Requiem for Ducks

In that time before I spoke many words or thought many thoughts, when my world was small and so was I, my father woke me and bundled me into my snowsuit and boots. I had no idea why we were leaving everyone else asleep in their beds, or why my father and I were leaving the city and driving into the prairie sunrise with sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper and a Thermos on the back seat. I fell asleep and woke at the entrance to a field covered with a thick crust of snow on top of stubble left from a grain harvest.We’re going duck hunting. What’s that? A shotgun. Off we went. I was given strict instructions to keep him in sight at all times and to never ever get in front of him. I have to pee. You can manage. We parted ways. I went to a stand of trees next to the field to wrestle with the zipper and snaps on my snowsuit and squat.I heard a loud pop and then another and looked toward my father to see dots fall from the sky. I followed him from a distance and watched him pick up the dots. He walked toward me with ducks flopped by his side and the gun bent and resting over his arm. We went to the car to eat egg salad sandwiches and drink warm milky tea, and then we drove home with ducks in the trunk.My father hung the ducks upside down in the garage. My neighborhood playmates thought that was weird and wouldn’t come see the ducks, so I visited them alone. I pulled their wings open, admired their iridescent feathers, and tapped their delicate yellow beaks with my fingernails. Why were they hanging there never to fly again? Why did I eat duck?My father grew up as a big city boy, spending school semesters with his working-class family in London and summers with his grandparents in Paris, until he joined the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. In the mid-1950s, he left London for Canada and hopscotched from city to city, married, and eventually settled in Edmonton in the early 1960s, shortly before my birth. Throughout his life, my father retained a mix of British and French tastes in clothing, automobiles, and, most notably, food. Whereas our neighbors in the suburbs grew the root-cellar staples of carrots, cabbage, and potatoes in their vegetable patches, my father used cold frames, grew herbs de Provence, tomatoes, courgettes, rhubarb, and gooseberries. He ignored the fat-fearing health fad of the era, despised margarine, slathered butter on bread, and doused salads in olive oil. He prepared weekend breakfasts of thick slices of crusty white bread fried in bacon fat with slabs of blood pudding and grilled tomatoes. He served us food with strong flavors, boiled onions with bechamel, nose-burning mustards, tinned sardines, offal, and cheeses so ripe they tasted like puke.My father encouraged us to enjoy the gamey flavor of the ducks he provided, but each time one was served for supper, my sisters and I loudly complained that the meat was too strong and impossibly chewy. My mother’s protests were silent, and when she found a lead pellet in her mouth, she’d scrunch up her nose before dramatically dropping it onto the side of her plate. Finally, our campaign succeeded, and my father ended his annual fall hunting excursions. His store of ducks in the chest freezer dwindled until my mother quietly snuck the last of the years-old, freezer-burned ducks into the garbage.Two decades passed. My father’s cremated bones were poured into a plastic bag and neatly sealed inside a cardboard box. My mother placed the box on the top shelf of the front hall closet to wait for her. Yet another decade passed. I went to Edmonton to help my sisters with the sad tasks of sorting and clearing the family home of objects and memories.Emptying the storage cabinet in my father’s garage, I found a canvas shoulder bag containing red shotgun shells that he’d tucked in the back, all those years ago. How easy it was to conjure him amongst the familiar smells of dust and motor oil mixed with rubber tires and garden fertilizers. I’d long forgotten how cared for I felt sitting next to him on a stool as he began to yank and tear out feathers. I watched him cut off a head and then pull out the slimy insides and plop them into a bucket. What’s that? Entrails. Can I touch? No, no, dear. He cut off the feet and gave me one to play with, showing me the tendon to pull. I must have asked him to save them all because the following day I went to school with a brown-paper lunch bag stuffed with orange feet and excitedly passed them around my first-grade class for show-and-tell. When you pull the tendon and let go, I said, holding one and demonstrating, the foot opens and closes.

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