Novelist Frank Bill looks around and finds very few writers that capture his life of deer hunting, physical labor, and ruggedness.
Somewhere men’s masculinity got hocked for gadgets, videogames, fast-food drive-thru’s, designer clothing, 10-minute oil changes, and reality TV.
Being raised in a working-class household, everything was earned and learned. My parents rented their bodies for hourly coin. My mother slaved in a chicken factory for a number of years, parting fowl with a butcher blade, while my Vietnam Vet father sweated in a tobacco plant in the ’70s and into the early ’80s. Then his plant shut down and he started over. Worked three jobs: selling insurance, tending bar, and playing soldier in the Army Reserve. My mother climbed the pay-raise ladder and took a swing-shift job in a battery-separator plant—and still cooked, cleaned, and nursed her family.
Hunting wild game placed most of the meat in our freezer and on the table. My father and grandfather always took me hunting during deer season. When a deer was shot, they showed me how to field-dress it. Then we dragged the damn thing to the barn unless we could get the truck or tractor close enough to it in the woods, wrapped a chain around its hinds and pulled it, or the three of us heaved it up onto the truck’s tailgate. Guys these days get scared at the site of blood when skinning or gutting an animal let alone dragging the damn thing from the woods and processing it themselves.
In this day and age, men have gone from being learned by their fathers and grandfathers, to being babied by their mothers. Growing up on videogames, McDonald’s, and having someone else wait on them hand and foot. Men seem to know less and less about where their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers came from. Their history, where and what they worked. What they endured and how they suffered to get them to where they are today.
By Frank Bill
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