The tape ran out partway through the catfish, so Uncle Leroy told that one over again the next Saturday. By Rule Number One, he had to tell it a little different. He says this is the better one. — C.P.

Mama's Cucumbers

In the spring of 1931 the creek came up over the bottom field and went back down and left a foot of black dirt on Mama's garden, the richest dirt anybody ever saw. You could plant a nail in it and come back Saturday and have a hinge.

Mama put in cucumbers. She planted them in the morning, and by dinnertime the vines had come up and climbed the garden fence and were feeling around for the clothesline. By supper there were cucumbers on them as long as your arm, and the vines were still growing, so fast you could hear them, a sort of a whispering, like a crowd at a ballgame.

The trouble was, the vines grew so fast they drug the cucumbers along the ground behind them. By the next morning the first cucumbers had been drug clean out of the garden and down the lane, and they were worn down to nubs, and the vines were still going. Daddy said those cucumbers had run off, and Mama said a cucumber had no business running off from a good home, and she sent my brother Edmund and me after them with the mule.

We tracked them two miles. They'd gone down the lane and across the McCants place and under a fence and up onto the highway, and when we found them they were lying in a row in the ditch along the road, plumb wore out, with their vines hanging in the fence like a wash line.

Goldie Stover lived right there by the ditch. She had come out with a dishpan and picked up all the ones that had stopped, and she made eleven quarts of pickles out of them, and she gave Mama six quarts, which we all agreed was fair, since Mama had raised them and Goldie had caught them.

Mama planted cucumbers every year after that, but she always tied a rock to each vine. She said a vegetable that would run off once would do it again, and she'd raised boys, and she knew.

The Catfish That Towed Me to Arkansas

You'll know Bull Shoals Lake, that they made when they dammed up the White River, and that the lake sits half in Missouri and half in Arkansas, with the state line running right across the water where nobody can see it. That part is true. I'm telling you first, by the rules.

In the summer of 1958 I had a trotline set off a point on the Missouri end, and I went out at daylight to run it, and about the middle of the line something took hold that was not a fish. I knew it wasn't a fish because it turned around and looked at me. It was a flathead catfish with a head as wide as a washtub and whiskers like buggy whips, and it looked at me like it had been expecting somebody better.

And then it started for Arkansas.

It went south, steady as a tugboat, with the line wrapped around my boat cleat and me holding on. I thought about cutting it loose, but it was a good line. We went down that lake all morning. We went past fishermen who waved. We went past a man water-skiing who fell down out of plain surprise. Along about noon I knew we were in Arkansas, because the water got a little warmer and the catfish slowed down and seemed easier in its mind, like a fellow who's got home.

That's where the Arkansas game warden pulled up beside me in his boat and asked to see my Arkansas fishing license.

I told him I didn't have one, because I wasn't fishing, I was being fished. He studied on that for a while. He looked at the line, and at the catfish, which was lying alongside my boat now, resting. And he wrote the catfish a ticket for towing without a license.

The catfish towed me home again that night, slow, by moonlight. I believe it was to pay the fine. When we got to the point, it let go of the line, polite as you please, and went off under the dock, and I never saw it again.

Ruth asked me where I'd been all day, and I told her Arkansas, and she said, "Well, I hope you took a sandwich."

The Hailstorm at Homecoming

Every July our church has homecoming, with dinner on the grounds, and in 1954 Ruth was put in charge of the ice cream, which was an honor, and which she took seriously, as she did everything but me.

The ladies had made up the custard the night before, eggs and sugar and cream and vanilla, in six big stone crocks, and set them out on the tables under the oaks to wait for the ice. Only the ice man's truck broke down on the highway twelve miles out, and it was ninety-eight degrees in the shade, and there were six crocks of warm custard and a hundred and ten Baptists looking at them.

Along about two o'clock a cloud came up over the ridge, black and green, the kind you don't like to see, and everybody ran for the church house. It hailed. It hailed stones as big as hen eggs, and it hailed hard, for about ten minutes, and the noise on the tin roof was so loud the preacher gave up praying and just pointed.

When it quit, we went out. The hail had fallen right into those open crocks, so hard and so fast that it had beat the custard like a churn, and so cold that it had froze it while it beat it. Every crock was full to the top with ice cream. Not a hailstone left in it. Smooth as you could want.

Ruth tasted it and stood there awhile. Then she said that hail had a lighter hand with the vanilla than she did. I was married to that woman forty-seven years and I never heard her say that about another living soul.

The ice man came at four. We gave him a bowl.

That's all the tape there was. If you're ever on the old road, stop at the feed store and sit a spell. If the bench is full, you stand, and you go first.

— Leroy Thornton