Tales for the Telling: including Chickens I Have Known and Northeast from Tahiti

By Walker Kincade

A varied collection of tales tugging at the emotions of concern and of pleasure that leave one wanting to know more of the stories and the people in them. In Tales for the Telling, we find a fight to save a horse from dogs and a photographer fights to save himself from a lion. A nod is given toward nearing exits from lif

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kincade Books
• Release date: Sep 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781737686118

Book preview

The Fire Extinguisher

I REMEMBER HAVING A bad feeling about it. The memo from HR stated that the company’s insurance carrier required a fire extinguisher be kept in every company car. I traveled a good bit throughout Alabama and my home state of Georgia during the week in the company’s nicely appointed Chevy Malibu—the previous year’s model, deep blue with bench seats and dark tan leather interior. Best of all, I had personal use of it on the weekends.

In my mind, there was no real need for an extinguisher. I mean, you hardly ever heard about fires in cars. I had never actually seen a car fire and knew of no one else in the office who had, either. This was just an example of insurance-company paranoia.

My extinguisher arrived a week later—a small, red, two-and-a-half-pound cylinder that fit under the driver’s seat. It was annoying at first because it kept sliding out and getting in my way around the pedals, but I solved the problem by shoving it well back under the seat. It went out of sight and out of mind.

One Sunday a few weeks later is when it happened. Ryan, our six-year-old, had been running around with his buddies after church, unmindful of his Sunday clothes, with his shirttail hanging out and one shoe missing, when Irma gathered up the kids to get them in the car. Karina, ten, found the shoe lying in the dirt next to the oak tree and helped her brother put it back on. He insisted he could tie it himself once she got the knot out.

I waited patiently behind the steering wheel during this drama, then started the engine and drove us toward home. I turned down the dirt lane that led past the parsonage, as I usually do, because it was lightly forested on one side and well shaded by the overhanging tree canopy—a pretty drive.

I was unaware that the extinguisher had rattled out from under the seat to lie alluringly on the floor in front of Ryan. As most six-year-old boys are wont to do, he picked it up and began looking it over. He couldn’t read the instructions but didn’t need to. There were picture diagrams on the label. Karina, on the far side of the bench seat, was also curious but didn’t suffer her brother’s double-dose of experimental nature. She became alarmed, though, when she saw him pull the ring pin just as the picture showed should be done. She cried out, You better stop! as he squeezed the silver handle.

At the same moment I heard Karina’s stern command, a hissing sound turned the world solid white. In that instant there was no road ahead, no windshield—only whiteness. Even the steering wheel disappeared into the cloud. Was this the Rapture?

I slammed on the brakes and jerked the lever into park at the same time I opened my door. Whatever this was, I had to get the kids away. I jumped out, noticed I could see again, and yanked Ryan’s door open. He tumbled out—having not fastened his seatbelt, of course—and I reached in to find Karina by feel, grasped her arm, and yanked. But she stuck fast. She had fastened her seatbelt. I half climbed in, undid her seat belt, and pulled her to safety, too.

I heard Irma’s voice coming from somewhere nearby, saying she couldn’t get her door opened. I couldn’t see her and she couldn’t find her door handle in a world with no visual references, so I shouted for her to come toward the sound of my voice and get out through my open door. With the kids out, I reached back into the fog to find Irma and guide her on out, too.

My family collected, I ushered everyone away from the car to where sunlight filtered through the trees. We could see colors again.

With its ghostly-looking interior and a whiteish mist leaching to the ground from the open doors, the car looked like an abandoned smoldering junker on the roadway. And our personal appearance did not improve the scene. Clothes, faces, hands—every inch of us was covered with a white powder that had just a hint of lavender. Except for our eyes, that is. They were bright and big, in pronounced contrast to our pasty faces.

Uncertain what is to be done when one’s car is suddenly filled with fresh chemical powder, I stood silent for a moment, repressing the urge to reduce the number of my heirs by one. It was certainly unwise to have my family travel any further in the extinguisher-mobile, so I led everyone over to the parsonage to see if our pastor could help. I was uncertain how he would react, for he had complimented me on my fine-looking family less than an hour before.

Upon answering the doorbell, he looked us up and down. His first words were, Lordy, what happened to you? Followed by, Man, I wish I had a camera—I’d win a best-photo contest for sure! And don’t your eyes look fine!

