DUCKS, DUCKS, AND MORE DUCKS
I was in the last year of college when Seth, our oldest son, was born. Peggy was working at the time and the company required that any employee having a baby stop working six weeks before the expected birth date and could not return until six weeks after the birth. These twelve weeks off were all without pay, at this time there was no such thing as maternity pay. Needless to say, we were in dire straits by the time Seth was born. We had serious discussions about me dropping out and working for a semester then starting back once we were more financially sound.
But we both decided that this wasn’t the best decision, it was mid November and graduation was in May, only six months away.
So, we dug in. But things were still tight, and we decided to apply for food stamps. This was the first and only time in our lives that we had that type of government assistance and we used them for about four weeks. I was so embarrassed that I would only go to one store, we had traded at that grocery store ever since we had married and the owner knew us. Even using that store exclusively I would only go at closing time. One time there, and I think it was the last time I ever used them, a man happened to be there and he started talking to the owner about health insurance. I can’t remember whether he had heard the owner ask how Peggy and Seth were doing, or not, or if he saw me using the food stamps. But he told the owner loudly enough for me to hear that he was self-insured. And to prove his point, he pulled out two $1,000.00 bills and flashed them long enough to make sure I saw them. Then he went into a mostly one-sided conversation filled with hints and innuendos about freeloaders on the system and how they ought to work and not expect the citizens to pay their taxes so that they could eat without working. I was working for a consultant forester every Saturday and every weekday after classes, and I was carrying a full load of senior level forestry courses, all of which were difficult and was in the last few weeks of Calculus 3. But he had no way of knowing that, he just assumed that we were not doing anything but living on public assistance.
We were living in a trailer court outside Monticello at the time and a duck hunting club had a couple of trailers that they used parked in the same court. They found out that we were struggling and asked if we would clean their ducks for them. They offered to pay us $0.50 per duck and would provide all the freezer paper and tape to wrap them. So began our duck cleaning business.
I would go to school, then after classes and on Saturdays I would go get my work assignment from the consultant forester. This usually involved marking timber for harvest or cruising a tract to determine volume to be used to develop a management plan. In addition to being paid $2.00 per hour, the company allowed me to take my work truck home and to school so that I would be able to spend more time in the woods rather than shuttling vehicles between home, school and work.
. After working, I would get home near or after dark most days. Peggy and I would eat and I would study until the hunters brought their ducks to us. Most of the time this was near or after 9:00 PM. Then we went to work cleaning the ducks. Anyone who has cleaned ducks knows that this is not an enviable job. This was especially true for ducks killed early in the morning and brought to us after 9:00 PM.
. For readers not familiar with it, this involved plucking the feathers, removing the guts and internal organs, pulling pin feathers, then singing the ducks to remove any feathers that remained. Some ducks were easier to clean than others and I don’t remember how long it took to clean the average duck. Through this process, Seth was asleep in his room in the trailer. We would leave the window open so that we could hear if he woke up and started crying.
Once the ducks were cleaned, we would wrap them individually and put them in our freezer. When the hunters brought another bunch of ducks, they would pick up the frozen ones. More often than not, they would pay us for all the ducks we cleaned then give us a couple. By the end of duck season, we had cleaned enough ducks to earn $200.00 or more. We also ate a bunch of ducks. All of this allowed us to drop the food stamps and get by until Peggy could go back to work. It also allowed me to graduate on time and move us to Hardy, Arkansas where the events in the book “Before We Were Heroes, Southern Fires” begin to take place.
We agreed that we would close our duck cleaning business and never, ever clean another one as long as we lived.