The Wives Blind in the Flooded Timber

The vote took four minutes. I timed it on the clock over the door, the same Falstaff beer clock that has hung in that clubhouse since before I was born, the one that runs six minutes fast.

It was the second Tuesday in August, and the window unit in the corner was losing its fight with the Arkansas heat.

Water dripped off the bottom of it into a coffee can. Twelve men sat in folding chairs facing the card table where Glenn Raney kept the minutes book.

I stood by the gun rack because there was no thirteenth chair. Over my head hung the photograph I had looked at my whole life.

My grandfather, Elmer Thorson, thirty years old in 1958, standing in knee-deep water with a strap of mallards over his shoulder and a grin that took up half his face.

He built this clubhouse with his own hands the year that picture was taken. He poured the slab, laid the cinderblock, and talked eleven other men from around Humphrey and Stuttgart into going in with him on the lease.

He wrote the bylaws on two pages of a Big Chief tablet. They are framed beside the photograph.

“Becca,” Glenn said, and he stood up to say it, which I will give him. “I want you to hear this first. This is nothing against you.”

“I know that, Glenn.”

“You’re Elmer’s granddaughter. Everybody in this room thinks the world of you.” He looked around, and a few heads nodded. “But this club has been twelve men since 1958. It’s tradition. That’s all it is.”

I had prepared for a lot of things. I had brought a copy of my hunting license going back to the first one I bought at fourteen.

I had brought the plaque from the junior calling contest in Stuttgart, where I took second place in 1996. I left it all in my bag. You do not argue with the word tradition.

The Hands

Harold Pruitt’s seat had come open in June. Harold was eighty-one, and his daughter had finally talked him into moving to Little Rock so she could see him more than twice a year. He called me himself before he called Glenn.

“You ought to put in for it,” he said. “Elmer would’ve wanted somebody named Thorson in that seat.”

My cousin Danny already held a seat, the one that came down through his daddy, Elmer’s oldest boy.

Mine was supposed to come down through my daddy, but my daddy never cared for hunting. He sold the membership back to the club in 1989 to pay for a combine. Nobody blamed him.

So I filled out the one-page application like anybody else would. Name, address, hunting experience, two members to vouch for me. Harold vouched for me by phone from Little Rock. Danny signed the second line without being asked.

“All in favor of keeping the membership the way it’s always been,” Glenn said. “Men only. Raise your hand.”

Eleven hands went up. Some went up fast and some went up slow. Gene Whitley’s went up so slow I thought for a second he might not finish.

One hand stayed down. Danny sat with his elbows on his knees and looked at the floor between his boots. He just kept his hand where it was.

“Motion carries,” Glenn said. He wrote it down in the minutes book. I watched the pen move. Then he closed the book and looked at me like a man doing what he believes is his duty and not enjoying it. “I’m sorry, Becca. I mean that.”

“I believe you do,” I said. Nobody looked up at the photograph. I noticed that. Twelve men in a room with my grandfather’s face hanging over them, and not one of them raised his eyes to it.