The Gobbler My Boy Called In Himself

Colby held the beard up in the sun. It was black and coarse and shiny, and it swung a little in the wind.

“Grandpa,” he said. “Can you put this on your hat?”

My father stopped what he was doing.

“Some of the old men wear them on their hat band,” Colby said. “Mr. Jory has one on his. I saw it. I want you to have it. It’s for your seed cap.”

My father put down the knife. He wiped his hands on a rag for a long time, longer than he needed to. Then he took the beard from Colby and turned it over in his fingers.

“I’ve killed I don’t know how many turkeys,” he said. “Sixty, seventy. I never once put a beard on my hat.”

“You could put this one,” Colby said.

My father nodded. He did not trust his voice.

He went in the house and came out a while later, and he had tied that beard onto the band of his seed cap with a piece of fishing line, and it hung down past his ear.

He has worn it every day since. He wore it to church.

The pastor looked at it and smiled and did not say a thing about it, and after the service three different old men came up and asked him about it, and he told each one the whole story from the beginning.

I did not call Trent. I want to be honest about that. I did not text him the picture. I did not post it anywhere. I did not tell Colby to call him either.

I thought about it. I thought about it a lot.

But I knew if I sent it, it would come out of my hand looking like a rock thrown through a window, no matter what I wrote under it. That was not what that morning was.

So I left it on the board at the feed store. Everybody in Osage County goes into that feed store sooner or later. Trent buys his mineral and his fencing there. I figured the board could do the talking.

It took nine days.

It was a Monday in early May, about ten in the morning, bright and warm. I was at the feed store buying a sack of layer pellets for my hens and a bag of sunflower seed.

My father was there on the bench by the door with his coffee, the way he is most weekday mornings, his seed cap on his knee.

Trent came in for fence staples. I saw him at the counter. He saw me and nodded, short. We have gotten to where we can do that at least.

He paid. He picked up his staples. He turned around to go out the door.

And he stopped in front of the board.

I watched it happen. I could not have looked away if the building was on fire.

He stood there with the box of staples in one hand, and he looked at that picture in the middle of the board for a long time.

He read the index card. I watched his lips move. Called in himself.