Deadeye Dick Page 0,18
did not become a freakish adult, except for my record as a double murderer, as other people my age more or less caught up with me.
But I was abnormally tall and weak for a time there. I may have been trying to evolve into a superman, and then gave it up in the face of community disapproval.
• • •
So after we got home from the Rod and Gun Club, and I could feel the key to the gun room burning a hole in my pocket, there was yet another proof that I had to be a man now, because Felix was leaving. I had to chop the heads off two chickens for supper that night. This was another privilege which had been accorded Felix, who used to make me watch him.
The place of execution was the stump of the walnut tree, under which Father and old August Gunther had been lunching when the Marítimo brothers arrived in Midland City so long ago. There was a marble bust on a pedestal, which also had to watch. It was another piece of loot from the von Furstenberg estate in Austria. It was a bust of Voltaire.
And Felix used to play God to the chickens, saying in that voice of his, “If you have any last words to say, now is the time to say them,” or “Take your last look at the world,” and so on. We didn’t raise chickens. A farmer brought in two chickens every Sunday morning, and they had their peepholes closed by a machete in Felix’s right hand almost immediately.
Now, with Felix watching, and about to catch a train for Columbus and then a bus for Fort Benning, Georgia, it was up to me to do.
So I grabbed a chicken by its legs, and I flopped it down on the stump, and I said in a voice like a penny whistle, “Take your last look at the world.”
Off came its head.
• • •
Felix kissed Mother, and he shook Father’s hand, and he boarded the train at the train station. And then Mother and Father and I had to hurry on home, because we were expecting a very important guest for lunch. She was none other than Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of the President of the United States. She was visiting war plants in the boondocks to raise morale.
Whenever a famous visitor came to Midland City, he or she was usually brought to Father’s studio at one point or another, since there was so little else to see. Usually, they were in Midland City to lecture or sing or play some instrument, or whatever, at the YMCA. That was how I got to meet Nicholas Murray Butler, the president of Columbia University, when I was a boy—and Alexander Woollcott, the wit and writer and broadcaster, and Cornelia Otis Skinner, the monologist, and Gregor Piatigor-sky, the cellist, and on and on.
They all said what Mrs. Roosevelt was about to say: “It’s hard to believe I’m in Midland City, Ohio.”
Father used to sprinkle a few drops of turpentine and linseed oil on the hot-air registers, so the place would smell like an active studio. When a guest walked in, there was always some classical record on the phonograph, but never German music after Father decided that being a Nazi wasn’t such a good idea after all. There was always imported wine, even during the war. There was always Liederkranz cheese, and Father would tell the story of its invention.
And the food was excellent, even when war came and there was strict rationing of meat, since Mary Hoobler was so resourceful with catfish and crayfish from Sugar Creek, and with unrationed parts of animals which other people didn’t consider edible.
• • •
Mary Hoobler’s chitlins: Take the small intestine of a pig, cut it up into two-inch sections, and wash and wash them, changing the water often, until no fatty particles remain.
Boil them for three or four hours with onions, herbs, and garlic. Serve with greens and grits.
• • •
That is what we served Eleanor Roosevelt for lunch on Mother’s Day in 1944—Mary Hoobler’s chitlins. She was most appreciative, and she was very democratic, too. She went out into the kitchen and talked to Mary and the other servants there. She had Secret Service agents along, of course, and one of them said to Father, I remember, “I hear you have quite a collection of guns.”
So the Secret Service had checked us out. They surely knew, too, that Father had been an admirer