Sticking the Cow: An Appalachian Flash Memoir
Version 1:
The story goes: Great Grandma Holliman aimed a shotgun at the ground between her young son’s legs and took the head off a very pissed-off rattler. I hear blushing Freudian implications in my aunt’s voice as she says, “De law! What if her aim’d been off! You’d be missing a few cousins, Christy!” I see buck shot careening through generations, taking out an entire branch of my family tree.
My sharpshooting Mimaw, with the wing-delicate skin of the very old and dying, winding and unwinding her hair. If I didn’t fidget, she let me sit in her lap and brush the silver river of it. Her voice a peaceful nonsense trickle as I steered the bristles downstream. Sometimes, she’d break the stillness with a sudden angry accusation that someone was stealing her shoes.
She would count and recount them, a sort of Alzheimer’s-having, Appalachian Imelda Marcos, losing her benign calmness when she couldn’t find a mate for this slip-on or that Sunday short heel. I seemed to be beyond suspicion, but I had my sister pegged for it. My aunts whisper-called her a klep-to. I guess it could have been my creepy cousin Daryl, the one who stared at my legs in shorts, the one who left porn laying around for Grandma Blanche to find, who wore, “silly faggot, dicks are for chicks” shirts to the church hall at family gatherings.
I didn’t understand then, as someone who never lacked shoes, how important they could be. How they could colonize the failing brain as the dominant imprint of dementia.
I imagine her Annie Oakley moment happening on the same spot in the front yard where the menfolk used to bleed the animals. They’d string up a dead cow, place a bucket under its head, run a knife through its jugular furrow. I’d watch the blood drip from black raspberry bushes a few feet away. If they noticed me, they’d try to gross me out by moving its limbs around, pretending to dance with it. We call this ritual "sticking the cow.”
My mother called penises “tallywackers.” That’s a name meant to scare a girl off ‘em. I wonder if that word came to mind when she was 18, when her uncle raped her.
I don’t know where to imagine the rape. And I don’t know if my great grandmother was ever made aware that one of her sons raped my mother. The way my mother would spend the rest of her life running from her body, the way she’d call her daughters whores if she even suspected we were letting boys near us with their tallywackers.
If my hands could reach back in time, I’d grip the underside of the barrel, and I’d gun for a different snake.
Version 2 (original):
My great grandmother shot the head off an angry rattlesnake between her young son’s legs, thereby saving his life.
I hold this story of my sharpshooting Mimaw against the image of her winding and unwinding her old-lady bun, counting and recounting her shoes, convinced someone was stealing them.
I didn’t understand then, as someone who never lacked shoes, how important they could be. How they could colonize the failing brain as the dominant imprint of dementia.
I hold this story of me, still and little in her lap, brushing the silver river of her hair, against another story I know. My mother raped by her uncle. My Mimaw’s son, maybe the same son.
I didn’t understand then, as someone who had never been raped, how it can make a woman run from her body forever, force her daughters out of their bodies to protect them from snakes, too.
Version 3:
My great grandma shot the head off a rattler about to strike her young son.
Years later, when my mother was being raped by one of her uncles, I wonder was it the same one Mimaw saved with her double-barrel blast?
Where was the shotgun then?
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