By Dwayne Klein

I was born and raised on a ranch in Fredericksburg, Texas. My family emigrated from Germany 150 years before and we were not going anywhere. Fredericksburg is a very traditional German town. Boys grow to be men who take over the family ranch. Girls grow to be women who marry the boy from the ranch across the fence. Everybody knows everything about you, your daddy, your granddaddy and possibly, your great-granddaddy. There are no secrets in Fredericksburg and few people ever leave. But I did. In fact, I ran like hell. After high school, I joined the Navy and spent six years seeing the world. Not the best parts of it mind you, but it was not Fredericksburg. Do not get me wrong, I loved the town and the people; I just wanted more out of life than cows.

At the end of my tour, I moved from Fredericksburg to Austin to find work. It was there that I met the woman I would eventually marry. We were introduced by my sister and it was a whirlwind romance. After dating for six months, things got pretty serious and I knew the time was coming for her to meet my family back home. I had been avoiding the situation far too long, but not for the usual reason. Usually when a man does not want his family to meet his significant other it is because he is not proud of his choice of mates. In this case, the opposite was true.

The people in my family are the typical country folk so prevalent in the South. Insular and clannish, they are good, hard-working people, but they just do not trust strangers. It is seldom personal but everyone they know, they have always known. If you are local they know you, who your parents are, who their parents are, and so on. If you are not local, you will forever be an “Auslander” and never entirely accepted.

The issue was that Barbara, my future wife, did not grow up in Fredericksburg. Nowhere near it. She was from that most foreign of places: New Hampshire. According to my family, Barbara was the dreaded New England Yankee City Girl coming to drag the innocent country boy away from the farm. They were going to hate her and vice versa. It would be war.

I actually did grow up on the farm, but my family conveniently forgets that afterwards I spent six years in the U.S. Navy seeing the world. The old adage about not keeping the boy on the farm once he has seen Paris is very true. I love my family and enjoy visiting and working the farm, but I was never going to be content to live there.

One day I could put it off no longer and made the call. We went to the ranch to see what would happen.

The only person at the ranch on that day was my grandmother, the matriarch of the family. No one messed with this little old German lady. She made the rules and everyone knew it. She was tough and no-nonsense but if Barbara could win her over no one else would say another word about it, at least in my grandmother’s presence.

When we pulled into the barnyard, my grandmother was outside waiting for us with an axe in her hand. This could mean many things, none of them good. The first words out of her mouth were “I have two roosters that are always fighting and I want you to chop their heads off.” This was obviously a test to see if the city girl would get her hands dirty.

This chore was nothing new to me. I grew up here and it was just part of life, but Barbara was a little stunned. To her everlasting credit, she grabbed the axe and headed towards the barn. At the barn, I explained the process. “You hold his legs and put his neck across this log. When I chop his head off, you throw him on the ground away from you.” She grabbed the first rooster by both legs and held him so that his neck was lying across the log. I chopped down with the old axe and said, “Throw him!” She did not. There she stood holding this rooster by the legs, as it flopped, like a chicken with its head cut off, flinging feathers and fluids all over her.

When it was time for the remaining rooster to meet his maker I told her, “You have to throw him when I chop off his head!” When all was ready, the rooster was placed in position, and the axe fell. This time however, the dull old axe did not cut cleanly. As the axe came down and only wounded the bird, Barbara threw it as far as she could. Of course it promptly jumped up and ran away.

Five minutes later, I was crawling through the brush with a rifle, chasing a wounded, paranoid rooster, since we could not leave him to suffer. Eventually I caught up to him and the unfortunate scenario was over. I walked back to where the women were chatting and realized that Barbara had passed the test. I still do not know if she passed by how she handled her exposure to the harsh realities of farm life, or if it was due to the mutual disgust of both women for my skills as a country boy.

 

Dwayne Klein is a New College student in his junior year at St. Edward’s University. He is a husband, father of two beautiful girls and works full-time as an instrument technician at a local power plant. Dwayne joined the Navy right out of high-school and is a veteran of Desert Storm. He is seeking his bachelor’s in business management.

Photo by Marcos Morales.