The Talk

I never was a hunter, not in the sense that I understood a hunter to be, but even now the days just before Thanksgiving find me thinking back to those few days when maybe, just maybe, I'd get to spend some time with my dad out deer hunting. While I was in school Dad wasn't high enough up the seniority ladder with Glendenning to be able to take his vacation during deer season but I'm pretty sure that if he could have he would have. It really was the only time that dad and I were ever alone together for any amount of time, a day or two, maybe three, the last part of November during deer season.

For years and years I kept the sweater and socks my mom had knit me to wear for those few hours on a couple or three days of the year when I'd find myself in the middle of the woods before sunrise watching my breath and trying to be as quiet as possible. Why the socks were red I was never sure but that sweater was red enough to be seen across most any clearing and through some fairly thick undergrowth as well if need be. And on those predawn mornings in late November that heavy wool sweater wasn't always enough to keep me from wishing I was still home in bed and warm. Then one year the folks figured they could afford it and I got a set of olive green insulated underwear that when I put them on I thought I looked like a North Korean soldier.

As I remember it my dad shot the largest deer in Juneau County one year, a buck that field dressed at 220 pounds, but that could be the memory of a kid who wanted something he would never get.

 

I'd first seen her when I was standing on the basketball court and she was on the risers during some combined school choir program I remember nothing about today. I still remember looking up there and seeing an auburn haired vision of beauty. Our eyes met from across the auditorium and there was no question but what I had to, that's the really had to kind of had to, meet her. I've always remembered those eyes and how something inside me suddenly came alive in a new and wondrous way. She was special.

Oh and how she was special though I remember almost nothing that went on around us when we were together. I do remembered her, just her, holding her hand, having her next to me, kissing her and getting my ass knocked across the car when I went to put my hand where it didn't belong.

In my humble opinion she was without a doubt one of the most beautiful girls I had ever seen, certainly of any I'd seen in real flesh and blood life, and she'd decided it would be alright if she were seen with me. I was in heaven and the only thing I could think about was her and the coming weekend when I'd get to see her and be with her again if only for a few hours. Oh yeah, it was love or something really, really close to it.

Those weekends were spent going to Hillsboro and the dance in the high school gym every Saturday night. For all I know some of the greatest up and coming bands in the Midwest played there but it mattered not at all to me. I couldn't have told you the names of those groups even as I was holding Monica close to me through a slow song that was never slow enough nor long enough. And in the end she was probably more girl/woman than I was ready for but oh how I loved being with her. That was what I would tell myself later but the fact of the matter may well have been that I wasn't man enough for either of us.

When I wasn't with her I would write. I don't remember how much or how often but I would write and she would write back and of course I never thought her words said as much as I thought I wanted to hear but they said enough to keep me driving back to that farmhouse outside Kendall where this vision of beauty remained through the week that led up to yet another Saturday night and another dance in Hillsboro.

Those letters that meant so much to me all the while unknown to me also meant a great deal to my mother. Oh, she'd let me read them first and then she would find them, read them and create her own scenario of what really went on. I never did figure out how or from whom my mother heard whatever it was she heard about Monica but I do know for a fact that someone lied to her and lied big time. You see, mom heard and believed that her precious, innocent and naïve (that's the only part that was ever true about him) son was being dragged into a pit of sexual perversion by some cheap little hussy. Where she ever came up with those ideas I will never know but she believed them the way she believed the story she told herself that her boy was one day going to be the next Lawrence Welk. The problem for me was that she believed what she believed about a floozy from another town that her son was dating and damn the truth of it all!

Mom and I argued often and we argued with the vigor and passion that might have been considered something more than a parent and child disagreeing. When we argued it was mostly toe to toe, face to face and at a level of intensity that made dogs run and hide. I never won but I never backed down either and when it came to the love of my life and the truth I knew about her there was no giving in. In the end however there was the reality that I was still dependent on that house and so ultimately there came a moment in time when Monica and I understood that the only peace we would have would be in saying good bye to each other.

 

That moment would come but this day was not the day…

"I hear you've been seeing some girl," my dad said to me as we stood in front of the car out there on Germantown Road, dad smoking a Camel, drinking coffee and looking straight ahead while I held my Remington semi-automatic 30-06 like I might actually do something with it.

Father-son talks were unheard of in my world. But here was my father on the verge of holding a conversation with me; this was something I was not prepared for. Never before had he ever mentioned anything about the sports or music I was involved in, two things that were focal points of my life. Now he was suddenly talking with me about the girl I was in love with. And the trouble was I was pretty sure he knew almost nothing about her unless mom had filled him with the lies she believed to be the truth.

"Yeah," was all that could find its' way out of my mouth.

"Well," he took a drag off his cigarette then held it at his side between two gloved fingers, "keep your pecker in your pants."

The cigarette dropped from his hand as he reached for his rifle. The Remington 30-06 roared once and then there was silence. In the ditch not thirty yards in front of us lay an eight point buck.