The Gobbler My Boy Called In Himself

The gobbler walked behind a hickory. Colby lifted the gun, slow, the way he had practiced in the yard a hundred times with an empty gun and his grandpa counting.

The gobbler came out from behind the hickory and walked right to the decoy and turned in a circle around it, puffing and spitting, close enough I could see his spurs. Twenty-two steps, Colby said later. He paced it.

“When he sticks his neck up,” my father said, so soft I barely heard it. “Your bird, Colby. Your shot.”

The gobbler went out of strut and lifted his head to look around, and Colby shot.

I will not pretend to you that I remember the next part well.

I remember my father saying “good, good, good” and I remember Colby breaking the gun open, the empty shell flying, before he did anything else at all. He did it before he even stood up.

Then he set the gun against the oak, open and empty, and he ran.

He ran out into that sunny grass and dropped to his knees beside that bird, and he put his hand on its back, and he looked back at us with a face I will keep the rest of my life.

My father got up off the ground. It took him a while.

He put his hand on the oak and pushed and then got his stick under him, and then he walked out across the grass to his grandson, slow and steady, in his faded brown barn coat and his cap, with his white mustache wet.

He knelt down in the grass next to Colby. He put his hand on Colby’s shoulder. Neither one of them said anything at all.

I took the picture. That is the picture. A boy in a camo jacket and camo cap, grinning, kneeling at the edge of the oak timber in the early morning sun, with a big gobbler’s fan spread in front of him.

His grandpa kneeling beside him with a hand on his shoulder. The old cedar box call lying on the leaves where Colby had dropped it running.

Then I put the phone down and cried like a fool into my father’s jacket, and nobody cared.

We ate the fried egg sandwiches sitting right there in the grass. Colby ate his in four bites. My father ate half of his and gave the rest to Colby, and Colby ate that too.

“Your grandma used to make these,” my father said to him. “Every opening morning for thirty years.”

“Mom told me,” Colby said.

“Did she.” My father looked at me. “Well. It’s a good sandwich.”

My father bowed his head a minute before we got up, the way he does at supper. He did not say anything out loud.

Colby bowed his too, and I watched them both, the old man’s cap and the boy’s camo cap, and the sun on the back of their necks.

Colby called the bird in to Telecheck with my father’s phone before we left the timber, reading the numbers off his permit slow and careful, the way the conservation agent had shown his class.

Missouri wants every turkey checked by ten that night. Colby had it done by seven fifteen.