One Sunday afternoon, when September finally turned cooler, my wife and I were riding an old 4-wheeler around a scrubby patch of woods on her family’s farmland, which is what counts as a big weekend now that our kids have left home. We hadn’t set foot on this land in years, partly because it’s been leased to a hunting club for over a decade, and partly because it’s just plain hard to get to. The tract is separated from the larger, more navigable part of the property by a winding tributary of Thompson Creek, which has carved out a ravine deep and raggedy enough to have made crossing with a wheeled vehicle effectively impossible. On the other side of this creek, the terrain rises into what pass for high bluffs in this part of the world, and in the years since anyone has farmed it, the property has taken on a woolly, land-that-time-forgot character as trees fall, saplings rise, and open fields once planted in wheat and soybeans are replaced by the pines and hardwoods that ruled until people started showing up with saws a couple hundred years ago.
While trundling our clapped-out 4-wheeler through one of the last slivers of open pasture, our passel of dogs flushed what must have been twenty wild turkeys. They burst from the waist-high grass and lit out for the treetops to the delight of dogs and humans alike. Watching the turkeys whirring away brought to mind one of many stories about my wife’s father, Richard—an accomplished turkey hunter and by all accounts an inveterate joker, too. In this particular story, Richard had entered a turkey calling competition—the kind in which turkey hunting purists are scored on their ability to mimic flirtatious hens by a panel of stone-faced judges. As the other contestants yelped, purred, and cackled away, Richard concluded that he didn’t have a chance of winning, and decided to go in a different direction. When his turn came, he faced the judges, pulled two handfuls of corn from his pockets, and scattered it onto the stage. The judges recoiled in horror; the audience gasped. If hunters wore pearls they would have clutched them, because as everyone in attendance knew perfectly well, baiting turkeys is illegal.
"Filling the large spaces between memory fragments are the stories."
Whether I have this story quite right or not I cannot say, partly because I can’t remember who told it to me, and also because Richard died in 1975, when my wife was just a little girl. But throughout the more than thirty years she and I have known each other, stories about her father have always been around. From his younger brother, Mike, who still lives outside of Mobile, Alabama, where they grew up. From friends made during Richard’s LSU days, when he played catcher for LSU Baseball and acquired lasting infamy by streaking through the quad. And from my mother-in-law, Dorcas, who faced the unimaginable task of raising two young daughters and running a farm as a young widow when melanoma took her husband at the age of thirty-two. As for my wife, who was five at the time, her own recollections of her father are slippery, precious snippets that occupy a liminal space somewhere between memories and feelings. She remembers the sense of safety; there’s a recollection of sitting in a big lap and stopping a spinning world globe with her small finger to choose which country they would “visit” in their imaginations. When things are hard, she has a feeling of never quite being alone.
Filling the large spaces between memory fragments are the stories—of a big, ambitious, jovial man who liked a joke, loved his kids and his friends, longed to travel, and lived life to the fullest, all the way to the end. Twenty years ago, feeling short on stories, my wife and her sister tracked down three of Richard’s friends from his LSU days and invited them to the house. Doctors all, they drove in from Thibodaux, Lafayette, and Breaux Bridge, and did not disappoint. After supper, I put the kids to bed while the five of them took a bottle of whiskey to the porch. They stayed there for hours, filling up the large spaces with stories, laughter, and some tears, too, When they left, they’d gifted my wife and her sister a richer, more complete picture of their father—and perhaps of themselves, too. When something big goes missing, the stories we share are gifts—the connective tissue that binds memories together and us to one another, helping us to understand better who we are, where we belong, and why we are here after all.
—James Fox-Smith, publisher
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