Off Her Rocker
A reminiscence for October.
My memory ain’t what it used to be, but I still remember that day clear as I see you. Sue would too, if she were still here. Feels like it was yesterday. But it wasn’t, of course you probably already know that. It was nigh on fifty years ago I reckon.
It was a beautiful Autumn day—a clear sky—a breeze. Granny was rocking on the porch like she was want to do almost every day. They say rain, sleet, hail, and snow, I forget the order, can’t stop the mail, well, I figure they got that saying about Granny. She was out there in a tornado one time—a tornado!—and she was rocking like it wasn’t even there, might have even used the wind to rock. She never said a word, she just rocked.
Like I said, it was an Autumn day, and this man, he comes up, you see, right up to our stead. He was dressed in rags, I recollect, that were all tattered—you couldn’t even tell what they were supposed to be, could have been a quilt tied about his waste with some rope—which looked, too, like it could break in two at any moment. Well, this man who looked like he hadn’t slept in a decent place for nigh on two weeks, he comes up and grabs Granny by her hair and pulls her off the rocking chair. We shall shout and start to come at him.
What happened still is a mystery, but when Granny stood up, she took a shotgun from somewhere—where it came from is also a mystery—and fired ‘bout every shell into the poor son of a gun. There weren’t much left for the sheriff to see, let alone try to identify.
I don’t know if something had snapped, or some pent up feelings broke though, or if she had been crazy all along, or if something or someone took control of her, but she turned that shotgun on John—he was our eldest brother, you remember—and blew him away. Poor John, he never did anyone any harm. Don’t know why she blew him to kingdom come.
Well, I grabbed little Alisha and ran to the fields to hide from Granny, not knowing what had come over her. Well, we hear the shotgun fire repeatedly, and we hear screams—lot’s of screams. We never saw Ma and Pa after that, living or dead—what Granny did to them I can’t imagine.
It was around then that Alisha and I see Sue running from the house, crying her eyes out. My sister and I waved her over, and she came. She told us Granny had gotten Ezekiel, right between the eyes. Sue and Ezekiel had been mighty fond of each other, and she claimed she would die a widow. I didn’t bother telling her that they hadn’t even been engaged yet, but true to her word she passed away last year, still unmarried to that day.
As for Granny, well, she ran into the woods, and we never did see her again. We looked for her, we did, and we had parties assembled from town to go look for her, but nobody saw ‘er. Least nobody who ever lived to tell the tale. Many people—townsfolk and travelers—who had passed through those woods were found dead, killed by a shotgun. After about a dozen or so—we figured when Granny had finally run out of bullets—the injuries changed, instead they looked like they had been clubbed by a large heavy object of the same size as a shotgun.
It still haunts me to this day. I can still hear that shotgun, and those screams—I don’t know which was worse. But I’ll tell you what was worse than both—the laughter. Granny was laughing her head off the whole time. And it still rings through my ears.
The End
God bless