A Gun Named ‘Meat In The Pot’

My dad died the day after I wrote last month’s column, a rambling piece about outdoor memories I titled First Deer, Last Deer. 

We knew his passing was coming, and it seemed to be coming on quick that week. And I’m sure that’s why last month I was so sentimental about outdoor memories and how much they mean to me. 

My dad really liked hunting and fishing. After my mom passed away 10 years ago, my father made his own picture-montage CD, kind of his life story in pictures. He made it 10 years ago, and I didn’t watch it until two days after he died. It was full of hunting and fishing pictures. There was me and brother as little kids with double fist-fulls of greenhead mallards. Stringers of bream from the backwaters of Tunica Cutoff—long before they built casinos at Tunica and changed that oxbow forever. Dad and his fishing buddies on the Tennessee River…

Then our family’s move to Georgia is marked when the pictures transition to an Allatoona striped bass he caught after learning some tips from Robert Eidson, tips he took to Lake Oconee when he later moved out here. There was the picture of a handsome 130-inch 8-point buck dad killed on the lease we had in Henry County for 12 years. And a picture of my son, very young, with a bucketful of bream he caught with my dad in a Morgan County pond.

What’s unique about the memorial montage of pictures is that dad made it himself. He chose the pictures to tell his own story, rather than a family member throwing something together after his death just in time for the memorial service. He chose the pictures, and he chose so many hunting and fishing pictures.

I wrote last month’s editorial on a Thursday afternoon just before that November issue of GON went to press. I always write this column last, at the last minute. This doesn’t come easy—not just writing about my dad after his death, but just writing this column in general. It’s a painful combination of procrastination and angst that I hope occasionally works out well. I’m an introvert by nature. I enjoy writing about other people, not about my opinions and myself.

Dad knew how much consternation writing this column caused me most months. So that Thursday evening, the day before he passed, dad asked me what I wrote about. I told him I wrote about my first deer, that Mississippi Delta buck, about how afraid of the dark I was that morning, about how I laid there in that swamp bottom looking at the sky for what seemed like hours waiting on him to come get me and my first deer. 

Dad smiled. And then he asked if I told y’all about the gun named Meat in the Pot. I hadn’t, and I regretted it. The gun I killed that buck with is special to my family, special to my dad. 

Meat in the Pot is a 12 gauge pump shotgun that looks like it’s been used as a billy club and a walking stick as much as it’s been a hunting gun. It’s a J.C. Higgins pump, ordered from a Sears catalog, older than the house my dad grew up in, passed down to my dad by his grandfather. Do I need to tell you why that full-choke shotgun got the name Meat in the Pot?

A gun that arrived by train to a tiny Mississippi Delta town almost a century ago. A gun that has put untold quantities and varieties of meat in the pots of four generations of a family, including my first deer. A 9-point buck that met its fate with three rounds of 00 buckshot—well, one shot that counted. Two follow-up shots went who knows where.

The past six months or so my dad’s one good eye—he lost his other when he was a kid—wasn’t so good anymore. He couldn’t read the magazine, so he’d have these editorials read out loud to him. He didn’t get to hear last month’s read to him, but the evening before he passed away, I told my dad about the column I wrote that day. I told him it was about my first deer. And he asked if I told you about Meat in the Pot. Now I have.

A gun that has spanned four generations. God willing, four and counting.