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Illustration Ryan Kirby
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Ghosts of past Thanksgivings
by Tom Kelly
There is no way I can tell you how long ago this was without incurring the severest displeasure on the subject of these paragraphs. When my daughter was very small, the hunting camp I belonged to reserved Thanksgiving Day for its grand opening of hunting season. Deer season officially opened in Alabama on Nov. 20 in those days, but the club waited until the following Thursday to start — and opened it with the mother of all deer drives.
On the Thanksgiving drive, most of the two-dozen members invited two or three hunting guests and an additional two or three guests of varying ages for Thanksgiving dinner — a dinner held at the clubhouse at 1 p.m., after the drive.
There would be 70 or 80 standers, most of the dogs from the north end of Baldwin County, and several truckloads of dog handlers at the hunt. Drives of that size tend to get a little noisy.
Three miles north of the camp house is the site of the Fort Mims massacre where, on Aug. 29, 1813, somebody forgot to close the gate of the fort at noon. The Creek Indians killed more than 500 settlers and took more than 250 scalps.
While the Creeks beat the hell out of us in the matter of bloodshed, I would give you even money that our drive would have taken the palm on noise.
The club used to kill five or six deer at one of these events, and considering the amount of logistical support required, and the degree of confusion that resulted from so many people on 5,000 acres at the same time, that's just about the number you would expect.
But the real reason for the event was not the deer drive. The main social event of the season, the one to which all the wives and children of club members were invited, all at the same time, was our particular reenactment of the pilgrims on their first Thanksgiving. Wrong state surely, three centuries later perhaps, but the same intellectual atmosphere.
The ladies of the club members, in the finest traditions of the rural South, brought enough dinner to feed the Fort Mims dead, the 750 Creek who effected the massacre, and the 200-odd attendees at the club's deer drive.
One judges these affairs not by the amount of meat and vegetables presented, or the incredible variety of desserts, but by the different kinds of bread on the table. And I swear to you that at each Thanksgiving dinner there were seven varieties, every crumb of which was homemade.
In the very middle of this pandering to the gods of gluttony, in the presence of enough rations to have made the miracle of the loaves and fishes unnecessary, sat a single 4-year-old girl, eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. And I ain't got to tell you who she was kin to.
She didn't even know how to say it. At 4 she called them "pe-nup and jelly," but she damned sure knew how to eat it, and there was a period in her life of about 12 months duration where she ate almost nothing else.
In direct disobedience of the instructions listed in the Manual of Discipline, the field manual that governs the responsibilities of parents of girl children younger than 7, she was allowed to take her own lunch, in its brown paper bag, and eat it at the banquet table. Nobody at the table appeared to be bothered by the anomaly, but it did sort of remind you of one of Dickens' orphans in "Oliver Twist."
Whoever and wherever you are, and whatever the age of the offspring who happen to have their feet under your table, don't worry about it.
They will all do better next year.
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