Sweet and Sour Pie: A Wisconsin Boyhood

by Dave Crehore

  into the outlines of geese. Later, turpentine vapor filled the house as he turned each outline into a simplified oil painting of a Canada with a movable head and neck. When he had made thirty of these

  profile decoys, Dad brought home a couple of navy surplus sea bags to carry them in, and got out the goose calls.

  He had bought the calls by mail order from Herter’s, with an

  instruction book and a 78-rpm record of expert calling. During

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  October, we spent a half hour most nights playing the record on the Magnavox and calling along with it. Our rehearsals were loud and repetitive; they sent our beagles into ecstasy and Mom into the

  kitchen.

  Then Dad brought home two goose guns in plain brown

  wrappers, a well-used but sturdy Winchester Model 21 side-by-side for him and a Model 12 pump for me. In late October, we practiced on the skeet field, stepping back thirty yards from the targets. Over and over, I tried the long crossing shots from stations three, four, and five. “Lead ’em the length of your gun,” Dad told me.

  Most goose hunting stories start when the hunters struggle out of bed in the cold, dark hours of early morning, but if you hunted at Horicon in those days you had to get going the night before. The federal government had built goose blinds around the edges of the northern part of the refuge, and they were assigned to hunters on a first-come, first-served basis before dawn each morning. To secure a good blind, you had to get your car into line on a country road near the marsh by one or two in the morning, and that meant leaving

  Manitowoc no later than nine thirty.

  And so, on a Friday night in late November, we hit the road to

  Horicon in our Studebaker station wagon crammed with decoys,

  guns, ammunition, and bags of lunch.

  Nothing much was going on in Valders and Chilton as we passed

  through. Along the east shore of Lake Winnebago, the little towns of Brothertown, Calumetville, and Pipe had gone to bed, and by the

  time we got to Fond du Lac, the Blatz and Old Style signs were

  winking out as the bars closed. Then I fell asleep until Dad pulled into the waiting line of cars at the refuge.

  He hopped out and counted the cars ahead of us.

  “Eight, nine, ten—we’re eleventh in line, I guess that’s pretty

  good for a Saturday morning,” Dad said. “Get some more sleep if

  you can.”

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  But I couldn’t. Up and down the line, drivers were idling their

  engines to warm up their cars. Men and dogs, their breath smoking in the cold, ran errands into the cornfields along the road. One guy had set up an army cot on the shoulder. He was sound asleep with a big Chesapeake Bay retriever curled up under the cot.

  At 4:00 a.m., the line began to move. We drew up to a sort of

  roadside stand where the blinds were assigned.

  “We want blind 56 if it isn’t taken,” Dad said. A friend of his had gotten a goose from blind 56 on Thursday morning.

  “Fifty-six it is,” the warden said. He checked our licenses and

  duck stamps, wrote down our names, and gave us a hand-drawn

  map. And off we went, the Studie bottoming out on the rutted clay.

  After a mile or two of back roads, our headlights jabbed into a

  small, muddy parking lot that served blinds 55, 56, and 57. Following the map, Dad and I lugged our goose gear down a steep hill into the darkness.

  Blind 56 was an open-topped, six-by-six-foot structure of snow

  fence and cornstalks about a quarter mile from the parking lot. Dad walked around with a flashlight to get the lay of the land.

  “Let’s set up the decoys in that picked cornfield just up the hill,”

  he said, shouldering the first bag. He laid the folded decoys on the ground, spaced a few feet apart in a curving, upwind V, and heeled their wooden stakes into the soil. My job was to follow along behind him and attach the decoys to the stakes with carriage bolts and wing nuts.

  Setting up profile decoys is hard work, and it turns into desperate work when dawn sneaks in from the east and threatens to expose

  you. I had the feeling that thousands of beady black Canada goose eyes were watching me as I spun the last few wing nuts and ducked into the blind.

