Goat Tight and Bull High

By Harry P. Noble
Published on July 30, 2008
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Donnis plans to raid Mr. Elton’s watermelon patch tonight, Harry.”

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.

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