kidding,” I said, unconvinced.
“Lucky McDaniel also taught John Wayne to shoot.”
But the time Charlie took me bird hunting, it was different. With my first shot, a dove fell out of the sky like a stone.
“Well done!” Charlie yelled. “See, what did I tell you? You didn’t aim, right? You just shot at it.”
Bella found the dove in the cornfield and brought it to Charlie.
“A clean shot,” Charlie yelled again.
The dead dove was a mourning dove and monogamous, and I vowed then never again to shoot and kill anything.
Clay pigeon targets are made from a mixture of pitch and pulverized limestone rock and shaped like an upside-down soup dish. They are designed to both be tossed from traps at high speeds and break easily when hit by pellets from a shotgun.
The twins, Sam and Pete, were identical except for a small mole over Pete’s right eyebrow. When they were babies, I painted one of Pete’s fingernails bright red so that I could tell them apart easily. Now that they were nine years old, I could no longer do that. The twins were inseparable, private, smart, cute, and a little creepy.
Every weekday morning at 7:45, I drove them to the end of the driveway so that they could catch the school bus, and every afternoon at 4:10, I would drive down again and pick them up.
“How was school?” I asked.
“Fine,” they answered together.
“What did you learn today?” I persevered.
“That the South won the Civil War.” They both laughed. The sound of their laughter more like a cackle.
“That’s not funny,” I said.
Silence.
The South, the South. I hated the South. I hated the hypocrisy, the phony gentile manners, the accent, the racism. In all the years—ten—that I had lived in Virginia, I had not met a single black person. The only black persons I knew to speak to—“hi there,” “how’re you doing,” and “thanks”—were the baggers in the supermarket, the boy who pumped gas into the truck, a girl at a roadside stand who, in summer, sold peaches, and the woman who came to the house once a week to clean and whose name was Alice Washington.
Washington—for God’s sake!
I am from New England originally, a small town in Massachusetts, famous for a pond.
I wondered where Cliff was from.
“It’s a cuckoo’s, sir—I know all about it; except where he was born, and who were his parents, and how he got his money at first,” is how Nelly, the housekeeper in Wuthering Heights, describes Heathcliff.*****
***** Brontë, Wuthering Heights, p. 35.
A solitary bird known as a brood parasite, the cuckoo lays its eggs in another bird’s nest, then leaves. When the baby cuckoo hatches—the cuckoo egg usually hatches first—he pushes all the other birds or eggs, as the case may be, out of the nest and takes all the food for himself from his surrogate parents.
I don’t remember where I read this story. The story takes place during the Renaissance, in Florence. It seems that a certain countess, who lived in a beautiful palazzo, had her jewels stolen. Every day during one hot summer—the windows of the palazzo all left open—another ring, another bracelet and necklace, went missing from her dressing table in her bedroom. She accused her maid. The maid denied any knowledge of the missing jewels, but the maid was fired. More servants were fired. No one admitted to stealing the countess’s jewels, and the countess never got any satisfaction before she died. But many, many years later, while some workmen were redoing the facade of the palazzo, hidden high up in the eaves, they came across a nest. Guess what they found inside it?
Charlie got to know Cliff when he began taking flying lessons that summer. The airport, as the crow flies, was only a few miles from the farm, and Charlie maintained that his whole entire life his ambition was to fly.
“Really?” I was skeptical.
“I hate to fly,” I also said.
Charlie just laughed.
“Wait and see,” he said. “Once I get my pilot’s license, I’ll take you to Rehoboth Beach.”
Rehoboth Beach is a popular vacation destination. The wooden boardwalk is a mile long and lined with shops, restaurants, and attractions. Located near the boardwalk, the Rehoboth Beach Bandstand holds open-air concerts during the summer season.
Cliff owned a Cessna 172 Skyhawk. The Cessna 172 Skyhawk is a four-seat, single-engine, high-wing, fixed-wing aircraft.
“It’s a safe plane,” Charlie reported. “The Skyhawk has the best accident rate in private aviation.”
After his flying lessons, Charlie started going up with Cliff. Additional instruction, I suppose. They didn’t go far; they just flew around the county. One time they nearly ran out of gas as they were circling our farm—I was out riding and the plane was flying so low that my horse shied. They made it back to the airport just in time.
“You could have gotten me killed,” I told Charlie when he got home.
“You’re lucky we didn’t get killed,” Charlie answered.
One sock—buy him.
Two socks—try him.
Three socks—doubt him.
Four socks—do without him.
Four white feet and a white nose—knock him in the head and feed him to the crows.
The old adage horsemen like to spout about horses’ markings is dead wrong.
My nine-year-old chestnut mare, Esmeralda, Esmé for short, had four white stockings and a star on her forehead and was a sweetheart. I had had her for four years and she had calmed down a lot since we bought her. She had comfortable gaits and she could jump like “a toad in a thunderstorm”—who said that? Mark Twain? She was usually pretty calm and the only thing that really bothered her was a loud noise—a car door slamming or a gunshot. We were riding along the road one day when a truck went by and the driver blew his air horn at us, and, bucking, Esmé bolted and I nearly got thrown.
I read the part in Wuthering Heights where it is Nelly, the housekeeper, and not Catherine who tries to dispel Heathcliff’s black mood by telling him: “You’re fit for a prince in disguise. Who knows, but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen.”******
The movie version with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, directed by William Wyler, is, in fact, quite different from the novel.
****** Brontë, Wuthering Heights, p. 58.
One afternoon when the weather—heavy rain and predicted thunderstorms—kept them from
