The Gobbler My Boy Called In Himself

Colby had been practicing on a box call since Christmas. My father gave it to him, an old cedar call with a paddle worn smooth from forty springs of use, and showed him how to chalk it.

Every night after supper Colby sat on the back steps and worked that call. Yelps. Clucks. Purrs. Cutts. The neighbor’s dog learned to howl back at him, and the neighbor told me she did not mind one bit.

So that is what Trent handed across. Not a piece of paper. Three months of a boy sitting on cold back steps, scratching a paddle across cedar, believing.

I could have fought it. I thought about it for most of that Saturday, standing at the sink, staring out at the clothesline.

But the slip had Trent’s number on it. The cattleman had taken the call from the parent who entered the boy, and he had said yes to the change because to him it was one family’s business. It was.

And I knew what a fight looked like.

It looked like phone calls and lawyers and a custody order pulled out of a drawer, and it looked like the youth weekend going right by while the grown people shouted. Colby would lose either way.

So I did the one thing I have always done when the ground tips. I called my father.

Harlan Moss is seventy-four. He farmed row crops and ran cattle on the home place outside Linn for fifty years before his knees told him to quit.

He kept eighty acres of oak and hickory timber when he sold the rest.

He answered on the second ring, the way he always does, like the phone might get away from him.

“Daddy,” I said, and then I could not get the rest out for a minute.

He waited. My father is a man who knows how to wait. I told him the whole thing standing in the kitchen, and he did not say one word until I was done.

“Well,” he said. “That’s a poor thing.”

“It is.”

“Youth weekend’s this one coming,” he said. “Regular season opens the Monday after next. Runs three weeks. Boy can hunt any morning of it with a regular youth permit, and the birds don’t care whose ground it is.”

“Daddy, you can’t walk those ridges anymore.”

“I can walk them slow,” he said. “Turkey hunting is mostly sitting. I’m real good at sitting. Put him on the phone.”

I went and knocked on Colby’s door. He opened it, and his eyes were red, and he was holding that box call like a thing he had found dead in the road.

“Grandpa wants you,” I said.

I do not know everything my father said to him. I heard Colby say “yes sir” four or five times, and then he said “really?” and then he said “can we go look this afternoon?”

That afternoon my father drove over in his old farm truck and picked Colby up.

They went to the feed store first, and Vesta sold Colby a youth spring turkey permit across the same counter where his name had come out of the coffee can.