Letting Go

What kind of gun do you suppose God shoots?” Edsel asked, glancing at my new gun before looking skyward as the first drops of rain began to fall.
The two of us were squatting in November cattails beside an 11-year-old Lab, waiting for dawn and ducks. Listening to what sounded like cannon fire rumbling behind black clouds that prowled the sky like warships, I knew we were in for a doozy. Already the wind was cuffing whitecaps from the waves, slapping them against our waders, and licks of lightning were probing the horizon where the sun was supposed to rise.
“Beats me,” I said, pulling up the collar of my Barbour coat and covering the Beretta from rain and spray with my arms. After not hunting for years, I’d hurriedly purchased the coat and gun along with waders, a vest, a hat and pants from an online catalog. I knew my shooting shortcomings and had figured I might as well look the part.
I thought about the question another moment, then added: “If He has any sense, He’s limbering up with a sleek side-by-side for a morning quail hunt in Georgia to be followed by breakfast and mint juleps.” I dropped the flaps on my waxed Filson hat and secured the straps under my chin as the rain started stinging my cheeks.
“You’re a mail-order duck hunter if I ever saw one,” Edsel laughed, nodding at me trying to protect my gun and rolling his eyes. “Side-by-side, my fanny. God shoots a pump same as me, hunts a crippled black Lab same as me, and doesn’t give a damn if his gun gets wet or not . . . same as me. And you can bet your big-city paycheck He’s drinking a Bud and not wearing any Abercrombie and Fitch waxed gear or any of the rest of that tweedy stuff you got on. You sure as hell don’t look like the hunter you used to be.”
“It’s Barbour, Orvis and Filson.”
“Whatever.”
Some things never change between brothers, I thought.
Sketching crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes and lining his forehead with deep wrinkles, time had drawn more than a few two-tracks on Edsel since I’d seen him last. He sat hunched against the wind wearing his faded army jacket tucked into the tops of his cracked waders, squinting beneath the bill of a ragged camouflage ball cap at two dozen scarred decoys bouncing and rolling in the rough water. I felt sorry for him, stuck in a life I had escaped.
Minutes before, we’d dared the breakers and picked our way over submerged rocks that threatened to trip us headfirst into the froth. Leaning forward as I heaved the decoys into the wind and heard the satisfying smack of their weight on the water, I watched Edsel arrange a dozen into a “J” and bunch the others together like card players around a poker table with some seats left empty for newcomers. At least they won’t be rafting, I figured, as I loaded the over/under with steel shot.
“I wish shooting time would get a wiggle on,” Edsel said.
Impatient as ever, he settled Dad’s battered, silver-barreled Winchester 97 on his lap and put his arm around Lazarus, his grizzled, lame Lab. In some ways the dog reminded me of my brother and looked too handicapped to handle the rough water—a point I made to Edsel.
“You’ll see,” he said. “It’s kind of like the kid who stutters when he talks but doesn’t when he sings. Same with Laz. He looks half-dead when he’s out of water, but he comes to life when he’s in it. Kinda like me in a marsh.”
Seeing my elder brother hug his old dog in the dim light of dawn, I was struck by the singular picture of happiness they created.
Edsel had chosen the road not taken by the rest of us. He was the oldest of the siblings and, except for a stint in the Army, he’d stayed home on the farm until our parents had passed. I remember growing up he wasn’t much for books and school and definitely not college, living mostly outside of the interests that captivated my other brothers and me. Girls, cars, sports . . . none of that stuff mattered to him. Except for the outdoors, he never found much in the world that suited him other than odd jobs. Dad said something about Edsel just never took off. Maybe he was just living up to his name.
As much as we felt sorry for him, none of us minded Edsel’s lack of worldly success, because he saw our parents through the hard times while the rest of us launched careers and families and chased the American dream. Other than on holidays and birthdays and finally funerals, we mostly stayed away, leaving him as caretaker of the past. Out of gratitude and perhaps guilt, each of us relinquished any claim to the farm and left it to him as our parents had wished.
