It wasn’t long after my mother died. Froehmer and some of the others were doing what they could to keep my father occupied, a parade of men coming by, always trying to get us out of the house, away from the reminders for a while, I guess. Froehmer arrived one Saturday morning when it was still pitch-black out and we loaded in his car and drove out to the woods somewhere. It was far. I fell asleep on the way. I was eight, and probably shouldn’t have even been on the trip. They didn’t give me a gun. The three of us sat in a deer stand in the trees for hours. The air was crisp and seemed to get colder the longer we stayed out in it. The wooden platform was damp and I didn’t want to sit on it, so I tried squatting like an Indian or savage or someone I’d seen on TV, but I couldn’t do that for too long with my legs aching. My father kept whispering at me to be quiet. They sat in chairs and looked intently over a field. I didn’t know what to do, and whatever it was that I was doing was wrong. My father would wave his hand at me to knock it off and I’d have to find something else to occupy my mind with for a few minutes.

The only time I was interested in anything was right before the sun came up, when the sky started to get light but you couldn’t see the sun. I thought it was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen. I still do. Light with no visible source of light. I know it’s a simple thing, but there’s something almost magical about it; it almost gives you hope. So I watched the sky go from black to gray to blue to orange to blue again, and Froehmer and my father saw nothing, at least nothing they were looking for. We sat there for another hundred hours or more and then Froehmer started packing away his guns and we left.

“I was hoping to shoot something,” my father said.

“Sometimes it’s like that,” Froehmer said. “Most times. I like being out in the quiet. I don’t need to take a shot.” He immediately regretted saying that. “I would have liked you to get one though. We’ll go out again. You’ll get one.” We never went back out.