Retrospection/Grandma's Root Cellar

Secrets and memories of Grandma's root cellar, the headless man, the roosters, and a rural farm in the 1950's in the Ozark foothills of Wayne County, Missouri.

 

Shadows.  Some light fog and mist.  I wonder if I could somehow step through it?  Go back to that time almost seventy years ago?  Would that rooster be waiting for me there still?  The black walnut tree?  The woodpile?

Is it possible to remember joy and be overwhelmed with sadness at the same time?  Maybe that fits somewhere in the very definition of nostalgia.

A few years ago we made the trip back to what once was the small farm of my grandmother, Bessie Wilson, near Greenville, Missouri in the Ozark foothills of Wayne County, Missouri.  The house now is in total ruin and a few of the wooden outbuildings have succumbed to weather, decay, mold, and mildew and have become as one with nature. 

But not the stone masonry of the old freestanding root cellar.  It still stands and floods my brain with the 1950's memories of the childhood laughter of cousins, Grandma, and adventure.

I could not see the ruin revealed now before me without also unseeing it. For the very visage brought back with astonishing clarity another time there.  A time of innocence.  A better time because of it.

I remember summers most of all.  Opening the screen door from Grandma Wilson's kitchen led to the screened in back porch sheltering the well from which our cooking and drinking water was hauled up each day, bucket after bucket.  Then, if the call of nature was the relevant mission of the moment, you had to open the remaining screen door, navigate the old steps, the flat rocks at the base of the steps that served as a landing pad for my bare feet, and then I could begin my oft charted course around and behind the stone cellar to the original old wood outhouse on the edge of the dry wash some fifty or so yards distant.

As soon as the first toe hit the flat rocks you were greeted by a rush of hens anticipating the scraps from the kitchen or dinner table slung in their direction by Grandma. The rocks were also the depository of the breakfast coffee grounds, making them an incredible worm farm for providing me with bait for my many fishing adventures.  All you had to do  was flip one over.  

It was never the hens that caused my heart to skip a beat, it was what awaited me around the back of the old stone cellar.  

They haunted the place.  They were fierce and I dreaded the quest I was undertaking  more than having to sit through another showing of "The Creature From the Black Lagoon".  If one wasn't there, the other would be.  They never left the path to the outhouse unguarded.

Whether it was the old red rooster or the dark feathered banty rooster, they were coming for me and I knew it.  The back corner of the stone cellar was the last safe zone until the door shut in the privy.  I'd always pause at that corner, gathering courage and summoning the powers that be to give my feet wings.  I wasn't very big, but God had blessed me with speed.  

I never made the race once without the extended neck of one of the roosters at a full out gallop within inches of making an assault upon my bare legs.  It was pure joy at having won the contest, but meant also that it was time to survey for the wasps and yellow jackets that called the place home and consider the possibility that you were were sharing the space with a kingsnake or worse.  Only then could you drop trousers and flip to the sporting goods and toy pages in the Sears catalog.  That catalog served to entertain as well as other necessary purposes.

Within moments came the realization that you would have to make the trip back around the corner of the cellar to safety once again.  Those feathered ogres intent upon my destruction never caught me.  Not once.  Some of my cousins were not as fortunate.  

It was a very important day in my memories of my stays at Grandma's when, making my first dash of the trip to the outhouse I realized I was alone in my journey.  I inquired of Grandma the absence of my nemesis' and was delighted to find that some wild critter had made the banty rooster dinner and Grandma and Beverly had made Sunday dinner out of the red rooster.  I wish I could have been there.  I would have loved to see Grandma grab that old rooster by the head and spin him around until his old mean carcass separated and sailed into the yard by the root cellar.  I'll bet you, as that rooster's eyes blinked in disbelief there in her hand, his last thought was where was that skinny kid from Kentucky?

Some years later, maybe around 1958 give or take a few years, I had the urge to open the door to the cellar and see what was there.  It was a dank, dark, and intimidating place to me, the air moist and offering promise of the visage of the apparition of the man walking and holding his head my Uncle Herbie reportedly saw one evening after his return from his time in the Marines in Korea and the horrifying warfare at Chosin Reservoir. I hoped that man and his head were walking someplace else.

It had been a very long time since the cellar had seen use.  There were none of Grandma's mason jars, and no root vegetables from the garden stored--they had been eaten as soon as they were plucked from the rocky soil of her kitchen garden at the side of the house.  Times were hard.  Grandpa had been dead almost 12 years and the tiny farm was down to one milk cow, the chickens, and a tail-less cat.  That cat owed its anatomical state to the eagle eye of my Uncle Cecil and his .22 rifle. Anything grown in that garden was consumed immediately as it ripened.  Grandma had no income to speak of.