I’d planned to come home only to retrieve a few mementoes, but at Edsel’s insistence had agreed to a duck hunt.
“Come on, Eddie,” he said, “it will be like old times. Just you, me, the dog and the ducks. If you’re coming down here, you might as well stay with me and throw a gun to your shoulder. I’ll do all the work. All you have to do is show up.”
“I’m not sure I have time, Edsel,” I said.
“Sure you do,” he pleaded. “What’s more important than staying in the house where you grew up and duck hunting with your brother?”
Glancing at the papers piled on my desk and the people waiting outside my door, I paused, let my cell phone ring and mulled a thousand answers before I found the right question.
“What time?” I sighed.
“Show up a week from Friday at 5 p.m., and I’ll have supper ready. And leave that Blueberry or whatever you call it at the office,” he laughed, “unless it’s got a ring tone that quacks like a duck.”
True to his word, Edsel prepared a wild-game supper the likes of which I hadn’t enjoyed since we were boys. Grouse and duck wrapped in bacon on beds of rice with homemade biscuits and vegetables from the garden, and even a pie made from apples he’d picked in the orchard where he’d shot some of the birds.
Then it was to the porch like we used to do with Dad, back then putting empty pipes in our mouths and pretending to be men while Dad smoked a full one, the rich aroma of tobacco wafting across the yard. Edsel never forgot any of it, and when he spoke of the past, I almost could hear my father talking and see him working his Georgia-peach rocker front to back while puffing Prince Albert smoke rings into the air. Sometimes Dad would lift an imaginary gun to his cheek like he was shooting ducks landing right in front of us on the lawn.
“Pick one out and shoot below him, boys, and then pick another and shoot above him when he flares. No hens, only drakes. Let the girls go.”
It was a time when nothing mattered to us boys except cupped-wing mallards hovering over the decoys. When my brothers and I waited for creamsicle sunrises to melt over the horizon, pink and purple dissolving into dawn as the blue of night gave way to the gold of day. When wind gusts pushed the cattails sideways, making them murmur like seashells, while waves licked the shoreline and a tall faint moon smudged the morning sky. Soon followed the ducks headed for fields of corn and wheat, their voices stoking our excitement as shooting time neared and Dad let us load our guns.
It was good to be home.
Awakening to ominous skies and the rattle of the percolator that had served as an alarm clock since I was a boy, I felt again the tingle of excitement as I dressed in the dark for my first duck hunt in over a decade. Outside the window a row of oaks swayed in the wind, their brittle leaves torn from branches and tumbling wildly across the driveway like tattered bits of brown cloth. Edsel poured me a thick cup of coffee, which was followed by an even thicker bowl of oatmeal and a plateful of buttered toast. Then he bowed his head, folded his hands and waited for me to join him before we spoke grace, the same one we’d shared as boys at our father’s breakfast table before every duck hunt.
“God is great and God is good, and we thank him for this food. Amen.” It was the first prayer that had left my lips since I’d left home.
Slipping Lazarus a piece of toast, Edsel pushed a jar of jam toward me. “Blueberries?” he asked, smiling.

The ducks came with the rain, a downpour that drenched the marsh and bounced off the water’s surface like shot. First a flock of blue-winged teal dipped and tipped, flashed past, and were good and gone before we watched them disappear in the gray haze, their speed more than a match for both of us. We’d have missed seeing them altogether if it hadn’t been for the dog’s whine.
“Good boy, Laz,” Edsel said, arranging his gun to ready. “We’ll get the next ones.”
The next flock came downwind like bandits, and both of us tensed until we saw the telltale black-and-white wing flutter of mergansers. Quick to land, they rode the waves like cowboys into the decoys, bouncing and bucking and diving beneath the froth, appearing and disappearing as if starring in some magic rodeo show. Although legal to shoot, mergansers weren’t for the table—a lesson we’d been taught the hard way when Dad made us clean and eat a couple of fish ducks we’d shot in the river behind the house. Wasting nature wasn’t an option in our family.
