The Wives Blind in the Flooded Timber

The First Morning

Saturday, December twelfth. Twenty-eight degrees at five in the morning, by the thermometer on the dash. I pulled onto the levee road at ten after five and cut my lights.

Sherri’s truck was already there. So was Pam’s, and Donna’s behind hers, then Carla’s, then Jan’s. Five trucks sitting in the dark with their engines running and their parking lights off.

They got out together when they saw me. Not a word. They had their waders on already. They had their guns cased and their shell bags over their shoulders. Somebody had brought a thermos big enough to float a canoe.

“I said I’d make the coffee,” I said.

“You make the next pot,” Sherri said.

We walked the boardwalk in the dark with our flashlights pointed down. Dixie went ahead of us like she owned it. I heard Carla say, very quietly, “Lord, it’s a sidewalk,” and I heard Pam laugh.

North of us, across the fence line, we could hear the club coming in. Men wading. The slosh and suck of waders in mud. A flashlight beam swinging through the trees.

Then somebody said, loud enough to carry across the water, “Is that Sherri’s truck on Hubbards’ levee?” Nobody over there answered him.

We got settled in the first blind. Five women on a bench built for five, Dixie on her stand, me at the end with Grandpa’s call on the lanyard around my neck.

It is a black walnut call. He turned it on his own lathe in 1961 and burned his initials into the barrel with a soldering iron. E.T. He gave it to me the Christmas I was ten. I have never gone into the timber without it.

Shooting time on the Grand Prairie that morning was six thirty-four. The mist came up off the water and hung in the oaks like smoke. We sat still and listened to the wings go over in the dark, the whistle of them, the way you hear them before you see them.

At six-forty a dozen mallards came in from the east, high over the club’s hole. I watched the men’s calls go up, loud, a lot of calls all at once. The ducks swung wide. They slid right past the club’s hole and kept coming south.

They came over the fence line, low, looking. I put Grandpa’s call to my mouth and gave them a single soft chuckle. That’s all. Just enough to say there was company down here.

The ducks cupped their wings. Beside me, Sherri Raney slid off her safety. She did not take her eyes off the birds.

“Tell me when, Becca,” she whispered.

I let them come one more swing. I let them drop through the hole in the oaks with their orange feet down. “Take them,” I said.