« A Bad Day | Main | Andreas Katsulas: 1946--2006 »

Crossing the Paddies (A true story)

It was early autumn in the Valley, summer hadn’t quite gone and the wet winter was still a month off. The valley floor was bone dry after a row of 100+ degree days, the dry rice paddies lay covered with the stubble of the rice harvest that had gone to market leaving nothing but their burned remnants in the fields to mark the passing of another year. It was Pheasant season again and my two older cousins, my father and I all set out across the drained rice paddies in “finger 4” formation in search of our game as we had a dozen times before. My cousin Dale and I were on the far right, his brother Gary and my father over towards the left, with about 50 yards distance between the two of us. We hunted in a curved line, each covering our own zone, careful of the sweep of each of weapons as we moved across the field. After a few miles into the walk we crossed a small uneven berm that was covered with star thistle. Star thistle is a hellish weed that grows in thick heavy brush and is as close to a living version of barbed wire as anything ever has been. Its only redeeming feature is the way it sends off a sweet scent in the summer that is a very nice and distinctive aspect of living here in the valley. No matter how it smells, you don’t walk through it; you go around it whenever you can and that’s just what we did.

As we crossed around the berm, Gary and my Dad split up and as a result they momentarily moved out of each other’s field of vision. After he crossed the berm, my cousin then stopped and faced towards Dale and I with his shotgun cradled in his arm when at that exact moment, four large pheasants suddenly flushed out of the berm that was now behind him. Gary quickly wheeled around, took aim and shot towards the pheasants that were by then at the very edge of his range.

Only he didn’t hit the pheasants, he hit my Dad.

My Dad was facing away from Gary and the edge of the scatter caught him in the shoulder, upper right arm and lower neck. The force of the shot knocked him off his feet, where his weapon discharged into the ground. In the area where he had once been standing, a cloud of goose down now filled the air.

I didn’t see any of it; I heard the shot, thought nothing of it and continued moving forward watching my zone. Then I heard Dale, my other cousin, who was watching my towards my left call out “ Oh God, Gary shot your dad!” Well, that got my attention and I turned in their direction to see the cloud of goose down where I had to assume my Dad had once been.

Dale and I took off running towards Gary and the cloud of goose down at the tail end of the berm, which was blocking any view of my now wounded Dad. Gary, being the closest to the scene arrived at my Dad first. He stopped for a moment and then stepped slowly backwards and took off like a shot running in the opposite direction, passing Dale and I as we ran towards where my Dad was now laying. Now Dale and I didn’t know what to expect. The look on Gary’s face as he passed us was one of pure fear and we feared for the worse.

We came over the berm and there was my Dad. There he was, on his knees, shot wounded with the pellets having torn into his vest and jacket all the way down to the skin, his hair and neck matted from the blood which was now also covered incongruously with goose down. The scene was accompanied with a sound that anyone who’s grown up in a Navy family would know, a stream of deep invectives and cursewords that could strip rust from steel, and they were all aimed directly at my cousin who was now running quite literally for his life in the other direction from my wounded father. You see, my father wasn’t just sitting there tending his wounds but was methodically trying to reload his shotgun all while calling down the “Gods of thunder” on poor cousin Gary with his bellowing out as loud as can be:

You stupid a**hole, you G*dDamned F**king idiot, you get you Candya** back here and get shot like a man, where do you think you are running to?, I got the G-Dammed keys to the truck you Stupid Sh*t! Don’t make me come after you, GET BACK HERE NOW…!

It went on like this for 20 minutes, without him stopping once to catch his breath.

He was standing there in the fading daylight, covered with bits of jacket, feathers and blood, shaking his fist on one side and holding his shotgun on the other and he looked generally awful, but I knew when I heard him cussing at the top of his lungs that he was fine. Dale and I checked him out and found that for all the blood, it was just surface level wounds and no real deep damage was done, it looked far worse than it was. We both then sat down on the star thistle berm and watched and laughed ourselves horse as my Dad continued his verbal rant against the poor aim and bad field judgment of my still fast running cousin. We laughed at my Dads rants and we were relieved that it was the very definition of a near miss instead of what we at first feared was a direct hit. The old man it seemed, would live another day.

After awhile, we all started walking back to the truck, Dale and I holding our sides in stifled laughter, while my dad continued to rant under his breath at his nephew Gary and his marksmanship. Every other step or so we would hear something that sounded like the words “G*ddamned”, “Stupid" or “ Jackass” followed by low guttural growls from the man who wounded but clearly not defeated,who was always known by everyone as ‘the old man” no matter his actual age or their relationship.

The walk back did the old man some good because when we finally arrived at the truck, he was calmed down enough to hand me his shotgun and to go off and talk to Gary, man to man. Gary was actually pretty frightened that he may have in fact seriously hurt my dad, and felt pretty bad about it. My dad could see that Gary was upset and brought himself back to the reality of the moment by consoling with Gary on the back bumper of the truck. There was no anger heard over the whispers that Dale and I caught between Gary and my dad at the far end of the truck. In the end, all was forgiven and as men often do, they went on about their business with nothing but a firm handshake and the forgiveness that comes from a nod of understanding cementing the fact that no real harm had been done and no ill will was felt.

It was an accident, no more, no less.

The ride home was very quiet with the exception of my Dad occasionally taking a moment to calmly lecture his young nephew for what had happened. Well, it was quiet, until Dale and I broke up laughing at poor Gary, who having just shot a man now found himself the point of endless parental lecturing from his former target. It was a long ride home for Gary, and in the end I think he would have preferred being the one who was shot.

After we got home, we all agreed that it was best to never discuss this event again, and we never did.

To this day, neither my mom nor my aunt knows anything about this event.

Posted @ February 14, 2006 05:16 PM | Current Affairs

Posted by: jreid at February 19, 2006 06:18 PM

Posted by: Bonnie at February 19, 2006 07:08 PM