Well, you know how it goes, there are in-laws and there are outlaws and sometimes you are on the “outs” with your in-laws. One of the realities of Thanksgiving in my childhood home was a never ending barrage of relatives that would stop by to “shake and howdy” with everyone. Okay, everyone had their own meal, but you never knew who might drop in before, or definitely after dinner. It started early in the morning, when my maternal grandmother would show up to help my mother cook Thanksgiving dinner. When I say help, I mean that she would flit around the kitchen making passive aggressive comments to get my mother in a bad mood. “I think you are opening that oven too often, but you do what you want.” “Oh, box stuffing? Haven’t you been baking enough bread to have some crusty loaves to make your own?” “Store bought pie crust? That didn’t exist when I was raising children.” And it would go on like that, until the tension in the air got as thick as pea soup—pea soup that was put in the freezer last year.
The real traffic started after dinner, when the round of family visitors would randomly show up. Early in the afternoon it was folks stopping for coffee and dessert. Keep in mind, that deer season started the Monday after Thanksgiving, and the diaspora relatives would be trickling into town too. My mother’s sister had a husband that came every year. They lived out near Philadelphia somewhere. Uncle Lester was a nice enough guy, but wasn’t that familiar with the ways of wild critters or the places that they live. One year, he shot a buck and proceeded to drag it out, probably a mile drag or so. People saw him and congratulated him. Several hours later, he was still not seen, and his vehicle (a sedan with tarps in the trunk to catch the blood) was still parked on the hardtop road. Panic ensued about six o’clock, three hours after the deer was killed. Dad and I had hunted in the morning before he had to go to work at 3 o’clock , but we had not seen Uncle Lester. They called dad at work, which never happened. You just didn’t call dad at work. This, of course, was before cell phones, but even at that, it wasn’t like the factory had telephones on every hallway. Someone had to go find him, and then it was a big production to have someone fill in at his post while he walked to the phone. You only called if it was serious. I once got in trouble at school and was fairly defiant about the matter, feeling I was in the right. I got paddled. Sat down. Then the principal said he was going to call my father at work. I felt the color leave my face and being right didn’t matter anymore.
“We don’t know where Lester is!” mom yelled into the phone. Followed by “Uh uh. Hmm. Okay. You’re father wants to talk to you,” mom handed me the phone, which was attached to the wall of the kitchen.
“Yeah?” I said.
“Have your mother drive you out to Lester’s car. Take the big flashlight, and all the bulbs for the light and all the D batteries we have. Take a couple small flashlights to change batteries in the big flashlight if you need to do that.”
“Okay,” I said.
“He must be on the main road, they say he shot it back towards the old coal mine. That is close to where we run hare.”
“I know where you mean.”
“Don’t leave that main dirt road. When you get to the coal mine turnoff, you should see drag marks on the snow. If you do not, just turn around and go back to the car with your mother. If you find him take him out to his care. Tell him I said buck the deer, I will get it get it in the morning. I will be home at 11 o’clock tonight. Don’t call me back unless you don’t find him or he is dead or something. If he is okay, I will get the details when I get home.” Only, he didn’t say “buck the deer.” Sure enough, I found the drag marks, going the wrong way down the main road. There wasn’t much snow, but enough to see a bit of blood. I found Uncle Lester a couple miles later, he saw my flashlight and came running to me.
“I am right here!” He said, then “Bobby?”
“Dad sent me, let’s get going. You walked the wrong way.”
“I gotta get my buck!”
“Dad said buck the deer, he will help you get it in the morning,” only I didn’t say buck. I wasn’t old enough to drive yet, but I had been given permission to use the biggest cuss word and it felt really rebellious. Everything worked out, and the buck was fine the next day, a little frozen.
Anyway, all these visiting hunters stopped by in the evening of Thanksgiving to tell hunting stories, drink a beer, and then maybe watch the end of a football game. The house would get claustrophobic with people watching TV in our small living room.
Dad and I always hunted rabbits on Thanksgiving morning. Just to escape the process of my mom and her mom getting into each other’s way in a small kitchen.
“We ain’t in no hurry to shoot a rabbit,” dad would always say. If we could get a good chase until ten o’clock, we would then shoot. Well, he would let me shoot. It can be tough to get a really long chase, and often the rabbit would hole up after an hour.
“I could have shot that one,” my child-self would say, “It was going to hole anyway!”
“Find me a rabbit!” Dad would yell to the dogs and they would leave the hole to beat the brush, “You can shoot later.”
The year after “Wrong Way Lester” as the joke come to be called, Dad asked me on Thanksgiving Eve, “How’s your patience doing?”
“What?”
“I think tomorrow we will go to a spot that will have a lot more hare than cottontail. You can’t shoot a hare until after Christmas. You gonna be able to tell the difference and resist?”
“I think so.”
“You better know so.”
“I will be careful,” I said.
“I am only worried about the first circle if it is a hare, it might short circle and not run very big. Otherwise it will be obvious by the size of the circles.”
An overgrown clear cut adjacent to a huge stand of hemlocks in the Allegheny National Forest was our destination. Tall grasses were feeding the cottontail and hare, the hare would run the hemlocks, the cottontails would stay closer to the sumac and cattails, running into the thick cover where the tree tops were left from the last logging operation. The first rabbit ran into the hemlocks briefly and circled back.
“Shoot it,” dad whispered in my ear as it hurtled across the dirt road towards the thickets. I collected the cottontail before the dogs arrived to potentially tear it up. After 20 minutes or so I saw a big hare burst out of the cattails and into the hemlocks, crossing the road 80 yards in front of me. A few minutes later the dogs opened up and off they went. “That was a hare!” I said.
