The Squirrel Hunters

When I was three or four my father brought a wooden shotgun home from the state fair and gave it to me as a gift. This wasn’t a pop gun. It was a carving of a Winchester Model 12 scaled to fit an elementary schooler, complete with a working fore end that I could rack just like a real shotgun. I loved that thing. One sunny fall afternoon, while visiting my great-grandmother’s rural property in Bienville Parish my grandfather took me hunting. We walked together through the back pasture and crossed the fence then took a seat under a pine tree near where the sandy black soil and pine trees turned to swampy mud in a hardwood bottom. He carried a Belgium made Browning Auto 5 that my grandmother bought for him sometime in the 1950s and I proudly carried that wooden model twelve. My grandfather sat stone still and scanned the trees and I tried and failed to do the same.

Eventually he saw a gray squirrel leaving it’s nest for an evening feed. My grandfather pointed it out to me and I aimed my wooden model twelve while he aimed his Browning and when I said “BANG” he pulled the trigger and that Belgium Browning barked and when that squirrel fell out of the tree I was as proud as a peacock, convinced that I’d killed it. That moment is one of my earliest memories. It had to be October, 82 or 83. I know it was October because that’s when the Louisiana State Fair is held. October was my birth month. October was squirrel season. October was and is my favorite month of the year.

That afternoon was my first squirrel hunt but it wouldn’t be my last. Outside of the deep South, squirrel hunting is often sneered at as something for poor rednecks. Even Texan's look down on the sport. Duck, turkey and hog hunting is serious business in the Lone Star State. Dove and deer are almost a religion but to Texans squirrel’s are tree rats, not worth the shell. But in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi, especially when I was a kid, the opening weekend of squirrel season was a holiday for a lot of families, including mine.

Each year on the first weekend of October my dad would let me and later my brother skip school on Friday so we could drive to Bienville Parish. We’d camp in the back pasture under a large hardwood we called “The Bo Bo Tree” for reasons I never learned. Sometimes my dad’s Army buddies came. Sometimes his brothers and my cousins. Sometimes my Pawpaw. Friday night we’d build a campfire and eat hotdogs and dad would tell scary stories about panthers and nights when the devil walks the highways looking for children to steal. We’d wake before daylight, pair up, and head to the woods for sunrise. My dad carried a double barrel and later a Japanese made Browning Auto 5. I carried a BB gun, and then an unloaded Sears and Roebuck .410 and later the same gun in .20 gauge. We hunted a swampy hardwood thicket they called “The Devil’s Den” and I was always nervous in the dark before the sun came up, afraid of what devil might be lurking there.

We'd hunt Saturday morning until ten or eleven, break for lunch and a nap, then hunt the afternoon until the sun went down. My brother and my cousins rarely made the second hunt. By then they’d retreated to our Mimi’s nearby house and the television but I went knowing full well I’d be exhausted and my feet would hurt by the end of the day. Every year it seemed a cold front blew through on Saturday evening. Saturday night was rainy. Sunday morning was freezing cold when we hunted again in the morning. At noon we’d clean what we’d shot, most of which got given away to relatives or neighbors, then we’d break camp and head home.

Aside from Christmas it was the highlight of my year. I lived my life, or at least the first nine weeks of the school year, for the first weekend of October. My grades and behavior were always the best in August and September because I knew if I fucked up before October first I couldn’t go hunting and that was unimaginable to me. I loved sitting by the fire. I loved playing in the dirt. I love tromping through the woods struggling to keep an eye on where I was stepping to avoid rattlesnakes and copperheads while scanning the trees for cat squirrels and big red fox squirrels. I loved eating bologna and hot dogs and drinking RC cola. I loved peeing on trees. I loved shooting shotguns. I was a trooper. I didn’t mind the cold and the dirt and the bugs and the blood and the recoil.

Through elementary and most of middle school the first weekend of October was a religion for me.

But the world never stays still and things always change. Dad got promoted and had to work more. My Mimi died and the Bienville Parish property sat empty. Dad went to war. Dad got transferred to the State Headquarters in New Orleans and Bienville was six hours away instead of one and we made the trip less and less often. I joined the Army. My Pawpaw got sick. My brother joined the Army. I went to war and got hurt. My Pawpaw died. My brother went to war. He got married and went to work. I went to college but it didn’t last. I dropped out and went to work, then I got married. The first weekend of October became a memory. It became just a date on the calendar. I’d think about it fondly when the first fall cold front made the air crisp and cool but we were too often too busy to make the trip.

Then dad got sick.

