The Deer Lease My Cousin Signed Over

Curtis was last. He stood a long time with his hands at his sides, looking at Rick. Then he took the club ledger out of the tool box under the bench and set it in front of Otis.

“I’ll cut her a check Monday morning,” Curtis said, to the whole table. “Eighty-four hundred, out of our own treasury. The club paid it once to the wrong hands, and the club will pay it again to the right ones.

And the club can take the rest up with Mr. Tuttle.”

“That isn’t necessary,” I said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Curtis said. “It is.”

Otis took down the guest sheet that hangs on a nail by the vests. Every man who has hunted that timber without paying dues has his name on it, and there are eleven. Rick’s has been on it since 1998, in Walt’s printing.

Otis took the pencil on its string and drew one long line through the name, slowly, the way you cross out a name in a family Bible.

“There’s a place at this table for any man who asks,” he said. “And none for one who doesn’t.” He did not raise his voice.

He did not need to. “Walt’s Oak goes to Eli Pruitt this season. That was Walt’s word, and now it’s the club’s.”

The boy beside me, with a slice of pie on his chili, looked up with his eyes enormous and whispered, loud enough for the next county to hear, “Is it really mine?”

“It really is,” I said.

I sat at the end of that table with sixteen men’s elbows against me and felt sick and tender and tired all at once. When I looked up the empty bench, my cousin was still standing in the pavilion with the melting ice, looking at the sign Walt had painted with the crooked B.

I did something then that I have gone over a hundred times since. I ladled a bowl of chili and set a square of cornbread on it and carried it the length of the table to Rick.

“There’s plenty,” I said. “You drove all the way out.”

He looked at that bowl. I think if I had slapped him he would have been less ruined. His chin shook. The bag of ice slid out of his arms and burst on the clay, and he said, “Dee, I can’t.”

“I know,” I said. “Take it anyway.”

He did not. He turned and walked out to the Tahoe, and I stood there holding the bowl until the taillights went through the pines and were gone. I did not eat that night.

The morning after

Opening morning I sat on the porch at five-thirty with a blanket on my knees and a cup of coffee, in the dark, and listened to the trucks.

They stopped. Every one of them, eighteen trucks in the gray before daylight, each pausing at my gate with its engine running. Nobody got out. Nobody said a word.

Each driver lifted a hand off the wheel and pulled on toward the back track, and I sat there and cried as quietly as I could.

By sunup there was a sack of ice on the step, and Otis’s thermos, and a ring of venison sausage in white freezer paper, and a pie tin of mine the club had carried home in 2017 and never returned, washed and shining.

A note was taped to the tin in a child’s looping pencil. It said: Thank you for the pie. Eli.

That afternoon Eli shot a doe from Walt’s Oak at ten past four, a clean shot at a hundred and twenty yards, and Gerald walked him back through the pines to show me before they dressed it.

He asked if Mr. Walt could see it.

“I expect he had the best seat in the house,” I said.