The Gobbler My Boy Called In Himself

My father would not let anyone carry the bird but Colby.

Colby carried it by the legs over his shoulder all the way back to the gate, and he had to stop twice and switch shoulders, and he did not complain once.

We drove straight to the feed store.

It opens at seven on Saturdays, and by seven thirty there are always five or six men standing around the coffee pot by the scale, talking about rain and calves and the price of fertilizer.

They stopped talking when Colby walked in with that bird.

Vesta came around the counter. She is close to my father’s age and has worked that register for thirty-some years, and I have never once seen her come around that counter for anything.

“Well, look at you,” she said. “Put him up there.”

The scale at the feed store is a big old platform scale they weigh seed sacks on.

Colby laid the gobbler on it, and the men moved in around, and one of them slid the weight along the beam until it balanced.

“Twenty-two pounds,” he said. “Even. That’s a good bird, son.”

Another man took out a tape measure from his pocket and measured the beard. Ten and a quarter inches. Then he felt the spurs with his thumb and said they were an inch and an eighth, and whistled.

“Three-year-old bird,” he said. “Maybe four. You call him?”

“Yes sir,” Colby said. “With my grandpa’s box call. And Jory’s decoy.”

“Jory’s decoy.” The man laughed. “That old hen’s been bringing birds in since Jory had hair.”

They all shook Colby’s hand. Every one of them.

These are men who have worked cattle and run combines for forty years and have hands like saddle leather, and they shook my boy’s hand like he was one of them.

None of them said a word about the cattleman’s farm or about Trent. Not one. They did not have to.

It was in the way they looked at my father, and the way they each touched his shoulder on the way back to the coffee pot.

Vesta took my phone and printed the picture on the machine in the back office, the one she uses for receipts and flyers. Then she walked over to the board by the door with a thumbtack.

There was a spot right at eye level, right in the middle.

She moved two old pictures from last fall to make room, and she pinned Colby’s picture up there, and she wrote under it on an index card in her careful cursive: Colby Pettibone, age 12. 22 lbs, 10 1/4 in. beard. Called in himself.

She pinned the card under the picture. Then she stood back and looked at it the way my father had looked at the empty board two weeks before.

“There,” she said. “That’s where that goes.”

We cleaned the bird that afternoon at my father’s place, in the shade of the machine shed. My father showed Colby how to breast it out and how to take the legs.

Then he showed him how to cut the beard off close to the skin and how to cut the tail fan and pin it to a board with salt to dry.