My dad was a big man, in spirit and in stature. He stood four inches taller than me and outweighed me by at least a hundred pounds. A Colonel in the Louisiana National Guard, he was something of a regional legend. His troops, some of them my buddies, worshiped him. As Kris Kristofferson said “he could light up a room with just a smile, and I was proud as hell to be his kid.” He and my Granny taught me to love country music and I will always remember him playing Kris Kristofferson far too loud while he cooked Sunday dinner. I loved riding in the front seat of his truck to and from those hunting trips with the windows down listening to KWKH and KRMD playing Hank Williams Jr and George Strait. We invented a game where you had to guess the song before the singer sang and I later introduced it into F Quad at Schofield Barracks as a drinking game that kept us wasted most weekends. To the outside world my dad was a welcome presence, a jokester and a story teller and if I have any talent for telling a tale he’s part of the reason. People loved him.

But living under the shadow of a man like that isn’t easy and fathers and sons are fathers and sons and like most men my father was often different at home than he was in the outside world, never abusive, but too rarely the smiling, laughing, jokester others often saw. For a long while, for far, far too long, the only time I felt like I got along with Gary Hammett was while we were hunting in the fall woods. Through everything, all the chaos of puberty, high school rebellion, the Army, the war, my injuries, the first weekend of October and good country music were something dad and I shared and I missed those hunting trips as they became fewer and further between. I think dad did too.

He retreated to those woods in Bienville Parish in times of crisis. I did too. The first weekend in October and that place in Bienville Parish, it was a sanctuary, a place where I...where we could go when there was nowhere else. A place where I could go that was nothing but positive memories, where I felt grounded and alive and close to the people I loved.

There’s a line about father and son fishing trips in The Drive By Trucker’s “TVA” where Jason Isbell sings, “I got a little older I wouldn’t and now daddy can’t” and it guts me every time I hear it. I want to cry now thinking about it because I eventually fell into that same trap. I started my career just as dad ended his. I married and moved to New Orleans just as he retired. I had a new house and a new job and a new wife and I didn’t mean to blow him off but I was busy and it was hard for a rookie to get the time off. He would have gone to Bienville Parish on the first weekend of October if I asked. Sometimes he went without me. I regret that almost as much as I regret my behavior when he got sick.

For years my dad sat with me in the hospital and held my hand through every surgery but when it was his turn I couldn’t. I blamed the distance and the new job but the truth was I couldn’t watch him hurt and dying. My dad was a big, strong, man and I feared and loved him all my life then one day he was shrunken and frail and dying and I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t help him because I was scared. Because I knew how bad those fucking needles and those fucking tubes and those fucking tests and that fucking medicine hurt and I couldn’t… So in the most cowardly moment of my life I left that burden to my mother and my brother.

Dad understood though. Same as I understood in the end, when he decided he couldn’t go on any more with the doctors and the needles and decided to end his treatment. There were people who got mad at him for his decision. There were folks who didn’t understand. But I did, because I’d been there and I knew how much it hurt. So I told him I loved him and I told him to do what he had to do. I told him I’d be okay. And mostly I was.

Dad died in late September. He was 54 years old and had just started to enjoy his retirement. His second grandchild was born the day after he passed. We buried him in Shreveport on the first weekend of October.

I don’t feel like I mourn like most people. I've always, almost instinctively, understood that death was inevitable. I can choke back the tears and keep a stiff upper lip. I don’t think I cried until I had to read dad's eulogy standing in front of a church full of people, staring down at my brother and cousins as they sobbed. Even then I managed to mostly keep it in check. I cried once, alone. I can give you directions to his tombstone, just a few plots over from where Granny and Pawpaw are buried in Shreveport. I haven’t seen it since Granny passed. I won’t visit it. I don’t care much for graves because all they hold are bones. Instead I think about dad when a good country song plays. I think of him on the first week of October. Instead I retreat to Bienville Parish.

In fact that's exactly what I did the day after dad's funeral, driving down with my brother from Shreveport. I didn’t have a hunting license. We didn’t bring a shotgun, or a hunting vest or boots, all I had was my dad’s old Browning Hi-Power pistol, a floor board full of coke cans and a box of 9mm so my brother and I shot cans off of fence posts until the ammunition ran out, then we picked up our brass and drove home and I went back to work.

There was something about that warm early October afternoon. Something comforting in the smell of black dirt, sassafras and gun smoke. On the drive home I made a decision and a promise to myself. The next year I drove back to Bienville Parish on the first weekend of October and on a cool Saturday morning I used the Japanese Browning Auto five that my dad left me to shoot a gray squirrel out of a hardwood tree in “the devil’s den.” Later I cleaned it and made a casserole that my new wife refused to eat, but that’s okay, mama never ate squirrel either. The dog and I finished it. I made the drive again in November and on a cool morning shot a small buck with an old lever action rifle. My brother came up that trip and helped me clean him. My wife ate the venison.

