Tales with a Texas Twist

by Donna Ingham

Now that he had his horse, there was only one more thing that would make Bill’s life complete, and that came along in the form of Sluefoot Sue. Bill was back down by the Pecos River, where so many things had happened to him, the first time he saw Sluefoot Sue. She could ride anything, this woman could, and she was riding down the river on the back of one of those big old Texas catfish. Well, for Bill it was love at first sight because she was pretty.

  She was prettier than a speckled pup under a red wagon, and you all know how pretty that is. He was so smitten with her that he called out a proposal of marriage to her right there on the spot.

  And she accepted, too, on two conditions. One, she wanted a wedding dress with a big old bustle on it, and two, she wanted to ride Widowmaker to the ceremony. Fine, Bill said, and he mounted up and rode Widowmaker all the way to Dallas. He went to Neiman-Marcus and bought the prettiest wedding dress with the biggest bustle on it he could find. When he brought it back, Sluefoot Sue got all gussied up in that dress and prepared to mount Widowmaker. There was only one thing she hadn’t thought of, and that was what was going to happen when she tried to sit down on a saddle with that bustle on. You see, the bustle acted just like a spring, and the minute she sat on the saddle, the bustle went s-p-r-o-i-n-g! And up she went into outer space. She went clear up around the moon, and when she came back down, she landed on the bustle again. S-p-r-o-i-n-g-! Back she went into outer space. Bill didn’t know what to do.

  Lucky for them, about that time along came a Texas tornado just bearing down on Bill’s longhorn herd. Bill did the only thing he knew to do. He shook himself out a loop with his rattlesnake rope and roped that storm. He was going to pull it down, but it was a good deal stronger than he’d anticipated. It dipped down a little bit, but then it jerked back up, and when it did, it jerked Bill up, too, and he was riding it.

  “That’s okay, you big bag of wind,” Bill said. “Just get me over here where I can catch my Sluefoot Sue.” She was still bouncing.

  But that storm had other ideas, and it went tearing across the plains, sucking up the rivers and the lakes. Well, that made Bill mad. So he took another hitch on his rattlesnake rope and started pulling and pulling and pulling until he made that storm cry. Oh, it was just bawling and squalling, big old salty tears a-falling down.

  They say that’s what formed the Great Salt Lake.

  By this time, Bill had the storm calmed down enough so that he could guide it back over to where Sluefoot Sue was still bouncing. He caught her on an upward bounce and pulled her over behind him on the tornado, and together they rode it until it rained out from under them somewhere over California.

  When they landed, now, it was right on top of a Conestoga wagon, and who do you suppose was in the wagon? Why, Bill’s ma and pa and his sixteen brothers and sisters. They were still looking for a place to light.

  “You done missed it,” Bill said. “There ain’t no better place in the world to live than Texas. Just turn this thing around. We’re going back to Texas and get us a ranch and raise longhorns. We’ll all be cowboys, and we’ll be about as happy as a bunch of boardinghouse pups.”

  And, sure enough, that’s what they did.

  The Meandering Melon

  In Texas we take great pride in our ability to lie. We pass on classic tall tales like the three previous stories, and we’re still making up whoppers and having contests to see who’s the champion liar in our neighborhood. I started my lying career in Austin, the state capital, and won that city’s liars’ contest seven times. Those of us who entered admitted to being rank amateurs since we figured all the pros were way too busy in the state legislature to participate. But we were kidding, mostly. I moved on to become the Biggest Liar in Austin seven times and the Biggest Liar in Texas three times. These next stories are three of my winning whoppers. My philosophy of lying is that it’s best to start out with the truth, but when we begin to stretch the truth—well, that’s when the fun starts.

  Up there in Terry County my daddy liked to grow things. He did. He raised livestock, of course: cattle, horses, bird dogs, guinea fowl—you name it, he’d try it. For crops he raised cotton on the back forty and alfalfa down in the draw. And every year he had a big garden. There by the house he’d plant tomatoes and peppers and cucumbers, and out in the field he’d plant quarter-mile rows of field corn and black-eyed peas and string beans. That was in the spring. In the fall he’d plant turnips. Every year my daddy got his picture in the Brownfield News and Terry County Herald holding the longest cucumber or the biggest turnip.

