Blog

A Solution — Sort Of

January 6, 2020 | Ben Reach, Short Stories | Comments
Ben Reach had a Monday morning appointment he dreaded. After breakfast at Millie’s with Sam he trudged to his office to “face the music,” as his father said whenever his mother insisted he join her at a symphony performance (quarterly). He had spent most of a sleepless night working out what his advice would be this morning to Gilbert Spain. Read more

Debit Man ~ A Story for Christmas and 2020

January 2, 2020 | Ben Reach, Short Stories | Comments
Ben Reach and Sam Nixon MD had long enjoyed a secret Christmas season ritual. It required the conspiratorial help of The Debit Man, a man even shorter than Ben Reach but the only Caucasian who had the information Ben and Sam required to fulfill their annual ritual. What is a Debit Man? If you must ask that question you did not grow up among Poor People in the South in Ben and Sam’s era. Read more

An Easy Fix

November 19, 2019 | Ben Reach, Short Stories | Comments
“What is on the book this week?” Ben Reach asked Joanne when he arrived at the office Monday morning. “You have new clients at ten this morning, Sally and Sam Collins, about their mother Mary’s estate. She died two weeks ago. I put her will and trust agreement on your desk along with a summary of her assets. Her accountant, Ron Cease, will be with them — he is a co-executor and co-trustee with them. I’ll bring you a cup of coffee.” Read more

Just For Fun

October 23, 2019 | Ben Reach | Comments
Ben Reach found himself in a new role at the Deep South Quail Championship being run at Knotty Pine Plantation. He had gone expecting just to ride in the gallery, but discovered on arrival that the dog truck driver had failed to show, so Ben volunteered for the job. Read more

The Callimores

October 7, 2019 | Short Stories | Comments
The father, Jim, worked at S&M Milling for minimum wages, unloading and loading hundred-pound burlap sacks of grain hauled in by farmers for milling and mixing into animal feed. Jim and his wife had sixteen children, according to rumor. I knew only three, Billy, Freddy and Jean. Read more

Suspicion Unconfirmed

September 26, 2019 | Short Stories | Comments
Fred Barnes was a watcher. Little got by him. For the last two years he had been watching John Payne, a professional pointing dog handler, and his scout, Willie Blevins. Fred judged field trials a lot. Why? Because he had horses and a truck-trailer rig to haul them, and if he committed he showed, and he appeared to be without favorites among handlers or owners, pointers or setters. He was pleasant enough, stayed sober in daylight hours. Accepted only gas money to judge. He watched constantly the dogs under judgment. Did not chat or gather wool while judging. Rode every brace at the same pace. Read more

One Course Fiascos

September 16, 2019 | Short Stories | Comments
Most of us got our start with bird dogs foot hunting on farms where we grew up. For my generation there were hunt-able populations of quail on farms from Florida north to Indiana and grouse above and in mountains west of that, and of course quail and pheasants to the west. For the small percent of us attracted to pointing dog trials, it was the on-foot fun trials with a bird field and then the weekend one-course horseback trials that first captured our imaginations. Read more

Two Farmers, the Buck and the Boy

September 10, 2019 | Ben Reach, Short Stories | Comments
Jake Todd and Buck Read had been adjoining farmers all their adult lives. Each was now approaching eighty. Blood enemies as well, most of those years. Why, you ask, and the question tells me you have no experience with their situation. To adjoin is to irritate, irk, agitate, infuriate. No myth is so untrue as that of rural tranquility. It exists only in the imagination of delusional city dwellers. Rural inhabitants know better. Read more

Gunny

September 4, 2019 | Bird Dogs, Remembrances | Comments
Ask a professional trainer-handler of pointing dogs to name his best dog ever and you will likely get an ambiguous or evasive answer. Not so from Jim Heckert, who broke into the pro ranks long ago and has been at it ever since while also managing quail shooting plantations, including Wire Grass at Albany, Georgia for Thomas Vail of Cleveland Plain Dealer fame and currently Cedar Grove Plantation at Clarksville, Virginia for my friend Will Pannill. Read more