The Granddaughter Who Fed the Card Club

The Buns

Buns turned out to be the easy part.

Our neighbor down the road, a widow named Ilse, had been baking bread for the church bake sale since before I was born. When my wife called her and told her what Paisley was planning, Ilse said she would have four dozen hamburger buns ready by eleven Saturday morning.

“I will not take a dime,” she told Paisley on the phone. “I knew your grandma forty years. She’d want her granddaughter’s buns homemade.”

Friday night Paisley thawed the ground venison in the refrigerator. Saturday morning at eight she was at the kitchen counter with a big steel bowl, mixing in a little pork fat from the locker, salt, pepper, a little onion. She patted out forty burgers one at a time and laid them on wax paper in two coolers.

She counted them twice. Forty.

I loaded the little propane grill we use for camping into the bed of the truck, along with a spatula, a box of paper plates, a jar of pickles, and two bottles of ketchup. Paisley put on her tan Carhartt coat and her blaze orange stocking cap. She let her long blond hair hang loose under the cap.

“Why the orange?” I asked.

“So they know I’m a hunter,” she said. We stopped at Ilse’s at eleven. She came out to the truck with two big paper sacks of buns, still warm, and kissed Paisley on the top of her stocking cap.

“Go get ’em, sweetheart,” she said.

The Yard

It was one of those November days northeast Iowa gives you once or twice a year as a gift. Bright sun, no wind, warm enough to unzip your coat. The trees were bare and the fields were all picked and black.

We pulled into Orrin’s farmyard at a quarter to twelve. I could see six or seven pickups already parked by the machine shed. The big sliding door was rolled open to let in the sun, and inside I could see the card tables, the woodstove, the coffee pot, and the backs of old men in seed caps and barn coats.

I backed the truck up to about thirty feet from the shed door and dropped the tailgate. Paisley set the grill on the tailgate and lit it, standing on the gravel beside the truck. I put on my green co-op jacket against the shade, red beard and all, and set the sacks of buns beside me.

Nobody came out right away. But I saw heads turn. The first burgers hit the grill and the smell went straight into that shed like it had been invited.

Royal

The first one out was Royal. He’s seventy-eight, walks with a cane on account of his knees, and farmed the place across the road from Orrin for fifty years.

He came across the gravel slow, leaning on that cane, squinting in the sun.

“Well, now,” he said. “What’s all this?” Paisley flipped a burger and looked right at him. “Lunch, Royal. Venison burgers. You want one?”

“I would never say no to that,” he said. She put a burger on one of Ilse’s buns and set it on a paper plate. Then she handed it to him with both hands.

“This is my deer,” she said. “I shot it on our place last Saturday with my bow. The one Grandpa gave you in October was my deer too. I shot it on youth weekend. I just wanted you to know.”

Royal held that plate and looked at her for a long time.

“That was yours?” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Orrin never said.” He looked over toward the shed. Then he looked back at her. “I ate those steaks thinking your grandpa shot that deer. I told my daughter he still had it in him.”

“It’s okay,” Paisley said. “I just wanted you to know whose it was.” Royal set his cane against the truck, held the plate in one hand, and put his other hand on her shoulder.

“Thank you, Paisley,” he said. “That was the best venison I’ve had in ten years. I mean that.”