Pulley Bone

       

       

         Grandma Howell bought two hundred leghorn chicks a year knowing that in a good year only a hundred or so would survive. Then we ate them. One at a time, spaced out over the better part of a year doing it.

        Fried chicken dinners down at grandma's in Little Dixie did not come in succession, they came in well spaced intervals making them all the more gratifying. Garden green beans with cream sauce and pearl onions, mashed potatoes and cream gravy, fried okra, pickled beets and butter milk biscuits. Sweetened iced tea so cold it made your teeth hurt washed it all down.

       Dessert? Well, yes. Peach cobbler from her small grove, or maybe a blackberry cobbler picked from vines growing wild down where her one cow, a Guernsey, grazed making milk, cream and butter without even realizing it.

       Grandma raised ten kids, lost three others in childbirth, and raised me until I was four years old. The "pandemic" of her time was The Great Depression. You may have heard of it. It altered her life and those of her ten children in ways they could not calculate. 

       Nobody thinks about a future while they're fighting off calamity. Day dreaming, while your world is collapsing all around you, is a luxury. If you have a job, you work in fear of losing it, and so nobody ever worked as hard as you do. Or else. Becoming a "hand", a real worker, was a matter of pride to men and women trying to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Get that done, and you could imagine a better day ahead. But not now.

       Four of those kids became millionaires. One of them lost his million, made it back again, and then lost it again. Not all, but nearly all, were serious risk takers, and gambled like Kenny Rogers on a midnight smoker bound for nowhere. Poker, dice, ball games, boxing matches, the number of peas in a pod, you name it. If nothing in your life was ever guaranteed, you're always looking for the next chance. Roll 'em, buddy.

       Years after growing up there, they knew if they went home they'd find something to eat at grandma's. If their luck was good, maybe a fried chicken dinner. Then, back to work. New men. New women.

       Unlike the steroidal monster chickens sold at today's markets, grandma's chickens were lithe and lean, making their living off very little corn and lots of grasshoppers, worms, beetles and the occasional mouse. They could fly in long, white parabolic arcs about the barnyard, and run like whippets when they hit the ground. The chickens trusted her and would come close to her in the yard, getting daily little smidgens of chopped corn from her apron's pockets one of which held her little silver can of Copenhagen. Using a long broom handle with a shepherd's crook made out of a clothes hanger on the end, she could snare them by their feet right about where their legs began.

       Roosters were the first to go, nobody really liking being awakened at three or four of a morning attached to a day that everybody knew was going to be too long as it was. Then too, many of the hens were laying eggs and more than paying for their keep. A family tradition you might say. Working, I mean, not laying eggs. I watched her do it so many times as I grew up spending the summers with her, but I never got over how fast she could break down a live chicken and get it fried and on the table.

       Once snared, she grabbed the bird's legs in her left hand, grasped its neck in her right, turned loose its legs, and whirled its body two or three times at waist level with a whipping motion until its head came free of its body, the body going one direction on its last whippet run, and the head falling to the ground, its eye with a beautiful black and gold iris looking right at ... well, me.

       Its heart still pumping, it bled out pretty quickly whereupon Grandma was quick to take the chicken dinner into the kitchen where she scalded the bird with hot tap water to loosen its feathers making them easy to pull out. Once de-feathered, and gutted, the bird was cut into pieces small enough to feed all the people in the house which, you remember, included a sizable number, all of them hungry. The hope was that all the "fixin's" would take up the slack, and they always did. At any moment of doubt, the importance of the biscuits, gravy and mashed potatoes became crucial.

       At dinnertime, the smaller the kid the smaller the piece of chicken. It made sense when you think about it. There was never more than one chicken served up at a time. It was a problem Jesus solved one time with some loaves and fishes, a story easily believed by anyone sitting down to a Lily Howell chicken dinner in the 1930's.

       Necks and backs were prized by the smallest kids, incredible by today's standards, but it was all that was left when their choice came. Livers, and gizzards? Oh, my goodness. There could be fights. 

       The "pulley bone", that "Y" shaped bone separating the two halves of a chicken breast was a great find at some point during every chicken dinner I ever sat down to, with the two people closest to its discovery getting to each grab an end of the "Y" and make a wish as they pulled the bone in opposite directions. When the bone snapped, the person holding the longer end of the two got their wish answered. That's what they said. The wishbone was always broken and gone by the time the platter came to me.

       My mother's favorite piece of chicken as a child was the back (highly underrated, by the way), and she grew to favor it even into an adulthood that found her eating chicken in some of the finest restaurants among some of the most far flung continents in the world. I loved her very much for that.

       So, here we are in the midst of our own "Great Depression", The Great Pandemic of 2020. Can't get out. Self-quarantined. Nothing on the shelves when we can get out to shop. We're eating a lot out of our freezer. I'm finding some surprises in there, things, good things, I had forgotten about. I found the other day some dove breasts, small "chickens" I say, and took them into the house.

       "What'd you find?" Pam asked.

       "Dove breasts."

       "Great!. What're we gonna' do with 'em?"

       "I'm gonna' wrap them in bacon, grill 'em 'til the bacon is done, and hope we've got some asparagus or green peas left."

       "Yes, we do," she grinned, "and some wild rice and two pear halves, and maybe a spoonful of cottage cheese apiece. That's it. Hard times."

       "Good times. We got pulley bones. Something to wish on."

© 2020 Conrad M. Vollertsen