Daddy’s Stories

My father loved to tell stories and tall tales. Some were true. Others had some elements of truth in them--maybe just enough to make the listener think they could be true, at least until toward the end of the tale. He had a way of making an observation or turning a phrase that would catch your attention and make it easy to remember. I recall one such phase at one of our Fourth of July fish fries.

Our little country community where I spent my junior high and high school years got together every year for a big fish fry on July 4. There weren't any public parks close enough to go to. Someone would scout around and find a place on the bank of the river or the shore of a nearby lake. Some would come early in the morning, eight or nine o'clock, bringing pickup loads of rough lumber. They would set to building a long serving table and benches all out among the trees. The fire pit would be dug and firewood gathered. A support for the big black wash pot in which catfish and hush puppies would be fried would be constructed. Later in the morning others would come bringing all sorts of vegetable dishes, salads, and desserts to round out the meal.

We were usually the only ones around, but this particular year we had selected the shore of a horseshoe lake near the Tallahatchie River, and another group had come in about fifty yards up the shoreline. Only they were not having a fish fry. The first thing they set up was a very large, black pot. I'd never seen one so big. It must have been five feet across and was so heavy it took several men to get it into position. They filled it about half full of water and started a big fire under it. Then, they began to put all manner of things in the pot.

It seemed like everybody added something different. There were whole onions, potatoes, tomatoes, okra, and a number of vegetables we could not identify. The meats were equally varied. We could agree that there were pieces of pork and beef, whole squirrels, rabbits, and quail, and several other things we couldn't name. I had been sitting around with a group of the men who were watching this operation and making comments about this communal stew being created before our very eyes. A late arrival joined our group and observed the activity for a few minutes before asking, "What in the world have they got in that pot?" My daddy replied, "Well, D. J., the best I can figure out, they've got everything in there from bull nuts to cooter." (Cooter was a local term for a turtle.)

Since these are my daddy's stories, I'm going to try to write 'em like he told 'em.

The Kicking Gun
One day early last fall, before the cotton was ready to pick, a bunch of us were down at the store sittin' around on the porch visitin' when ol' Bill Butler drove up. The conversation got around to guns and huntin'. Bill told us about what happened to him a coupla weeks before.

Said he had gone to town to get a piece for one of his wagons and had stopped by the feed store. There were eight or ten fellows, some he knew and some he didn't, sittin' under the shed. They were talkin' and swappin' knives when one fellow Bill didn't know started tellin' them about a shotgun he had. Said it was the hardest kickin' gun he'd ever shot. Some got to askin' about it, so he went and got it out of his truck.

Everybody looked at it. It was a Remington pump and it wasn't very old. Said he wouldn't mind tradin' it off. At that, Bill went out to his truck and got his gun and let the fellow look at it. Bill's was a pump, but it was an older model Stevens. The Remington was much better and newer, but Bill could really shoot his old Stevens and wasn't too hot to trade. At least that's what he kept saying. But that fellow was in a tradin' mood, so he offered to throw in an almost new Barlow knife to boot. Bill thought he had himself a mighty good deal, so he agreed and they swapped right there.

Now, the fellow had warned Bill that the gun would kick, but Bill said he'd been shootin' all kinds of guns for thirty years and figured there wasn't a gun around that could get the best of him. Well, he was wrong. Said he'd been out with it three or four times and the gun had about kicked him to death no matter what he did. Said the last time out he'd missed several easy shots because he was gettin' afraid of how hard the gun was gonna kick him.

At that point I started kiddin' him about not bein' much of a man and not knowin' how to shoot, to let a little ol' gun get the best of him. Well, that kinda got away with him and he said, "All right, Luke, you think you're such a hotshot shooter, you just take this gun out and see if I'm not tellin' the truth. I'll even give you a handful of shells so you won't have to use up any of yours." With that, he went to his truck, got the gun and put in my truck. I didn't have much choice but to take it huntin', but I figured I could shoot most anything made.

Squirrel season hadn't been open long, and I'd planned on going the next morning anyway, so I figured I'd just try out Bill's new Remington. It was a nice gun . . . had good balance. It couldn't be that bad.

I got into the woods about daylight. The leaves were dry, which made it hard to move quietly. I was creepm' along when I heard a squirrel jump. I figured he'd heard me and was on the run. I saw him run down a limb in a tree to my left and jump to a farther tree. I saw the end of the branch he was goin' to land on, so I snapped the gun up with a bead on that spot and pulled the trigger when he landed on it.

