Life Sketches by Terry Berkson

Turkey in the Saw: A Thanksgiving Hunting Story

Several years ago, two friends from Richfield, Tiger Goodale and Rudy Marriot, came up the drive with what they thought was a good story for me to write. They had been in the Genesee, one of the local watering holes, when this guy came in and told how he or another one-legged man—they didn’t make it clear—was up in a tree building a stand for hunting when his prosthetic leg fell off and landed on the ground right under the nose of his Saint Bernard. It sounded like a good story. In fact, it reminded me of celebrated writer Flannery O’Connor’s tale where a man romances a woman in a hay mow just so he can run off with her wooden leg. When I pressed them for details they told me I had better get them straight from the horse’s mouth and gave me a phone number to call, which I did, but there was no response, so I just left my name and number on the answering machine.