me her little man, says it all depends on me on account of me being the responsible one. It’s not easy. That’s what she’s always saying. This isn’t easy for me, you know?”
Grizz made a humming sound in his throat. “How often does the girl come over?”
Lee shrugged once more, and Grizz decided not to press him. What had it been like growing up in the household of Will Gunderson? Lee raised his gaze. “I charge three dollars an hour, and I can only come on Saturdays, when my mother is working at the nursing home.”
“Those are fair terms.”
“What kind of work do you have for me today?”
GRIZZ TOOK HIM OUT to the truck garden, among the viny rows of potato plants overgrown with weeds. He pointed out the difference between the potatoes and the weeds, the velvety lamb’s ears and pestilent burdock that grew among the crop. The plants were carefully hilled, and Grizz loosened the ground with a spade and then tugged one up by the base and shook out the loose black dirt from the small clump of potatoes. “These are Yukon Gold,” he said, “about half the size they should be.”
Lee whistled. “We only got eighty bushels an acre this year in corn. It’s bad all over the county.”
“I planted sweet corn and peas and carrots, but this is all we have left.” Earlier in the summer, Grizz had hand carried buckets of water from the well to save what he could from the relentless sun. Now he rubbed the potatoes to clean off the dirt and tossed them into a gallon bucket.
Without being instructed further, Lee worked the dirt with his shovel, crouched, and tugged out a plant of his own. He held up a potato mealy with holes. “What do I do with the bad ones?”
Grizz took it from his hand and hurled it off into the trees. He left the boy to go do chores. There was a surprise he was preparing in the woods, something he’d been working on to keep his mind occupied, to escape his troubling fire dreams. When he came back an hour later, Lee had finished a row and filled three of the gallon buckets. He was a better worker than his son had been. Together they carried the buckets up to the porch, where Grizz had filled a pitcher with well water and grape powdered Kool-Aid. The well water was so cold it made his fillings ache.
Lee stood and dusted his jeans when they were done, heading for the back field. “Hold on,” said Grizz. “We’ll finish the potatoes another day. I got something to show you.” He trundled over a wheelbarrow he’d made ready for the purpose and slit open a bag of dried concrete with a spade. Grizz showed Lee how to mix it with gravel and water to get just the right consistency. Chilly well water splashed up and soaked Lee’s sleeve, but he didn’t complain. Grizz let the boy push the laden wheelbarrow up the driveway and into the woods.
An empty figure of mesh wires waited there, leaning against a tree. Metal posts had been driven through the legs and spine to give it support.
“You’re making more of them?” Years had passed since Grizz had added anything to the Frozen Garden, his forest of statues growing mossy with time. “What’s this one going to be?”
“That’s Minnehaha herself, the hero’s bride.”
She leaned against a silver oak, her head drooping. Around them on the ground lay more gallon buckets with broken green glass bottles and the cowrie shells Grizz used for skin.
“What happened to her?”
“She dies of sickness in the story. It happens before his last battle, before Hiawatha must face Pau-Puk-Keewis, his ultimate enemy.”
Lee touched the empty metal wires. “Why do you make the statues? Everyone in town says it because you’re crazy.”
“What do you think?”
Lee rubbed the arm he’d wounded coming down the mountain, kneading the muscle as he peered up at Grizz. “I think it’s because you’re sad. You’ve been sad for a long time.”
Grizz swallowed. “I guess that’s a good enough reason. They were for my brother. Maybe an apology for all that I couldn’t do for him.”
“I didn’t know you had a brother.”
“This was all before your time. You never got to see the pageant, did you?”
“I was just a baby when they did the last one. Dad said it got to be too much trouble for the town. And every year less people visited to see it.”