Gunshots and Gumbo on the Gulf

Chapter 1

December 12, 1943

The gray squirrel bounced out onto the limb to obtain a meal of a large hickory nut. The scaly-bark hickory tree had been a feeding station for years for the bushytailed rodent community. A sharp crack from a .22 caliber rifle suddenly silenced the wildlife sounds nearby. The squirrel didn’t survive long enough to hear the silence; it lurched to the left and careened off the limb. Thump was the last sound the animal would make as it landed in the yellow and orange leaves accumulated under the tree.

Albert sat there with his back against a huge loblolly pine tree that camouflaged him against the hillside. That was the second squirrel he had taken this evening. Mama would be excited when he got home. Loraine West was a large woman who could make a delicacy out of any critter, wild or domestic. Loraine found squirrel brains to be a palatable treat. Albert could never stomach the looks of the meal, much less ingest it. Before they could be cooked, he would have to skin the head and cut it off the carcass. Mama would then boil the head with eyes and teeth intact. At mealtime, she would have a plate of squirrel skulls and a table knife. She would crack the heads with the handle of the knife like she was cracking a walnut. When the bone shell was opened, she would dig the warm brains out with her fingers. Disgusting to most people, it was tasty to Loraine. Beaver tail also ranked in the top three of her exotic food list.

Eighteen-year-old Albert West was under the pretense of hunting for food this evening, but it was really peace of mind he was hunting for. He had graduated from high school and started junior college. The time he had dreaded was now here; Uncle Sam had called him up to military service. Three weeks prior, the young man found out he had been drafted. Tomorrow was the day he would report to ship out to basic training. Memories and thoughts ran a steady race across his mind.

Albert lived on a small farm in Simpson County, Mississippi and had never been farther than ten miles from home. Born in 1925, the first child of Elg and Loraine West, this was the second location in which he’d lived. During Albert’s early childhood, the family lived on inherited land on the banks of Rials Creek. Rials Creek, really just a small stream, was a life line through the community of residents. Indians had chosen the land previously for a home at some time in the past, attested by the artifacts that were always found every spring after the first rain on the freshly plowed fields. The arrowheads the children found were fun to collect and trade. There was a general store with a gristmill on the creek.. The creek water turned the wooden wheel that spun the large stones used to grind corn into corn meal.

Albert was fond of the creek; it supplied many meals and other sources of income for the West family each year. In warm weather, Loraine loved to go fishing on Saturday afternoons, after all the chores had been done. She would bend a safety pin into a hook and attach it to a bamboo stick with eight or nine feet of sewing thread. A cork from an old medicine bottle would serve as a float. Albert was in charge of turning over rotten logs to find grub worms that would serve as her bait. He put the captured bait in an old syrup can for his mother and walked behind her dutifully. He knew the outing would last a couple of hours and his patience only ten minutes. Mama would usually catch four or five small red-bellied sun fish about as wide as three fingers put together. Occasionally, she would land a big fat catfish. Elg would fish once in a while if he had nothing else at all to do. His philosophy was, you could lose a crop on such foolishness.

In the winter time, the creek also supplied a source of income. Elg trapped beavers, raccoons, and minks on the creek banks and sold the furs for profit. He once tanned a hide from a large raccoon he’d caught. The tanning solution he used contained tannic acid extracted from boiled bitter weed plants. After the skin was tanned, Loraine trimmed the skin and sewed it together to make a coonskin cap, complete with a red flannel lining. Albert pretended to be Daniel Boone when he wore the hat and romped through the woods.

Albert went to school in a one room school house that sat on a hill overlooking Rials Creek. When he was in his early teens, the school suffered a fire and the students were forced go to school in town. At that time, Elg found some land for sell about five miles away from their Rials Creek home. He decided to buy the property and move his family there. This was the land they homesteaded and now lived on.

A large timber company had owned the land. They had clear cut the virgin forest and then sold off the property in forty acre parcels for people to homestead. Elg initially purchased forty acres. He worked and added new acreage as he paid off each piece of ground. The going price for clear cut land at that time was ten dollars an acre. In all, Elg owned one hundred and forty acres.

Being a fiercely independent man, he worked sunup to sundown and could do nearly anything. He built their house, barns, and sheds. Also, he could tinker and fix most things that were broken. Too young to fight in World War I and too old to be drafted for the present war, Elg never served in the military. After high school, he went on to get a teaching certificate, but the solitude of farming life suited him just fine as a career.

Albert sighed as a peaceful breeze rustled the leaves. The local people got newspapers each week to find out the latest world events. Sometime before Christmas in 1941, someone came to school and told the teacher that the Japs had bombed our boys at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. They said that many Americans were killed and President Roosevelt had declared America to be at war.

