The Granddaughter Who Fed the Card Club

Orrin’s Reason

My wife told me the part I had half forgotten. Six years ago her mother got sick in the fall. It was the kind of sick where everybody knew by Christmas. Orrin quit going anywhere but the hospital in Waterloo and back.

His card club, nine old farmers who had played pinochle every Saturday since the Carter years, did not let him starve. They brought casseroles all winter. They plowed his lane. Royal fed his cattle for three weeks in January when Orrin could not leave her bedside. Lavern drove him to Waterloo twice when the roads were bad and Orrin’s hands shook too much to drive.

After the funeral, the club moved its game to Orrin’s machine shed, because he would not leave the farm and they would not let him sit alone. They put a woodstove in there. They have played every Saturday since.

“He’s been paying them back for six years,” my wife said. “Sweet corn. Firewood. Half a hog every fall. He thinks he still owes them.”

“He does owe them,” I said. “Paisley doesn’t.” She looked at me and nodded. “I know. I know he was wrong. I just don’t know what to do with it.”

The Second Tag

Paisley did not cry about it. That was what scared me. She went quiet for about a week. She did her homework. She fed the barn cats. She did not mention her grandpa, and she did not mention the deer.

Then one evening in late October she came into the kitchen while I was washing up and set a slip of paper on the counter. It was an antlerless tag for Bremer County, bought online with her own babysitting money.

“Archery’s open,” she said. “Can I hunt our place?” We have sixty acres east of town. Most of it is rented out for corn. The rest is a creek bottom with oak and walnut and a little brush where the deer come through on their way to the picked fields.

“With a bow?” I asked.

“You taught me to shoot it in fifth grade.” She was right. She had a compound bow I’d bought used at a sporting goods swap in Cedar Falls, set light for her. She had shot it plenty, but never at anything with a heartbeat.

“You know a bow’s harder,” I said. “You have to let them get close. You might sit a dozen mornings and never get a shot.”

“Then I’ll sit a dozen mornings,” she said.