Behind the Blind

The deer blind surrounded by white oaks on the hill above the meadow is a stock cage from a pickup turned upside down, and it makes a small entertainment center similar in size to the back of a van. The bars make frame and walls, what was open floor is now a ceiling covered by plywood; a few big sheets of heavy black industrial rubber cloak everything and do it waterproof. Inside there's a nice bucket seat saved from some Torino facing what was the lower front end and is now a wide rectangular window open to the view—and shotguns, two weekends a year, for deer, for venison and communion, it's all we hunt anymore, for good or bad. But the blind sits all year on the hilltop here among the white oaks just beyond the first pond, facing down over the roughly triangular end of a meadow cradled between this hill and the hill where the second pond shows as just a sliver of silver amid spruce and pine.

Sometimes I step out and walk into the picture.

"I can make it all as real as it ever was, and as blessed," lonely old Sam Clemens wrote, remembering timbers and prairies and creatures of all kinds he saw while a child, summers on his uncle's farm. He'd gone away to make a fortune, he lost it and made another, outlived everybody, died with the most toys, and ended up surrounded by servants in a mansion in New England. Remembering how a hawk's pinfeathers looked "against the blue of the vault."

And money never meant so much to me, few Americans of my century grew up poor as Mark Twain—no, my devil was the other one—fame. Sex: it was lured by the television screen and by loneliness known or imagined, but good reason or bad (win or lose) the change of venue was much the same. Sam and I abandoned the culture we'd been born into for the life of the cities. And if you're going to compare yourself to someone, think big.

Leaving the country for the city is so common—almost universal—an experience in the last century and a half that it's finding someone or whose family who didn't that's difficult; you'd have to go East, to where everybody crowded into cities to begin with. It was a great historic event, the post-agrarian migrations, but too close in time—some still survive—for academia or fashion in general to see anything beyond Ernest Hee-Haw Beverly Hillbillies. They aren't a race to be studied, they're inbred white trash; not a rural people, they're rednecks.

The coon tracks left in the night in the snow beside the creek (pronounced crick) hadn't had time to soften in the weak December sun, and the curve pressed in the night by the right front paw was still molded cold and perfect to my fingertip—frosty delicacy lost only at my touch. Clawhole toes, delicate separation of palm and thumb, one track of a set fresh among many others where the path crosses the creek downhill from the blind on the western tip of the triangular meadow (pasture) between three hills. Bright white snow scattered in thin, broken film over the stubble of grass and weeds laid in long rows left by tractor tires last spring. Mowing in the sun last spring. Snow spread in uneven white stripes to the view in sun coming down through bare, shadowed trees. Walking the hilltop to the south.

Jewell Jones, Queen of the Bootleggers, is gone now, and I don't know where she rests, or even whether she does. All I know is her story as heard from my mother's father a long time ago when I was haunted by the poetry in her name. She was a beautiful blond teenage waitress in the village's one café who was fascinated away one afternoon when a carload of blue-jawed Detroit gangsters spun wheels of gold at her table with the clock stopped dead...