Word: fathered
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When he is working, David's father drives a buggy in the mines and carries a shovel, which he derisively calls "an ignorant stick." To work in mining, David's generation will need to operate computers. In Prenter only four out of ten children graduate from high school. "I will either get a house here or build one on a big piece of land up there on the mountain," says David, imagining his future. Then the vista darkens: "But if there is no work here, I would have to move away, find a new job or somethin...
When David turned ten last year, he was finally old enough for a Nelson family ritual, deer hunting. He had waited impatiently for the birthday. David's father had not been allowed to hunt with his father until he was ten. The waiting and expectation give importance to the ritual. David and his father went up on Old Brammer Ridge to search for a buck with antlers big enough to be legal. "We got to where we's goin'," David remembers. "We couldn't find no deer." There were more deer when he was a boy, Larry told...
...that happy though ever distant day when David moves into his new house, one item will surely go with him. It is the mounted head of the nine-point buck he and his father shot last fall. David remembers: "We came to skin the deer, and Dad looks at it and says, 'I'm going to have that mounted.' Then he was tearin' the skin off, and we found where I had shot it real close to the tail where it went through the backbone and came out the other side. And Dad says, 'If you goin' to shoot...
...head now hangs in the living room with a plaque inscribed LARRY AND DAVID NELSON, NOV. 23, 1987. The trophy, just to the right of the mantelpiece, has a place of prominence in the house. "Goin' huntin' with your son is something a father can't explain," Larry says. He looks up at the deer. "I downed the deer, and David put it away. It was a special time for us. Maybe 20 years from now David will look back and recollect the times we had together...
...Bianca has a lot of her father's features," Sherri says. No photographs of the man are around the house. Sherri never lived with him. Bianca saw him only occasionally before he became ill and died when she was not yet four years old. "You don't miss what you don't know," says Sherri, dismissing any relevance to Bianca's life. Recently, Bianca was asked for her father's name in a school workbook. She wrote in Leonard's name...