  “OK,” Dad said, “I’ve paced it off, and that big willow over there is about forty yards away. So is the fence and the far edge of the 155

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  decoy spread. We’ll cripple birds any farther away than that, so don’t shoot at anything that is beyond the decoys, the tree, or the fence.”

  “The best part is that we’ve got the place to ourselves,” Dad said.

  Sure enough, blind 55, about two hundred yards north of us, was

  empty, and so was 57, the same distance to the south.

  We took our guns from their cases and loaded them, poured

  coffee into the steel caps of our thermos bottles, and unwrapped a couple of Mom’s bologna and mayonnaise sandwiches. “Might as

  well have some breakfast now,” Dad said, “because they’re going to start moving any minute.”

  And as though they had been waiting for his cue, ten thousand

  Canadas lifted themselves from the marsh with a wild fanfare and began to wheel chaotically on the western horizon. As we watched, the whirling galaxy of geese broke into flocks and subflocks spinning off to all points of the compass.

  “Here comes a string of about twenty right at us,” Dad whispered.

  “They’re climbing to get over the hill, so we’ve gotta call them down into our decoys. I won’t shoot this first time. Let’s start calling and I’ll tell you when to stand up. Remember, nothing over forty yards!”

  Hunkered down in the blind and watching the geese through

  holes in the cornstalks, we began the “hink, honk, hink-honk, honk, hink-honk” duet that Herter’s had assured us would sound like

  dozens of geese.

  Apparently it did. The birds were headed straight for our decoy

  spread, slowing, gliding, dropping lower. Then they were so close that I couldn’t see them through the stalks and slats of the blind.

  “Stop calling!” Dad said, and in the sudden silence I could hear the hiss of wind in the pinions of the geese overhead.

  “Now!” Dad said.

  I stood up and spun around toward the decoys. Dad’s Masonite

  flock and our five-dollar calls had fooled all of the geese in the string.

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  They were dropping in for a landing, talking to each other, their great webbed feet extended.

  Then they saw me. Twenty geese accelerated wildly in all direc-

  tions. I picked a goose headed to my right and swung the Winchester through him. On the skeet field, it would have been a station three high-house shot, and I could usually hit those. I led the goose a gun-length and yanked the shotgun’s trigger.

  The gun barked and bucked and I pumped the action so hard

  that the ejected shell flew completely out of the blind. But I didn’t need a second shot. The goose folded, fell end-over-end to the

  ground, and bounced, stone dead.

  I stood open-mouthed. My ears roared. The goose lay there,

  crumpled among the decoys. Dad was saying something. I couldn’t

  hear him.

  “What?” I shouted.

  “Put your safety back on,” Dad said. “And go pick up your bird.”

  All was well in blind 56. Dad congratulated me on my shooting. I congratulated him on the high quality of his decoys. We admired my goose and polished off some more coffee and bologna sandwiches.

  And then trouble arrived, in the form of two guys who walked

  down the hill to blind 55. They wore ordinary work clothes and

  carried uncased shotguns,
several boxes of shells, and what looked like a bottle in a paper bag. No calls. No decoys.

  Dad hadn’t killed his goose yet, and small groups of Canadas

  were still trading back and forth on the borders of the marsh. But whenever some geese headed our way the men in 55 would scare

  them off by firing shot after shot at impossible distances.

  An hour passed. Three times we called geese almost close

  enough, and three times we were thwarted by the sky busters in

  blind 55. Their supply of ammunition seemed unlimited. Finally,

  after firing at about a dozen geese apiece, they scratched down two.

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  The Horicon goose limit in those days was one goose per hunter per season; that meant the men in 55 were through for the year, but they showed no signs of leaving. “Well,” Dad said, “I’m sick of running a guide service for those buggers. Let’s give it another hour and then pack up.”

  I was half asleep when Dad poked me. “Here comes a little string from the south,” he said, “real low. Don’t call. I’ll try to get one before those guys see them.”

  When the geese were as close as they were going to get, Dad

  stood up and shot a big one going away at forty yards. It died in the air, falling about halfway between blind 55 and us.

