Riley Henderson Casey

In the 1990s I became a Special Assistant United States Attorney, and the Justice Department sent me for special litigation training in various cities across the country. Two of the trips were to the DOJ Advocacy Center in Columbia, South Carolina.

After classes were finished each day, I would go jogging and sightseeing in the South Carolina capital city. It seemed every street had a statue honoring some war hero or famous politician. I remember thinking, for some odd reason, that nobody ever erected a statue of Riley Henderson Casey—my maternal grandfather. 

Since I had just began the writing game, my random thought motivated me to write a story about Grandpa while I was there. I never finished it, and like many of my early writing attempts, it never saw the light of day. But in retrospect, some parts hinted at literary merit.

Grandpa was a plainspoken man, with voice inflections and tone from an earlier time. He said “hit” for it; “aught” for zero; “Gee” and “Haw” as voice commands for our plow horse to turn right or left; an ordinary potato was an “Irish” potato; and the closest he got to cussing was saying, “I’ll be a suck-egg mule.” 

His formal education, like Jethro Bodine of the Beverly Hillbillies, ended after the sixth grade at the Montier School. I don’t know it for a fact, but I suspect part of the reason for his early departure lay at the feet of an abusive teacher. The teacher, whose name is lost to history, used to regularly whip him with a belt. 

Grandpa might not have been a scholar, but his memory regarding past wrongs was rock solid. The Urban Dictionary describes a similar condition as Irish Alzheimer’s—a lapse in memory that is “almost always accompanied by an innate ability to recall with unparalleled clarity any wrong another has caused them regardless of how trivial or seemingly unrelated.” 

Some years later, Grandpa saw his nemesis teacher and confronted him. “You used to whip me all the time. Now, I’m going to whip you.” Like bullies often do, the teacher took off running and jumped a fence to escape. Grandpa told the story with pride and laughter. It always made me laugh, too, as I pictured an Ichabod Crane-looking fellow hightailing off and sailing over a barbed wire fence.

Grandpa had excellent common sense, and I’ve never known a harder worker. Grandma often said, “There’s not a lazy bone in his body.” He was unnuanced- right was right and wrong was wrong. He lived by simple precepts. Dozens of times I heard him say, “Two things I can’t abide: a liar and a thief.”

After his formal education ended, he worked on the family farm. Good with horses, he took up blacksmithing, first making horseshoes, and later taking on other jobs. For a time, he worked on the railroad section gang at Montier, but the wealth potential of the oil boom in the 1920s lured him and my grandmother to the oil fields of Texas and Oklahoma.

He and his brother-in-law set up a blacksmith operation, shoeing horses and making trailers for the oil drillers. Times were good -for a while. He even shoed one of Tom Mix’s horses when the movie star was in the area for an event. But while operating a sheet metal joiner, his shirtsleeve got caught, and the contraption pulled his arm into its biting jaws and severed it above the wrist. 

Around the kitchen table as a child, I would listen to my grandparents talk of the painful recovery and depression he felt as a one-armed man who made his living with his hands. Eventually he wore a prothesis with a metal hook, which he could he operate by manipulating its leather shoulder harness. The technique was barely noticeable. With a simple shrug of his shoulder, he could open and close the steel grasping hook. But the Great Depression hit and jobs were scarce. They ended up as sharecroppers in the cotton fields of Arkansas. 

In the early 1950s, after working in the Tri-Cities of Iowa and Illinois during World War II, my grandparents returned to farming in Montier. During that time, although they were Christians, they didn’t regularly attend a church. But in the 1960s, they reconnected with old friends, Arthur and Launa Duncan, and became regulars at the Pilgrim’s Rest Church, located north of Teresita on Shannon County Road OO.

The membership elected Grandpa as the Sunday School Superintendent. Visiting there one Sunday, it was the first time I ever saw him speak in front of a group. I still can picture him tentatively raising his arm and stub directing the congregation to rise for a song. In the dictionary sense, it was an epiphany for me: “a revealing scene or moment.” I felt proud for him.

Arthur Duncan was the song leader at Pilgrim’s Rest and had the ability to ready the shape-note musical notation in the hymnals. That day, he and my grandmother sang a duet together. Singing the lead, Arthur’s high-pitched, nasal tenor blended with Grandma’s alto harmony. Another epiphany: I never knew my grandmother could sing, let alone, harmonize. 

My freshman year at WSHS, Pilgrim’s Rest hosted an old-fashioned singing, with “dinner on the grounds.” A non-denominational affair, folks from different churches from Birch Tree to Mountain View would be in attendance. My grandmother heard I was part of a quartet, and requested that I bring “my” group to perform at the event.

I wasn’t enthusiastic about going. First, I wasn’t sure the other members, Richard Smith, Jody Corn, Eddie Mack Hill, and Jimmy Thomas (our pianist) would be interested. Secondly, we only knew barbershop songs. And finally, we had only practiced at WSHS teacher Raymond Newby’s house and had never sung in public. But my mother reminded me how important it was to my grandmother, and my inclination changed. The attraction of unlimited food proved to be a sufficient motivation for the other boys to participate.

The day of the singing, Pilgrim’s Rest had a big crowd, but our performance missed the mark . . . for some folks. We sang two traditional barbershop songs, “Tell Me Why” and “Shine on Me.” We thought, since strictly speaking it wasn’t a church service, that our selections might be okay. A couple older women, however, thought the songs were “worldly.” Oh well, the food was excellent—Jimmy Thomas said my grandmother’s blackberry cobbler was the best he had ever had—and my grandmother was proud of our effort.

No, Riley Henderson Casey never had a public statue erected in his honor, but there is a permanent place of honor in my mind. For the man who could make a sling shot from a forked hickory limb, a bicycle innertube, and a tongue from the shoe he was wearing. For the man who taught me how to skin a squirrel. For the man who taught me the proper way to cinch a horse saddle. For the man who instilled the importance of honesty. And for the man I never once heard complain about his loss. 

Thanks to Jeanne Sharpe Gaddy for research assistance.