Sweet and Sour Pie: A Wisconsin Boyhood

Sacrificing Sweet Sixteen

93 l Sacrificing Sweet Sixteen Out in the woods, a bird hunter lives in the past, the present, and the future at the same time. In the thick of a cover, he lives for the moment. But when he stops for a breather, he thinks of old times and old dogs and looks forward to puppies and seasons to come. And when he has a minute to dream, he dreams of shotguns, because he always could use a better one. Back in the late 1940s, my dad dreamed of a Sweet Sixteen, the sixteen-gauge version of John Browning’s venerable semiautomatic shotgun. What Dad saw in the Sweet Sixteen was hard to understand. He was used to side-by-sides. As a boy, he learned to shoot with an old Baker twelve-gauge that his father, a county sheriff at the time, had taken away from a man who had shot someone with it. The Baker’s barrels had no choke whatsoever, and it was a bird killer as lithe and 94 SacrificingSweetSixteen pitiless as a goshawk. By the late twenties, though, when Dad was in his teens, the Baker had shot loose. Grandpa gave Dad a D. M. Lefever to take its place. Dad and the Lefever hunted together through the Depression years. Then came 1941, and hunting was largely canceled for the duration. But when the war was over and things had settled down, Dad scraped together enough money to buy a Sweet Sixteen, and the Lefever was moved to the back of the gun rack. I suppose Dad loved his Sweet Sixteen because it was the first new gun he had ever owned and the first he had ever bought with his own money. And after we moved to Wisconsin, it didn’t take long for Dad and the Sweet Sixteen to become a team. Sunday afternoons in October and November were grousehunting time for Dad, and his posthunt rituals are among my fondest memories of him. First, there would be a heavy clumping on the back porch as he kicked the clay out of the cleats on his boot soles. I would run to meet him in the back hall. He’d stand the cased Sweet Sixteen against the wall behind the door and show me the grouse. There always seemed to be two. He would put the birds in a grocery bag and tuck them in the icebox to cool, so they would be easier to skin and dress. After supper he would clean the grouse on the back porch, carefully fanning out the tail feathers so I could add them to my collection. Then he’d take the Sixteen down to the basement workshop, put a strip of old carpet on the workbench, carefully disassemble the gun, and clean it. The smells of those grouse-hunting Sunday nights were as memorable as the sights. There would be the mingled scents of muck, sweetfern, and juniper on Dad’s boots, the aroma of his pipe tobacco—Walnut if he had some extra money, Kentucky Club if he didn’t—the supper smell of Swiss steak and stewed tomatoes from the kitchen, and the odor of gunpowder solvent down in the workshop. 95 Through all this, childhood was waning. Before long a milestone was reached: I turned twelve and was judged reliable enough to start hunting. A “first” is always memorable: first kiss, first car, first punch in the nose, first shotgun. After supper on Christmas Eve 1954, Dad headed down the basement stairs and motioned for me to follow. In the workshop was a cabinet where the Sweet Sixteen, the old Baker, the Lefever, and my Savage single-shot .22 rifle were stored. Dad opened the cabinet and took out a slender wand of a shotgun. He pivoted its top lever, swung the barrels down, and handed it to me. “There you go,” he said. “Take care of it. It’s a Fox.” I had heard enough shotgun talk to know that a D-grade Ansley H. Fox twenty-gauge ejector double like this one, with a sweeping flame in its oil-finished walnut and deep engraving on its frame, wasn’t just any old bird-banger; it was one of the finest shotguns ever made in the United States. And it lay there in my hands like a steel Stradivarius. Dad smiled. I babbled. I looked down the Fox’s...