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short stories

mexican journal

romantics



"pap" (clyde ludington)
detail of portrait by the author

Quail Hunting

Jake Bartmess was out quail hunting on the Little Muskingum, back when the country was all wild and covered with deep forest. As Jake came down through the woods toward the river, he looked up in the sycamore there and saw six quail sitting on a limb, all in a row, where the tree leaned out over the water.

Now the old muzzle-loading rifle he carried was good for only one shot. Jake studied it from this way and that, and came upon a plan. Very carefully he got up under that limb and aimed upwards, and when he fired, that limb split right open so all six quail dropped in and had their legs caught.

But the limb was still too high to be reached, so how was Jake to get them down?

At this point Jake didn't have to study much, he just reloaded and shot the limb off the tree. But of course it fell right in the river with a great splash.

Jake was wearing his old high-top leather boots, so he quickly waded out to keep his limb full of quail from being swept away. But those boots are wide at the top, and after he dragged the limb up on shore, and climbed back up the bank, he took off his boots to pour out the water. And what did he find? Each boot was full of fish right to the brim!

Context & Inspiration

To 1979

My Papaw was a country storyteller in the tradition of the western Appalachians, which still had a bit of frontier feeling when he was a young man. Even in the 'teens and early 20's no one had cars and the hills were dark and wild. I grew up listening to his ghost stories and Jake Bartmess stories, and as soon as I learned the rudiments of writing I was putting together my own storybooks.

My mom was an English teacher who loved literature, and she would read to me out loud, engaging me in the books she was studying. I did a huge amount of writing from early childhood on, but until I entered engineering school the vast majority of my writing was humor: satire and whimsy, most of it adolescent in the extreme. I was the cartoonist for the high school newspaper and the founder of a "secret society", code name Sigma Pi Chi, who controlled both the paper and the yearbook. Together we collaboratively wrote a prominent column incorporating a lot of incomprehensible inside jokes. With all our "influence", we were still social outsiders in the school, and we wanted to get back at the popular kids.

 She Disappeared

When I was a young man up on Eddy's Ridge, you had to walk a long ways to find entertainment of a night. And most people were a little leery of the dark.

I'd gone to Nob Church one evening and was returning in the dark with Ray Bauerbach and Ernie Schmelzenbaugh, out between the church and Eddy Cemetary. We were coming along the road past Bill Snyder's place and came upon a patch of mud in the road, so we left the road to pass through Snyder's yard.

Back then, natural gas was not a marketable commodity. Wherever there was an oil well, farmers used gas for heating and lighting, and many of them had a ten foot pipe in their yards with a gas lamp they would light at night for a yard light. Snyder's had one of those in front of the house and it flooded the yard with light from the road to the front porch.

Now Snyder also had a fence around the front yard, with a front gate on the road that was closed, and a gate on each side, both of which were open that night. Just as I was walking toward the side gate to enter the yard, I saw something, and I started to speak up, then thought better of it. It was something that I couldn't explain, and I had a pretty good idea what the others would say if I told them about it. But it shook me up, that's all I'll say.

All three of us walked across the yard and back onto the road without saying a word. We went on, almost to Eddy Cemetary, silent the whole way. There was a log there by the side of the road. I couldn't keep quiet any longer, and I suggested we take a rest. We were sitting on the log and I asked them if they'd seen anything at Snyder's.

Ernie described exactly what I had seen. As we were about to enter the yard, a woman in a white gown had come out of the road toward the house, passing right through the fence, walking behind the gas lamp so she was lit up bright as day, across our path, and onto the front porch of the house. And there she just disappeared. She didn't open the door, she just vanished, clear as could be in the strong light of that lamp.

There was nothing threatening about what we'd seen, and none of us had been scared, but when we compared observations, all three of us matched completely.

As I said, we had stopped to rest just before the cemetary. Up ahead, the cemetary lay on both sides of the road, and as I recall big oaks that kept the road in shadow. But the way to our home place was down the lane before the cemetary. Ray was so scared at that point that he wouldn't go on. He followed me home to stay the night.