384
PARTISAN REVIEW
In Nashville Thanksgiving Day might be quite warm.
It
might
be almost a
sluggi~hly
summerlike day, and sometimes we'd find
that the freakish iris in the flower bed beside the porch had a few
pale, bedraggled blooms left. But, too, there will be years when it
will snow at Thanksgiving time in Nashville, and everyone will be
thinking so much about the problems of Christmas ahead that they
have but little heart even for the football game.
Uncle Jake always went duck hunting on the week-end before
Thursday so that there'd be ducks for Thanksgiving dinner. On
Thanksgiving morning he went quail hunting. Dinner was usually
kept waiting on him, for Mother would say that they were, after all,
his ducks. But if he was very late, the tension would sometimes become
unendurable, and Mother would go through the dining room, push
open the swinging door a little way, and call to the cook mournfully,
"Well, we'll just have to go ahead without Mr. Jake." It seems to
me now that he always came in just as Father was carving the ducks.
Father would go on carving the roasted fowl before him while he
admired the dead partridges that Uncle Jake brought out of the large
patch pockets of his khaki hunting coat. Father would stop a minute
with his knife still placed in a joint of the duck and watch Uncle
Jake's big fingers feeling through the soft, dark feathers over the
dead bird's breast. Once I wondered momentarily whether or not
I'd be able to eat my meal after seeing the poor dead partridge with
the blood on its speckled neck.
But there is no aroma more affecting to the palate than that of
just-carved roast duck. When the steaming slices of dark meat and
drumstick were placed in front of me I had no more thoughts of the
dead birds that we would eat the following Sunday. I inhaled the de–
licious odor of the duck, I listened to the warm, eager voices around
the table, and soon I would look up to see Uncle Jake returned now
in his navy blue smoking jacket and with his hands washed whiter
and cleaner than I ever saw them on ordinary days.
But before Uncle Jake came there would be tension, because the
Thanksgiving football game began at two o'clock. And Father and
Mother, no matter the weather, did attend the Thanksgiving football
game. Presumably they had long ago established this as the one really
feasible outing of the year because fall weather was neither too hot nor
too cold. There was also the fact that at some time in the remote
past Father had been a left tackle on the University team, and Mother
had come there to watch his superb tackling and blocking. Actually,
too, the football game was just as necessary to Uncle Jake's happiness
on that day as was his quail hunting.