  One spring he decided to plant some watermelons in between the corn rows. And not just any watermelons, either. No sir. He planted Black Diamond watermelons, the ones that are dark green on the outside and ruby red on the inside. Big-hearted watermelons they are. Oh, they are good.

  Well, your Black Diamonds grow big anyway, but this one particular melon got to growing bigger and bigger and bigger until pretty soon it was pushing out beyond the corn rows. It uprooted about a quarter acre or so. It got too big for Daddy to load in the back of the pickup and take into town to have his picture made with it. So he just called the editor of the newspaper and said, “You’re going to have to come out here this year, boys. I have something you’ve got to see.” And they did.

  So there stood my daddy with his hand up on that watermelon. Oh, it was way taller than he was, and my daddy was five-foot-nine with his boots off.

  Then my stepmother got to thinking about what it was she wanted to take to the county fair that year in the way of canned goods. She didn’t enter the baked goods, but she did love to can. Her corn relish had won the blue ribbon just the year before. Well, she got to thinking about those watermelons, and she had a real good recipe for watermelon preserves. So she decided to try her hand at that.

  She went up to the field to look over the crop, and naturally her eye fell upon that big old melon that Daddy had had his picture made with. She said to herself, “I wonder if that melon is any good. I reckon I’d better plug it and find out.” Now, she had an eight-inch butcher knife with her, and she began to cut through the rind in a triangle shape like any good plugger does. But I’m telling you, the rind was so thick that, when she pulled that plug out, it was all rind. There wasn’t any melon meat on it.

  So she stuck her hand in through the plug hole clear up to her shoulder, but still all she could feel was rind. Well, that provoked her some, and she took that butcher knife and kept hacking away at the plug hole until before long it was big enough she could step inside, aiming to get to the heart of that watermelon.

  You know, I think everything would have been all right if there hadn’t been just a little slope to that field. But there already being some strain on the vine there, what with that big old melon on it, when my stepmother added her weight to it, it was just too much for that little old bitty stem, and it popped right off. The next thing she knew she was tumbling head over heels over head over heels inside the watermelon as it rolled down the slope out of the corn patch and onto the county road, taking out about a half mile of fence posts as it went.

  Daddy was over standing by the barn when he looked up and saw his melon rolling by, and he could hear his wife’s voice from inside hollering, “The heart! The heart!” Well, he thought she was having a heart attack, so he jumped in his pickup, pushing the case of canning jars he’d bought that morning at the Piggly Wiggly over to one side, and got in behind the melon.

  The county road made a little banking turn there as it came into town, and it just kicked that watermelon over onto Highway 82 so now it was on its way to Lubbock—by way of Meadow, Ropesville, and Wolforth. The melon was rolling right down the middle of the highway, forcing cars and pickups and eighteen-wheelers off into the bar ditch. It was mowing down mailboxes and Burma Shave signs. Daddy was doing his best to keep up; meanwhile, police cars and ambulances and fire trucks were falling in behind him. There was even a traffic helicopter flying overhead.r />
  All Daddy had to do to get up-to-the-minute reports was just turn on the radio: “The runaway melon is approaching Lubbock at a very high rate of speed. It is headed right for the South Plains Fair Grounds. The midway has been evacuated, and the exhibits area is on high alert.”

  Lucky for everyone concerned, the melon didn’t quite negotiate a sharp curve in the highway going into Lubbock, and it bounced off into McKenzie Park—right in the middle of Prairie Dog Town. (No animals were hurt in this part of the story.)

  There it was rolling across all those prairie dog holes, and they must have acted just like hundreds of little speed bumps because they sure enough did start to slow that melon down. So by the time it bounced on over to the South Plains Fair Grounds, it rolled to a stop, just as docile as you please, right in front of the Food Exhibits building.

  Daddy came to a screeching halt in the pickup and bailed out, still thinking his wife was having a heart attack. “Are you all right, Sweet Thing? Do you need CPR?”

