We sat at a Formica kitchen table that used to have a giant canister of black pepper on it for Grandma Mary’s signature (and only edible) dish: biscuits and sausage gravy. That day there were seven of us in what was once her kitchen—two aunts (one by marriage), two uncles, my grandmother’s youngest brother, and my father. Three years later, only five of us are still alive.
The hatchet story nearly didn’t get told. We were packing up our things and about to head out through the back porch where Grandma Mary used to keep dozens of stray cats when Aunt Norma said, “Oh, you know about Granny Bishop?” I had just started dabbling in genealogy, so it took me a few moments to conjure an image of the person she was talking about.
I remembered seeing her pictures on Ancestry.com, labeled by her maiden name, “Mary Jane Fields.” From the photos, she seems so diminutive, hunched over as if the weight of her thin cotton dress was too much for her small frame to hold. There are no photos that show her smiling, but that is understandable since, from the telltale hollow around her lips, it was clear she had lost her teeth.
“I know who you’re talking about, but I don’t know anything in particular about her,” I said, stuffing my iPad into its case.
Norma rose from the kitchen table and started to walk my dad and me to the back door when she said, matter-of-factly, “Well, there was a lady hanging around Granny Bishop’s man, so Granny hit her in the chest with a hatchet. Woman died two weeks later, but everyone said it was from pneumonia.”
My dad and I stopped in our tracks and turned back around as the kitchen broke out in pandemonium, a mix of questions from those of us who’d never heard the story and loud confirmation from those who knew about the hatchet. No matter how many questions I asked, Aunt Norma didn’t know much beyond what she’d just said, but my Uncle Larry and his wife, Barb, had also heard this story before. The part about listing pneumonia as the cause of death was news to them, though they’d heard about the hatchet and that the victim had been following my great-great grandfather around on their mountainous Kentucky farmland.