The Bride Wore Crimson and Other Stories

by Bryan Woolley

  After she had finished testifying, Mae granted an interview. “He never did love me,” she told the reporter. “He didn’t say the things other men would, nor act as they would.”

  The reporter said, “But you must have had a terrible fascination for him, an overpowering charm, if he did what the state claims.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t understand. It all puzzles me.”

  Mae said she sensed that many of the people in the courtroom, “the women, particularly,” were bitter toward her. “But I had to do it. I was afraid. It was either tell this story, much as I hated it, or run the risk of being killed myself.”

  Many of the hostile people were from Comanche County. Mae said she knew of only two families in Lamkin who hadn’t come the 125 miles to Dallas for the trial. “You know how a little town is,” she said. “They’re just eating it up, talking and talking, as little towns do….

  “And Toy, he stands out in the corridor there during the recesses and stares and stares at me. I guess he hates me. If looks could kill….”

  Mr. McCutcheon began his defense by calling 88 character witnesses—from Comanche and Hamilton counties, from Ellsworth Avenue and from Trinity Universal Insurance Co.—to testify that Toy was an honest, truth-telling man and had the respect of the people who knew him. Several of the Lamkin people testified that Mae didn’t enjoy such a sterling reputation among her neighbors.

  Then on Thursday, Mr. McCutcheon announced to the reporters that Toy would take the stand in his own defense, probably Thursday night or Friday morning.

  “What the defendant will say about how his young wife met her untimely death is the principal thing the jury and followers of the trial want to know,” the Times Herald reported. “… In fact, the entire defense, while hard to analyze and understand in all details, has been mostly a ‘build-up’ for the defendant’s own story of the shooting.

  “His burden, though, has been made heavy by the state in the criss-cross of circumstances pointing to a murder motive. Woolley, the state claims, may find it easy to tell how Dorothy was killed, but not so easy to explain many of his actions, and the telephone calls and letters he wrote to Miss Cantrell during the time he was married to Dorothy.”

  But the week ended without Toy coming to the stand. A bailiff took the jury to a movie at the Majestic Theater Saturday night, services at City Temple Church Sunday morning, and a bus ride around the city Sunday afternoon. Court reporter Jack Tingle said he had taken down 300,000 words of testimony in shorthand, and estimated he would pass the 500,000-word mark before the end of the trial. The Morning News said this was about the same length as Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables.

  Monday night, Mr. McCutcheon put Mina on the stand and asked the judge’s permission to set up Toy and Dorothy’s bedroom furniture in the courtroom.

  “The courtroom was packed until there was no breathing space,” the Times Herald reported. “Men and women strained to see and hear. An atmosphere of morbid expectancy hung over the room as bailiffs set up the deathbed and brought in the chair and other furniture as Mina said it was the morning of Dorothy’s death.”

  The newspapers described Mina as “a slender, attractive young girl.” She wore a red-and-black silk dress and a black, tight-fitting hat. She said she had been visiting Toy and Dorothy and had stayed with them Friday and Saturday nights.

  Mr. McCutcheon showed her a picture of Dorothy and asked if that was her brother’s wife. She said it was. He set the picture on the defense table in front of Toy. The jury, the judge, the spectators watched for a reaction. The state’s attorneys sat silent.

  “For fully five minutes, the young defendant’s eyes were glued to the girl the state claims he murdered,” a reporter wrote. “His lips drew tight. It appeared he was on the verge of throwing himself on the table and bursting into tears. Everyone seemed to expect him to do that. He didn’t. Instead he just looked and looked.”

  Mr. McCutcheon then asked Mina to recreate the death scene. She sat on the vanity bench and held the shotgun as her brother had held it. She then moved to the rocker, to show the jury where she was when the gun went off. The position she took placed her directly in the line of fire. Mr. McCutcheon pointed out that if Dorothy had moved, Toy would have killed his own sister. Mina then lay across the bed in the position she said Dorothy was in.

  “Now demonstrate to the jury just what happened when the gun went off,” Mr. McCutcheon directed.

  Mina returned to the vanity bench, held the shotgun as Toy had held it, then jumped up, dropped the gun, and sent the bench scooting across the floor.

