“Two dollars,” my sister said. “Any duck on the table. Two dollars.”
She was saying it to a man in a seed corn cap who had one of Dad’s mallard drakes turned upside down in his hand, the way you’d check the bottom of a melon. He dug two singles out of his shirt pocket. Gail dropped them in a cigar box, and he walked down the driveway past me with a month of my father’s winter evenings tucked under his arm like a loaf of bread.
It was ten o’clock on the Saturday after the funeral. I had been out of the truck for maybe forty seconds.
“Gail,” I said.
“Morning.” She didn’t look up. She was making change for a woman buying a set of Pyrex bowls. “You made good time.”
“Those are Dad’s decoys.”
“Those are Dad’s everything, Patty. That’s what a sale is.”
Doug had come around the front of the truck by then, with our daughter Emma behind him. My husband is an electrician and a quiet man, but he has a way of setting his shoulders when he’s about to say something, and I saw him do it. I put my hand on his arm.
“Not yours to say,” I told him, low. “Might not even be mine.”
He looked at me a second. Then he nodded and stayed where he was. Emma didn’t say anything either. She’s sixteen. She was staring at the folding table.
I’d better tell you what was on it.
My father, Walt, tended lock for the Corps of Engineers for thirty-one years, down at La Grange, the better part of an hour south of Havana on the Illinois River. In the warm months he locked tows through, fifteen barges at a time, broken into two cuts because the chamber only holds about half of one. In the winters, when ice slowed the river and the work went quiet, he carved ducks. He started in 1966 with a hatchet and a block of white pine a towboat cook gave him, and he never stopped until his hands did.
They weren’t mantel ducks. They were working decoys, made the old Illinois River way: two halves of pine hollowed out with a gouge and glued back together so the bird rides light, a strip of lead tacked along the bottom to keep him upright in a chop, the feathers combed into wet paint with a piece of a broken hair comb. He hunted over some of them for forty years. He gave a good many away, to nephews and lockmen and any boy who showed an interest. What was left had sat on the shelves in his basement shop for as long as I could remember, rows of them, mallards and pintails and canvasbacks and bluebills, looking at you with their painted eyes when you went down for a jar of beans.
Now they were on a card table in my sister’s driveway, between a box of extension cords and Mom’s electric roaster.
There was a crowd, the way there is in a river town when a house with sixty years in it comes open. People I had known since grade school had my father’s birds in their hands. They were turning them over and rapping on them with a knuckle to hear the hollow.
I counted the table. I’m a payroll clerk for a school district. Counting is what I do when I can’t do anything else.
Nineteen.
“How many did you put out?” I asked.
“All of them.”
Ethan Blake is a skilled Creative Content Specialist with a talent for crafting engaging and thought-provoking narratives. With a strong background in storytelling and digital content creation, Ethan brings a unique perspective to his role at TheArchivists, where he curates and produces captivating content for a global audience.
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