He wrote back to accept the invitation and sure enough, two plane tickets soon arrived in the mail.
The way that Danny had come to live with them was a story in itself, and not an altogether happy one. Shortly after returning from Korea, he and Norma Jean had gotten married. They lived for a time in the small cabin that Cole had built, but when it was clear that a child was coming along, Mrs. Bailey had announced that she was moving into town with a maiden aunt and that the house near the knife workshop was the young couple’s if they wanted it.
“A cabin ain’t no place to raise a baby,” Mrs. Bailey had announced.
Cole liked his cabin just fine, but in the mysterious ways that women often operate, between Norman Jean and Mrs. Bailey, he found himself moved into the modest two-story clapboard farmhouse. He couldn’t even say exactly how it had happened. One of the two upstairs bedrooms had been done over into a baby’s room — a nursery, as Mrs. Bailey proudly called it.
The house was very modest, with just the two rooms downstairs, two rooms upstairs, and a lean-to kitchen off the back. Hollis Bailey’s father had built the place, using fieldstone for the foundation and logs for the floor joists. The house didn’t have a lick of insulation, but worn braided rugs across the painted floorboards kept the worst of the cold at bay through the mountain winters.
Cole and Norma Jean’s daughter, Janey, never had much liked the mountain life. No sooner had she graduated high school than she took up with a group of friends, traveling around to rock concerts and smoking dope. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, this was what a lot of young people were doing. Their daughter had gone hippie on them. It didn’t seem to bother Norma Jean, who saw Janey as a strong young woman following her own path, but truth be told, it just about broke Cole’s heart when Janey left the mountain. He missed the young girl he had once known who liked to run barefoot through the grass, catching June fireflies. But Janey had gone and grown up.
Then the news came that she’d had a child by some young man she wasn’t married to. Cole had to be talked out of arranging a good ol’ shotgun wedding. Even Norma Jean was not pleased by the situation. Janey promised to come by soon for them to meet their grandson, but the months passed. Whenever she called or wrote, she always seemed to be living in a different place.
It fell to the local sheriff to knock on their door one winter’s night with the news that the car Janey had been riding in was in a terrible accident somewhere in upstate New York, sliding off the road during a snowstorm. Janey and her man both died in the crash, but by some miracle, the baby had been spared.
There was no question that Cole and Norma Jean would raise the child as their own. Janey had named him Danny. As for the last name, well, Janey had never married the boy’s father, so as far as his grandparents were concerned, the boy’s name was Danny Cole.
Cole and Norma Jean had done the best they could for the boy, hoping that someday, things would turn out better than they had with Janey. The loss of their daughter nearly broke their hearts — the little boy was the only thing that kept them from being overwhelmed by grief.
Of course, Cole was always taking the boy into the woods, showing him all that he knew, from the names of the trees, to the shapes of the tracks beside a mountain stream, to the constellations in the winter sky. Cole had reached an age where he felt that it was important to pass things along. It was something he had not done with Janey, her being a girl and all, but Cole could see the error of his ways. If he had only spent more time with Janey, maybe things would have turned out differently. He didn’t plan on making the same mistake twice.
When the boy was ten, Cole gave him an old single-shot .22 rifle, expecting that he would cut his teeth as a hunter on the local squirrels and rabbits. While the boy was responsible with the rifle and learned to be a crack shot, he never brought home any game.
“I don’t like killing,” he had explained to his puzzled grandfather. Danny made a joke of it. “If I could shoot a Snickers bar out in the woods, I’d be the best hunter ever!”
Just once, when the boy was twelve, Cole had taken him deer hunting. It had been nothing short of disastrous, and by an unspoken mutual agreement, they had never discussed it since.
For Cole, his fondest memories of childhood — and those were few and far between — had been waking early to go with his old man into the woods to go hunting. He had thought to share something equally as special with Danny.
Sure enough, Danny had been excited to head out into the woods before dawn. The late fall morning felt crisp as the sun slowly crept above the hills. Cole had already found a likely spot where a buck he had been scouting all summer liked to pass through on his way to forage for hickory nuts. They set up behind a fallen log and waited.
“There he is,” Cole said quietly. “Aim just behind his shoulder, just like we talked about.”
Danny put the rifle to his shoulder. The lever-action .30/.30 kicked like a mule, but the boy could handle it for one shot.
Across the clearing, the buck seemed to sense them, lifting his majestic head. The first rays of the morning sun caught the antlers, reflecting off the ivory tips. It was a sight that damn near took Cole’s breath away. The buck was a ten-pointer and weighed more than two hundred pounds. Any boy ought to be proud to take an animal like that as his first deer.
Beside his grandson, Cole waited tensely. Seconds dragged by. Any moment now and the buck would be gone.
“Go on,” Cole whispered.
But Danny refused to shoot. Slowly, he lowered the rifle.
“What’s wrong? You’ve got a clear shot.”
“I can’t do it. I can’t kill him.”
The buck had not moved. Cole put his rifle to his shoulder, lined up the sights, and started to squeeze the trigger. He was about to kill again, just as he had done so many times before. He breathed out, breathed in, held it.
That’s when he sensed Danny at his elbow, the boy holding his breath. He glanced at the boy and saw a stricken white face, the soft brown eyes filled with tears.
Cole lowered the rifle. The buck seemed to look directly at them, maybe catching their scent at last, then leaped away. The sun-dappled clearing stood empty. The buck that Cole had watched and waited for all summer was gone, likely spooked for good.
“You let him go?” Danny asked.
“I reckon we’ll let him live another season and get even fatter,” Cole said.
“I’m sorry, Pa Cole,” Danny said, looking as if he might cry. “I know I let you down.”
Cole worked through several emotions in the space of a few seconds, from anger to disappointment, then resignation. For better or for worse, Danny was never going to be like him. He reached down and squeezed the boy’s shoulder, then managed to force a smile for the boy’s sake.
“Ain’t nothin’ to be sorry about,” Cole said. “Let me tell you, there are a lot of ways to disappoint someone, and letting that buck go ain’t on my list. Besides, that buck ain’t none too sorry!”
“But we came all the way out here this morning and we’re going back empty-handed.”
“There’s no such thing as a bad morning in the woods,” Cole said, taking a deep breath of the fall air that smelled of fallen leaves and frost. On mornings like this, when it felt so good just to be alive, he often thought of the dead who weren’t there to enjoy it. He hoped that heaven was like the mountains on a fall morning. “Coming out here with you this morning is enough for me.”
“What will Gran say?”
“What, about not shooting a deer?” Cole snorted. “She don’t care about that. What Gran is goin’ to say is, do we want buckwheat pancakes and bacon for breakfast, that’s what. Now, let’s head on back.”