The Cabin
A father’s gift commands obedience in the here and now, and thereafter
There’s a cougar under the deck
My father takes the form of a bear and wrecks my dubious inheritance
Before my father even built it, he told me the cabin would be mine someday. It was an old trick of his: serving himself in the present in such a way that his action could be construed as a future service to me, thereby obligating me to him. In this case, he would gain a second home, a wilderness cabin in Montana where he could retire from practicing patent law to hunt and fish and learn to paint and so on, and I would someday inherit whatever was left of it while being compelled in the meantime to visit him there a lot and eat the game birds and venison he killed and help with seasonal chores such as dragging lawn sprinklers onto the roof as a late-summer fire-prevention measure. I would have done these things anyway, probably, being a good son who lived nearby, but the prospect of his eventual generosity meant I would have to do them on his schedule, promptly, without adjustment or complaint. The cabin took him almost a year to build. From the outside, it had a British cottage theme …
