Stories From Under A Bootheel (Rants, Laughs, and Tears)

Chapter 2 Kinsmen and Kindness Part 1 Headless Chickens

Yeah, I learned a lot in my childhood and not just life lessons. Of course, when properly viewed, I guess everything is a life lesson. For example, as early as the age of three, I learned the origin of the expression "like a chicken with its head cut off." It is not a pleasant memory.

I remember my grandfather with an axe chopping the heads off chickens on a stump next to the shed behind their house and throwing the decapitated bodies on the ground where they literally ran around like chickens with their heads cut off. The other kids would laugh, I was a bit distressed by it. I was going to imbed a video I found online showing a guy chopping off a chicken's head on a stump. The video even had a young girl watching the act. She was about the same age I was when I first had this experience. The guy botched the job and I couldn't finish watching the video, so I'm not about to include it here. My grandfather never botched the job. The heads were severed quickly and cleanly with one stroke of the axe.

It was my mother's father with the axe. He was not a cruel man at all. This was just the way things were done.

People were very self-sufficient back then. Both my mother's parents had jobs in town, my grandfather had been county sheriff and my grandmother worked for the Red Cross; yet, they still had their own farm and raised a lot of their own food. Besides the chickens, I remember a cow, two apple trees, two cherry trees, a fig tree, a pecan orchard, a stand of corn grown just for me and a very large garden which my grandmother tended until she died at the relatively young age of ninety-seven. I say relatively young because most of her siblings lived past one-hundred.

My grandmother was the youngest of fourteen from a Pennsylvania Mennonite family that had moved to Ohio. (Kids, her Uncle Absalom Lehman discovered Lehman Caves in Nevada. Also, the Swiss genes were probably the source of her longevity.) My grandfather was the fifth oldest of nine siblings raised in central Tennessee most lived into their late eighties (Scotch-Irish genes).

My grandmother, who I called Mimi, and my grandfather, who I called Papa, both had left their families to carve out their own lives in Arkansas, the self-proclaimed, "land of opportunity." I suspect both of them had had enough of large families. I know my grandmother especially enjoyed the isolation of living on a farm out in the countryside. This might explain why my mother was an only child. Although, my grandfather's younger sister Lillian and one of their brothers did follow him to Arkansas, and my grandmother did have two sisters who lived nearby, Aunt Mabel who lived in town and Aunt Cora who lived in Piggott on the Missouri border just west of the bootheel.

By the time I was born, my grandfather was no longer sheriff. He had lost one of his legs due to gangrene. The gangrene had set in after he broke the leg falling off a horse. Self-sufficient to a fault, he had refused to go to the doctor about it and so eventually they had to amputate the leg.

Still even on one leg my Papa got around on crutches well enough to save me from a poisonous snake that I came face to face with in their garden. I was three and the moccasin was about five or more feet in length. As it reared up to a strike position, it was as tall as I was. I still remember staring that snake in the eyes. Papa killed it with a hoe.

Papa was taken from me when I was about five. I believe his death was related to the gangrene. Despite the memory of headless chickens and chopped up snakes, I will always remember my grandfather as a kind man who would play made up games with me on maps out of National Geographic magazines. Hence my love of geography and inventing things.