Short Stories

Joe and Denny and Me — and Lucky

April 1, 2020 | Short Stories | Comments

In the summer of 1973, when I was thirty-five and a striving Richmond lawyer, I got an amazing gift from a more striving life insurance salesman hoping for referrals from me, an introduction to his brother, Joe Prince, perhaps Virginia’s most striving grain farmer, and after his crops of wheat, peanuts, soybeans and corn were up, most striving quail hunter. Read more

The Trip

March 5, 2020 | Ben Reach, Short Stories | Comments

Ben Reach was breakfasting alone in Millie’s Diner when his old friend Fred Eanes entered and accepted Ben’s waived invitation to join him. Fred farmed near Camilla in partnership with his son. Like Ben, he had been a life-long lover of big going bird dogs, trial and hunting. He and Ben had often judged together, but not for the last decade. Read more

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