Colt walked across the lodge to the stone fireplace in the hush of the pre dawn, with his four bankers watching and the cook in the kitchen doorway holding a spatula, and he looked up at the old mallard mount with its wings spread, and at the carved plaque beneath it. He read it slowly. “Wendell Brantley. World Champion Duck Caller. Stuttgart, Arkansas. Nineteen seventy four.” He turned around. I am Wendell Brantley, eighty two years old, and I sat in the corner with my coffee and the dark wood call around my neck on its leather string. Beside it, the carved initials W.B. had worn smooth with fifty years of my thumb.
In 1974, at the Wings Over the Prairie festival, a twenty nine year old rice dryer operator with a borrowed call entered the world championship in the front row of a crowded gym, and blew a hail call that made the old judges stand up. I took first prize, a trophy the size of a loaf of bread, and a lifetime of free coffee. For thirty five years afterward I dried rice, and every morning of duck season I sat in a blind and called, because it was the only thing that ever made me feel I had a voice.
The lodge owner, a stout gray man named Mr. Pruitt, who had been standing in the doorway in his suspenders, crossed the room and put a hand on my shoulder. “Wendell,” he said, to the room, “has been sitting at the head of this lodge for fifty years, and not one of you has ever asked his name.” The four bankers, in their new camouflage, looked at their boots. The old cook set down his spatula on the stove. “I knew it,” he whispered. “I knew when I saw that call. I heard him in seventy four.”
A mallard mount above a lodge fireplace gave one old rice dryer man the pre dawn hour to bring a young guide back to the honest sound of a duck call.
I gave my terms to the guide when he came back across the floor with his hat in his hands. “Colt, I do not want an apology. I want you to sit in the blind with me this morning, on the stool beside mine, with your own call in your hand, and call. I will not tell you how. I will only listen. Then I would like you to find out the names of the people who sit in your lodge, the cook and the dishwasher and the old men in the corner, and use them. They taught the men who taught you.”
The face of Colt worked. “Mr. Brantley, I have called ducks since I was nine,” he said. “I won the junior division in Stuttgart. My granddaddy took me to your seat at the contest when I was a boy.” He ran a hand over his beard. “I told you to eat in the kitchen. The man whose call I used to practice with.” His voice cracked. One of the bankers, a gentleman in new boots, said softly, “Colt, you owe the man a lot more than an apology.” The cook, smiling, brought me a plate of pancakes.
But Colt could not look at the call without wanting to touch it, and in his confusion he reached out and snatched it from the leather string around my neck. He turned and strode for the back door of the lodge, intending, I suppose, to carry it out to the pond and hold it up in the first light as a kind of offering. He had taken a few steps when the cook, an old man, blocked the doorway with his big frame and the spatula held crosswise like a gate. Behind him the four bankers closed in quietly from the other side.
Colt stopped in front of the cook, with the call in his fist, and the old man looked at him without a word. In the silence, a coffee maker burbled. The cook lifted the spatula an inch and pointed it at the call. “Son,” he said, “that is not yours to carry.” Colt looked at the wood, the burned initials, the string. He lifted it, slowly, with both hands, and walked back across the lodge and laid it in my palm. Then he took off his GUIDE hat and put it on the table.
The consequences were fine and pleasant. We went out in the blind at first light, the two of us and the four bankers, and the mallards came into the flooded timber in a rush of wings. I called, once, and Colt called, and the birds turned. The lodge owner hung a new plaque by the door of the kitchen with the names of the cook and every dishwasher who had worked there since 1975. Colt now introduces every hunting party, at breakfast, with a speech about the old man in the corner.
In the name of my wife Maybelle, who passed in 2017, I started the Maybelle Brantley Fund. It pays for duck calling lessons for young people and scholarships for the children of rice farm workers, in Arkansas, Prairie and Monroe counties. In the first year we taught one hundred and eighty children to call, and sent twenty students to college. One was a girl from Stuttgart who won the junior world championship last November, and who brought the trophy to my kitchen table.
In December, I sat on a bench in the gym at the Wings Over the Prairie festival, in the front row, wearing my old call around my neck. On the stage, a nervous young man of twenty nine stood with a borrowed call in his hand. It was Colt. He took a breath, and blew a hail call that rolled across the gym, and the judges rose. I closed my eyes and listened. When I opened them, the cook in the seat beside me, in his Sunday suit, was grinning from ear to ear.
