People

REQUIEM FOR A HUNTER

By A Guest Contributor

I shifted uncomfortably in the narrow wooden folding chair on the front row nearest the casket. The organ music was too loud, and the smell and pollen from the flowers tickled in my nose.

“Achoo!” I used my hankie for a muffle, but my Mom still poked me in the arm nearest to her as a warning.

“Dear friends,” intoned the somber preacher, “we are gathered here today to pay tribute to our dear departed friend and neighbor, Jeb Miller. He was so loved among us.” The sad-faced preacher continued to sing the praises of the man lying before him.

I stretched my neck to see if he were talking about my grandpa. The name was right, but the words didn’t seem familiar. Mother nudged me again until I sat back.

I’d heard everyone say grandpa had left my grandma and five kids for another woman. Her name was Martha. It must be so, I concluded, because there she sat over by my Dad. I knew my own grandma was still living, and she wasn’t here in this old house with its tiny living room converted into a funeral parlor.

The organist’s dress was scooting up, and the white lace on her slip was torn. Her legs were showing.

Daddy was really going to get it from his sisters. There he was, offering his arm to Martha, that woman who stole and married my grandpa away from his family. That was many years before I was born, but my aunts never forgot.

The funeral procession wound through the back roads of the area until we came to a cemetery in a clearing in a near-by wood. From what I’d heard Dad say, grandpa would really be at rest here. Anyone who ever knew Jeb Miller, Daddy said, talked about the way he could hunt. He never came back from the woods without his bag limit. He knew where every squirrel had its nest, and his bird dogs were the best trained in the county.

The woods seemed to save its bounty for him. Well, maybe he couldn’t be held up as a fine example of a father and husband, but he was a faithful son of Nature. Daddy said grandpa could lay in bed at daybreak in early Spring and hear the mushrooms pop up as the sun struck the soft earth around decaying tree stumps and logs. He could hear the soft rustle as the mushrooms parted the leaves to come to the surface. I remember eating fresh-picked mushrooms, browned crisp, and delicious in butter. Knowing where the mushrooms came up in the Spring was a good thing.

Not too long before grandpa died, he gave Daddy a half-bushel basket of hickory nuts. Yeah, he had a way in the woods.

Settling back in my corner in the backseat of the car, I didn’t think of much going back home. My feet hurt in my new Sunday shoes, and the high-collared dress that Mom made me wear was choking me.

As soon as we got home, I ran from the car to my room and threw my good clothes toward the bed. My old jeans and t-shirt lay in an inviting heap where I’d left them on the floor by the window. As I stooped over to pick up my jeans, I glanced out the window.

Walking outside past my window was my Dad. He hadn’t even changed clothes yet. He had gone straight to the cellar and got that half-bushel basket of hickory nuts and was carrying them down the hill. He placed them beneath our big, old oak tree and came back to the house. Even while I watched, a pair of squirrels scuttled down the tree to peek into the basket.

I reckon it took about a week for the squirrels to carry each hickory nut up the tree to store in their nest for the winter. But for me, the memory will never go away.