We would take the partridges down to the basement. After cutting the wings off for me to carry upstairs again and into my bedroom, he would peel off the feathered skin in one piece. Then, holding the moist slippery carcass like a freshly peeled orange in one hand, pull out the insides in one neat section with the other. Now it was my turn. I fingered through them until I felt the watery, taut wall of the crop. My father, with one slice of his knife, cut open the crop for us to follow the minute details of this particular partridge’s wanderings in the last few hours before its death.
It was like reading a road map: the deep-woods murky outside coating gave way to compacted clover—we followed a series of sunny lumber trails where this partridge had fed first on small wood-clover and finally on bits of shiny sand. The partially fermented clover smelled fresh and warm, like the summer fields our dog rolled in out at great grandma’s. To me, in those days, my father had beautiful, round, clover-brown cow eyes.
With ducks, the outside revealed the nature of the inside. A clean shot preserved the inside meat and kept unbloody the undercoat of breast down, plucked for the cloudy pillows we slept on. My father was as precise with his gun as he was with his knife: his ducks were clean, unruffled, perfect.
Sometimes the neighbor at duck camp who sewed our pillows would take them to clean and pluck. Sometimes my father would bring them home and take them down to the locker plant the next morning. Once, when I was four years old, I took one of his ducks.
Like the rest of his ducks, the outside of my duck was alive—soft, green and perfect. No signs of the gunshot wound. I took my duck to bed with me, slept all night with it, held it, warmed it, showed it the young amethyst girls who danced in the pattern of my wallpaper. In the morning, when I got up, I put it in my stuffed animals’ bunk bed and covered it with an afghan that turned out to be just the right size. Midmorning, I went to check on Ducky. He was gone. I searched the rest of my room.
I did not run crying to my mother, asking where this duck, my new companion, had gone. I walked quietly out of that room. I walked out quietly and did not ask where Ducky had gone. I did not tell her Ducky was missing.
When my father came home for supper I asked him nothing about Ducky. I did not ask him to search every corner of the house with me. I did not ask if he thought Ducky was OK. I did not ask for a new duck.
Last summer when I found a kitschy Ottertail County duck tumbler at an art fair I knew it was a starting point to tell my duck story. I was drawn to the inside of the tumbler, whose contents had to be drunk in one long drink in order not to spill. I imagined the tumbler on its side, ribbons of images and beads sloshing out of the opening:
I imagined foxes
and strings of crystals,
mallard topazes
and changing alexandrites,
goldfish that did not offer three wishes,
and black Winnibigoshish lake pearls too dark
to make into mother-of-pearl buttons.
Instead, when I started to work, the contents of the inside goblet transfused through to the exterior, like the apple and onion and celery stuffing that sweetened the wild taste of the duck meat of my childhood. Unencumbered, Ducky can stand upright, a guardian.
We never ate the stuffing.
