My Great Granddaddy McKenzie

I promise, I will soon post the piece about my C&O Canal bike ride… but it’s still not done. This is still rough, but a poem I wrote capturing the memories I have of my great-granddaddy, who died when I was 12. A good while ago, I published a poem about his wife, my great grandmother, written by a cousin of my grandmother (who also appears in this poem). My great granddaddy, “Uncle Kenneth” shows up in that poem, too. Click here to read it.

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My last memory of you
as a lean old man 
sitting in a rocking chair 
in my grandmother’s back room,
a worn Bible on your nightstand.

Or maybe it was in my grandmother’s dining room 
where, after lunch,
you’d take a pat of fresh butter
and pour molasses or honey over it,
mixing the two with a fork,
and supping it up with a biscuit.

But other memories also come to mind.
You dressed in a screen wired hood,
holding a smoldering smoke pot
preparing to harvest honey from
the bee hives across the dirt two-track
by your house on Doub’s Chapel.
You kept us kids out of the way
but afterwards saved a piece of a cone
for each of us to enjoy.

And then there was the time down by Dunk’s pond,
you cut poles so that my brother and I, 
just toddlers, could act like we, too, were fishing.

Or on another occasion,
when the dam threatened to break
you worked hard with the younger men,
shoring up the spillway
before the dam eroded in a heavy rain.

And then there was you with an axe
out behind the house, splitting stove wood.
When you had a pile you’d step back and wait,
while I gathered an armful,
to carry inside to the bin by the wood stove
where great grandma’s apple pies baked.

And then, there you stood at Culdee Presbyterian, 
in a lanky gray suit, as the Sunday School Superintendent, 
leading the morning’s opening assembly.

These memories I cherish 
even though I haven’t seen you since 
your death in the fall of 1969.

But the memories I cherish the most are those you told me. 
of a mischievous boy, back before the turn of the century, 
Who didn’t seem much different than me some 70 years later.
There was the time you sat at the table for Sunday dinner
when the preacher visited.
To the horror of your parents,
you waited till he gnawed on a bone
from the chicken your mother fried, 
to inform him he was eating your pet.

Or how, on another occasion,
you happened upon neighboring farmer’s watermelon patch.
Seeing no one around, you
began splitting the melons and eating out only the hearts
as the noon sun began to disappear on a cloudless day. 
As the sky darkened, the birds began to sing. 
Looking up in horror, you dropped the melon
And ran home as fast as your barefoot could carry your young body,
not wanting to be caught in someone else’s watermelon patch
on Judgement Day.

And then there was the story told by my grandmother,
your daughter, who rode in a buckboard beside you 
to the mill in High Falls
with sacks of shucked corn and wheat in the back.
Coming home, through Carthage, 
you dropped off bags of corn meal and flour
at your sister’s home, who cared for your brother Harrison
who’d been gassed in the Great War. 

These memories are gifts, but the best gift you gave
represented by the Bible on your nightstand,
was your quiet but steadfast trust in our Savior
as reflected in the hymn sung at your funeral,
which the Preacher introduced as your favorite,
“He Leadeth Me.”

He leadeth me O blessed tho’t! O word with heavenly comfort fraught!
Whate’er I do, wher’e’ver I be, Still ’tis His hand that leadeth me!