  After Mina left the stand, Mr. McCutcheon asked the district attorney to give him a copy of the statement that Toy had made after his indictment was handed down, which contained his own version of Dorothy’s death. The prosecutors hadn’t introduced it into evidence.

  Mr. Hurt objected: “Your honor, this defendant signed this voluntary statement, and he is not entitled to it. If Mr. McCutcheon wants to know how this shooting happened, he can ask his client about it.”

  Mr. McCutcheon replied: “… There is just one way I know to make the district attorney produce the voluntary statement: The defendant rests.”

  The reporters raced for the phones. Toy wouldn’t testify after all. The prosecutors would never have a chance to question him.

  The last witness, in rebuttal, was Ralph Joynes. “Gentlemen,” he told the jury, “I am fully convinced that Toy Woolley deliberately killed my sister. I want you to know that I hate him with all my heart.”

  Mr. Monroe’s closing argument was an hour and 40 minutes long. Mr. McCutcheon’s was three hours long. Mr. Hurt’s was an hour. He demanded the death penalty. The jury got the case at 1:32 a.m. Wednesday. It returned to the courtroom at 9:45 a.m.

  Judge Williams read the verdict: “We, the jury, find the defendant not guilty.”

  Immediately, the courtroom was in an uproar. Mr. McCutcheon shouted: “Your honor, may truth always prevail in your court!” Gatewood Lafayette Woolley threw his arms around Toy’s neck and cried: “Thank God, I’ll get my boy back!” Sisters and brothers scrambled over the railing and smothered Toy with embraces and kisses.

  Jurors told reporters they had taken only three votes. The first two had been 10-to-2 for acquittal. The third had been unanimous. They were convinced by Mina’s testimony, they said, and were suspicious of the prosecution for not introducing Toy’s statement into evidence and not allowing Mr. McCutcheon to see it. The state had left reasonable doubts in their minds.

  Sheriff’s deputies hustled Toy back to the jail, where he had lived for 31 days. As he was being released from custody, Mr. McCutcheon told him, “Get your things and go home to your mother. Never go back to the cottage where you and Dorothy lived. Never take anythig that is associated with it. Try to forget.”

  Toy gave Dorothy’s .22 rifle to Deputy Fred Bradberry, who had guarded him during the trial. He gave his shotgun to Deputy Ted Hinton, who had maintained order in the courtroom.

  “You’ve treated me fine,” Toy said to them.

  He posed for newspaper photographers, then got into a taxi with his father and sped away.

  So I still don’t know whether Uncle Toy murdered his wife. Maybe nobody ever knew, except him. Maybe not even he knew for sure. I know he married at least twice more. I heard that he was a good son and took care of his mother—my grandmother—in her old age. I heard he was in his 70s when he died, and that he was a court bailiff in Lubbock at the time. I heard that Aunt Mina died at an early age, of natural causes. I have no idea what ever happened to Mae.

  But there’s another, last story about the gun.

  Not long ago, a friend mentioned an old newspaper page to me. It was framed and hanging on a wall of the Bonnie and Clyde Suite—Room 305—of the Stockyards Hotel in Fort Worth, he said. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow hid out from the law in that room for a time, so its walls are covered now with pictures of them. One of Bonnie’s guns is in a glass box, and there are newspap
er clippings about the Louisiana ambush that six officers set for Bonnie and Clyde on May 23, 1934, about five months after Uncle Toy’s trial.

  I drove to Fort Worth and read the old page, published the day after the ambush. Spread across it is a story that Bob Alcorn and Ted Hinton, Dallas County deputy sheriffs, told a reporter from the Dallas Dispatch. They’re describing how they and the others killed Bonnie and Clyde.

  “You couldn’t hear any one shot,” Deputy Alcorn is saying. “It was just a roar, a continuous roar, and it kept up for several minutes. We emptied our guns, reloaded and kept shooting….

  “As we jumped into sight, I could see Clyde reaching as if to get his gun, but he never had a chance to fire a shot. Neither did Bonnie, though we learned a few minutes later that they both were carrying rifles across their laps.

  “Each of us six officers had a shotgun and an automatic rifle and pistols. We opened fire with the automatic rifles. They were emptied before the car got even with us. Then we used shotguns.

