this is a story about chickens.

my grandfather (alonzo, everybody called him 'lon) was a schoolteacher way back in the day, but he wasn't good with kids so he gave up teaching and became a dairy farmer on his wife's family farm. my dad was born in 1940, the same year they got a new farmall tractor (which today is in better shape than he is). there's lots of places i could go with my dad and a cousin killing 98 rats in the new hen house with a water hose and a dog and lon's apoplectic reaction when he saw the flooded place, but this is not that story. focus. stay on topic.

in the '60s, my dad went off to The Big City to go to college. one day when he was home for spring break, he fell back into his old habits, and took the bull down to the creek to drink before he ran off to raise hell with his friends.

lon (my grandfather), having had an empty house for several months, didn't think about my dad possibly having watered the bull already, so he went down to the barn a little while later, tied a seagrass string[1] to the bull's horn, and led him down to the creek.

now the old adage is an old adage because it's true: you can lead a bull to water, but you can't make him drink. the bull wasn't thirsty, and was rather testy at being pulled out of the barnlot and away from the cows when he wasn't thirsty, so he started to walk back to the barn. my grandfather was, well, i don't know chewing on a blade of grass and thinking about which patch of beans to plant first or something, i don't know, i just know he wasn't paying attention to the bull.

as the bull walked away the string slipped through lon's fingers until it wrapped around his thumb, at which point he probably grasped it out of reflex.

the bull would not be deterred by a little tug on his horn, and yanked his head sharply to break the string free.

it did. and it pulled lon's thumb right off. *pop!*

i wasn't there, and being a stoic man he doubtless lied that he just walked quickly back up to the house before he started yelling at my grandmother, but i imagine he went completely bonkers and screamed his lungs out. i probably would. at any rate, he ran back up to the house and yelled "zella! zella! call the doctor! and go down by the creek and get my thumb!" and shortly thereafter they took off to ashland to get his brother to fix his hand.

but they never found the thumb.

they think the chickens ate it.

actually, that story is 100% true. lon was famous for being able to predict the weather by the sensations where his thumb used to be.

[1] seagrass string is what my dad calls the rough string that holds together bales of hay -- it's not wire, it's not rope, and it's not twine, it's just... seagrass string. tough, itchy, and in my dad's eyes, as universal as duct tape for fixing things.

Mon Sep 30 11:02:25 2002