Halloran disappeared into the back room and returned with a thick, dog-eared reference book, its spine cracked from decades of use: American Folk Decoys: Carvers of the Eastern Flyway.
He flipped to a page near the middle and turned the book toward me. There, in a faded black-and-white photograph from the 1950s, was a young man crouched beside a duck blind, holding up a decoy nearly identical to the one sitting on the counter between us. The caption underneath read: E. Ashford, Miller’s Marsh region — considered among the finest working decoy carvers of the postwar era, though little of his work survives outside private collections.
E. Ashford. Everett Ashford. My grandfather.
“He wasn’t well known outside a small circle,” Halloran explained, pulling his glasses down his nose. “Collectors who know decoys, though — real collectors — have been trying to track down authenticated Ashford pieces for thirty years. He apparently stopped carving and selling sometime in the sixties. Went quiet. Most people in the field assumed his surviving work had been lost, or destroyed, or was sitting unmarked in someone’s attic.”
He turned the decoy over again, tracing the burned initials — E.A. — with something close to awe.
“These initials, this burn technique, the way the primary feathers are layered instead of just painted on — this is textbook Ashford. If this is what I think it is, and there are twelve of them…” He stopped himself, like he didn’t want to say the number out loud yet.
He made some calls. Two days later, a collector drove four hours from out of state just to sit at Halloran’s counter and examine the crate, piece by piece, wearing thin cotton gloves like he was handling museum artifacts. Which, as it turned out, he essentially was.
The final appraisal, once all twelve decoys were authenticated, documented, and cross-referenced against auction records of the handful of confirmed Ashford pieces that had sold in the last two decades, came in at just under $260,000 for the full set — with a note that a few of the rarer species represented, including a hollow-carved pintail drake, could fetch even more individually at the right specialty auction.
I sat in my car in Halloran’s parking lot for a long time after hearing that number, trying to remember every single time I’d watched my grandfather sitting at his workbench with a pocketknife and a block of tupelo wood, and every single time I’d rolled my eyes and thought, there he goes again with the ducks.
I called my brother first. Told him the crate of his “pets” had just been appraised. There was a long pause on the line before he asked, quietly, if I was joking.
I wasn’t.
Here’s the part that still sits strangely with me: my grandfather never once mentioned that his carvings were worth anything. Not to me, not to my mother, not — as far as any of us can tell — to anyone. He carved because he loved it, sold occasionally to hunters who wanted a “real” decoy instead of a plastic one, and quietly walked away from the wider decoy-collecting world sometime after my grandmother passed, according to Halloran’s records, when the joy apparently went out of it for him.
He didn’t leave me the crate because it was worthless. And he didn’t leave the cabin to my brother or the savings to my sister because he loved them more.
I think he left each of us exactly what he wanted us to have — and trusted, in his quiet way, that I was the one who’d actually go looking at what was inside instead of just accepting what it looked like on the surface.
My brother still gets the lake view every summer. My sister has her $90,000, put toward a house down payment. And me — I sold two of the decoys to fund my transmission repair and a modest cushion in savings, and kept the other ten, including the pintail, displayed properly now, in a locked glass case, exactly the way Halloran told me a serious collector eventually would.
Colt doesn’t smirk anymore when the decoys come up at family dinners. Mostly, now, he just asks — a little too casually — whether I’ve thought about selling one more.
I haven’t. I don’t think I will.
