Out here at Brownspur, we’re having a banner year for fruit harvest.

First came the plums, of course, then the figs started turning ripe last week, and now the peach tree is not only breaking all kinds of records, but limbs as well. These are the little yellow peaches, and I’ve been paying attention to them, too.

One has to regularly “whup” his peach trees as the fruit matures, or else the limbs will break. It’s a sad situation, but on the Sunday that son Adam was christened, a Presbyterian minister named Sam Patterson (the kid is named Adam Samuel Neill) preached a jam-up good sermon about the peach tree: how it bore peaches until the limbs broke slap off, which had to hurt it, but the job God gave it was to grow peaches, so it did the best job of peach growing the world had ever seen.

Then he likened that peach tree to Jesus, who came to be crucified for our sins, even though He knew right from the get-go that it was going to hurt something terrible. But He did it anyway, because that was the job God gave Him.

Adam is now 43. How many sermons do you recall from that long ago?

Okay, that was a freebie. My point is, our peach tree is doing its God-given job so well, although it hurts, that we can’t keep up with the fruit. Yet I’ve been doing what I’m supposed to, by pulling immature peaches off the limbs as they bend, leaving just enough on the branches to fill out without breaking it down.

The grandboys and I had been out to the Swimming Hole for the afternoon, and along about dusk, we harkened to Doots’ supper call. In hustling back to the kitchen, we passed the peach and fig trees, and there was a sudden commotion.

Two, possibly three raccoons came crashing down out of the fruit trees, obviously thinking that they had been caught in the act, and they hightailed it for the Mammy Grudge ditchbank. As we stopped to see their escape, two possums abandoned the fruit trees, also heading for the safety of the ditchbank. The last denizen of the orchard looked to be a common housecat. It skedaddled in the same direction.

Except for the cat, I now realized that the gait of the coons and possums had not actually been a run — more of an aggravated waddle, being inconvenienced right at suppertime by the Grunk and two grandboys, who were cheering the sight. I inspected the peach tree, and I think I saw what’s been going on.

The owner of a peach tree can whup the tree free of extra fruit all he wants to, but if a nonetheless fully-loaded limb is mounted by a couple of 30-pound coons (and I’d have estimated that these coons were fattened to perfection, and probably weighed in at closer to 40 pounds each), then the extra weight undoes all the good that whupping the tree has done for weeks. Branches subjected to that much more weight are going to break, period. There seemed to be, but one good alternative, and it involved the demise of the invading coons, as well as the accompanying possums. I have eaten both coon and possum, and prepared well, the meat is delicious. When I was a boy, Little Dave and I would hold the searchlight for Big Dave, Uncle Shag, and Sammy, as they harvested enough coons for a barbecue. Big Dave would spend all day in the shade of, appropriately enough here, a fig tree that stood over an old-fashioned stone fireplace with a grill over it. He’d slather barbecue sauce over the cut-up pieces of coon, and when he brought it to the supper table, it ate right where you put it!

But I’d bet that Big Dave never got to barbecue a peach- or fig-stuffed coon!

Here was new ground to plow, a chance to get in on the ground floor of the next eating craze, and Betsy is a renowned chef, with her own establishment. I grabbed a grandboy in each hand, and ran to tell her the good news, on my way to the gun cabinet for a .22 pistol.

Well, I know I’ve built up your appetites, just to disappoint you. The Coffee Shop in Leland will not be serving lunches of peach-stuffed coon next week.

•

Robert Hitt Neill is an outdoors writer. He lives in Leland, Miss. Email him at unclebob@yahoo.com