Growing up in a small town deep in Hemingway, where everyone knows everyone, no story goes untold. You’d think there wouldn’t be much left to tell. Little do you know Pleasant Hill stories never run out or grow old.
While my grandpa has gotten to the point that he mixes up our names, you’d think he built that town with God himself the way he still knows every detail. “There’s no place like the ‘Hill,” he always says.
It’s my grandpa’s story, and he always tells his stories best, so I’ll grant you the gift of hearing this one from him.
“Not sure if this was my grandparents or my great grandparents, but they was going up that night — they had an old flambeau, a light at night they burned because they didn’t have no flashlights back then — and they would always see this doe deer at the end of the field,” he said. “And they shot [at] it several times but never could hit it.”
“And there was an old lady came over, visiting, and she told him, said ‘I can tell you how you can hit that deer.’ Said, ‘take a dime, cut it in three pieces, and when you packed your powders in the gun shell with those three pieces of dime in there, and then use that shell to shoot the deer, you will hit her.”
“Next time they went huntin,’ they saw the deer and they shot it and knew it hit her in the prime hind quarters. So, they trailed her; she was bleeding some.”
“So, they took that torch they had with the light, and they followed it into a little patch of the woods, into a man’s yard, and up the steps to the front door,” he said. “When they got inside the house, they saw that his wife was laying there shot in the hip.”
My dad had always suspected that it was a witch who transformed that woman into a deer, and that the same witch was the woman who gave my great grandpa the hunting tip. After all, who else would know how to break the curse than the one who created it?