It was a five hour drive from my new home in Austin to Bienville Parish and I wouldn’t make the trip every year, but I tried as often as I could. “The Bo Bo Tree” had fallen by then. The old house was empty and rotting. The pastures over grown. I camped in the front yard and hunted the spot where the pines sloped into the hardwood bottom where my Pawpaw and I killed that first gray squirrel. When life got hard, when I needed to reset or grieve, when I needed to remember I retreated to Bienville Parish. I ran back to the one place and time where everything was okay. I reverted to the first weekend in October.

In late summer 2015 my wife and I saw The Turnpike Troubadours live in the Moody Theater in downtown Austin. We paid for the good box seats because she was seven months pregnant with our first child, what would have been my father’s fourth grandchild. They opened the show, like they open most shows now, with “The Bird Hunters.” At the time it was the new single off their yet unreleased third album and I’d never heard it before but within a few bars it became my new favorite song. It’s a song about a man facing heartbreak who retreats to the winter woods. It’s a song about healing heartbreak on a cold morning with a good friend and a Browning Auto 5. It's a song that felt like it was pulled from my very soul. It took me back to Bienville Parish. It took me back to the first weekend in October. It sounded like my father’s voice. It reminded me of my Pawpaw. It reminded me of my brother. It reminded me of Chuck. It made me sad but in a special, secret, happy way that I’m not sure my wife understands or that I can explain.

I don’t think I grieve like other people. I never visited my dad’s grave. I can go weeks now without thinking of him, but sometimes, when I hear a good song, I tear up a little thinking how much he would like it. I ache in my heart wanting to call and share a good country song with him. I would have killed every one in that crowd to be able to see my dad and tell him, “hey you gotta hear this song ‘The Bird Hunters.’” He would’ve fucking loved it.

The week Turnpike Troubadours new album released our OBGYN predicted our due date would be October 26, my birthday. I asked twice if it was okay to make the trip back home for the first weekend of October and twice she told me it would be fine. The baby wasn’t due for another three weeks. So on the first weekend of October 2015 I loaded up the truck and I put that new Turnpike CD in the stereo and “The Bird Hunters” was the soundtrack as I drove the back roads across East Texas to Desoto Parish Louisiana for the opening day of squirrel season. My brother was bringing his daughters up, so instead of roughing it in Bienville Parish we decided to visit my Memaw and hunt her new husband’s property. We camped with the kids, fished a stock pond and hunted a hardwood bottom, then had dinner with my mom, Memaw and Mister Billy. My mother and my brother had to leave early Sunday so the kids wouldn’t miss Mass so I skipped the Sunday morning hunt, packed my things, and called home.

My wife said “Drive fast.”

So I did.

I tore ass across East Texas as fast as a Japanese V8 could go stopping only for a restroom and Whataburger to go. All the while that Turnpike album and “The Bird Hunters” was playing on the stereo. It’s five hours between Grand Cane, Louisiana and Cedar Park, Texas but I made it in four and a half. I was home well before dark with plenty of time to unload the truck, take a shower and even grab a quick nap. We didn’t leave for the hospital until midnight. It was around one a.m. the next morning, October 6, when my child was born. They came into the world seven years and two days after we buried my daddy, born in the first week of October.

I don’t think I grieve like other people. I only cried once when my dad died but all I could think about that morning when I called my family to tell them the news is how much he would’ve loved to have gotten that phone call and how much it hurt that he never would. My dad would've loved my kid.

They let you walk out of a hospital with a human being. They just give it to you and say good luck. One minute you’re surrounded by doctors and nurses and the next you’re standing in the parking lot alone with a tired wife, a new baby, and a car seat you’re not even sure yet how to use. I wasn’t raised with babies. I’d barely held one. I’d hardly changed a diaper and suddenly not only did I have a child of my own but I, Jeremy Hammett, dirtbag, redneck, certified knucklehead, was the primary care giver. We took them home and swaddled them and I held them on my chest until they fell asleep. I played that new Turnpike album on my phone to help soothe them, not “The Bird Hunters” but “Bossier City” because I’m from Shreveport and I thought the chorus “what ma’am don’t know won’t hurt her” was funny.

We moved home that summer, back to New Orleans, and the next year we once again made the five hour drive to Memaw and Mister Billy’s property in Desoto Parish. I camped out on the property with my brother, my cousin, and their kids while my wife and one year old slept at Memaw’s house in town. My niece and I shot a limit of squirrels Saturday morning with my dad’s old Browning. I played “The Bird Hunters” as we drove to Memaw’s for supper. The next week my kid turned one and we had their birthday party at “The Fly” between Audubon Zoo and the Mississippi River. Completely unrelated to us, the Zulu Brass Band played a show. That week I cooked the squirrels I’d shot in a Cajun sauce piquante. My kid ate it. My wife still wouldn’t. Before we left Louisiana for Massachusetts I bought my kid and I both lifetime hunting and fishing licenses. I did so they could always go home and go hunting. I did it so they could always retreat to Bienville Parish if they had to. I did it in honor of my Pawpaw and my dad.