I'd had to shoot so fast that I wasn't set good and was a little off balance, too. Well, I want to tell you, I've had mules kick me that didn't kick that hard. That gun kicked me back over a log and into a bunch of scrubby bushes. It stunned me for a coupla minutes. When I came to my senses, I blinked my eyes to clear my head and tried to figure out where I was. My feet were up on the top of the log and I was layin' on my back in amongst those little bushes.

Just as I started to swing my feet off the log and get up, I heard it. There was a rustlin' in the leaves off to my right. I froze. This was rattlesnake country, and it sounded just like a big rattler. My position was pretty awkward and I knew it'd take me several seconds to get untangled, so I thought I'd better see what I was goin' to have to deal with. If it were a rattler, he might be movin' away. But he wasn't. The sound was comin' closer. He would move a little, stop, and then move again. I held my head as still as I could and cut my eyes as hard as I could to see what it was. At first, all I could see was the leaves and bushes movin', but then I saw it.

At about that point, one of his listeners would not be able to contain himself any longer and would blurt out, "Was it a rattlesnake? ! "

Daddy would pause for effect, look all around his audience, and reply, "Naw, it was that gun backin' up to kick me again."

Deer Camp
A long time ago when I was younger, I used to go to deer camp two or three times a season. Back then a lot of the Delta had not been logged, so there was a lot of the big woods left and a lot of deer in them. There were several camps around. I liked to go to one down in Sharkey County.

The folks who ran them would usually set up about the same place every year. They had to be close to a spring or a good source for water. Some of them would drive down a pipe and make an artesian well. The underbrush would be cleared and tents set up. Each tent might have five or six hunters dependin' on how many canvas army cots would fit in. There would be one large tent with rough tables for cookin' and eatin'.

Hunters would pay so much per day or week with most staying a week at a time. The camp provided a cook, food, dogs, and dog handlers. Hunters just had to have their huntin' clothes, guns, and shells.

One year me and a friend of mine, Ozzie Williams, went together to this one I was tellin' you about. It was way back in the woods. They picked you up at the end of the road and took you the last two or three miles by wagon.

There wasn't much to do after supper except to play poker or drink or both. One night toward the middle of the week, Ozzie and I were sittin' around havin' a drink or two. We were sorta feelin' sorry for ourselves because neither one of us had killed a deer yet. I suppose that caused us to have one or two too many and led us to doin' what we did. I don't think we'd 'a done it otherwise.

The cook was a little ole gnarled up man we all just called "Cookie." His real name was James or somethin' like that, but nobody ever used it. A lot of the hunters gave him a rough time about the food and teased him about most anything. With the kind of food he had to start out with and the cookin' facilities he had, there was no way he was goin' to cook up anything real good. But I thought he did a pretty good job.

Well, Cookie's big aim was to kill him a deer and he worked at it real hard. Everyday after he'd cleaned up after breakfast and before he had to start supper, he'd walk out to a stand he had pretty close to camp and wait for a deer to come by. He'd been at this for four or five years and hadn't even seen a deer. But his lack of success had not reduced his enthusiasm. If anything, he'd gotten more determined with the passage of time.

Cookie's gun was an old, and I do mean old, muzzle loadin' musket with a bell-shaped barrel. It was the only one I ever recall seein' outside a museum. Of course, he got teased about it a lot, but he was not fazed by all the jokes at his expense. Much of his conversation around the cook tent was about what he was goin' to do when that big buck came into range.

Well, on the night I was tellin' you about, Ozzie and I got to talkin' about Cookie's musket. We decided that if he were going to kill a buck with it, he'd need a big charge of powder. So, we went over to the cook tent where he kept it and fixed it up. We pulled the ball and charge he had in it and put in a whole bunch of powder and tamped it in with some waddin'. Next, we figured that much powder needed more than one ball, so we just put in a double handful. By the time we got the last waddin' tamped in, the barrel was about full. I guess we thought he'd just find that barrel full of powder and shot and take it out. Even if he didn't find it for a day or two, we didn't think he'd have any reason to fire it, since he never saw a deer anyway.

The next morning after breakfast, the dog handlers loaded the dogs up in a wagon and headed out. Some other camp folk took us to our stands. Ozzie and I were pretty close together that day. We all had to be in place before daylight 'cause that's when the handlers would turn the dogs loose. They would get the deer stirred up and movin' around, and if they stayed on any of the trails they'd been usin', they had to go by somebody's stand.

About an hour after daylight, I heard the dogs. From the sound, they must have been pretty close on some deer's trail. The sound changed directions two or three times and then swung over in the direction of the camp. Before long, there came the most gosh-awful explosion I'd ever heard. It sounded like somebody had fired a cannon. Cookie had shot off that musket with that charge of powder and ball!