  Well, she came climbing out of the melon, all red in the face and spitting seeds. “No, I’m all right,” she said. “I just wish I had my canning jars because I don’t think I’m going to have time to get my preserves made and entered in the county fair.”

  “Not to worry,” Daddy said. “I’ve got a case of jars right here in the pickup. All you need to do is scoop out some of the heart of that watermelon and stir it up in these jars. You don’t even need to add sugar. You know how sweet these Black Diamonds are. You’ll win a blue ribbon for sure.”

  She pulled herself up to her full height, brushed herself off as best she could, and did exactly what he said. And, by doggies, she did win another blue ribbon.

  And I think the melon would have won a blue ribbon, too—if it hadn’t had so many miles on it.

  One Turkey-Power

  Uncle Key, my dad’s younger brother, was the storyteller in our family. Like the character in this tale, he loved hunting with his bird dog Biggun and fishing on Lake Meredith in the Texas Panhandle. He did make a fishing trip to the Texas Hill Country one time, he told me. But from there on the stretching starts. I like to think he’d enjoy being part of all this tomfoolery.

  You never saw a fellow who loved fishing and hunting any more than my uncle Key. Every weekend he was pulling his boat to Lake Meredith up there in the Texas Panhandle, and in the fall, he and his bird dog Biggun were walking the fields, trying to scare up some dove or quail or pheasant. So when we moved to central Texas, I asked him one time, I said, “Uncle Key, did you ever do any fishing in the Texas Hill Country?”

  “Oh, I did once,” he said, “and blamed if that didn’t turn out to be the beatin’est trip I ever took,” and then he told me this story. Because maybe even more than hunting and fishing, Uncle Key loved telling stories.

  This one time, he said, he drove down to the Hill Country with several carloads of old boys from Amarillo, where he lived, and they rented themselves a place right there on the shores of Lake Travis—planning to do a little bass fishing. But, he said, he saw this flyer advertising a turkey shoot on the other side of the lake, and being a pretty fair shot himself, he decided to enter the contest.

  When he got to studying the map, he could see it was a pretty good ways around to the other side of the lake by highway, so he decided to take a shortcut across the water in his little fishing boat. He could see the opposite shore all right and was a fair navigator, but not being used to so many trees, he said he had a dickens of a time finding the place.

  When he did finally get there, he sized up the competition and got his first good look at the turkey. It was a mighty big bird, he said, and not at all happy about being tied up by its feet.

  “It was a-flappin’ and a-gobblin’ and a-carryin’ on, all the time frettin’ itself against those cords binding its legs,” he said.

  Now, they weren’t to shoot the turkey itself, of course. There were paper targets tacked on the trees. And it wasn’t long until Uncle Key knew he had that contest won.

  “Why, most of those fellows couldn’t hit a bull in the butt with a bass fiddle,” he said. Meanwhile, Uncle Key was hitting the bull’s-eye every time. So, sure enough, he won the turkey.

  But now here’s where things got kind of interesting. Picture, if you will, this agitated live turkey with its feet tied together, not much cottoning to the idea of riding in anybody’s fishing boat. Your average turkey just doesn’t consider itself to be much of a water bird, after all.

  “It was still a-gobblin’ in as complaining a way as you’ve ever heard a turkey gobble,” Uncle Key said, “and still a-tryin’ to flap those big old wings.”

  Nevertheless, Uncle Key gathered Old Tom up and laid him down real careful-like in the bottom of the boat near the bow and tied him in with a double half hitch of anchor line around one leg and said sweet and loving things to him. Then Uncle Key pull-started the little outboard motor, and pretty quick after that is when the trouble started.

  They were about in the middle of the lake when the outboard went to sputtering and sputtering and then just up and died. No amount of pulling and kicking and cussing could get it started again, either. “I know,” Uncle Key said, “because I tried it all.” He said even the turkey seemed to grasp the gravity of the situation.

  So Uncle Key did the only thing he knew to do: He pulled out the paddle and started maneuvering toward the opposite shore.

