The Wives Blind in the Flooded Timber

The Call

Ava was already in the blind. She had come out with Kurt before daylight to put the decoys in. When she saw Glenn Raney come down the boardwalk on a cane, she got up without a word and moved to the far end of the bench so he could have the end with the rail to hold.

He sat down heavily and let out a long breath. Nobody said anything for a while. The mist was coming off the water. Then he looked over at me and his eyes fell on the call around my neck.

He went very still.

“That’s Elmer’s,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Black walnut. He turned it in his shop behind the house.” His voice had gone strange. “Let me see it.”

I took the lanyard off over my head and put it in his hand. He held it up close to his face in the gray light. He turned it over until he found the initials. E.T. He ran his thumb across them, over and over, the way you’d touch a photograph.

“I was twelve,” he said. “Your granddad caught me behind the feed store in Humphrey, blowing on a dime-store call that sounded like a goose with a cold. I thought he was going to run me off. Instead he sat down on an overturned bucket and took this out of his pocket.”

He stopped. He swallowed. “He taught me on this call,” he said. “Every Saturday that whole winter. Behind the feed store. One note at a time.”

Nobody in the blind said a word.

“When I was twenty-four, he sponsored me into the club,” Glenn said. “I was the youngest member it ever had. My daddy never hunted. I didn’t have anybody else. That club was mine. It was the one place in my whole life where I was still that boy behind the feed store.”

His hand closed around the call. “I’m sixty-four years old,” he said. “My knees are gone. My hands shake in the morning. Every year one more of the old ones dies or moves to Little Rock.”

“And when you put in for Harold’s seat, I sat in my chair at home and thought, if one thing changes, then everything changes. And then it won’t be mine anymore. It’ll be something else, and I’ll be the old man nobody remembers who taught him.”

He looked at me then. “That isn’t a reason,” he said. “I know it isn’t. But that was it. I was scared.”

I did not say anything right away. I thought about Grandpa sitting on an upturned bucket behind a feed store with a twelve-year-old boy who had nobody.

“He’d have hated that vote,” I said. “But he’d have understood why you did it.”

Glenn’s eyes filled up. He looked out at the water.