Goat Tight and Bull High
Even the best fence can’t stop a watermelon thief.
July/August 2008
Harry P. Noble
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Michele Tremaine
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“Donnis plans to raid Mr. Elton’s watermelon patch tonight, Harry.”
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I looked up at Burnice wondering what I should do with that piece of information.
It was the summer of 1947. As teenagers, our ages sat right in the middle of unpredictability. As the oldest of the group at 17, my opinion carried a little more weight – a fallacy in itself.
We’d had a favorable spring for watermelons in East Texas, and almost every farm had an acre or two interspersed among their fields of cotton and corn.
Watermelons belong to the gourd family, and propitious rains had produced a bumper crop of red- and yellow-meated fruit. Eight to 10 melons clustered on each vine, and some of them weighed as much as 50 or 60 pounds. Picked when ripe, they were sweet out to the rind.
This late Saturday evening I was in our barn milking when Burnice stuck his head in the stall door. He still had a slight headache from watching the Saturday afternoon double feature at the picture show in town. I knew he had dropped by to check on my plans.
“How do you know that, Burnice?” I asked, getting up, walking out to the sweet gum tree and flipping the calf rope loose so the calf could nurse what I’d left for him.
“I saw Donnis in town at the picture show. He’s got a cousin spending the weekend, and he told me they planned to hit Mr. Elton’s patch tonight.”
“What do you want to do – see if we can get invited?”
“I’m kinda burned out on watermelons,” Burnice replied. “Besides, Donnis will tell us scene by scene the Western he saw, and I’ve already seen it. I don’t want to listen to him.”
“Me neither,” I said, handing Burnice a bucket of milk to carry and heading for the house. “What do you want to do tonight?”
“I don’t know. We could go over to Donnis’s after they get back.”
“What’s his cousin’s name?”
“Jason something – I don’t know.”
Both of us rummaged around in our empty heads but failed to come up with anything. It certainly didn’t enter our minds, or prick our consciences, that sneaking into someone’s watermelon patch and stealing two or three watermelons was wrong. In fact, our view came from the opposite position. We considered it a right of passage – something a boy had to do to say goodbye to comic books and hello to shaving.
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