A Good Dog Always Knows
Ain’t nothing to writing Papa Hemingway said, you just sit at the typewriter and bleed. I sat at the keyboard and cried for Zebo, damn near about shorted it out with my salty tears. It’s a twisted tale, as good tales are. Me and Miss Biscuits built a house on...
The Rising of the Sun and the Running of the Deer
The dogs struck in the old ricefield bottom, grown up now in a great snarl of water-trees, the bell-trunked tupelo, sweet gum and soft maple, the ground beneath a foot deep with the soggy litter from the last hurricane surge, driftwood snags and ricks of dead spartina...
Fair Winds, My Brother: Daufuskie Family
Forget about deer stands,” he said. “Just boost your woman high up in a live oak late in the afternoon. That way you’ll know she’ll still be there when you come to fetch her home after sunset.” We were on his front porch, out of the wind on a chilly afternoon, easing...
A Man In Full: Roosevelt Becomes A Man
Daddy sent Theodore off to Harvard in 1876 with this advice: “Take care of your morals first, your health second, and your studies third.” Predictably, young Roosevelt was a better boxer than student, much preferring independent inquiries rather than activities...
Three Boys and a Cannon Barrel
It was a Federal Criminal Conspiracy: three boys, a cannon barrel and scaup to drive them crazy. The saltwater scaup are mostly gone now, but back when I was a boy they would raft offshore, a thousand, ten thousand at a time. It would take a booming gale to get them...
Little Windy and the Wingshooting Woman
She was a great Nordic beauty, and she came with a duck lease. She was a green-eyed freckle-faced redhead, long of hair and limb, married a couple of times before I met her but neither lasted too long. Her name, literally translated, meant “the daughter of an...
Hemingway’s Pilar – Chasing Billfish and German U-boats
Papa called her Pilar and she was a fishing machine, a 1934 Wheeler Playmate, custom built to his specifications in a Brooklyn boatyard. She was 38 feet at the waterline, with a low-cut transom rigged with a roller for sliding fish aboard. She held a ton of ice, had...
When the Turkeys Busted Loose
Me and Poach and the Window Wizard, walking this scrubby sheep pasture west of town. Sheep got buck teeth and clip the grass right down to the dirt. Canada thistle and prickly ash take over, tight clumps around the boulders the glaciers brought when they came and...
Belle Baruch: The Troublesome Child
Ever the tomboy, Belle Baruch hunted and fished, chased German spies, surprised her family with equestrian triumphs and scandalous affairs. When it was all done, she willed 17,500 acres for public education.