The Gobbler My Boy Called In Himself

Trent stood on my porch steps on a bright Saturday morning in early April, keys in his hand, and said it like he was telling me the weather.

“I’m taking him instead,” he said. “The farm hunt. I already called and had them put the name over. It’s done, Shay.”

Behind me, in the doorway, my son Colby was holding the box call he had practiced on every single night since Christmas. He was twelve. He did not say a word.

I want to tell this right, because I have told it wrong in my head a hundred times. In my head I yell.

In my head I throw the coffee. In real life I stood there with a dish towel over my shoulder and felt the floor tip.

“Instead of Colby,” I said.

“Instead of Colby this once.” Trent looked past me at our son and then looked away fast, the way a man does when he knows. “He’s got years. The other boy doesn’t have anybody.”

The other boy was his new wife’s son. He was ten. His own daddy had walked out on them two winters back and had not called once, not on a birthday, not at Christmas.

I knew all that. I knew it the way you know a fence line in the dark. It did not make one ounce of difference to the twelve-year-old standing behind me with a box call in his hand.

Trent walked back to his pickup. He had the other boy in the passenger seat already, a little thing in a camo shirt too big for him, and the boy waved at Colby through the windshield.

Colby lifted his hand and waved back. Then he went to his room and shut the door very quietly. That quiet door was worse than any slam I ever heard.

I should explain the hunt, because people who do not hunt turkeys will not understand why a twelve-year-old would care this much about one Saturday.

There is a cattleman east of Linn, down toward the Osage, who owns a long stretch of bottom ground and oak ridges.

Every spring he lets one youth hunter onto his place for the youth weekend, and he guides the child himself.

He does it by drawing. In February the feed store puts out a coffee can on the counter, and parents write the child’s name and their own phone number on a slip of paper and drop it in.

Trent had dropped Colby’s slip in. That was a good thing he did, and I want that said.

He was the one who thought of it and the one who filled it out, so it was his number on the paper.

When Vesta at the feed store drew Colby’s name in late February, she called Trent. Trent told Colby that Sunday at his house, and Colby came home lit up like a Christmas tree.

That cattleman’s ground holds birds every year. Everybody in Osage County knows it.

A boy who gets drawn for that farm comes home with a tom more often than not, and has his picture on the board at the feed store by noon.