Memorial Day: What about remembering?

My wife is a good cook. Not me. I have to cheat. Somewhere around Memorial day is when you are most likely to catch me. I’m pretty good at it. I’m probably doing it as you read this.

I watched over my father’s shoulder the first chicken he ever charcoal grilled. It was up in Nebraska where we were visiting my grandpa Harry between dad’s naval service moves. He hated growing up on that farm, but somehow always managed to pull us into that muddy drive just north of the milk barn for “leave” between the two coasts. Remembering his parents, he wanted to visit with them, farm or not.

If we were to stay a week, Dad would get bored somewhere around the third day in, and start doing the farm chores he joined the Navy to get away from. Mowing alfalfa to be baled, he would jump down off the tractor and run down baby jacks and cottontails fleeing the side-mower blades. I said, “run them down”. It didn’t seem possible, but he would bring them to me in a cardboard box to play with.

Once he brought me six, one jack and five cottontails. Those cottontails were sly, perfectly content to lie quietly in a little balled up, furry bunch in one corner of the box. They knew their time would come, and that all things come to he who waits.

All of them eventually escaped back into the hay field except the jack. That jack was born to run, constantly, I think, and died of confinement of spirit behind brown cardboard walls much the same way as Satanta, the Kiowa, died in prison by jumping out a window down yonder in Texas where the Texicans penned him up like a pig in a sty.

He did not have a pig’s spirit, and proved it. Not all of my heroes have been cowboys, Willie.

It was boredom that put Dad to helping his younger brother, Norm, who loved the farm, shell grandpa’s corn crop from the previous year. When the sheller started up, the Norway rats went running everywhere in the barn; around our legs, along the barn eaves and rafters, everywhere, hundreds of them.

Uncle Norm was ready for them. He had seen this show before. He had leaned his Savage twenty-two pump rifle close at hand. When the rats started running, Uncle Norm started shooting. He got tired. Then Dad shot awhile. When he got tired, I shot awhile. If, when in that country, somebody asks you how all those holes got in that barn’s tin roof, tell them I know.

I now own the gun, occasionally bring it out carefully, run an oily rag over it, and shoot a few squirrels with it. Doing it helps me remember things.

One time Dad found some old, rusted, busted cultivator discs from one of Grandpa’s discarded cultivators, and was reminded of something that drew him out of his boredom. Apparently, Dad had seen a 1950’s era charcoal grill somewhere, maybe in a magazine, and decided we needed one since we had never had one before.

He made one out of the old rusty discs, using grandpa’s welding machine, and his acetylene torch, to fashion it together; put legs on it, too, with a piece of rusty, expanded metal as the grill. It might’ve weighed two hundred pounds, maybe three; no wheels of course, but we moved that thing clear across country, Atlantic to Pacific, at least five times, because it grilled chicken like you wouldn’t believe.

Seasoning? Rubs? Give me a break. There were none, unless you accepted grandma’s plain black pepper as such. Except cinnamon, it was all she had. Dad lathered it on heavy. It’s the way I still do it today. Just that pepper. A country boy will survive.

Turn the chicken often, cooking it in its own peppered fat, and be careful to not let it burn. Potato salad or scalloped potatoes on the side. Sure, and iced tea so cold it makes your teeth hurt.

I told you I cheat. I also lie. Several years ago, Alan Karstetter, the old CPHS wrestling coach (yeah, he’s old; so am I. Call the cops.) fed me a mixed platter of grilled venison and chicken. It almost beat dad’s plain-Jane stuff.

What’d you season this with?” I asked suspiciously, not believing Coach was capable of producing anything so good, but obviously he had.

“Daddy Hinkles. I use it on every thing I grill. Reasor’s has it.”

So does Walmart. They dropped it awhile, and then brought it back. I bought a combined package of the rub and the marinade there the other day

It’s made in a little building just at the west edge of Cleveland on Highway 64 on the way to Pawnee. When Walmart stopped carrying it (there was no Reasor’s here yet) I had to journey to old Daddy Hinkle’s shop there in Cleveland to buy my stuff, and did it gladly.

Daddy Hinkle, by the way was a real person, an Osage County oilman that back in the ‘20’s and ‘30’s fed his work crews on special holiday occasions grilled and barbecued meat seasoned with his secret seasonings. The family decided to sell the product over the counter after he passed, so popular had it become.

So, that’s how I cook. I still do the plain black pepper, sometimes the Daddy Hinkle’s.

When people rave about my grilled duck, deer, rabbit, and pheasant they always get around to asking my secret recipe. I tell them only not to come around my house during the full moon period of any month, or I will kill them. If I don’t, the copperheads will.

That’s the lie, of course. Black pepper, or Daddy Hinkle’s is the truth.

It’s Memorial Day, right? We all want to eat. There’s going to be some sort of outdoor feast, right? What about the remembering?

Uncle Norm passed away right around Christmas 2015. Dad passed in February, and I delivered the eulogy. That should have put an end to all that old time stuff. But I’m still remembering things.

© 2016 Conrad Vollertsen

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