  “Ted’s was the shotgun given him by Toy Woolley after his trial in Dallas for the death of his wife. It was the gun Woolley was cleaning when the thing went off and killed the girl. …”

  May 1992

  THE HANDS AND EYE OF TEXAS BILLY MAYS

  In July of 1990 I was on a plane from Dallas to Denver and fell into conversation with my seatmate. He had the look of an aging cowboy - boots, jeans, Budweiser jacket, gray hair, thick spectacles. He asked me my trade, and I told him I was a journalist, on my way to South Dakota to do a story about the Sioux. He told me that he played shuffle-board for a living and was on his way to a tournament in Nebraska. I said, “You know, way back in the ‘60s I read a story in Sports Illustrated about a shuffleboard hustler named Texas Billy Mays. I wonder whatever happened to him.” And my seatmate replied, “I’m Billy Mays.” This story, which I wrote several months later, was reprinted in The Best American Sports Writing: 1991.

  IT COULD EASILY HAVE TURNED OUT WRONG, TEXAS BILLY MAYS IS saying. If he hadn’t fallen off that oil derrick on that day so long ago, if he hadn’t been dating that waitress, if Granville Humphrey hadn’t come into Sam’s Bar, there’s no telling whichaway his life might have gone.

  “The way I see it,” he says, “every man is born with the ability to do something better than anybody else can do that thing. The trouble is, most men never find out what their thing is. I’m one of the lucky ones. I found the one thing I can do better than anybody.”

  Billy’s sitting at a table in Click’s, a bar and game room on Northwest Highway in Dallas, drinking a beer, explaining.

  It was 1958, he says. He was 21 and not long off the family farm up at Emory, near Sulphur Springs. The derrick was on a rig in the Gulf of Mexico, off Louisiana. Billy’s fall broke his back. While he healed, he hung out at Sam’s Bar on Haskell Avenue in Dallas, where his girlfriend worked. “They had a shuffleboard in there,” Billy says, “but I didn’t pay any attention to it. Hell, I didn’t even know what a shuffleboard was.”

  Then one day, Granville Humphrey walked in. “He came from Oklahoma City,” Billy says. “He had beat everybody in Dallas. He was the world’s champion.”

  The bar patrons started drawing partners for a shuffleboard round robin. Thirty-nine players signed up. They needed a 40th. They talked Billy into giving it a try.

  “It turned out, me and Granville Humphrey drawed partners,” Billy says. “He toted me, I guess you’d say. We won the round robin. I played the rest of the day and lost the $40 I’d won, but I’d been hooked. I’d be at Sam’s when they opened up in the morning, and I wouldn’t leave till they shut the door at midnight. At the end of three months, I was the best shuffleboard player in Dallas. By the time I was 22, I was the best in the world.”

  In the kind of shuffleboard played by passengers on cruise ships and senior citizens in St. Petersburg, they shove pucks about the deck or floor with long sticks. That isn’t the kind that Billy Mays learned at Sam’s Bar.

  Billy’s is the true shuffleboard, the original shuffleboard, the shuffleboard played in English taverns as early at 1532 and by the early settlers as soon as they had been on the shore of North America long enough to build taverns of their own.

  The modem version of the game is played on a slab of rock maple that’s 20 feet, 8 inches long. The slab sits on a table and is surrounded by a padded trough. The players stand at one end of the table and, taking turns, slide four metal weights each toward the other end. The board has been sprinkled with powdered wax to make the weights slide quickly and smoothly. The player who places a weight closest to the opposite end of the board without its dropping off scores points. Then the weights are shot from the other end of the table. In the most commonly played variety of the game, the first player—or, in the case of doubles, the first team—to score 15 points is the winner.

  Every beer joint worthy of the name has its shuffleboard, along with its pool table and its jukebox loaded with country music, and Billy knows where they all are.

