Shooting at Loons

I smiled. “Wish I could.”

“Me, too. I hate school.”

“Yeah, I did, too.”

He glanced over at me quickly before his eyes darted away again. “How’d you get to be a judge then?”

“I didn’t say I hated learning. I said I hated school. Especially days like this. They made me want to be outdoors, not shut up inside.”

“Yeah,” he said, gazing wistfully out at the banks.

I found myself covertly examining his face and as much of his neck as was visible beneath the long-sleeved shirt, but I saw no fresh bruises. Just because Mahlon might use corporal punishment didn’t make him a child abuser. My own daddy’d switched every one of us at one time or another for doing things not much worse than taking a boat without permission; but we never questioned his love for us. Unfortunately, there was no way to ask Guthrie if he felt loved and secure.

“Sometimes I have to say a courtroom feels like being back in school,” I told him.

As if my words had given him the opening he’d needed, he said, “Want to thank you.”

“For what?”

“My daddy told me he saw you yesterday and you let him off.”

“I didn’t let him off, son. The prosecution didn’t prove its case.”

He looked dubious but didn’t comment.

More doors banged further up the path, near the road. Mark Lewis waved, then hopped in the car where his mother was waiting to drive him to school off-island. Another house over, Makely’s mother, too, was already backing the car out of their garage. I’ve sat in too many juvenile courts to think that every woman who bears a child is ipso facto a loving mother out of a Hallmark commercial; nevertheless, seeing those two boys with their mothers made my heart ache for Guthrie, raised by a reclusive grandmother and a short- tempered grandfather.

If it bothered Guthrie, he didn’t show it. Somewhere, not too far away, we heard a school bus horn.

“Reckon I better go.” As he started up the path toward the road, he paused and said, “You ever get any clams? I told Mark and Makely to get you some.”

“Another lie,” sighed the preacher disapprovingly.

“But think why,” urged the pragmatist.

“That was real thoughtful of you,” I told Guthrie. “Thank you.”

He nodded and hurried on. A moment later the big orange school bus gathered him up and rumbled on down the road.

As I lingered, Mahlon came out, cast a weather eye toward sky and water, then walked on down to where I stood.

“Getting ready to turn,” he said. “Be raining by nightfall.”

“With the sun this bright?”

“She can change quicker’n a woman’s mind.” He gave a sly, gap-toothed grin, but it was too early in the morning to annoy me.

“Well, looky yonder!” he said abruptly, pointing to a pair of waterfowl heading up the shoreline. “Loons!”

They passed us almost at eye level and less than fifty feet out. I’d never seen any up close and I was delighted by their beauty: soot-black heads, crisp black-and-white checkered backs. But there was something about their awkward silhouette—head lower than the humpbacked body, legs trailing along behind—that reminded me of a mourning dove’s not-quite-got-it-together flight. They didn’t seem to fly much faster than a dove either.

“Wisht I had my gun,” said Mahlon.

“You’d shoot a loon in front of a judge?” I asked.

Again that sideways grin. “Ain’t against the law to shoot at ‘em. Only if you hit.”

As the two loons disappeared into the distance, Mahlon followed their flight with a wistful yearning. “Lord, but they’re a pretty sight.”

“Then how come you shoot them?”

“Been doing it all my life,” he said. “Mostly they come along the shoreline like them two, only a little farther out, right at the edge of your gun range, just teasing you. And it’s sorta like they harden their feathers or something so the bird shot just slides off. I tell you, first time a youngun brings one home, he thinks he’s a man sure enough.”

Rites of passage may be important, “But they’re an endangered species,” I argued.

He gave an exasperated snort. “They ain’t no more endangered than turtles and I wish to hell turtles ate people, then maybe some folks’d get some sense about it. Turtles and loons ain’t endangered— we’re the ones in danger.”

With that, he stomped off toward the boat shed and a moment later I heard the steady pounding of his hammer.

•      •      •

The shoreline in front of the cottage is too narrow and too cluttered with rocks or piers to make walking any distance very pleasant, so I walked back up the path, left my cup on the porch, then cut through the Willises’ side yard and hiked on up to Cab’s, my favorite store on the island. In addition to Seven-Eleven type groceries and