Grandma went all out when the preacher came for Sunday dinner. She had heard, which was common knowledge, that the preacher’s favorite meal was fried chicken.
It seemed when the Rhode Island Red chicken flock needed thinning out, the preacher always came to Sunday dinner.
The chickens came to realize that their lives were on the line when grandma gave them extra shelled corn at 9 a.m. on Sunday morning, whereas, their feeding time was always just before sundown. They smelled a rat and ran up under the house while the unlucky ones couldn’t resist the shelled corn and sacrificed their lives for the preacher’s voracious appetite.
Grandma urged her 10 children to watch their table manners and save the bigger pieces of chicken for Reverend Terry.
My daddy didn’t always listen to grandma’s wise council and reached for an extra piece of fried chicken. She politely reached for his right ear and gave it a circular twist to get her message across. “I said just one piece today!”
The table was always a hungry man’s dream. There was a huge steaming bowl of fresh butterbeans, sliced tomatoes, fried okra, sweet skillet corn, homemade vegetable soup, and blackberry and apple pie with thick cream for dessert. But, the one item that was always on the table was grandma’s huge buttermilk biscuits that went well with fresh garden vegetables and southern fried chicken. If there were any biscuits left over from the meal, grandma pitched them from the back porch to the hound dogs below. With so much practice, the biscuits always found their mark into the hound dog’s open mouth and seldom hit the ground.
As Preacher Terry thanked grandma for the delicious meal and slowly ambled toward the back porch, grandma realized that a pair of kittens were about to get under the preacher’s feet and trip him up, causing him to fall. Without thinking, she scooped up the small kittens from the floor and tossed them one by one from the porch.
The greedy old hound dogs were waiting with open mouths, thinking that they were about to receive a warm, soft biscuit straight from grandma’s oven. The wayward biscuits had found their mark, and the hunting dogs walked away satisfied.
Little Mary Ann let out a mournful cry, realizing that the dogs had swallowed her pet kittens. Preacher Terry was lost for words and drew little Mary Ann closer to him.
“It is so tragic,” Brother Terry exclaimed, “Hopefully something good will happen from this.”
As the last words of sympathy spilled from his mouth, the hound dogs sheepishly came from the back of the house followed by two slimy balls of wet fur, looking none the worse.
