After all that writing I did about the pheasants, and my great-grandmother Rose chasing one around the backyard, the most unexpected of clarifications came though from my dad and his sisters.
There were two pheasants.
The one that graced the china hutch, which I remember seeing as a child, was a gift. The one from family lore, which met its end in the backyard, actually hit the house and was dispatched rather than hunted. Two different birds who both happened to be pheasants.
The truth is where our stories cross.
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My dad (the oldest): FYI, I remember the pheasant, flying into the second bedroom window on the lower level. My grandmother went outside to see if someone threw something at the house. She found the pheasant and wrung its neck.
I don’t think this was the same one as in the house. She would have plucked it to cook it, so it couldn’t be taxidermied.
Rose (middle, also called Ginger): The pheasant that was taxidermied was given to them by someone. That is what I was told by Grandma.
Dad: When the pheasant hit, there were only two undeveloped lots in the area. One was next door to the Markulin house. The boys used to play Army over there in the jungle. Bluegrass, trees and bushes nothing really open enough to support pheasants
Rose: So, what year did the pheasant hit the house?
Dad: Sometime between ‘55 and ‘59. I’d guess ‘57? Based on my recollection of how old I was.
Janice (the youngest): It was finally sold to someone who wanted it for their den. This was done when Ginger and I had their household belongings up for sale. I really wanted to keep it, but kept telling myself I didn’t need a stuffed bird.
As a child I liked to stroke part of its neck feathers as they were small, soft and beautiful blues and greens. The story I heard about the broom pheasant is that it was eaten. Someone had given her the stuffed one. I handled it a lot, because that’s the kind of rotten grandchild I was, and found a small hole in the neck, which I assumed was leftover from a gunshot. But who knows.
The last time we toured the old neighborhood … We were at the site of the old Greenfield Elementary School. Half the building was standing and half was gone. I was just sitting there to take photos when I saw the head of a pheasant above a field of wild grasses. I got out of the car and saw another pheasant. And another. And another.I had an immediate image in my head of wild grasses in the area outside the Hull St. house, with pheasants. I had to laugh because it felt like the pheasant won and outlived Grandma and reclaimed their territory.
It was funny. But it was cool seeing the neighborhood in that state, reverting back to what it looked like probably when the area was being built up. Grasses, fields, trees, and pheasants.
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