“Sawbills,” Edsel whispered. “Guess a few live decoys won’t hurt.”
Ten minutes later a knot of bluebills spotted the spread and swooshed low through the rain, circling wide with the wind before turning and twisting, dropping on us like a small tornado, feet reaching for water when we rose to fire. Blinking rain from my eyes, I missed twice, tearing up whitecaps yards behind the birds. Edsel dropped two drakes stone dead. The snick-snick of his pumpgun sounded like laughter to me, but he never said a word.
By the time Laz stutter-stepped to the shoreline, the ducks had floated 15 yards deeper into the bay, sucked out by the undertow. The Lab plunged in, discarding his limp like he’d been touched by a faith healer and beelining to the birds like an otter. Minutes later the ducks lay white bellies up at our feet.
“I’ll be damned,” I said.
“I told you he could sing,” Edsel said over his shoulder as he stooped to collect his empty hulls.
As the rain continued, Edsel took ducks easily, adding a pair of mallards and a canvasback to the bluebills, while I struggled to hit a single bird. One of his shots—an over-the-back towering hit on a lone greenhead that had caught us unawares—even amazed him. With that shot, he put down his gun and began coaching me, reminding me like Dad used to about lead and follow-through and shooting below the landers and above the jumpers. Surprised by the ducks’ speed and rusty as old nails, I knew it had been too long since I’d hunted when I emptied my gun and barely scratched down a redhead, which Lazarus had to dive below the surface to retrieve.
By midmorning the wind had begun to broom the sky of clouds, and soon the sun was glinting off the rocks on the opposite shoreline. Edsel and I talked quietly together, two brothers sharing stories of two boys who’d glimpsed fall sunrises together while fidgeting and holding tight to single-barrel shotguns as flocks of ducks wandered beneath a canopy of stars. We laughed at Grandpa’s scorn for July and August for making the wait for hunting season so long. We recalled the ring around a soft moon that made us ponder the probability of rain, and the high white moons that scattered light over the bay and illuminated a silvery path across the dark water to our blinds. The decoys and dogs and Dad and we boys piled in the boat, anticipating the day’s hunt like children rushing downstairs Christmas morning. Wind and waves and muttering cattails, smells of muck and outboard exhaust mingling together, and the oozing, muddy suck of the marsh on our boots as we set our small spreads. Later the gunfire and the misses and the hits—the teasing and the gratitude for a chance to spend another day together chasing ducks.
 Wandering these memories once more, I recognized the rituals I’d left behind, feeling again the rhythm of the marsh, the ebb and flow of something greater than me but part of me nevertheless. I didn’t feel sorry for Edsel anymore; I felt sorry for myself.
At noon my last opportunity veered toward the spread: high and swift, a trio racing out of the sun and tracing the line of decoys, wings paused and dipping side to side like teeter-totters. I didn’t see the birds until Edsel whistled. Standing beside Lazarus at the edge of the water with a burlap sack to gather decoys, he froze. In the hush before the shot the ducks flared, and I swung on a head that glistened green, a living jewel in the midday sun, firing above the rising duck and dropping him cleanly. Swinging toward the other two, I recognized their muted brown feathers and declined, easing off the trigger and lowering my gun.
 “Let the girls go,” I whispered to myself, knowing then I’d already let go of much more than hens. Watching Lazarus swim toward the drake that blustery November day, I mourned what I’d abandoned and vowed never to miss another duck season.
“Good choice, Eddie” my brother said, stretching to take the greenhead from his dog’s mouth.

“Letting go” some years ago, Ted Jennings lives and hunts ducks in Michigan with his aging shorthair and Lab, whose graying muzzles resemble his own. Older and wiser, he admits to wearing Barbour, Orvis and Filson and to shooting a side-by-side except when it rains.