I was nine-years old and had never been on a train before when my mother suddenly decided it was time for the whole family to get on board the Southern Pacific Railroad and head out to Missouri to visit my grandmother. I didn’t even know where Missouri was, but I was really anticipating finally spending some time with Martha Adelaide Wilson Cline (my Granny) on her own turf.
Granny was not your ordinary elderly lady. Her grandparents had once rented a room to the famous outlaw Jesse James (who left them a dollar tip), and her mother was directly related (although it had never been explained exactly how) to Teddy Roosevelt. I hadn’t seen her since I was very little, but my mother had often explained that she lived in a small town called Ava, close to the town square, in a tiny white wooden house my father and uncle called `the shack’. The shack had been purchased at the height of the Great Depression for ten dollars down and ten dollars a month. It had no running water and when you had to go to the bathroom, you used a two-seat outhouse in the backyard. Drinking water was retrieved from a nearby well and since collecting enough water to take a bath was a real hassle, bathing was way down on everyone’s list of priorities.
The town itself still allowed horses to be tied up on posts in front of the grocery store and you could buy all the cherry Cokes you could drink for a dime and go to the movies on Saturday afternoon for a quarter. In other words, to a nine-year old boy who still rode around on a broom handle called Midnight and cherished his Roy Rogers lunch pail, Ava, Missouri sounded like paradise itself.
When we arrived at the shack, I was surprised at how small my Granny was. She was barely five-feet tall, but her eyes sparkled as she took me by the hand and led me out into the backyard to show me the chickens and rabbits she raised. I had never seen chickens before, but I had just decided that they were kind of cute when Granny bent over, grabbed one of them by the neck and began swinging it around over her head. I could hardly believe my eyes as she finally threw the poor thing down on the ground and waited patiently for it to stop running all over the place. When it suddenly dropped dead, she picked it up, took my hand, and the three of us returned to the kitchen to start preparing dinner.
“Have you ever plucked a chicken before?” she asked me as she handed me the lifeless bird. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t seem to speak.
The next afternoon, still not fully recovered from the shock of seeing a chicken get its neck wrung, I ventured out to the scene of the crime to play with the rabbits. They were caged in a huge hutch and there had to be at least 30 of them. Granny came up behind me and asked if I would like her to take one of them out so I could pet it.
“Can I pet them, really?” I remember asking her.
“Sure, you can pet them,” she said as she reached into the cage and pulled out the cutest one of the bunch. It was all white and fluffy, with big pink eyes and brown, droopy ears.
Granny waited patiently until I had petted myself out, gently took the bunny by the back of the neck and strolled over to an old tree stump. She then held the wiggling rabbit tightly against the flat wooden surface, and with one clean stroke of an axe, whopped off the bunny’s head.
It took me a few moments, but I finally managed to scream. Granny looked back at me with alarm, worried that I had hurt myself or something.
“Granny,” I cried out, “you gotta stop killing things!”
She left the dead bunny on the tree stump and hurried over to me. She put her arm around me, looked deep into my eyes and gently explained, “Honey, a body’s got to eat.”
I don’t remember exactly how long we stayed in Ava, Missouri that long ago summer, but by the time I went home I loved her fried chicken and rabbit dinners, and I could pluck feathers and help skin a rabbit with the best of them.
Over the years, Granny and I had many talks, and it would take forever to list all the valuable knowledge she passed along to me. She also wrote me a lot of letters (especially when I was in Vietnam), each of them ending with her favorite saying; “See you soon, if the good Lord’s willing and the creeks don’t rise.”
Granny passed away a few years back at the age of 89. She had been born before there were airplanes, lived through two World Wars and the Great Depression, saw a man take a stroll on the moon and was a walking, breathing history book. She also made sure that for almost 40 years, I always received a card on my birthday with two crisp, brand new dollar bills in it. She is buried on a gently rolling hill just outside of Ava, next to the only man she ever loved, and not far from her beloved shack.
A while back, someone asked me what was the toughest thing I’ve ever had to do. Serving in Vietnam and a number of other things crossed my mind, but the answer was actually very simple, reading the eulogy at my Granny’s funeral.