As my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I recall them being drawn to the far back left corner of the cellar and a pile of rust that covered a small area at the base of the wall.  My sleuthing instincts were ripe with anticipation of what could be below those flakes of disintegrating iron. Maybe an old civil war pistol or a bowie knife. My imagination was as developed as my instinct to dig away at the smattering of rust.

I knelt and began to claw at the spot of my attention and curiosity.  Ouch!

Tacks!  And some rotten wood. It had been a barrel of some sort and had been filled with nails and tacks and who knew what else?  But I also noticed something very different.  A patch of light tan or ivory the size of a half dollar.

It must be bones.  A skull probably. Was that the head of the man Uncle Herbie had seen?  I decided to stand up and take a step back in case it was necessary to extract myself back through the cellar door.

But I had to know.  The latent archaeologist that was and has been an important part of my composition all my life, had to see what was hiding just below the layer of rusted tacks.  I gave a quick look back over my shoulder to make sure the door was open as far as it could go, and surveyed the terrain and distance to Grandma's back screen door. I knelt once more in the musty earth at the corner base of the cellar...and began to carefully use a short piece of an old board to slice away at the layers of rust until I reached the top of the...what?  Skull?

It was easier to scrape away at the black soil now.  Probably black because of rotted brain matter I thought. 

A few pulls of the board end revealed the object to indeed be bone.  I sat upright and contemplated the possibilities.  Is this that guy's head?  Surely Grandma hadn't buried Grandpa out here.

I went to work again.  I just had to know. 

To my relief, a few more pulls of the board piece clarified matters more fully.  The bone was appeared to be long and tapered.  This gave me comfort until it dawned on my juvenile brain that this could be a long bone, maybe a leg or arm bone.  So.  Maybe not Uncle Herbie's specter's head, but his whole body?  I went to work again. My heart was racing faster than that old red rooster of years past could run.

And then I had it.  It was a... bull's horn?  Why would Grandma, or even Grandpa when he was alive, bury a bull's head in the cellar?  I scraped away dirt clinging to the horn with my fingers until I could see exactly what I had recovered.  I noticed a circle engraved around the tapered end.  And then, that the horn was hollow. Hot diggety dog!  I had found a powder horn used with an old black powder rifle!

I looked back into the short trench.  Maybe there were some musket balls.  Indeed there was something else of metal there. and, it took but a moment to extract what was obviously an old straight razor.  Probably had once belonged to Grandpa, I thought. Excited now, I grabbed up both the powder horn and straight razor and made a dash to find Grandma.

Grandma was in the kitchen and I'm sure she thought I was being chased by the devil.  I held up both of my prizes.  "Can I have these Grandma?"  She looked first at the powder horn and informed me that it was instead Grandpa's fox horn.  I wish I had been smart enough and calm enough to ask "whose Grandpa?"  Mine? Or yours?  Or which Grandpa ever.

Then her eyes shifted to the straight razor in my other hand. I remember her eyes had a different look in them that I didn't understand then.  They remained there for several moments, soft and, I guess, reflecting on another time in her life.  I never before had seen Grandma's eyes like that, and I never did again. Approaching eighty years of age now, I understand what I was seeing was memories there, of both pain and love.

And then she turned to me, her hand outstretched.  "You cain't keep Grandpa's razor," she said.  Her Ozark vocabulary was always to the point, but colorful and chock full of "you'un's" and "warsh your hands" and so on.

 I know now there were many reasons for her denying me the salvage of my dig, chiefly the damage I could do to myself on that rusted old blade.  And, if you are reading this, you know the other reasons as well. But I didn't understand then when I reluctantly placed the folded razor into her palm. 

I still own the fox horn and have had it examined by several people that claim to know about these things.  Most have confirmed it was a fox horn used to call the dogs in a fox hunt from horseback, usually.  One person believed that It had first been used as a rudimentary powder horn and been converted to more practical use in advancing years as a fox horn.  All believed it at least between 100-150 years since the bull surrendered it to one of my Grandpas.

So, here I was on that day a few years in the current past with my brother Ken standing outside the old cellar once more, in the dancing shadows and cool breezes of the Ozark hillside.  It did not seem right that that this visage was devoid of the sounds of laughter of my cousins, Grandma's voice, and the head of the old red rooster peeking around the back corner of the cellar, daring me to race it to the outhouse once more.  I felt the presence of spirits there, and they were glad to see me. I wish I knew their names.

I also wish I could stand outside the cellar once more and have so many memories flood my brain with my childhood recollections of the old farm.  But I probably never will. 

Keith

 

In memory of my maternal Grandparents:

Bessie Edith Moore            22 Aug 1899 - 21 Aug 1993

Clarence Madison Wilson   22 Sep 1891 - 23 Jul 1946

The Foxhorn

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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