Dad used to hunt. He didn’t golf, so hunting was his made-up reason for getting out of the house. He never struck me as the hunting type, but once or twice a year he’d take off for upstate for a long weekend. It was a Yorkville sort of man-thing in the 1950s and 60s.
One day, as he was walking out the door wearing his Elmer Fudd hat and carrying his rifle, Mom said,”If you shoot something, I want you to think about Bambi’s mother lying in the woods bleeding to death, alone, and she’s thinking about her poor baby, left with that heartless bastard of a father.” Dad’s face did tricks; I’d never seen such complicated movement from Dad’s mouth, eyes, cheeks, and eyebrows. He looked heartbroken, sad, angry, confused and, at the same time, like he wanted to kill Mom.
When he got home from the trip, he wasn’t talking. I gave him a good look-over, and I could see he wasn’t playing mum because of a hangover. Something was on his mind. He sat in his chair, and Mom started pressing him.
“What the hell’s a matter with you?”
For a long time, he said nothing, but Mom kept at him. Eventually he teared up. Until then, I had only ever seen Dad cry over movies. “I watched it die,” he said.
“What?”
“I shot a rabbit, then I watched it die.”
“You son of a bitch.”
“It was in pain. I’ll never hunt again.”
“You bet your ass.”
And that was that. While Mom and Dad were talking, I began to think about Thumper. Dad loved Thumper; he drew him for Rory and me all the time. Dad shot Thumper. I had nothing to say.
The next time it snowed, I asked Dad if I could use his pigskin gloves since he wasn’t going to hunt anymore. He gave me one of his “you’re out of your mind” looks. He loved those yellow gloves, and had had them since 1952. Then he thought it over and said, “OK.”
I flew over to Central Park with Rory and the McNamara brothers. We worked the hill on 79th Street until we were soaked to the bone. When the chills got us, we dragged our sleighs back home. Mom wouldn’t let us in the house until we took off everything but our drawers in the hallway. I was hoping to go back up to the park that night, so I needed to get everything dried quick. I wrapped my dungarees and long johns around the steam pole and put my socks, sweatshirt, and dad’s pigskin gloves on the radiator. An hour later, I went to check on everything. My dungarees and long johns were almost dry. I went to the radiator. The socks were fine, but Dad’s gloves looked like shrunken voodoo heads. The fingers were blackened and curled up like they wanted to take a nap. They were half their normal size. Beef Jerkies.
Before I could say I lost them, Dad came in the house and saw me looking them over. He walked up to me and took one of the gloves out of my hand. Dad didn’t hit, but sometimes I wished he did, instead of leaning in and delivering verbal assaults. I could see he was about to rip into me and I rushed to say, “Dad, I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean it, and you’re not going hunting anymore, right?” His face switched over, and I saw he was thinking about the bunny. He held the glove up, looked at it once, gave it back to me and walked away.
Dad & Rory, 1965
Thomas Pryor has been featured on A Prairie Home Companion and This American Life, and his work has appeared in the New York Times. He curates City Stories: Stoops to Nuts, a storytelling show at the Cornelia Street Café on the second Tuesday of the month (next one April 10th). Check out his blog Yorkville: Stoops to Nuts.