Soon after that, a chemical company contacted Elg wanting to buy old heart pine stumps off his land for one dollar-a-ton. The company took the old wood and refined the sap out of it to make gun powder for the war effort. The tentacles of war were reaching across the world and starting to touch local country folks.

That Remington rifle in his hands held good and bad memories. At fourteen years old, Albert had sold seeds to help buy this rifle he wanted. He didn’t sell enough seeds to earn the rifle outright, so he had to come up with fourteen dollars to boot. Extra money wasn’t easy to come by those days, so Albert had to think of a money-making idea. One day on a trip to town, they went to the cotton gin. While inside the gin’s office, he saw a mounted deer head and pheasant that belonged to the owner. Knowing nothing about how taxidermy work was done, he took two dollars of his saved money and mail-ordered a taxidermy course from the Northwestern School of Taxidermy in Omaha, Nebraska.

After reading up on how to stuff a bird, he decided that one of Mama’s hens, destined to be Sunday lunch anyway, would be a good specimen. Mama usually wielded the hatchet to subdue her chicken dinners, but Albert decided he could find a less traumatic way to dispatch the bird. Being new to the art form, he figured sewing a chicken’s head back on would be a more advanced procedure then he could perform. After quickly suffocating the bird, he used his pocket knife to make an incision up the chicken’s breast. He continued separating the skin away from the body until the fowl was completely skinned out. According to the instructions, the drumstick bones would have to be left on the mount. Knowing Loraine, he knew that this chicken carcass better have two drumsticks attached when it made it to her kitchen. So he cut the legs off the skin that was being used for the mount.

A hen with no legs… what to do? An idea! Mount the chicken sitting in a nest with no legs showing thought Albert.

Albert balled up a wad of hay and started wrapping string around it in order to make an artificial body that resembled the original. He picked up a couple of shiny black rocks from the edge of the road that would serve as great eyes for the mount. The skin had to be bug proofed before mounting. The family used an old sock filled with arsenic to dust their garden plants for bugs. He went to the shed and retrieved the arsenic to dust the chicken skin.

The skin, once bug proofed, had the straw body inserted into it. Albert sewed up the incision and implanted the black eyes into the chicken’s head. He then took some more hay and made a nest. He put the nest into a small, short-sided wooden box. Albert placed the mounted chicken on the nest and stepped back to admire it.

Pretty good for a beginner he thought.

The instructions stated that the chicken mount must cure for a week. On Friday evening after school, he went to check the bird out. Everything looked good except for the hen’s comb, which had dried a grayish color.

Ah hah! The thought sprung into Albert’s mind. There was some red paint left from painting the barn last year. He retrieved the rusty, metal, paint can and opened it to find the remaining paint still liquid. Brushing a coat of paint on the comb was just what the doctor ordered. The chicken, at last, looked lifelike.

Saturday morning after the early chores, Elg went into town. Albert tagged along and carried his taxidermied friend with him. While walking down Main Street, a lady from the hardware store summoned him over to examine what he was carrying. Upon inspection, she fell in love with the piece and offered Albert two dollars for the chicken mount. Albert accepted the unexpected offer and took orders from several other ladies who had gathered around.

Those city women just missed seein’ chickens, He guessed.

Over the next several weeks, he completed orders until he had earned enough money to purchase his gun.

Albert smiled as he reminisced about his chicken taxidermy career. The smile quickly faded as he thought of Tuff, an ole’ red fuzzy mutt.

He had wanted a puppy from a litter that the Smith’s dog had delivered, but Elg didn’t take kindly to the notion. After much filibustering, Albert was granted permission to get a puppy. Tuff was a good companion and was always excited to hear an ‘atta boy’. When Tuff had been around the farm for about two years, the new had worn off. Albert was sporadic in his care and attention to the dog. Elg told Albert that if he didn’t want the dog any more, he had to take it out to the field and shoot it. Albert was at the teenage stage of feeling his oats and being a big man. He called out and Tuff came running, wagging his tail excitedly because of Albert’s attention. Tuff faithfully followed Albert to the field where they stopped. His shiny dark-brown eyes followed Albert, questioning. Albert slowly raised the rifle, aimed at the dog, and pulled the trigger. The second Albert pulled the trigger; he knew he had made a terrible mistake.

Remorse poured over the young man as he ran to Tuff. He tried to apologize for his wrong as life drained from his friend’s body. Elg walked up, wiping back a tear, as Albert tearfully hugged the lifeless dog. Elg said, "Son, that’s a