The Gobbler My Boy Called In Himself

The men at the coffee pot got quiet. Not all at once. One at a time, the way a field goes quiet when a hawk comes over.

Nobody said anything. They just watched him, and they did not look away, and he knew they were watching.

That was the whole consequence, if you want to know. Nobody said one hard word to him.

He just had to stand in front of that board in front of every man he buys feed with, and look at his own son’s best morning, and know he was not there for it.

He turned around. His face had gone a color I had not seen on him since the day his own father was buried.

He looked at my father on the bench. He looked at the beard hanging off the seed cap on my father’s knee. Then he walked over.

My father did not stand up. He did not need to. He just looked up at Trent the way he looks at weather coming.

“Harlan,” Trent said.

“Trent.”

“You took him.”

“I did.”

Trent looked at the floor a minute. “Twenty-two pounds.”

“Ten and a quarter beard,” my father said. “Inch and an eighth spurs. He called that bird himself, start to finish. I didn’t touch the box call once. I just sat there.”

Trent nodded. He kept nodding, like he could not stop.

“I thought I was doing a good thing,” he said. “For the other boy. His daddy never once showed up for him. I wanted to be somebody who showed up.”

“I know it,” my father said.

“I didn’t think it through.”

“No,” my father said. “You didn’t.”

That was all. He did not raise his voice. He did not need to. Then he did something I did not expect. He moved over on the bench and made room.

Trent sat down next to him. Two men on a feed store bench, one seventy-four and one thirty-nine, looking at a corkboard. I stood by the layer pellets and held my breath.

“The boy wants to know,” my father said after a while, “if you’d go with him next spring.”

Trent turned his head. “He said that?”

“Ask him yourself. He’s out in my truck. I told him to stay put in case you came in.”

That was a lie. Colby was out in my father’s truck because he had a dentist appointment at eleven and I had pulled him out of school, and he was reading a comic book.

But my father has never been above a small lie in a good cause, and I have never been above letting him tell one.

Trent got up. He walked out the feed store door into the sunshine. I went to the window, and so did half the men at the coffee pot, and nobody pretended otherwise.

He walked up to the truck. Colby rolled down the window. I could not hear them. I could only see.

I saw Trent say something. I saw Colby put down his comic book.

I saw Colby reach down to the floorboard and come up with the old cedar box call, which he kept in that truck now like a good luck piece.