The Deer Lease My Cousin Signed Over

The pot

The Friday before opening day, for thirty years, I fed that club.

It started in the fall of 1996. Walt came in from the camp and said the men were cooking hot dogs over a fire barrel and he was ashamed to see it on his own ground. So I made a pot of venison chili, and a skillet of cornbread, and drove it out in the truck the night before the season opened.

I did it every year after that. The last one I did with Walt riding beside me.

Nobody called to ask this year. Nobody said, are you coming, Delia, or, we understand if you can’t.

I made it anyway.

I browned eleven pounds of venison in my mother’s big black pot. I made two skillets of cornbread and four pecan pies and a five-gallon jug of sweet tea with enough sugar to hold a spoon upright. At two o’clock I loaded it in the bed of Walt’s truck and wedged it with feed sacks.

I put the red Folgers can on the seat beside me, rubber band and all. I think I knew what I wanted them to see.

I drove out the back track at four, through my own pines, the red road Walt graded every September. It was cold and clear, and the sweetgums along Buffalo Creek were the color of a stop sign.

The camp

The camp sits at the back of my timber where the creek bends. It is nothing much: a tin-roofed pavilion with a plank table that seats twenty-two, a barrel stove, a cabin with eight bunks, and a row of nails on the post where every member hangs his orange vest.

Over the table is a sign Walt painted, Buffalo Creek Club, Est. 1995. The B is crooked.

Eighteen men were standing around the fire barrel when I came up the track. They stopped talking. I will remember that the rest of my life, how all those voices went out at once, like somebody had pulled a plug.

Curtis Pruitt walked out to the truck. He is fifty-four, a big man with welder’s burns up both forearms, and he could not look at me.

He lifted the pot out of the bed by himself, though it takes two, and stood there with it against his chest.

“Delia. We didn’t think… Rick said you couldn’t stand the trucks. He said you wanted to be left alone this season.”

“I stood those trucks thirty years, Curtis,” I said.

He opened his mouth and closed it again. He carried the pot to the table.

I set the pies at the foot, where I have always sat. Then I went to the head of the table, where Walt’s folding chair still stood, the green canvas one with a burn in the seat from a welding spark in 1999.

His blaze-orange cap was sitting on it. Nobody had moved it since February. I do not know who put it there. I think the club did it together and never spoke of it.

I held the cap a moment and set it back.

I put the red can down beside it. I did not say a word about the can. I took the ladle and started filling bowls, and the men came through the line one at a time with their heads down, and each one said, “Thank you, Delia,” quietly, the way you say it at a graveside.

A boy of twelve took his bowl and did not move on. Eli is Curtis’s youngest. Walt had been teaching him to shoot for two years, and every Saturday that child sat on Walt’s tailgate eating a baloney sandwich and asking about wind.

“Mrs. Delia,” he said, “Dad said you were moving away.”

“No, honey.”

“Good. Because Mr. Walt told me I could have the Oak when I turned thirteen, and I was going to ask you if it still counted.”

I put a slice of pecan pie on top of his chili, which is no way to build a plate. “It still counts,” I said.