The Granddaughter Who Fed the Card Club

The Old Men Talk

The thing I did not expect was the stories. A retired dairy farmer with hands like baseball mitts, stood by the tailgate eating his burger and said, “I shot my first deer in 1958. Twelve gauge with a rifled slug, on my uncle’s farm by Tripoli. Missed two before I hit one.”

Then the man next to him said his first deer was in ’64, and he’d been so excited he dropped his gun in the creek.

Then another one said his dad wouldn’t let him keep his first buck’s rack because it was too small, and he still regretted not saving it.

Paisley stood at the tailgate flipping burgers and listening to every word with her whole face. She asked them questions. What gun. What farm. Who was with you. Did you eat it.

They told her. All of them. Old men who probably had not told those stories in forty years, standing in the November sun telling them to a thirteen-year-old girl in a blaze orange stocking cap.

One of them laughed so hard he had to sit down on the tailgate.

Lavern

Lavern came last. He is eighty-six, the oldest man at the table, and he moves slow but he moves straight. He served in the Army in Germany and farmed southwest of Waverly for sixty years. He was the one who drove Orrin to the hospital in Waterloo the winter my mother-in-law was dying.

He took his plate. He listened to Paisley say her words. Then he set the plate down on the tailgate, untouched.

“Young lady,” he said. “Come here a minute.” Paisley turned the grill down and stepped away from the tailgate. She stood in front of him on the gravel.

Lavern reached into his barn coat and took out a sheath knife in a worn leather case. He held it out to her across both palms.

“I bought this in 1961, the fall I came home,” he said. “I’ve dressed every deer I shot since with it. My hands won’t hold it right anymore. I’ve been waiting to give it to the right person.”

Paisley looked at the knife. Then at me. I nodded.

“I can’t,” she said. “That’s yours.”

“It was mine,” Lavern said. “Now it’s yours. I ate your deer without knowing it was yours, and that’s on me as much as anybody. This is how I say thank you.”

She took it in both hands. She slid it halfway out of the sheath. The blade was dark and thin from sixty years of sharpening, and the handle was stacked leather worn smooth as glass.

“Thank you, Lavern,” she whispered. He patted her cheek. Then he picked up his burger and ate it in four bites. I had to turn around and look at the barn for a minute.