STABBED OUT

Evielon Childers walked into the paper office after I'd left for a Development Authority meeting. Office manager told her I'd be gone til noon but she was welcome to leave a note. Childers declined and had a seat on the couch up front near the bound copies and taxidermied marlin I'd found at the side of Cenie Road while scouting land to deerhunt.

The Authority discussed parcel of land they wanted the county to annex for their betterment and they shifted in their seats and stuttered and asked if I'd put my notebook away. Did one better and left. First one in Tony's Restaurant. Dating Game on. Ordered blueplate and sipped sugar water. When I walked throught the office door around one Childers asked me if I'd been eating at Tony's. She pointed to my shirt. Brown gravy skids wide as carpenter pencils.

She told me she read my columns and she like the ones about hunting most. She said she'd never hunted in her life nor ever known anyone who did. He daddy died in a farming accident when she was too little to know a big change had come in her life. But she heard from family he'd been an accomplished bird hunter. Mostly quail, she said. Aint none here no more since kye yote eat em all.

Childers was dwarfin short, liver-spotted, older than her years. Smelled like rosewater and cigarettes. Wore a black eyepatch and leisure suits better suited for rest home grannies. She invited me to hunt her land. Said she had lots of ducks on it. I told her I'd be there in the morning. I want to go with you, she said. Suit yourself, I said. Going to be early.

Knocked on Childer's door at quarter five. Kitchen light was on. She invited me in. Had a chipped china cup of Russian Tea and a honeybun served on a faux gold rimmed saucer. She wore green galoshes and a flower-print leisure suit and an old Army issue parka with a fur-lined hood. She smoked without ceasing. She asked me how I liked my job. She asked me how I liked Alma. I like it, I said. You like it? It OK, she said. It alright. She exhaled smoke heavy from her nostrils and looked around the kitchen at nothing so much. Geegaws. Knicknacks. An old washboard rusted red nailed to the wall. Let's go huntin, she said.

She led the way without light. Cows lowed. Dogs barked muffled miles away. Errant crow. Walked through fields and woods and through creekbeds and stepped stones in awkward hopscotch. Rain misted. We took a hill steeper than I wanted to and she stayed a good ten yards ahead, drifting upon the incline as apparition in cast-aside clothes, cigarette smoke unfurling from her face as a scarf.

At the top of the hill set a pond brown in the dark held with smoke and stabbed with limbs fallen and grown green with moss. Hope you brung your cooler, she said. You gone have a mess of birds come light. Her parka was slick with rain. She looked at me and her one good eye squnited. Aint you gone load that thing, she said pointing at the shotgun. It's loaded, Evie. What we done now, she said. Hurry up n wait? Yeah something like that, I said.

Light never came but the ducks did. Two drakes and a hen. Easy and slow from the sky to the water still held in the smoke. Chattered content and fed. Wings shook water and then up to the air and riddled with shot. Childers looked at me with her eye and squinted and asked why I aint get them all. Don't shoot hens, I said. Naw you aint, she said. You shoot ol gurl, she said. Aint bird watchin. This bird huntin. Hen set in the mist hidden. Hit my call. Feeding. Content. Aint workin, she said and screamed shoo and the hen got up in the smoke and beat away from the pond and then around calling for the fallen drakes set in the water heads limp and hanging and I led her and fired as she came straight away and the feathers brown and cream went flying adrift slowly and Childers said hot damn, her tiny hands outstretched groping for falling feathers.

After more tea and questions I asked her what happened to her bad eye. She smiled and shook her hands. She got up and brung a plate of Lorna Doones to the table and pushed it in front of me. I declined. No, I mean, I don't want to pry, I said. She waved me off and shrugged and said it werent no big thing. And I said, Well what happened and she looked at me and squinted and said, Aw it got stabbed out.