New Wilderness
Dad called. “Let’s go up to the home place. Bag some squirrels.”
The home place is only that. A place. A weedy knoll on a hillock, about a mile down two overgrown ruts from State Highway 85. Dad was raised here while his father sharecropped for old man Minter. The family lived in a rickety, worn wood house that slouched heavily on its field-stone foundation beneath two spreading oaks. The oaks are still there. The house seems to have dissolved. Piece by piece stolen away by neighbors in search of fix-it wood or nature in search of rot. Even the field stones are gone, stickery weeds and stunted young oaks starved for sunlight taking their place.
We parked under the oaks and followed a deer trail down through the pines toward a stand of old, tall hardwoods dad called the “woodlot.” It was Dad’s favorite place to hunt squirrels. Had been for almost 70 years, wars and school and stints in distant cities notwithstanding.
“We hunted squirrel a lot when I was a boy,” he said as we walked. “Papa didn’t like it though. Preferred we shot rabbit. More meat on a rabbit. We’d find’em in the bed and try to shoot their noses off. Squirrels were more fun. Smarter. Harder to hit. Harder to kill. You had to shoot straight. You only got three cartridges for a yard egg. You waste ’em and you could get a whipping. Meat hunting and Papa’s belt led you to shoot straight. Real straight.”
Sharecropping meant that old man Minter got two-thirds of whatever cotton Dad’s dad grew. Some years they shared some corn as well. The other third was given over to various other holders of debt who would then extend just enough new debt to get the family through the winter so they could start all over again.
My dad remembers those years as good ones. I couldn’t imagine it any other way myself. Life out here, in this game rich wilderness, had to have been good, farming aside, of course. Maybe better than good. I said so.
Dad smiled. “Wasn’t a wilderness then. This was a community. This pine thicket was the close-in field. The far field was on the other side of Sweetwater Creek. The woodlot was the only real forest for miles. Back then this was all cotton fields and houses in every direction. Twenty or thirty families.
“The Minters lived down on what’s now 85. Big three-story house. Handsome place. Over across the highway, which in those days was the farm road we drove in on, lived the Dukes. I took a shine early on to Eunice Dukes and her daddy never trusted me much after that. Some folks whose name I forget lived down in the hollow there and Lisbon Baptist Church was up on the other side of the hill. I remember when it burned.
“Over where the road crosses the creek, Sam Nations—your grandma got him confused with damn nations—had a white-washed two-story house. Heard my first radio program there. Jack Dempsey fight. Battery operated radio. Delcos, they were. I helped string the antenna.
“Lots of folks here then. You stand up here in the field and you heard kids playing, mules bellowing, folks shouting across the field.”
It was hard to believe. From the homeplace back to Fayetteville there is hardly a house. Only rolling woodlands punctuated by a few pastures. Now the land is subdivided by deer hunting clubs instead of cotton fields.
“We lived here until ‘24. That’s when the boll weevil moved in and we moved out. Mother nature, she just took the whole place back over. Gave it up to the critters. More game here now than we ever saw.”
“Lots of squirrels,” I said.
“That ain’t the start of it. Deer. And turkey. Folks had long since killed them all when I was a kid. Deer are pests now. Back then, a deer would have been a godsend. Lord what your grandma would have given for a deer. Or a turkey. Best of all a turkey.” Dad laughed. “Of course, we’d never seen a turkey, so if one came up it woulda probably scared us to death. No, squirrel and rabbit were pretty much the menu.”
We shot four squirrels that day. Enough for dumplings. Dad got three with his old Stevens, as he sat at the base of a tall sweetgum. He mumbled once about what a pretty girl Eunice Dukes was. I couldn’t help but think it must have been the best of both worlds, being my dad there under that tree, dead in the middle of his two favorite places: the old community and the new wilderness.