The First Beautiful Thing I Ever Saw
I was at the home of my maternal grandparents. I was probably about four years old, maybe a bit older. Some of the men had been out duck hunting. Later when I was old enough to hunt, I found it mainly boring, and I didn’t like killing things. But I remember being intrigued from the beginning by the paraphernalia: heavy canvas jackets and hats lined with red and black checkered flannel, the guns of dark metal and polished wood, shotgun shells with bases of gleaming brass and red or green cardboard sleeves. Later on the winter sky and the dead fields were added to these impressions.
They had brought back at least one duck, a mallard. The male mallard is the one with the bright green head; here’s a good picture. They must have let me hold it; at any rate I remember not only how it looked but how it felt to the touch. The feathers were miraculously soft and smooth and lustrous, but the body was unnaturally limp.
I had some idea what death was; at least I knew that it was possible for people to go away and never come back, though I’m not sure whether I had ever actually seen a dead thing. Anyway, I knew the duck was dead, and there was a sadness in that. But it was beautiful. I didn’t have that word and couldn’t have expressed my feelings. All I knew was that looking at the bird was intensely pleasurable and that I wanted to keep on looking at it. This is my earliest memory of that sensation.
The duck’s head was a dark green that remains one of the colors I like most—dark, and yet shining, green with streaks of something like gold where the light struck feathers at a certain angle. And on that green there was one perfect drop of brilliant red blood. That drop of blood still bothers me, because it was part of the beauty.
Pre-TypePad
Light On Dark Water 
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