I set off to runnin' through the woods toward camp. Pretty soon I spied Ozzie doin' the same. We knew Cookie had to be dead. That old musket surely exploded and probably blew Cookie into several pieces. I could see me and Ozzie in jail for the rest of our lives. From the look on Ozzie's face, I could tell he was thinkin' the same thing.

When we got close to camp, a lot of shoutin' and other commotion led us to Cookie's stand. We both pulled up in amazement. First of all, Cookie wasn't dead. Those dogs must have run a whole herd of deer past Cookie's stand and he had fired into them. That old musket had to have been made out of some heavy, strong metal. It hadn't exploded, but it did have a split barrel. Those musket balls must have gone through those deer like a load of grape-shot out of a cannon. Two deer were dead on the ground and two more had been broken down in their hindquarters so they couldn't run. Blood on the trail indicated that several more had been wounded.

Although Cookie was alive, he was not without injury. The musket had kicked back so hard that it dislocated his shoulder and knocked his arm out of its socket, so that it was hangin' almost down to the ground. He had the musket in his left hand and was goin' along beside one of the wounded deer which was trying to crawl away, and he was hittin' the deer over the head with it. When Cookie saw us, he yelled, "Y'all come help me! If I'd 'a had another half a charge, I'd 'a got 'em all!"

The Stone Mountain Deer
I want to tell y'all about a place I went to over in Georgia years ago. They call it Stone Mountain. It's a big mountain made entirely of granite, and it's completely round. I've never seen anything like it before or since. It's a sight to look at.

Now, as amazin' as that mountain was, there was somethin' just as amazin' that lived on it. A big buck deer with the biggest rack on his head that anybody had ever seen. Those that had seen it said it was as big as a rockin' chair.

I asked some of the local folks why nobody hadn't shot that buck and put that trophy on their wall. They said that many had tried, but none had been successful. They said they had decided that it was impossible to shoot that buck because he was too fast. He had a trail about halfway up that mountain that he ran round on. When somebody came to hunt him, he would start runnin' around the mountain so fast that it took two people to see him. One had to say, "Here he comes." And the other had to say, "There he goes." They had tried every way in the world to shoot him, but none worked. If you tried to shoot straight at the mountain, he'd be gone before you could pull the trigger. Some had thought they could line up with the trail and shoot at him as he ran by. They tried that, but he would outrun the bullet and go on around the mountain while the bullet went straight on out into space. There just wasn't any way to kill that deer.

Well, y'all know how I love to hunt deer, and I've killed my share. I just knew there had to be some way to get that buck. So I had them take me out there so I could see for myself. Everything they said was true. That deer was so fast that when he started runmn' around that mountain, you couldn't even see him the first few times around. You knew he was comin' by 'cause you could hear the clippity clop of his hooves on that granite. After a few trips, you could see somethin' go by, but you couldn't make out that it was a deer. It was just sort of a brown flash as he went by.

I walked around and studied the situation for a while, and decided that the only chance you'd have of hittin' that buck would be to get the bullet to follow the same trajectory as the deer. Since the mountain was completely round, I measured the degree of its curve. Then, I took my rifle to a gunsmith and had him bend the barrel that many degrees to the left, since that buck always ran in a counterclockwise direction.

It took me a coupla days to get this done. By this time a whole bunch of people had heard about what I was doin', so they all came out to see how my plan would work. I got my gun all set up. I wedged the barrel in a tree fork and scotched it steady once I got it in line with the curve of the mountain. I was ready. Before long, that buck came by. As one hollered, "Here he comes," I started to pull the trigger. The gun fired just as the other fellow yelled, "There he goes." And in an instant, both deer and bullet were gone around the mountain.

In a few minutes we heard the deer come by again, but we didn't hear just the sound of his hooves on the granite. What we heard was: "Clippity clop, Zing."
The "Zing" was the bullet following the deer. This went on for several trips.

"Clippity clop, Zing."

"Chppity clop, Zing."

"Clippity clop, Zing."

Before long, he began to slow down so we could see the flash as he went by. We could still hear the "Zing," so we knew the bullet was still after him.

After a little while, he'd slowed down so that you could barely make him out and the "Zing" was still there.

Finally, he slowed down so that you could really see him. He was a fine specimen of a deer. He was stretched out with his head back and that big rack sort of layin' on his shoulders. And then, I saw the bullet. It was about ten feet behind him and it was workin' so hard to keep up, until drops of sweat as big as the end of your finger were fallin' off it.

Previous: Raymond

     Next: After Bedtime Stories

• Article Word Count: 3278
• |
• Total Views: 164
• |
• permalink