Junior Ray by John Pritchard

Author:John Pritchard [Pritchard, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Junior Ray, John Pritchard, comedy, Mississippi Delta life, Mississippi, fiction
ISBN: 9781603061223
Publisher: NewSouth Books
Published: 2008-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Peed I’ma lunkin

Peed I’ma lye

Peed I’ma lunkin

Punkin pie!

Issa hissa hucka

Duvva kucka wye

Peed I’ma lunkin

Punkin pie!

We sat there just inside, on the edge of a darkening wood of broadleaf and cypress in the late December afternoon during deer season, he, my father, in the branches of a maple and I, beside him, in the fork of an elm. But he had become lost and far away in the sounds and small events of the forest. He did not carry a gun. I was the hunter then, and it was I who would be smeared with the blood of the buck after the kill, by my uncles and my cousins — or I whose shirt-tail would be sheared, for shooting at and missing the kill. But on that day neither took place. My father and I sat and watched, and I did not shoot, nor did he indicate to me that he wanted me to, even when, at one time, five doe and a spike trotted beneath us, as though he may have felt that silence and beauty, far better than blood or humiliation, would mark me more irrefutably as a man.

Anyway, for the longest time, we still thought he was out over ’cross the levee—later, of course, we knew he wuddn and zeroed in on the area around the silo, but, well, fuk, things take time.

We got two reports of somebody seein’ the “maniac” out at Hawk Lake—which was over on the wet side of the levee on a big piece of land that had the Cut-off on one side of it and the Mississippi River on the other. Why the fuk he’d a’been out there I do not know, but that was the word, so we had to go check it out. By “we” I mean Voyd and me.

Hawk Lake was sump’m. It was surrounded by them big-ass cypresses the niggas call lawdgods, ’cause they say only the “Lawd God” knows how old they are. They were big. And them fukkin woods out there was vast. It was all part of a hunt’n club and still is today, but, back then, the members was local people, and today it’s Meffis people. The owners was from up in Meffis, and one day they come down and kicked out all the local people and sold memberships to all their Meffis buddies for thousands of fukkin dollars, And, I heard, cut down most of the fukkin trees and built a gotdamn big-ass clubhouse. But, back then, it was different. Once’t you got back in nem woods, muthafukka, you was lost in time. And you didn”t need no fukkin clubhouse.

So we go out there. We went to Evansville, hung a right, and cut a trail on the blacktop to Austin where we got up on the levee and rode south, past Grindle Lake, till we got to the place you turn off onto to go down on the other side of the levee into the Hawk Lake woods. It was about ten-thirty in the morning.

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