I am my father’s daughter. I took the little notepad out of my purse, the one I keep for grocery lists, and the pencil that goes with it. I walked down to the end of the driveway, where the concrete meets the street, and I stood there.
The first one to come past me was Mrs. Hill from the Methodist church, eighty if she’s a day, carrying a canvasback drake in both hands like a covered dish.
“Patty, honey. I’m so sorry about your daddy.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Hill. Could I see the bottom of him a second?”
She blinked at me. Then she turned him over.
Every decoy my father made, he signed the same way. He’d heat the tip of a soldering iron and burn it into the bare wood of the bottom, just ahead of the lead: his initials and the year. This one said W.B. 77, the letters gone soft and brown.
I wrote it down. Mrs. Hill. Canvasback drake. W.B. 77. 10:06.
“What’s that for?” she asked.
“So I know where they went,” I said. “Nothing more than that. You enjoy him.”
She patted my arm and went on to her car. Doug, who needed something to do with his hands, carried Mom’s roaster out behind her and set it in her trunk.
I stood at the end of that driveway for an hour and fifty minutes.
I got so I could tell the birds by their heft before anybody turned one over. A hollow decoy is lighter than your eye expects, a pound and a half maybe, and the weight sits low where the lead is, so it rocks in your hand as if it’s already on the water. They smelled like Dad’s basement: linseed oil, old oil paint, and under that the river mud that never quite washes out of the cord wound around the neck. When people knocked on them, they sounded like a knuckle on an empty cupboard.
Dale from the bait shop had a bluebill. W.B. 85. A young couple I didn’t know, Jeff and Kim, they told me, married in October, had a mallard drake and hen that had plainly been made as a pair. W.B. 92, both of them. A widow named Donna had a pintail with a neck as long and fine as a teacup handle. W.B. 03.
Nobody refused me. Not one person asked what business it was of mine. They turned the birds over, I wrote, I said thank you, and they went.
After a while Emma came and stood beside me. She didn’t ask what I was doing. She watched three or four go by, and then, when a man I didn’t recognize came down the drive with a bluebill hen, she stepped up and said, “Excuse me, sir, could we get your name? It’s for my grandpa.” He gave it to her like she’d asked for the time.
Around eleven, a boy came down the driveway by himself. Nine years old, maybe. His grandmother was still up at the table looking at Mom’s dish towels. He had paid in quarters. I’d seen him count them out of a sandwich bag onto the card table, eight of them, and Gail had waited for every one.
He was carrying the smallest bird on the table. A green-winged teal, not much bigger than a man’s fist, with a cinnamon head and the green patch swept back from the eye.
“Can I see the bottom of yours?” I asked.
He held it up over his head so I could look.
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