would buy.”
The printout from the VA went on top. I turned it so that Doug could see the account number, the one ending in 3307, and the line that read Pension active. I did not need to say another word. He looked at the number. Then he looked at his wife, and I watched it dawn on him, like a man waking up in a house where somebody has moved all the furniture. “Linda,” he said, very low. “That is the account for the pool.” She said nothing. “You told me the pool was paid off from your bonus. You told me that.” Linda lifted her chin. “Doug, this is not the time.” “It is exactly the time,” said Doug.
He grew quieter, if anything. He asked Linda how much. She said she did not know. He asked her again, in the same flat tone, and she began to cry, and it came out between sobs. Three years of pension, at two thousand, one hundred dollars a month. Seventy five thousand dollars. The pool, a new roof, and the credit cards. “Dad had nothing to spend it on,” she said. “He lived in my back bedroom! He ate my food! I was going to pay it back when the business turned around.” I said, mildly, “Daughter, I paid you rent for the food.”
A bound contract set beside cold bacon told a daughter and her husband what a quiet carver in the back bedroom had really built.
Doug pushed back his chair and stood up. He was gray in the face. For a minute, I feared he would walk out of the room and out of the house, and that would be the end of that family. Instead he did the thing that surprised me most. He came around the table and stood next to me, with one hand on my shoulder, and he said to his wife, “Linda, you will go to the VA office on Monday with your father, and you will tell them everything. And you will say it in your own words, not a lawyer.” She stared at him. “You would turn me in?” “I would turn myself in first,” he said, “if I had done this. Because I could not live with it.”
I did not want that, and I told them. I am seventy eight years old, and I did not carve sixty one ducks to send my only child to a courtroom. I told them what I had arranged. A lawyer in Annapolis named Mr. Feeney, who had been a Marine, had already drafted a repayment agreement. Every dollar returned to the pension, with no interest, over five years, from her own salary and from the pool, which would be sold. And the VA would be told the truth and make its own decision. “I will not stand in the way of anyone,” I said. “But I would rather that she were the one to knock on the door.”
Monday morning, Linda and I took the bus together, as I had gone alone the week before. She wore a navy suit. She held her purse in both hands the whole ride, and said nothing until we reached Cambridge. As we climbed the steps, she said in a small, scared voice, “Dad, what if they put me in jail?” I took her arm. “Then I will bring you cookies,” I said. At the counter, the young Marine who had helped me printed the form without a word, and Linda signed her name at the bottom in the careful handwriting she had used as a girl.
The VA looked at the facts, at the payments, and at the signed agreement, and decided to accept the restitution and refer nothing for prosecution. The letter said that the cooperation of Linda had been taken into account. She read it at the kitchen table, then handed it to me with shaking fingers. “Dad,” she said, “why are you so kind?” I thought about it. “Because your mother would have been,” I said. “And because I made a pretty mean carving of a daughter once, in my head. I thought I had to shave away the bad parts. It turns out the grain was there all along.”
The grandchildren were another matter. The older boy, Tyler, fifteen, who had said nobody would buy wooden ducks, came to the back bedroom door on the first night and stood on the threshold looking at the bench. “Grandpa,” he said, “I am sorry I said that.” “You did not know,” I said. “Come here.” I put a block of tupelo in his hands and a small knife. “Do not cut toward your thumb,” I said, and showed him how. At the end he held up a lump that had the shape of a mallard if you squinted, and I told him it was the best first duck I had ever seen.
The collection came out in the autumn. Decoys, lamps, bookends, prints, each with my signature in the corner and a little line that said, Carved on the Eastern Shore. A man from the sporting company brought the first box to the house himself, and I let the family open it at the table. Linda held a pintail lamp to the light and turned it, and her face did a complicated thing. “Dad, these are beautiful,” she said. “They are,” I said. “I carved them while you were all asleep.” She laughed so hard she had to put the lamp down.
I bought a small house on Dover Street with a garage big enough for a lathe, and Tyler comes every Saturday. He is learning to paint feathers. Last week, he finished a wood duck with a green head and the white stripe down the cheek, and he put it on the mantel without a word. I looked at it for a long time, and then I looked at him. “Is it good?” he asked. I thought of Dot. I thought of every hunter on the shore who ever stood a duck of mine on a mantel and said nothing about it. “It is yours,” I said. “That is better than good.”