  “At last,” Dad said. “Now, do your old father a favor and go get that goose.”

  I squeezed out of the blind and walked toward Dad’s bird. Then

  I saw one of the men from blind 55 heading for it too, at a dead run.

  I sped up, got to the goose first, and picked it up by the legs.

  The man from blind 55 came puffing up and took the goose by

  the neck. “Give me that goose, kid,” he yelled. “I shot it!”

  I froze, my heart hammering. I didn’t let go of my end of the

  goose. “The hell you did,” I said. “My dad shot it.”

  “Gimme the goose, you little puke, or I’ll knock you on your

  ass,” said the man from blind 55.

  “Why don’t you pick on somebody your own size,” said Dad

  from behind me. I hadn’t heard him come up. There was an unfa-

  miliar edge to his voice. “Davy, step aside,” Dad said.

  I dropped the goose’s legs and scuttled sideways, glad to be out from between five hundred pounds of angry men. I took a good look at the guy from blind 55.

  He was a man of action all right, the first I had ever seen up close.

  He was a little bigger than Dad and twenty years younger, with a stubble of beard and a smell of brandy on him that would cut varnish.

  He dropped the goose, cursed, and swung a wild right hook at Dad’s 158

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  head. Dad’s left hand shot out and stopped the punch in midair. His right fist, which measured six inches from side to side, was poised a foot from the man’s face.

  It was the moment I had been waiting for. This was the kind of

  violence you seldom saw in Methodists. Boy, would I have a story to tell on the school bus!

  But Dad never threw his punch. Instead, he maintained his grip

  on the man’s right fist and pushed him away. The man stumbled and fell heavily into a half-frozen puddle.

  “Take the damn goose and get back in your blind,” Dad said.

  The man obeyed. We turned and walked away.

  What was this? It was Dad’s goose! Why did he let the man take

  it? Had we won or lost? My emotions wound themselves into a pret-zel. Back at our blind, Dad grabbed the decoy bags. “You pull ’em up and I’ll bag ’em,” he said. I didn’t argue. Within forty-five minutes we were in the parking lot with all our gear. When it was stowed away, we sat on the Studie’s tailgate to finish our lukewarm coffee.

  As soon as Dad’s pipe was drawing well, I figured it was OK to

  ask a question.

  “Jeez, Dad, why didn’t you hit that guy?” I asked.

  “Because he was drunk, and he was afraid,” Dad said. “And this is supposed to be hunting, not kids in a sandbox.”

  “Why did you let him have the goose?”

  “Because it put him over the limit, that’s why,” Dad said.

  Some geese were moving again, and as we watched from the

  hilltop, the men in 55 fired salvoes at a passing flock.

  “You hear that?” Dad said. “One of those guys fired five shots in a row, and the other one at least four. They’ve been doing that all morning, and it’s against the law.” Obviously the men in 55 hadn’t bothered to plug the magazines of their guns. That made two more violations. They were getting away with murder; it wasn’t fair, and I said as much.

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  “Don’t worry about it,” Dad said. “I’ve still got my goose tag. If you can stand another day of this, we’ll come back next Saturday and you can help me call one in. Now let’s go find a game warden.”

  Dad fired up the Studie and we headed out of the parking lot. I

  was dead tired and wildly excited at the same time. What a day! I had killed my first goose. And Dad had ended a fight with nothing more than a stare and a shove. I no longer had a juicy story for the school bus, but somewhere in the back of my fourteen-year-old

  brain, a new idea of manhood was peeking over the horizon.

  We hadn’t gone more than a hundred yards when we saw a brown

  Chevrolet pickup bouncing down the road in our direction. Dad

  waved and the truck stopped alongside us. We recognized the federal warden who had assigned us our blind that morning.

  “I think you should check blind 55,” Dad said. “There are two

  men in there with three geese, they’re still shooting, and I don’t believe either gun is plugged.”