“Good,” dad lit his pipe and walked towards the truck. He unloaded his gun, and told me to do the same. We sat on the tailgate, and just talked. The kind of talk where there is long bits of silence. We joked about mom and gram. Then we would talk about school. When the dogs would come back we would get up to look for the hare and watch the dogs cross. This was before GPS, and the two beagles we owned would go way out of hearing and we had no idea where they were. I am going to guess that they were running for about three hours or so when they started getting close for about the fifth time, and their frantic chase song was getting louder. I am going to guess it was three hours or so, only because we got home right before meal time, which was one o’clock. Mom had a rule that we needed to be back by then, but we sometimes were late. The chase may have been longer than three hours. Like I said, there was no GPS handheld with a clock on it then.
Dad tapped out his pipe and started sprinting for the hemlocks. He was 6’ 2’’ and long legged. I am only 6’ and long waisted. Years of smoking took away the 4 minute mile that he could rattle of in youth, but his ¼ mile sprint was still pretty strong, even at almost 60 years of age. The dogs were a little pooped, and were not easy to catch, but were not too difficult once he was close enough to yell “Down!” He grabbed Princess and leashed her. She was the tougher to catch. I was there just a few seconds later and leashed Duke. We cleaned the rabbit, and headed for home, about a half hour away. We pulled in the driveway, and I put the rabbit in water to soak in the basement refrigerator where we kept mostly fishing bait and dad’s Schmidt’s beer. Then we put the dogs in the fenced yard.
“You want me to put them in the kennel or let them run in the yard?” I asked, “I bet they are content enough not to try and dig out?”
“Let’s kennel them,” he said, “Lord knows who might stop and make them bark, or who might accidentally open the gate.”
The kennel was an above ground shed that dad build, with above ground runs with wire floors over a cement pad to catch the refuse. He had electricity ran to the kennel, and even an electric heater he could run. Each wire run extended into the insulated shed, where you had a box with a lid.
“You like Turkey?” He asked.
“Yeah, why?”
He climbed the three steps to get into the shed. I followed, and was confronted with odor. Not dog odor (I had to clean that entire kennel every day), but the smell of food.
“What is this?” I asked.
“I started a crockpot of rabbit stew early this morning before daylight. You can eat all the turkey you want, but after we eat dinner, I think we will come out here. We have all kinds of people stopping by to hunt this year. Your mom’s brother is back in the area, and he has a few kids with him. Lester will no doubt be around. There won’t be enough seats!” He pointed at two lawn chairs he must have brought to the kennel from the lawn shed. “We can sit out here and eat supper. They will leave faster if I am not there. Plus, I only left 5 beers in the refrigerator, they won’t stay too long!”
After dinner (I went light on the turkey) we chatted and had dessert. It got to be 3 o’clock or so, and dad said, “Hey, where is the other leash?” Our leashes always hung on a peg just inside the back door/mud room.
“I hung mine up,” I said.
“I did too,” dad said. We always had leather leashes, with French snaps. I checked the floor. Nothing.
“Hey!” Dad yelled in the general direction of my mom, “We re going to run out and look for that leash we lost!”
“Okay!” mom yelled.
“Hurry back,” gram said, “Lots of company is coming.”
“Do my best,” dad said and we drove out the driveway, headed in the wrong direction to get where we hunted.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Here,” dad threw the leash to me, which had been in the truck all along.
“I don’t understand…” I held the leash.
“If they see my truck, they will find me. I am parking it behind the kennel.” He laughed. We rushed around, parked, and closed the truck doors as quiet as possible. In the bed of the truck he pulled out a cooler with 4 beers and 4 RC colas. And a big piece of cardboard and tape.
“What’s the cardboard for?” I asked.
“Blocking the window in the kennel so that they can’t see the light from the kitchen.” I rooted into the cooler, and got a pop. Dad let the dogs out of the sleeping boxes and into the shed part of the kennel. The beagles were balls of energy, as they were not in that part of the kennel very often.
“I almost forgot!” He slinked out the kennel, closing the dogs in, and returned with a big smoked ham hock for each of them. Their eyes bulged in ravenous zeal. We sat with the dogs, talked, and ate rabbit stew on paper plates. We used an old radio to put some music in the room for the times between dialogue, when we just scratched a dog’s ear. I put it to a station that played older country music, on AM radio, the music dad liked. About 7 o’clock dad said, “Go get the the dogs their supper. See who is still here, and tell them you are feeding dogs and that I am thinking about going out to look for that leash again.”
“PHHEW!” I spit RC Cola out at the thought of being gone this long for a leash.
“Hi mom,” I said.
“That took forever!” Mom answered, “I was worried.”
“No one here?”
“My brother was here with his three boys, and are gone. Your grandmother went to my sister’s house. She took Uncle Lester’s family with her, except for Lester. He wants to talk to your dad.”
“Okay,” I grabbed the bowls of Purina covered in turkey gravy and went out to the kennel.
“All clear?” dad asked?
“Just Lester, everyone else left.”
“Here,” he opened the doors of the run to put in the food and he added a second water bowl for each hound, “Those ham hocks will make them thirsty.”
We walked in the house and Lester was there, “You went out all that time looking for a cheap leash?” Lester laughed his sort of hoarse cackle.
“Shit,” dad said, “If I sent my little boy out into the night air to fetch your bucking ass last year, you know I wasn’t going to strand my favorite leash.” Only he didn’t say bucking.
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