03/28/2024
Spread the love

By: Jefferson Weaver

KellyFestElliot Henry’s eyes were deep-set and often merry, but piercing.

“Hey Bo,” he’d say. “You in a hurry? I want to show you something.”

Mr. Elliot was a little man, but he was a man among men. On his 85th birthday, he rode a zipline out across the canal and dropped into water that’s well over my head. When he had an accident with a platform mower that nearly cost him his life, and did injure one hand, his response was that God was taking care of him, and he’d lived long enough not to need the tips of those fingers.

We celebrated Mr. Elliot’s home-going last week; there are always tears at a funeral, but laughter, and memories overshadowed most of the sadness. I think he’d have wanted it that way.

I really got to know Elliot Henry a year or two before we moved to Kelly. His farm had been honored by the state with a Century Farm award, and is still a testimony to generations of love of the land. He readily shared his photo albums and scrapbooks, but with the infuriating modesty that was such a part of his personality, I had to drag personal information out of him.

He helped found two of the drainage corporations that dug the canals that turned mud into fertile pastures. He worked in the shipyards for much of World War II, and was drafted at the very end into the Marine Corps. He was a board member for our telephone cooperative, as well as a member of the county school board. Later, he helped found Harrells Christian Academy. He wanted his children – and every child – to have the best education they could get.

He despised waste, like anyone who grew up during the Depression, on a farm where they didn’t see much difference after Wall Street crashed. I cannot count the number of times I heard him fuss about corn being “wasted” by harvesters. When his family cut corn, he would note, there were never so many ears left on the ground as when the combines finished. He would occasionally admit, however, that considering the size of modern fields, modern harvesting did have its advantages – but he still thought they wasted too much corn.

Elliot Henry loved three things with a ferocious passion – Jesus Christ, his family, and the land. He was not one to grandstand with a Pharisaical prayer in the market place, but as a Sunday school teacher, a strong church member, and a Christian, he took the biblical directives to heart. I have no idea how many people told me how he shared the word of Christ with them, or was there in a particularly bad time. He quietly made sure folks who needed food were fed, and that those whose homes were cold in winter had heat until things were better.

One of my favorite stories about Mr. Elliot came from a dear friend who was somewhat new to the community. One tragic night, she lost a horse in foal. She called around to the few folks she knew, asking for help.

It wasn’t long before “a little, old man” she didn’t even really know was pulling up the lane, driving a backhoe.

Elliot handled the sad task, then sat on the porch and listened while she poured out her broken heart. She never forgot the simple gesture of being a neighbor.

While he was respected and liked by a lot of men, few and far between were the women, young and of a certain age, who didn’t nigh on to fall in love with Elliot Henry. A dear friend of ours who met him but once cried when she heard the news that he had passed.

“Men aren’t nice like that anymore,” she said.

Mr. Elliot could never sit still for very long; whether it was in one of his battered trucks, behind the wheel of a tractor, on a horse or a four-wheeler, Elliot Henry was constantly in motion.

Even when he wasn’t supposed to drive anymore, Elliot would be seen heading up the road to Charles’ store for a hot dog and a Mountain Dew. There was always something to do, somewhere to go, someone who needed a hand.

He found it silly that we had a pet hog, but he was more than willing to share his surplus of watermelons with Sam. That led to one of my favorite adventures with Mr. Elliot.

The roads through his farm were a mess from too much rain; rather than take the chance of tearing something up, or getting stuck, I asked if I could borrow one of his four-wheelers to pick up a load of melons. Not only did I get enthusiastic approval, but he volunteered to come along to show me the way and help me load up “enough to keep that pig fat for dinner.”

I am not sure I have ever been so frightened as I was on that sunny Sunday afternoon.

My ATV experience was somewhat limited, but I wasn’t afraid of the contraption. I was, however, terrified Mr. Elliot was going to kill himself, and I’d be held responsible. He drove that four-wheeler like a madman; and kept circling back to come up beside me and tell me to speed up.

He was 86 or 87 at the time, and teased me that I was “a fraidy cat” for not tearing down the road at highway speeds. He would point at the gearshift I had carefully left in low, and wave.

“Put it in high!” he yelled. “You got to give it some gas, Bo!”

Most of our time together was spent not on a four-wheeler, but in his truck. Any time I heard the words, “You in a hurry? I want to show you something,” I did my best to open the next few hours, because we were going for an adventure.

He showed me the remains of a dredge built by one of his long-dead forebears, who suffered the embarrassment of having tried to dredge a canal in the wrong direction and instead of draining a swamp, made things far worse. We drove through cathedrals of long leaf pine trees far more beautiful than anything man could ever build, a forest he lovingly maintained for his grandchildren and great-grandchildren, since he bluntly said “I’ll be gone before they’re ready to be cut.”

He introduced me to the cabin at Henry’s Pass (one of the most impossibly narrow bridges ever built), and watched my reaction when he showed me the claw marks of a huge bear on the back of the cabin. “It scares the city people,” he told me. “I’m glad you aren’t scared.”

He despised the deer that were such a pestilence on soybeans and corn, but made me faithfully promise to guard the wild turkeys on the main farm. I could shoot any turkeys I wanted on another section, but not on the main spread. He liked watching them come back as a species.

“We had one or two when I was a boy,” he say, “but that’s all.” On our last safari, when we counted 40-plus birds hunting insects in a warm spring field, Mr. Elliot did admit that it might be time to open up that area to hunting – in a few years.

“Let anything go too long,” he said, “and there get to be too many of them.”

He had a passionate hatred for both beavers and coyotes, a hatred which led to our friendship. It took me several years of trapping beavers for him before he’d let me chase coyotes, bobcats and foxes on his farm. He loved his land, and you didn’t get carte blanche without proving to be a good steward and guest.

We buried Elliot Henry’s body the other day; his soul went to Heaven, but his touch is still there in the long leaf pines, the roads to nowhere, the wicker of a well-trained horse, and the classrooms of a school. His legacy lives on in overalls bought for young boys whose family could afford none, firewood by a widow’s back door, and laughter around a campfire.

Husband, father, brother, grandfather, friend, host, farmer, leader, Christian – Elliot Henry was a man among men.

He left an incredible example for those of us who knew and loved him – but if we want to be even a shadow of what he was to his family and community, we have to put it in high, and give it some gas.

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