spring turkey

most weekend days the sweetie and i eat our breakfast out. we don't so much go someplace fancy. we just like going. lately we've been spending our sunday breakfasts at a place in a little town about twelve miles from home. i like the drive because it takes us along a wild creek with a fairly impressive waterfall and, on good days, the largest cow i've ever seen. ever in the world. and i grew up seeing plenty of cows. the sweetie likes the drive because any road following a wild creek will be twisty and full of opportunity to drive with sass. and he does.

the breakfast place has a horseshoe counter in the center, with nine or ten of those pedestal spinning stools planted around it. there are tables up front near the big window generally full of families with small children and then there are a few tables along the wall and in back. that's where we sit. over to the side. this is the sort of place where the cook strolls out of the kitchen from time to time to visit with someone hunched over coffee at the counter. it is the sort of place where folks sitting at the counter are free to go behind the counter to get a fork or a new salt shaker. most mornings when we're there a woman who has grandma written all over her will get up off her stool near the coffee pot and pour us coffee when she freshens up her own cup. like my own grandma used to do at keller's and then later at colonel's pancake house.

it is noisy today when we show up, busy and a little bit crowded and the voices of children scrape the air along with the forks and cups. and although we do not know the folks eating there mostly they seem to know each other and there's usually some visiting across the counter, mostly about the weather. about halfway through our meal the children are gone and the voices from the counter, heavier and softer, take over. it is in places like this i notice that no matter how far north i get myself, if i listen to a bunch of old guys sitting around a lunch counter with coffee, i hear the english language the way it came out of the mouths of my own grandparents, with the south in it, low-slung words ragged from cigarettes and pulled loose from all but the edges of the letters we use to mean them.

at some point i am lost in the sound of the voices, have no idea what words they are using, when i hear a man on one side of the counter say to two men across from him that they look like they're readying up for turkey season. now it seems to me a little foolish to be hunting an egg laying animal in spring, but i know next to nothing about the habits of a wild turkey and the folks who do say it's fine. but none of that is what's important. one of the men he's talking to, younger than him by a generation, nods and when asked about the best way to hunt turkeys begins with an explanation, then laughs. "the best way to hunt turkeys," he says, "is to drive up and shoot 'em from your truck."

there is laughter. not raucous or loud but that knowing sort of laughter. and the younger man continues by saying he'd never do that, that he draws out the birds with a crow call. the man who first asked him accuses him more loudly than he should have of hunting from his truck. this is wrong. both the accusation and the act. it is wrong to hunt from a truck because it is lazy. it's not sporting. but i have seen men in trucks stopped on the road with guns resting on rolled down windows. the younger man shakes his head and repeats what he said about the crow call. and then, while i'm stabbing into my bacon and cheddar omelet, he puts his hands up over his nose and mouth and a great screaming crow flaps out of him. a man sitting on the corner of the lunch counter, nearer to us than the other men, says he uses a baby turkey call. i am looking at his back when a sound i have never heard before, but which i am now absolutely sure is the cry of a frightened baby turkey, wails out of him and settles all around us. and this is just breakfast.