The Gobbler My Boy Called In Himself

Colby had passed hunter education the fall before, at the community building with the conservation agent, so he had his card. My father checked it anyway, holding it out at arm’s length with his glasses on his forehead.

Vesta told me later that my father stood at the counter a long minute after the permit printed and looked at the board by the door.

The board is a big corkboard that has hung by the feed store door longer than I have been alive.

Every spring it fills with pictures of kids and their first turkeys, and every fall with kids and their first deer.

“He just looked at it,” Vesta said. “Like he was measuring a wall for a picture.”

They spent that afternoon in my father’s timber.

I drove out around four with a pan of cornbread and found them sitting on an old log at the top of the ridge, not talking, both of them looking down into the hollow.

“Scratching,” my father said, and pointed with his chin at a patch of turned-over leaves. “And there. See the droppings, the long one curled like a J? That’s a gobbler. Hens leave a round pile.”

Colby leaned over the leaves like he was reading a newspaper. “How old?”

“Day or two. They’re working this ridge in the afternoon. They’ll roost down in those big white oaks along the creek.”

I sat down on the log next to them. It was the first time all day I had not felt sick.

That week went by slow. Colby went to school and came home and did his chores without being told.

Every afternoon at four my father’s truck pulled into the drive, and every afternoon they went out to the timber and sat.

They were not hunting. You cannot hunt before the season opens. They were watching and listening and learning where the birds went, the way my father learned it from his father in the same timber seventy years ago.

On the youth Saturday, the one that should have been Colby’s, I took him to the creek fishing so he would not have to sit around the house.

We caught four bluegill and one little bass that he let go.

He did not mention the cattleman’s farm once. Around ten he looked at his watch and then looked at the creek, and I knew what he was thinking about, and I let him think it.

Sunday afternoon I drove past the feed store. I did not mean to look at the board. I looked anyway.

There was no new picture of Trent’s stepson on it.

I found out later the boy had sat in the blind two mornings and gotten cold and scared of the gobbling and asked to go home. Nobody got a bird off that farm that year.

I am not proud that the first thing I felt was a little flicker of something mean.

I said a prayer about it in church that morning, sitting next to my father, and I meant it. That boy was ten and had nobody. It was not his doing.

Regular season opened on a Monday. Shooting hours in Missouri in the spring run from a half hour before sunrise until one in the afternoon.