The Miracle of Acorns

BY JOHN MANDERINO

He even has me praying with him. We get down on our knees on the linoleum oor in front of the cross on the wall above the couch and fold our hands and bow our heads and speak to Jesus—not out loud, so I can pray for anything I want. And the thing I ask Jesus for, would it be possible for Him to ll Dad’s heart a little bit less? Don’t leave completely or he’ll go back to drinking, but could You possibly leave enough room in his heart for deer hunting?

I have a Remington Model Seven with a scope and Dad has a Marlin pump action, and all they do now, those two beautiful guns, is sit in the closet.

Three weeks ago Dad came home from one of his AA meetings on Woodford Street so happy and excited I thought he fell o the wagon. But he hadn’t. He got born again.

In the cabinet over the kitchen sink there’s a bottle of Jim Beam he hasn’t touched ever since, and I’m really glad. But here’s the thing. I wish he would talk about something else besides Jesus.

I remember when he rst started taking me with him. We did some target practice in this gravel pit in Gorham, then went to the woods behind an old abandoned farm out in Buxton. e rst deer I ever saw Dad bag was a doe, this quiet pretty thing just standing there minding its own business, and the way it went down in sti little stages, coughing blood—I couldn’t help it, I started crying. Dad told me to quit being a little girl. Which hurt.

e next time we went out together a stag showed up. “Take it,” Dad whispered. I scoped it, then slowly squeezed the trigger.

It went down, no stages, just straight down dead. What a feeling! You can’t imagine. Dad took a picture of me holding up its head by the antlers so the deer and me are both looking at the camera. He had that picture blown up and framed and hung it on the wall above the couch.

But now it’s down. A er getting saved he took it down and put something less violent up there—a man hanging by nails from a cross!

We still go to the woods together, but we don’t bring our guns. It isn’t Christian to kill for the fun of it, according to Dad, even though we always ate the meat and even though he always used to talk about the “long-standing Maine tradition of hunting.” e last time we went for one of our “Christian walks” we ended up sitting under an oak tree admiring an acorn. I’m serious. Dad held it out in his palm saying it was one of God’s miracles, this tiny thing turning into a mighty oak tree. I said, “Huh,” pretending that was really something, even though it’s not, even though it’s just science, even though it’s boring sitting there talking about acorns instead of looking around for a deer to kill.

Later on that day we came across one, a beautiful-looking eight-pointer. We both of us froze the way we used to. But without our guns all we could do was stand there watching it munch, “appreciating it,” as Dad says. It made me want to cry, standing there appreciating it instead of shooting it.

I don’t know what Jesus did to Dad at that AA meeting, how He took over so totally, but whenever we pray together I always ask Him to please let go a little. When it was Jim Beam instead of Jesus, at least Dad was sober now and then. n