It was four o’clock in the afternoon and the light was already going long and yellow across the stubble fields.
The gate was shut. The chain was looped around the post the way it should be, and the padlock was snapped. It was the same padlock that had always been on that gate. Wes kept three keys to it. One was on my ring. One hung on a nail in the shop. And one he had given to Cody on his sixteenth birthday, tucked inside a card.
I had not been out to the eighty four times since the funeral. I will own that. I would drive as far as the gate and see the two-track going down into the trees, and my hands would start shaking on the steering wheel, and I would turn the pickup around and go home.
This time I got out and unlocked the gate and drove down.
The first thing I saw was the sign.
It was a square of plywood wired to the big cottonwood where the two-track forks. Painted white, with black letters done carefully with a brush. Somebody had taken time on those letters.
PRIVATE GROUND. HUNTING BY RESERVATION ONLY. CALL CODY.
And under that, his telephone number.
I stood and read it three times. Then I walked the creek.
Down at the bend there was a new metal ladder stand strapped to an ash tree. The store tag was still zip-tied to the rail. There were truck tracks cut deep into the soft ground along the bottom. Deeper than anything Wes ever left. Wes walked in. He always walked in.
Then I went to Wes’s stand.
It sits eight feet up in a bur oak above the crossing, where the deer come down off the hill to water. He built it out of treated lumber in 1998, and he replaced the boards every few years whether they needed it or not. The ladder is two-by-fours. The bench is a single plank. The rail across the front is a two-by-six he ran his hand along so many seasons that the top of it has gone smooth and dark, like the arm of an old church pew.
I climbed up.
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.
CODY. AGE 12.
And next to that, small, in Wes’s hand:
PROUD OF YOU.
I had never seen it. In thirty-six years of marriage, I had never once climbed that ladder. I had always figured it was his place, his and the boy’s, and I left them to it.
I put my hand on those letters.
I did my crying up there, where nobody was looking. Then I climbed down and drove home, and I did not sleep that night.
Specialty: Quiet Comebacks & Personal Justice
David Reynolds focuses on stories where underestimated individuals regain control of their lives. His writing centers on measured decisions rather than dramatic outbursts — emphasizing preparation, patience, and the long game. His characters don’t shout; they act.