Adios Uncle Stumpy

It took four days for Uncle Stumpy to die, and a week for the family to congregate. The clan gathered at my Aunt Irma’s Ice House the day before the funeral.  In the glow of the wide screen TV’s we wept together and ate and drank as if food and drink and tears might fill the hole left by uncle’s death.

Uncle Stumpy’s wake was the first time I had met most of my relatives. A few flew to Texas from various parts of the country and a lot of the others drove in a caravan all the way from Murphy Village, South Carolina.  My cousin Jodie’s folks had a neighbor drive them up from Galveston, and the “barefoot branch of the family” commandeered an old school bus so they could make the trip from Marfa.

Once people started arriving, casseroles, potato salad, deviled eggs, cakes, pies, and cookies multiplied like biblical loaves and fishes on the ice house pool tables and buried the old oak bar. Out back in the parking lot a group of the men spent the day barbecuing sausages, turkey legs, and baby goats. Grandma’s sister, Cher, and her husband, Tartoo, brought a big, black pot of gumbo, bubbling on a propane burner in the bed of their ’62 Ford pick-up, all the way from Mamou, Louisiana.

I was sitting with Grandma when Cher and Tartoo hauled their caldron into Aunt Irma’s. As soon as she spotted that big iron pot, Grandma heaved herself off her chair and shuffled towards it.  Next thing I knew, she’d stuck her hand into the steaming gumbo and had fished out a chicken foot.  She sucked on it a long time before smacking her lips and drying the twisted talon on the hem of her full skirt.  Then she grabbed me by my shoulder and we walked outside and stood under a pin oak tree.   Together we bowed our heads and Grandma mumbled one of her sing-song, ancient woman’s prayer, all the time waving the chicken foot to the north, south, east, and west.  Finally she stuffed it down the front of her blouse and we went back to the family.

When Grandma appeared the following morning, she’d hung the chicken foot on a silver chain and was wearing it, a scaled and yellowed amulet, on her generous breasts.   During the night she had transformed it into the talisman that would protect her on the day when she said goodbye to her favorite son at the Calgary Hill Eternal Rest Funeral Chapel and Memorial Park.

For his exit, Uncle Stumpy was dressed in a chartreuse, silk brocade smoking jacket and white flannel pants. He looked more like a napping riverboat gambler than a dead man. His hair was swept back across the satin pillow. Someone had trimmed his handlebar mustache and mutton-chops, probably the same person who had manicured his fingernails and shined his alligator boots.  He smelled so good that, to this day, I cannot walk past a counter of men’s colognes without thinking of Uncle Stumpy sneaking into Heaven in his happily-ever-after makeover.

Everyone called my uncle “Fast Floyd” except for Grandma and me.  To Grandma he was always her Wild Child.  But to me he was Uncle Stumpy because one of his legs had been clipped off just below the knee in either a motorcycle accident or a mishap on a merchant marine ship. During his lifetime, my uncle enjoyed a glamorous persona, steeped in a rich, rough mythology, so I was never sure which version was true. “The Famous Fast Floyd Leg Story” changed depending who told it. And Uncle Stumpy was no help because whenever I asked him about it he would just smile and tell me to rub the terrible purple scar for good luck.

The beginning of the end came for Uncle Stumpy when he celebrated his forty-fourth birthday with the boys from Cut And Shoot. The whole crew cruised into Magnolia on their Harleys and ended the evening of partying at my Aunt Jane’s Icehouse.  Buzzed up on Bud and Yeagermeister, the bikers began passing pills. Uncle Stumpy, who an hour earlier had removed his wooden leg and swallowed a triple a dose of Vicodin to deadened the ache in his stump, threw caution to the wind and super-sized a helping of Xanax.  Bingo! Uncle Stumpy’s brain ceased to function, although his heart beat bravely in his barrel chest for four days until Grandma finally agreed to let him pass with dignity.  It was the hardest thing she ever had to do.

At the funeral service I sat in the front row of the Chapel of Eternal Rest between my dad and Grandma, while a man named Reverend Bob said nice things about Uncle Stumpy, even though the two of them had never met.  Then my dad and his brothers carried Uncle Stumpy on their shoulders out of the chapel and to his grave.  I held Grandma’s arm with one hand and carried her big black bag with the other as we followed the casket down the aisle and out the door into the bright spring sunlight.  Grandma smelled like ginger root and camphor and her face was the color of autumn smoke.  She wore her long black dress with the swirling skirt and had wrapped her hair in the burgundy feather boa that Uncle Stumpy had given her for her birthday. Gently, her silver bracelets jangled on her arms as we moved forward through the crowd and I tried very hard not to let her purse knock against anything because I knew that was where she kept her gun.

Together we sat under a tent on white folding chairs set up around an extra-large hole in the Astroturf that had been dug especially for Uncle Stumpy and his motorcycle.  It had taken a bit of doing, but after five days of talking, Uncle John and eight hundred dollars had convinced Reverend Bob that Uncle Stumpy needed to ride into the great beyond on his Harley. 

People talked in hushed voices as they found places around Uncle Stumpy’s pit. Even the freeway traffic at the edge of the cemetery seemed to slow in respect.  Then the air filled with a roar and the boys from Cut And Shoot shot through the great iron gates on their hogs in a farewell salute to their fallen friend. I was seven years old then, and when I saw those men dressed in black leather, racing and looping among the graves, then taking an extra lap around Calgary Hill, there was joy in my heart because I knew my uncle was going straight to heaven. 

And so, with the sounds of the motorcycle engines still booming in my ears, I stepped forward with my Dad and my Uncle John on either side of me, and we threw shinny pennies and moon stones on the top of Uncle Stumpy. Then the back-hoe moved in and covered him up.  All during the ceremony, Grandma clutched at the chicken foot that hung around her neck and mewed like a mamma cat who’d lost her kitten.

For a month after the funeral Grandma refused to speak and ate by herself in the hall closet.  Wedged in with the winter coats and rubber boots, she sat on a wooden box at a rickety, metal TV tray, using a flashlight to find her food.  And when she wasn’t eating or sleeping she sat silently staring at re-runs of “The Bold and the Beautiful”, still stroking the gnarled chicken foot that dangled on the silver chain.

Deborah Rothschild is a freelance writer, grandmother, feminist, and supporter of liberal causes.

Email: Deborah Rothschild

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