Pastor Dave was pleased to have a part to play in our little drama and loaned me a red bandana to tie over my nose and mouth while I drove the car home. He said he’d take the rest of the family for me. Before he pulled out in his car with Irma and the children, he looked back again and said, "I’ll bet you couldn’t even build a fire in that thing!"

Heading for home seven miles distant with all the windows down, I wore the bandana and drove with my head hanging out the window. The white powder was whipped by the wind into a trailing fog, and I am certain I looked like a bandito barreling down the highway with his car ablaze, desperate to make good a getaway.

The last two miles of the road was dirt, its washboard texture shaking powder from so many unseen crevices it looked like it was snowing inside the car. Once home, I spent the rest of the day vacuuming the clinging powder into a series of vacuum-cleaner bags.

I never did replace that fire extinguisher. And for the remainder of the life of that car, every time it hit a bump in the roadway or went over a railroad track, a sprinkle of white powder would drop out of somewhere. The way I saw it, that car was now self-extinguishing.

Antlers at the Restaurant

THOSE THINGS LOOK really familiar."

Jim spoke to himself rather than to me as he stared at the wall across the room. We had just sat down for lunch at Cracker Barrel when something caught Jim’s eye. The wall was cluttered with antiques of various descriptions: old-looking framed photographs of non-smiling people looking starched and stiff, metal signs advertising Steel Elephant Tractors and Benson’s Feed and Seed, ice-handling tools, an old kids’ sled—all the things that usually decorate a restaurant with a country theme. It was deer antlers that caught his attention, though—a large and well-formed rack mounted with a leather skull cap. A ten-pointer.

I’d swear those things look just like Old Man Johnson’s antlers, he said to no one in particular, scooting his chair back to walk over and get a closer look. He returned to the table excited. "That’s them, alright! No doubt about it.

Old Man Johnson lived next door to Granddad when we lived north of Pace, he explained. They were hunting buddies and the like. He was a second grandfather to me. Granddad called him Pete and I did, too—unless Granddad was around. He chuckled at some memory of patriarchal power before continuing.

I was over at both of their houses a lot as a kid. Pete had those antlers up over his fireplace—I know it’s the same ones because they have the little metal plaque: November 4, 1914. I once asked Granddad what the date meant, and he said that was when Pete bagged the deer— on his thirty-sixth birthday. You want to know how he got those antlers?

I didn’t have time to answer before Jim took off with the story, apparently pleased to be able to relate the history. I listened while taking a quick look at the menu.

Pete and Granddad had gone hunting, supposedly to celebrate the birthday but actually just to go off hunting. It was the opening day of the black powder season. They both had replica flintlock muzzle loaders, .44 caliber. Granddad told me they were Indian trade guns they had purchased several years earlier through a special sale sponsored by the Museum of the Fur Trade—I think he said it’s somewhere in Nebraska. Anyway, they had bought those guns together for the fun of it and seemed to think the twenty-one-pound weight and the fifty-two-inch length were advantages rather than encumbrances.

Jim was more into guns than I was and could rattle off details of types and calibers and the like without batting an eye. I thought for a moment about asking him what an Indian trade gun was but didn’t because the waitress came with two glasses of water and to take our order. Jim hadn’t even glanced at the menu. He absentmindedly scanned it while I ordered and then quickly told her he’d have the same thing I was having. He was more interested in continuing with his story than in ordering anything in particular.

There was this large deer they’d seen off and on, but mostly off, for three years running. It wasn’t one of your open-field-edge-of-the-woods deer. It was a deep-woodsalmost-never-seen-and-hard-to-track big buck. Real wily. Had maybe six points when they saw him that first fall. They had been after that one deer ever since. Every time, it saw them first and ran off, or it was too far away for a shot. Always something. That deer led a charmed life.

I grunted acknowledgment, though he hardly heard me.

"Over the previous summer they had each built a tree stand way back in the woods—on two different game trails about sixty yards apart. They could just barely see each other from their different stands because of the thick foliage, but each man had a good, clear view of his own trail.

"That day was cold, but you know how you don’t feel the cold so much when you’re hunting . . . It was also misty and damp—made things more interesting and miserable, but you