Editor's Note: This story appears in the new Game Fish Issue of the Field & Stream Journal. To receive the issue, become a member of the 1871 Club, or purchase individual copies here.
My father suffered a catastrophic heart attack on the last day of the 2017 Virginia deer season. His terrified hunt-club buddies carried him in their arms to the nearest pickup truck, tossed him in the back, and administered CPR while speeding through dirt-road mudholes to an ambulance waiting several miles away, on the nearest blacktop. I got a call from my mother that evening, telling me Daddy was in the hospital and his health was rapidly heading south. I immediately headed north through a snowstorm to be at his bedside. He was in a coma when I got there. He died two days later. I was devastated.
People wear grief in different ways. Some cling desperately to everything that reminds them of the dead. Others purge. My mother was the type that finds solace in cleaning. Within days of Daddy’s funeral, she was sorting his hunting gear into piles—one for sale, one for donation, one for the garbage bin.
“Where’s Daddy’s turkey vest?” I asked. I am the clingy kind of griever.
Digging through the piles like a fiend, I finally found it near the bottom of the stack destined for the landfill. I don’t blame my mother for putting it there. Even brand-new, the vest was nothing special. Just a bargain-price item he’d pulled off the rack at a local sporting-goods store. By this point, the vest was in rough shape from years of hard use. Its well-worn Mossy Oak fabric was faded and frayed, splotched with dry, crusty bloodstains. It did not look like something anyone would want. But I wanted it.
Investment of a Lifetime
I first hit the turkey woods in the mid-1980s. I was just a skinny, knobby-kneed kid trudging along in too-big boots and mismatched camo, trying to keep pace with Daddy. Back then, he walked through the predawn fog of the soggy river-bottoms we hunted with long strides and silent grace. He always moved in a hurry, hell-bent on getting close to the roosted gobblers he had put to bed the night before.
I didn’t have much gear then, mostly hand-me-down duck camo with the sleeves and pant legs rolled up so they wouldn’t drag in the mud, and maybe a tattered face mask stuffed in my pocket. Daddy toted all the necessary supplies—his calls, the dekes, the ever-essential emergency TP—in his turkey vest. Back then, I thought my father was a -turkey--hunting god. I still do.
H.R. Jones was Mozart with a mouth call. He could enchant gobblers with the soft, lyrical putts, clucks, yelps, and purrs that he coaxed from his instrument. He could sweet-talk even the most lockjawed longbeards, the birds that were so stressed and pressured that nobody could hunt them. Nobody but Daddy. He always filled his tags, even when turkey populations in the Southeast were just beginning to swing back from the brink of extirpation, before their populations reached the healthy numbers hunters enjoy today.
I was 14 years old when I connected with my first respectable gobbler. The No. 5 shot from my Remington 870 Wingmaster peppered the tom in the head and neck just above a 10-inch beard. That bird had come running hot off a tree-limb roost toward my father’s yelps. The gobbler put on the brakes 25 yards from where we were posted up, spitting and drumming, with his fan up. I was shaking so hard, Daddy was scared the bird would see me.
“Be still,” he said. “Wait for him to stretch out his head.”
Daddy’s whisper was so quiet in my ear I could barely hear more than his breath. He made one soft cluck. The bird stretched out—the red, white, and blue of his head lighting up like a neon sign against the mint green of honeysuckle and poplar in the spring woods. A moment later, my finger pulled the trigger. The gobbler dropped dead after a few half-hearted flops.
Daddy let out a whoop in celebration. After he helped me tag the bird, he conjured a handful of snack-size Snickers from the left front pocket of his turkey vest. Flashing a mile-wide grin, he tossed two my way. We unwrapped them and “clinked” them together like wine glasses in a toast.
Photo Finish
When we got home, my mother snapped a backyard photo. Daddy carried the picture of me and that bird in his wallet until the day he died. That he carried that photo—not one from high-school or college graduation or my wedding day—says everything that needs to be said about where turkey hunting stood on his list of life priorities. I get it now: I shared those big days of celebration with lots of people. But that spring morning, that river-bottom, that turkey? That was just me and him.
Now, the vest I rescued from the trash pile wasn’t the same one Daddy wore on that hunt years ago. He’d long since worn out the original and, for all I know, unceremoniously dumped it in another trash heap. I’m just grateful that I managed to rescue his most recent—his last—vest from a similar fate. And when I did, I folded the garment with the tender reverence it deserved, carried it home, and tucked it between my wedding dress and my children’s baby blankets in a keepsake trunk.
But hunting vests, no matter how many memories they hold, deserve to be in the woods, not collecting cobwebs in the dark corners of a cedar chest in the attic. I pulled Daddy’s vest out the first turkey season I ventured into the woods without him.
I cinched the straps as tightly as I could in a vain attempt to make it fit, but even then, the vest hung loosely around my shoulders as I sat alone in the predawn fog of a soggy riverbottom and listened to a distant gobbler answer my tentative yelps. My calls were nothing like Daddy’s music. But there must have been some magic woven through the threads of his turkey vest, because just as the sky brightened from pale pink to gold, that bird strutted straight toward me.
I was shaking so hard. I remembered Daddy’s calming words and whispered them to myself beneath the netting of my face mask. “Be still. Wait for him to stretch out his head.”
What felt like an eternity later, the gobbler dropped out of his strut for a second. A moment later, my finger pulled the trigger. The longbeard shivered before he dropped and came to rest 25 yards from the tree I leaned against in the gathering light.
I notched my tag. The woods were noticeably silent as I dug around in the left front pocket of Daddy’s vest for what I’d brought along. When I found it, I placed one hand on the bird, then used the other to raise the Snickers bar, toasting the first bird I’d ever called in on my own.
“Cheers, Dad.”
I was alone, but it was the closest I had felt to Daddy since I had held his hand in that cold, sterile hospital room months before.
Daddy’s vest will never fit me. It will always hang loose like the hand-me-down camo I wore into the woods with him so many years ago. It does, however, fit my son, Silas, who can make music with a mouth call just like his granddaddy. Silas was only eight when Daddy first handed him a turkey call—a simple double-reed trimmed down to fit a mouth still full of baby teeth.
Passing on Daddy’s vest to Silas just feels right. I’ll just have to remind him to carry a few Snickers in the left front pocket next to his calls.