THE ONE-EYED HUNTERS

The rusted-out husk of broken down Buicks and Farmalls sunk into Roy Ferris’s front lawn; His bygone possessions amongst the jimsonweed, dodder, and dandelion. His clapboard house never felt the bristles of a loaded paintbrush. The quack grass grew undisturbed, swallowing two mower decks—obstacles for feral cats chasing field mice across his postage-stamp lot. My late grandfather, forever the good neighbor (their socio-economic disparity as wide as the cornfield separating their homes) invited Roy to our Kalkaska hunting camp.

Roy Ferris had nothing in common with the well-paid Detroit autoworkers arriving in their new F-150s. Still, he became one of us, the camaraderie natural and unforced. The deer need not worry about Roy’s marksmanship either; he tended the campfire, never wandering too far from the heat in his thin layer of clothing, his glass eye rolling inward, his good eye darting back and forth from smoke and flame to the surrounding forest, waiting for us to reappear from the swamps, waiting for someone to drag a freshly gutted buck into the clearing.

I’m not exactly sure how many times Roy stayed at our camp before his death, but my grandfather soon found someone else to converse with on the ride to and from camp. Enter Jimmy O, another poor chap, a younger version of Roy, collecting disability and working odd jobs whenever the opportunity arose. He had a lisp, his tongue smacking against the back of his upper incisors with more frequency after each swig of Jack Daniels. If my memory serves me well, we only had one one-eyed man per hunting season and not two.

The above photograph shows Jimmy O taking a much-needed rest. The prisoner drawing, aptly titled “The Eye in the Sky,” is a belated tribute to Roy Ferris.