My old man wasn’t exactly the
Daniel Boone type. He was born in the city, lived in the city and eventually
died in the city.
“Camping” with my father meant
throwing two sleeping bags in the back of the Country Squire and sleeping
“under the stars” – in the car – parked by the curb in front of the house. No,
I am not kidding.
I’m not exactly Grizzly Adams myself,
but I’ve put in a lot of woods and trails time over the years, backpacking,
hiking and so on. My pop’s feet, so far as I know, never touched anything but
pavement.
He was the quintessential city
boy.
Which is why it was so much fun
to visit my Great Grandma Kelly in Indiana. Great Grandma Kelly was old. I
don’t know how old; I was just a kid
and kids can’t gauge that sort of thing. But she looked like one of those apple
people you see in craft stores; nothing but gray hair and wrinkles stretched
parchment-thin over her tiny frame.
She walked bent over, usually
with an honest-to-God shillelagh brought over from County Cork, which she used
as a cane. She ruled her household with a will of granite that brooked no
dissent. She had seen her clan through the Depression and two World Wars. She
had outlived three husbands.
Old and hobbled she may have been,
but she was the rock upon which all the tribulations that might assail her
family broke. In the summer of my tenth year, she was the only adult I truly
feared and respected. Also, I loved her.
Great Grandma had lived for time
out of mind in a modest farm house on the outskirts of Indianapolis. Since
Great Grandpa’s death ten years earlier, the fields adjoining her house were
leased to a neighboring farm. But Double Grandma still kept a couple goats and
a small brood of hens out in the back yard.
They weren’t pets. They were
food.
This concept was as alien to me
as was the geology of the planet Neptune. Maybe that’s why I was so interested
when, one sunny Sunday afternoon, Grandma Kelly told my old man to bring in a
chicken.
“Make it a nice, fat one,” Great
Grandma instructed. “We’ve got five hungry mouths to feed!”
My dad had been taking orders
from Great Grandma since before he was my age. He complied. Or tried to.
I followed him out back to the
chicken pen, hoping for some easy entertainment. I was not disappointed. For
ten minutes, pop pursued panicked poultry around the wire enclosure, cursing
under his breath the entire time. At last he managed to corner the slowest of
the lot and snatched her up.
The hen, perhaps understanding
the momentousness of her plight, put up a helluva fight. Scratched and
hen-pecked, my dad wrestled the combative fowl back into the house.
Sadly, I cannot quote exactly my
Great Grandma’s words at this point. See, despite her age, great dignity, and
an abiding love for Jesus, Double Grandma maintained a store of profanity to
rival any longshoreman’s. And she was not happy my father had dragged a live
chicken into her spotless kitchen.
“For (expletive deleted)’s sake,
Bob,” she said. “You’ve got to kill the (expletive deleted) thing before we can
eat it! Hatchet’s in the shed.”
Like I said, my old man didn’t
know a lot about life on the farm. Without a word, he exited the house, marched
to the shed and pulled out the old Wetterlings axe, a tool large enough to fell
even the mightiest sequoia.
For ten minutes, I struggled diligently
not to laugh as my old man fought to wrestle that wildly clucking feathered
fury onto the chopping block, where he intended to separate the bird from its
head. Eventually, the hen escaped and my dad, sweating and disheveled, returned
to the chase.
It was at this point Great
Grandma shot out the back door, wiping her soap-reddened hands on her apron.
“(Expletive deleted) Bob!” she
snapped. “It’ll be dark before we get dinner on the table at this rate!”
Great Grandpa entered the
enclosure, unceremoniously elbowed my old man out of the way and with a quickness
that seemed almost supernatural in a woman who got around on a cane, she
snatched up a fat Jersey Giant. A quick flick of her arthritic wrist and the
hen’s neck was broken.
The bird trotted around a bit
until it figured out it was dead. Then Great Grandma hobbled to the shed,
returned with a small, much-used hatchet, and finished the grisly job.
A couple hours later we all sat
down to Sunday dinner. My dad didn’t eat much, but I did. I was surprisingly
unfazed by the violence which had preceded our repast. Also, I was hopeful
that, if I showed enough enthusiasm for chicken dinners, Great Grandma would
send my dad out there for another chicken the following Sunday.
For pure entertainment, my old
man struggling to execute a chicken was hard to beat.
(616) 730-1414
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