The Granddaughter Who Fed the Card Club

What He Took

I want to tell you what that doe meant, so you understand why I stood in that yard with my hands shaking.

Paisley passed her hunter safety course in the spring at the conservation club, the youngest girl in the room. She practiced with a twenty-gauge slug gun all summer on paper plates nailed to a hay bale behind our house. She got her youth license with her own money from babysitting.

Youth season in Iowa runs in September, before the regular seasons open. A youth hunter has to have a licensed adult along. I was on storm duty that week, working a line outage up toward Cresco after a wind came through, so Orrin took her. I was grateful. I said so.

She sat with him in a ground blind at the edge of his timber on a cool, clear Saturday morning. At a quarter to eight a doe came out of the draw and stopped broadside at forty yards. Paisley shot her clean. The deer went twenty yards and lay down in the grass along the edge of the beans.

She called me from Orrin’s phone, crying and laughing at the same time. I was forty feet up a pole and I could hear her over the wind.

“Dad, I got her. Dad, I did it right. Grandpa says I did it right.”

She tagged it herself. She reported the harvest that same morning. Orrin helped her field dress it and they hauled it to the locker plant in his pickup. She told me later she held the tag in her lap the whole ride like it was a ribbon from the county fair.

And then her grandpa gave every pound of it away and did not tell a single man whose deer it was.

Why I Didn’t Fight Him

My wife cried that night at the kitchen table. Not loud. She just put her face in her hands.

“He’s my dad,” she said. “He’s all I’ve got left of that house.”

“I know it.”

“What do we do? Call him and yell? Make him buy her a side of beef?”

I thought about it a long time. I thought about driving back out there and saying what I wanted to say. I thought about Thanksgiving, which was always at Orrin’s, because my mother-in-law always had it there and nobody had the heart to move it after she passed.

Here is the plain truth. The meat was done and eaten. It was in nine freezers and nine bellies across Bremer County. A fight at Thanksgiving was not going to put one pound back in my daughter’s freezer. It would only put a crack in the family that would never come out.

So I didn’t yell. But I didn’t let it go, either. There is a difference, and it took my daughter to show me where it was.