The Meadow Annual Literary Arts Journal 2018

Decoy John Gifford It’s the eyes that I notice from across the room, lustrous and brilliant in the autumn sunlight filtering in through the window. I thread my way through the maze of antique furniture and artwork, and behold the four dark pupils and brown irises looking back at me from the shelf. They’re glass eyes, detailed and intricate, and like the decoys themselves, oversized. The thought occurs to me that perhaps this is to lure collectors as much or more as ducks from the sky. The old pair has obviously been together a long time. Their wooden bodies, heavy and solid, have been carved from solid blocks of pine. It appears there has been no effort to smooth the hard edges left by the whittling blade. But the longer I study the duck decoys I realize this is by design, for these edges suggest feathers, overlapping feathers, feathered bodies from which the paint has gradually faded over the years and which today bears the type of understated patina that only time, and love, can create, like the enamel-worn stove in your grandmother’s kitchen, like the old gold band on her finger. When I think back to my seventh or eighth year of life, I recall taxidermy catalogs scattered around my parents’ house. My father, a sportsman, had taught himself this art over the course of a winter, perhaps as a way of bridging that fallow period between the end of duck hunting season and the onset of spring fishing, or maybe it was only the thought of earning extra money that encouraged this endeavor. He mounted fish mostly—both his own catches and those friends and relatives brought him. These fish were nearly always bass. Largemouth bass. I remember the sandbox he used to create a mold of the fish, and the foam body he would construct from this, and how 192 The Meadow

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