  “We’ll see about that,” the warden said. He looked at my goose,

  made sure it was tagged, and then drove on to the parking lot we had just left. Soon we saw him walking down the path to blind 55. Dad got out his binoculars and we passed them back and forth to watch the little drama unfolding on the hillside below us.

  The warden unloaded both men’s guns and pulled the magazine

  caps. There were no plugs. He looked at one goose in the blind and found two others that had been hidden in a clump of cattails. Then he started writing citations. He wrote a lot of citations.

  Dad lit his pipe and shook out the match. “And what did you

  learn from this wonderful morning?” he asked.

  “Patience is a virtue?” I replied.

  “No. The lesson for today is that revenge is sweet, especially

  when somebody else does it for you. And it looks like Uncle Sam has just delivered a swift kick to the wallet.”

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  No Fair!

  O n a wet Sunday afternoon in early June 1957, I was sitting at the dining room table in our old house on River Road, drinking a glass of milk, and paging through the Milwaukee Journal comics section.

  It was raining too hard to go fishing, I was fourteen years old and bored, and the comics weren’t helping much. As usual, Dick Tracy was fighting crime and talking on his 2-Way Wrist Radio, the

  Dragon Lady was plotting Oriental intrigue, Fearless Fosdick was shooting neat round holes in the bad guys, and evil commies were kidnapping Little Orphan Annie while her dog Sandy looked on

  helplessly, saying “Arf.”

  I flipped to Pogo and Li’l Abner, the only strips I actually liked. Pogo was always good for a laugh, and I routinely checked out Li’l Abner to gawk at Daisy Mae, Moonbeam McSwine, Stupefyin’ Jones, and the

  other Dogpatch girls in their incredibly tight and skimpy clothes.

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  I was looking them over when Dad came in from the kitchen and

  handed me three envelopes of Burpee seeds—watermelons, acorn

  squas
h, and cucumbers—and a slender book on raising vegetables.

  “Project for you this summer,” Dad said. “Spade up a patch

  behind the shed and plant ’em according to the instructions in the book.” Cripes, I thought, school just got out Tuesday and already he has me digging.

  “It’ll be a money-making proposition,” Dad said. “I’ll pay you

  fifty cents for every watermelon that’s big enough to eat, a quarter apiece for the squash, and a nickel each for the cucumbers. And if you enter some of them in the county fair, you’ll get an exhibitor’s pass that will let you in free every day, whether you win a ribbon or not. That’s two bucks saved right there, and if you’re lucky with your crops you’ll have all the money you need for the fair.”

  That got my attention; I was a fair fanatic. The Manitowoc

  County Fair was held six days each August about a mile and a half from our place, and I never missed a day. It ranked right up there with Christmas and Thanksgiving as one of the high points of my

  year. In Manitowoc, the fair was as close as we ever got to the bright lights.

  To my surprise the vegetables flourished. By the middle of

  August I had a dozen big watermelons, two rows of plump and prof-itable squash, and about a hundred cucumbers that met the strict standards set by my book: four inches long, an inch in diameter, and warty. Bigger cucumbers, the book said, were full of seeds and too large to be conveniently pickled and put into Mason jars.

  I decided to enter my cucumbers, and it was with great expecta-

  tions that I paid the one-dollar entry fee, signed a form, and picked up the pass. On Monday, the first day of the fair, I put a paper plate with five carefully chosen cukes on a long table in the Armory with dozens of others, mostly huge and undesirable. Apparently the

  people who grew them hadn’t read the book.

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  The largest cucumbers of them all, great swollen things like green submarines, were next to mine. They had been entered by someone

  named Laura Larsen. I pictured her as a chubby, snub-nosed little girl in a starched pinafore who would pout when I walked off with the blue ribbon.

  I left the Armory and took a walk around the fairgrounds while

  the morning was still fresh and cool. On the north side of the midway, seriously sunburned men were walking slowly back and forth, assembling the Ferris wheel, the Tilt-A-Whirl, the Scrambler, the Octopus, and other large and rickety rides.