  Meanwhile, the turkey was losing patience. By and large, you know, your average turkey is not a patient bird. Before they were even in the middle of the lake, he’d already decided for sure that he didn’t like boating and he didn’t like having his feet tied together and he didn’t like being hitched to that anchor line. Besides that, by now it was getting on toward evening, and he was thinking mostly about getting up on something high and settling in to roost. So back he went to flapping and floundering around, and the first thing Uncle Key knew, that bird, hobbled as he was, had somehow managed to get himself up onto the prow of the boat. There he sat, wings all spread out, ready to take off.

  That’s when Uncle Key dropped the paddle right over the side of the boat—when he lunged forward, made a grab for the turkey, and missed. The turkey flapped and flew. Uncle Key did manage to grab hold of the anchor line tied to the bird’s leg, but it was pulling through his hands and pulling through his hands and leaving him with little more than rope burns to show for his efforts. Fortunately for him, though, the anchor itself caught in the prow of the boat and lodged there. So now, the slack being out of the rope, the airborne turkey was pulling the boat. And friends, I’m telling you, there is no good way in the world to steer a turkey.

  Now, Lake Travis is sixty-five miles long, and Uncle Key saw mile marker forty-seven flash by as that turkey seemed headed right straight for Mansfield Dam this side of Austin. About twenty miles later, along about the settlement of Lakeway, the boat traffic began to pick up, which didn’t faze the turkey much, but Uncle Key was hollering and waving and dodging as best he could. The Jet Skis and party boats cleared the channel, and the bass fishermen mostly looked disgusted and hunted for a quieter place to cast. The pleasure boaters were all pointing to the sky and hollering, “It’s a plane! It’s Superman! Nope, it’s a bird!”

  To tell you the truth, the turkey seemed to be enjoying the attention and likely would have flown right on over the dam if he hadn’t had considerable wing fatigue by this time and, of course, the weight of that boat and Uncle Key trailing along behind. As it was, he just headed for the nearest grove of trees, the boat bumping ashore and coming to a rest right outside of Carlos & Charlie’s Bar & Grill.

  Shaken but unhurt, Uncle Key wrapped the anchor rope around a tree branch to secure his feathered trophy and went inside to call his fishing buddies to come get him. He rode all the way back to Amarillo with that turkey in his lap and wouldn’t yield it up either to his wife or to anybody else to cook into turkey and dres
sing and giblet gravy when he got home.

  “No sir,” he said, “by then I just didn’t have any heart for eating that bird, after all we’d been through. I decided to just keep him for a pet.”

  So Old Tom lived a pretty good life up there in Amarillo, spending most of his time in Uncle Key’s backyard with Biggun. He roosted nights on the clothesline pole. Except on the weekends when Uncle Key went cruising on Lake Meredith under one turkey-power—because Uncle Key said he never could teach that bird to fly at trolling speed.

  See You Later, Alligator

  Still following my formula of starting with the truth and then stretching it, I’ve enlarged on an anecdote told by a family friend. And the end of this story has some truth to it, too: There really is an alligator statue in El Paso’s Plaza de los Lagartos.

  Little Betty Yarbrough was a bookish girl, but she had a sense of adventure and was always up for a challenge. Like the time her daddy sent her the live baby alligator all the way from Florida. Packed him in a cigar box and mailed him to Betty down there in the Texas Rio Grande Valley, he did.

  He was a cute little thing, the alligator was, in a reptilian sort of way—had black and yellow stripes and those big yellow eyes. He had a mischievous little grin that reminded Betty of her cousin that was going into politics, so she named that alligator Ralph.

  Ralph, the alligator, was only about six or eight inches long when Betty got him, so he lived in one of those 55-gallon aquariums to start with. Had enough water to submerge himself in at one end and a pile of rocks on which to bask at the other end. Alligators like to bask.

  But Ralph kept growing and growing and getting longer and longer ’til pretty soon he outgrew that aquarium. Well, Betty moved him to the back yard and put him in a child’s wading pool—after removing the child, of course. She fenced him in with one of those chain link dog runs—after removing the dog, of course. And still Ralph grew.