The Deer Lease My Cousin Signed Over

What Otis read

Nobody moved. Otis laid that stub on the plank table and took the next one.

“1998. Thirty-one hundred. Taxes. Verna’s hospital bill. Dee says don’t tell Rick.” He glanced up at my cousin and went on. “2003. Thirty-six hundred.

Taxes and the well. 2009. Five thousand. New tires, Dee made me. 2011. Fifty-two hundred. Surgery. Dee slept in that chair nine days.”

“Otis,” Rick said.

“2022. Eighty-four hundred. Taxes, and the pacemaker copay. Dee’s idea to keep the trees.” His thumbs were shaking. “There’s one more.”

He held it a while before he read it.

“October of last year. Eighty-four hundred. Taxes. The rest to Dee, for a new stove. She has cooked on that one for the boys thirty years.”

I had read every stub on that bedroom floor in March but that one. I had put it back face down. I could not.

A man down the table made a sound in his throat. Wade Tackett, I believe. Otis took off his glasses and folded them and set them on the plank, and for a moment nobody under that tin roof was eighty-four or fifty-four or twelve.

“Curtis,” he said. “Who did the club pay this year?”

Curtis looked at his boots. “Rick, Otis. He came to the shop on the twenty-second and said Delia had set it up that way. Said the estate was in trust. He had a letter.”

“Did anybody call Delia?”

The quiet went so long I could hear the creek.

“He said she’d broke down at the co-op,” Wade Tackett said finally. “Said she was going to her daughter’s, and don’t bother her, boys. We figured…” His voice cracked. “We figured it was the kind thing.”

“It was a lie, Wade,” Gerald Moss said, not unkindly. Gerald is a Marine from Vietnam who has never said a word more than the day required.

“And every one of us had a chance to ask her, and every one of us drove by.”

Rick

He had not put down the sack of ice. He was holding it against his chest, and water ran down the front of his good canvas jacket and dripped on the dirt, and he did not seem to know it.

“Otis, this is a family matter.”

“It’s a club matter,” Otis said. “Eighty-four hundred of the club’s money.”

“I was holding it for the estate. For Dee. She isn’t able to manage, you know that. Pam said…”

“Rick.” That was a voice from the shadows by the barrel, and everybody turned. Lavern Pickett sat on an overturned bucket with his cane across his knees. I had not seen him come.

I do not know to this day who told him the hour, or whether he simply knew, the way a man knows a county.

He pulled the old letter out of his shirt pocket and held it up. “This says ‘while I am recovering.’ I stamped the receipt myself when Walt was back on his tractor. A man doesn’t misread that, son. He just chooses not to.”

Rick turned his head toward Lavern. His mouth worked. I think he was looking for a sentence, and I watched him go through every one he owned.

“I was going to put it back,” he said finally.

It was the first true thing he had said in two months, and it was terrible to hear.

“Where is it?” Otis asked quietly.

“Some of it’s in the operating account.”

“How much?”

My cousin looked at the floor of that pavilion, where the red clay had worn smooth under thirty years of boots. “About half.”

What happened next took less time than it takes to tell. I had expected shouting, because that is what I had seen in my head for ten nights.

I thought Wade might hit him. I thought somebody would say a word you cannot say in front of a widow.

Nobody did.

Wade Tackett put down his bowl and walked the length of that plank table, six foot five and quiet as a church usher, and sat on the bench at my end beside the pies. Gerald Moss got up with his bowl and sat across from him.

Then the next man, and the next, until sixteen of them were crowded down my end with their elbows touching and their backs to the head of the table, and one long bench with nobody on it.