Three Veterans on Grandpa’s Eighty

“I didn’t,” I said. “And they weren’t.”

Kurt looked past me, up toward Tim’s stand, where a blaze-orange hat showed against the dark oaks.

Then up the ridge, where Wes’s showed too. Then back at Dale, standing there with his gray beard and his hands loose at his sides.

“Who are these guys?” Mike asked.

“They’re from my church,” I said. “Dale Moody, Tim Seger, Wes Hanna. All three of them are Army. Dale was in the Gulf. Wes did two tours in Iraq. Tim came home from Afghanistan. None of them ever had a place to hunt. They hunt here now.”

Nobody said anything for a long time. Somewhere off to the east, maybe a mile away, the first shot of the season cracked across the hills, and then another.

Kurt looked at the ground. He looked at the frost on the cornstalks. Then he pulled off his right glove, stepped forward past me, and held out his hand to Dale.

Dale took it. They shook once, two big men in the gray light, and neither one of them said a word.

Then Kurt put his glove back on, turned around, and walked back down the field edge toward the gate. Mike and Russ stood there one second longer, and then they followed him.

I heard the truck doors shut and the engine turn over and the sound of it going away down County H.

I let out a breath I didn’t know I had been holding.

“Well,” Dale said. He handed me the empty thermos cap. “I guess I’ll go sit in my chair.”

I went back to the house and made bacon and eggs I couldn’t eat.

I stood at Grandpa’s kitchen window with my coffee and watched the sun come up over the ridge and listened to the shooting all over the township.

At ten after nine, a single shot came off the creek bottom. Just one. I knew from the direction it was Tim.

I waited. I made myself wait, because Grandpa always said you give a man time to find his deer and do it right.

At about ten o’clock, I saw orange moving at the edge of the oaks.

It was Tim and Wes. They had dragged a deer out of the creek bottom together, a big doe, and when they got to the edge of the yard Wes let go of the rope and stepped back.

Tim bent down, got the doe up across his shoulders, and carried her the last fifty yards himself.

He laid her down in the frosty grass at the foot of my porch steps. Then he just stood there.

His hat was pushed back. His face was red from the cold and the work, and his eyes were wet.

He didn’t say anything. I came out the screen door in my socks and stood on the top step, and the two of us just looked at that doe for a long minute, and nobody needed to say a thing.

“My first one,” Tim finally said. “My uncle always said I’d get one someday.”

“He was right,” I said.

Wes came up and clapped him on the back so hard he staggered.

Tim pulled out his phone and registered the deer right there on the porch steps, the way you do now, with his harvest authorization number. Then I made all three of them come in for bacon.