  “Just in the state of Texas, I’d say there’s 5,000 boards now,” he says. “California’s got probably 6,000. Washington and Oregon together has got more than California has. They play a lot in Connecticut and Maine and Massachusetts, but there’s no good players up there. There’s a couple of good players in New York. Pennsylvania’s got the best on the East Coast. Michigan, Indiana and Illinois have a lot of boards, but there’s just five or six places in Iowa to play it. Nebraska’s real full of them. Kansas has got quite a few, and Colorado. There’s 50 or 100 in Montana, but just a few in Wyoming. North Dakota’s got a couple. South Dakota’s got, I’d say, 20. Idaho don’t have very many. …”

  Shuffleboard is a favorite pastime of cowboys, truck drivers, farmers, miners, construction workers, people who work hard with their hands, but a lot of businessmen and city-slicker professionals play it, too. Shuffleboard players like to bet on their games, and they listen to loud music, drink beer and smoke cigarettes while they play. Maybe that’s why the game looks so much easier than it is. Nobody seems to be straining at it.

  “But it’s the toughest game in the world,” Billy says. “It’s a combination of Bobby Fischer type chess, Arnold Palmer type golf and Muhammad Ali type nerve. There’s very little luck in it and a tremendous amount of skill. It’s a precision game.”

  Looking at Billy, you would never peg him for the world’s greatest master of the world’s toughest game. He’s so wiry he could be mistaken for scrawny. He dresses in cowboy boots and satin jackets that advertise beer. His glasses are so thick that his eyes seem outlandishly large. Maybe because of the glasses, his brow is always furrowed horizontally, giving him an air of perpetual bemusement, as if he doesn’t know quite where he is, or as if he’s trying to find a familiar face in a crowd.

  One of the thick lenses isn’t very useful. When Billy was 9 years old, a rock from his brother’s slingshot struck him in the right eye, robbing it of sight. He can distinguish light and dark with it, he says, but nothing else. Then, when he was 17, he fought a boxing match in Longview against Donnie Fleeman—who later would KO Ezzard Charles—and was knocked cross-eyed by a blow to the back of his head. “When I get tired, that right eye still wanders a little,” Billy says. “I can’t hold the thing still.”

  But it doesn’t matter much. “I don’t look at the weights when I shoot anyway,” he says. “I shoot with my mind. If you turn the weight loose right at your end of the table, it’ll go right at the other end. What you’ve got to do is read the drift, and then you shoot into the drift.”

  Every shuffleboard is as unique as a fingerprint. Its humps and warps and quirks and curves, its slow spots and fast spots—all undetectable to the eye—make up a board’s drift, and the drift is what gives it its character. “The drift is part of the table,” Billy says, “but the drift isn’t always the same. Weather can change it. Putting a matchbook under one of the table legs can change it.

  “When you go play someone on their own table,” he say
s, “it’s a bigger advantage to them than when you play a football team on its home field. A guy who plays on a board all the time, he’ll know every little drift in it. It’s like spotting him three or four points. But in about two games, I’ll know the board better than him. I watch. I study what the board does. It’s like opening a book and studying it instead of just opening a book and reading.”

  Billy finishes his beer and walks over to the shuffleboard. It’s a board he knows well, for it’s a World’s Best, his own brand, built by Texas Billy Mays himself at his shop in Seagoville. His signature is on it.

  It’s what he does for most of his living these days, he says, building and selling shuffleboards for $3,200 to $4,500 each and packaging and selling cans of his special shuffleboard wax, which he says is “the fastest wax on the market,” mixed according to his own secret formula. But tonight Click’s is paying him $500 to perform trick shots for the customers and then play all challengers.

  He starts simple. His wife, Doris, sets two weights on the table at the other end. Billy slides two weights down and knocks them off simultaneously. He repeats the trick using three weights. Then Doris sets two weights on the table and lays a cigarette across them like a rail. Billy slides a weight between them and knocks the cigarette away without touching the two weights supporting it. Then Doris sets a weight near the end of the table and stands a penny against it, on edge. Billy’s shot knocks the penny away without touching the weight. Then his grand finale: Billy blindfolds himself with bar napkins, shoves two weights down the board simultaneously and knocks off two weights at the comers of the other end.

  Then for three hours he plays 11-point games against all comers. He’s handicapped by a finger he broke two weeks earlier when he dropped a shuffleboard on it, but he still beats them all. At Click’s and other bars where Billy has put on his exhibition over the years, he has played more than 300 games and has lost only one. “They don’t pay me for losing,” he says.