His hand-painted signs along Ga. 22 beckon:
COME EAT WITH HEAVY GRANT & FAMILY
See His Unique Museum and Dining Room
As so rarely happens, the word ``unique'' is used correctly.
The word ``museum,'' however, is open to interpretation.
``I always wanted a barbecue house and fix it up with plenty of good food and plenty of good things to look at,'' says Heavy, 67, who prefers to be addressed by his apt nickname rather than by ``Mr. Grant.'' ``Heaps of people come in here, and their eyes get big and they say they can't eat for looking.''
That's because most of what they're looking at is looking back.
The walls, ceilings, rafters and some of the floor space are crowded with more than 250 dead, stuffed animals. There are so many dead, stuffed animals in Heavy's place that it would be easy to believe that there are no live wild animals left in Taliaferro County.
Heavy, of course, is blissfully proud of his furry and feral decor.
A stunning albino deer, with a snow-white coat, stares blankly through eerie pink eyes. A black bear, with teeth bared, is frozen in perpetual ferocity. A bobcat, up on its hind legs, has its mouth wide open in a soundless hiss.
Heavy doesn't only shoot animals, he dresses them up. A mink goes formal in a red bow. A doe sports a baseball cap. Behind a glass display case two deer are hitched to a goat wagon ordered from the Sears catalog, circa 1900. The deer look in cross-eyed dismay at the red noses Heavy has fitted over their own in a Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Christmas motif.
It would be a disservice to Heavy to suggest that dead animals are his sole decorating theme.
For 40 years Heavy worked for the phone company. All the while he collected and stored an astonishing amount of stuff with which he planned to fill his barbecue restaurant. After he retired in 1979, he opened Heavy's Bar-B-Q. Decorating the place posed no dilemmas.
There are hundreds of baseball and hunting caps (``people come in wearing one hat and leave with another one on their heads''), antique sewing machines and switchboards, sabers and muzzleloaders, a piano, a metal horse collar, a 1926 Dodge, a 1948 firetruck, a Coca-Cola wagon and a handmade kicking machine with work boots on each peg.
``Hunters are always saying they could kick themselves for what got away,'' Heavy says, ``so I fixed up something for them to do it with.''
Heavy's regular customers ignore the decor. They come in for the barbecue, cooked over oak wood, and to tease Heavy, whose wife, Louise, son Perry and daughter-in-law Lydia cook in preparation for weekends. Heavy's place is only open from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
Billy Hall, 71, says he and his friend Bud Griffin like to shock the snootier customers by musing in stage whispers about Heavy collecting possum and other road kill to serve in his restaurant.
``One lady turned up her nose, but she looked like she was going to get sick,'' Hall recalls happily.
``You got to watch Heavy, 'cause he won't tell you the truth,'' says Griffin, 69, who is a deer-hunting consultant and has business cards to prove it. ``You ask, `Heavy, is the sweet potato pie fresh?' and he'll say, `Yep, always fresh,' but you look behind him and while he's nodding his head, Miss Louise is shaking her head no. You got to go to Miss Louise for the truth.''
Heavy pays no mind to his buddies' comments. He ambles from table to table, a plastic pitcher of sweet tea in his hand. On each picnic table there is Red Rooster Louisiana Hot Sauce, homemade barbecue sauce and a loaf of Sunbeam King white bread.
Patricia Durst, an insurance broker from Atlanta, has brought two friends from Spain to experience Heavy's place.
``The barbecue is the best I ever had, and I grew up in Memphis, a barbecue town,'' says Durst, 26. ``And the ambience is, uh, particularly quaint. Country Americana I'd call it.''
``For what is a loaf of white bread on the table?'' asks her friend Silvia Perez, 26.
Heavy and his family provide a guest book for customers to sign as they depart his barbecue shack. A diner from New York City found Heavy's ``wonderfully surreal,'' a South Carolinian, possibly describing more than the barbecue, wrote ``That was killer!'' A visitor from England by the name of Ringo Starr told the Grants they had quite the place. In the guest book, the Beatle wrote, ``bloody well good!''
Heavy not only possesses a secret barbecue recipe, but a sly sense of humor that might not be universally appreciated.
When a first-time customer opened the door to the ladies' room and emitted a gasp and a little scream, Heavy chuckled and waddled over to explain.
``In the men's room, there's a buck's butt,'' he told her. ``That there's a doe's butt.''
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