The Gobbler My Boy Called In Himself

He held it out the window. He chalked the lid with the little stub of chalk he kept in his pocket. And he drew the paddle across the cedar, soft, three times.

A yelp. Right there in the feed store parking lot at ten in the morning, with half the town watching through the glass.

Trent laughed. It was the first time I had heard him laugh in two years. He put his hand over his face and laughed and shook his head.

Then Colby said something else, and Trent stopped laughing and just looked at him.

I found out later what it was. I asked Colby that night at supper, and he told me, chewing on a biscuit, like it was nothing.

“I told him the other boy can come too if he wants,” Colby said. “I can show him the box call. He just got scared of the gobbling, that’s all. Everybody’s scared of it the first time. I was.”

I put my fork down.

“And I told Dad he should come with me and Grandpa next spring,” Colby said. “To Grandpa’s timber. All three of us. I can call one in for him.”

He went back to his biscuit.

I sat there and looked at my son, twelve years old, with leaf bits still stuck in the treads of his boots by the back door, and I could not think of one thing I had ever done that earned him.

Trent called me that week. He did not make a speech.

He said he was sorry, and he said he had told his wife what he had done, and she had told him he ought to have been ashamed, and he said he was.

He asked if Colby could come out to his place some Saturday and show the other boy how to work a box call. I said yes. I said it fast, before I could think of a reason not to.

Colby went the next Saturday.

He took the old cedar call and his little stub of chalk, and he sat with that ten-year-old boy on Trent’s back steps for two hours, and when I came to pick him up, both boys were yelping and Trent’s dog was howling back at them.

My father still wears the beard on his seed cap. The fishing line has held.

It has been through rain and church and a broken stock tank and a funeral, and every time somebody asks him about it, he tells it from the beginning.

The picture is still on the board at the feed store, right in the middle at eye level. Vesta says it stays there until there is a better one, and she says she does not expect one soon.

Next April, if the Lord lets my father’s knees hold out one more spring, the three of them are going into his timber before daylight. Colby has already told me I am making the fried egg sandwiches.

I will make four. That little boy of Trent’s has nobody to make him one either, and I figure that is how it starts.