It’s been eight long years now since I’ve hunted in Louisiana. I’ve manage fishing trips but I’ve only been back to Bienville Parish for a single morning. I took my kid on a walk in the woods but we didn’t get to do any hunting. My Mimi’s old house sits empty and slowly crumbling. My dad’s Browning is locked in a case at my mom’s new house where she lives with my new step-father. Squirrel season doesn’t start until the middle of October here in Massachusetts. Not many people hunt them here, which is odd because the hunting is excellent. The squirrel’s here are so fat and lazy that they taste significantly better than the scrawny things back home. Massachusetts squirrels taste so good my wife will eat them. I make a gumbo most years.

Hunting is different here in New England. It’s somehow easier and worse. The seasons are incredibly short and all crammed together, forcing me to decide between squirrel, duck, pheasant, rabbit, or archery deer. Dove hunting is illegal here. There’s plenty of public land near my house and the hunting isn’t bad, but it’s not the same. The woods are crowded with hunters, hikers, and occasionally angry PETA protesters. Even on the weekdays and rainy, cold, hard hunting mornings, it seems like someone is always around, there's always other hunters, there's always people and noise. I can hear the leaf blowers and highway noise from my deer stand. There's traffic no matter where I go. Waking up in my own house and driving to a trail head just isn’t the same as camping under “The Bo Bo Tree.” It’s just not the same without a camp fire, bologna and hot dogs. It feels somehow soulless without family. It feels empty without Bienville Parish.

But I make an effort most years. I don’t hunt so much as take a walk in the woods with a shotgun. I do it to try to keep a tradition alive. I do it so my kid will come out with me, so they can experience the fall woods and get at least a taste of the tradition I loved when I was a child, even if it’s just a cheap facsimile. Even if the best I can do for them is a Temu knock off of the best moments of my childhood. We’ve shot squirrels and a limit of ducks together. They make an afternoon deer hunt at least once a year and helped me clean the six point I shot. They prefer fishing to hunting and I can’t blame them. Hard truth is they prefer video games but they're still willing to humor me, though I can see puberty on the horizon.

It makes me sad when the first cold front of the fall blows through because my kid will never sit under a pine tree with their Pawpaw. They’ll never eat bologna by the campfire or get scared by folk tales about the devil. They won’t be there when their cousin eats too many hotdogs and pukes all over the sleeping bags. By Massachusetts state law they can’t carry a gun into the woods for another four years. By then they’ll be too deep into video games and the opposite (or same) sex to "waste" a Saturday morning in the field. I’ll fight as hard as I can to keep the tradition alive but I will most likely fail. It hurts to know they won’t have Bienville Parish and the first weekend of October. If there’s a consolation it’s that they love The Turnpike Troubadours and wears their ballcap to school most days. Their favorites song is “Gin, Smoke, and Lies” not “The Bird Hunters” but it’s reassuring to know that we share something. It helps to know that one day they’ll be middle aged and they’ll think about riding in the truck with me and listening to one of those songs. They’ll think of something we did that was special and they’ll smile sadly and make a note to try to do the same for their kid.

It hurts to know I can never sit under a tree with my Pawpaw again. It hurts to know I'll never share a new country song with my dad. It hurts to know that I can’t share my kid with their Pawpaw. I’ll never get to see them walk off into the woods together. It hurts to know that Bienville Parish, in fact all of Louisiana outside of New Orleans is just an abstract memory for my kid. Still it comforts me to know that I have these memories.

I don’t grieve like other people. I don’t remember my dad’s birthday and I had to look up the day he died. I don’t visit his grave. But I have his Kris Kristofferson albums on vinyl and I have that Japanese Browning. I still have the moment when September becomes October and the first cold front of fall passes. When the wind turns a little cool and the leaves start to change and the geese begin their long flight South I remember my dad standing in a pasture under an old hardwood tree with a cheap cigar in his mouth and a Japanese Browning Auto 5 on his shoulder. I remember my Pawpaw in quilted camo overalls and a battered gray Stetson. I remember the smell of gun oil, black soil, and sassafras. I remember the bark of that shotgun and the small thud a gray squirrel makes when it falls from the trees. I remember cold night skies and stars and campfires and a place in Bienville Parish that I can always retreat to.

And on every October first since 2015, no matter what I’m doing, I roll down the windows of my truck and I put on “The Bird Hunters” and I play it loud and I smile and I think about all of this. I think “Goddamn I wish I could share this with my old man” and I hope one day when I’m gone my kid will do something similar.