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Sample Story One - " Female Crickets Catch More Fish "
My friend Mark runs a country store in the Mississippi Delta. He’s a pleasant, unassuming businessman, faithful husband and loving father. He’s also a world-class practical joker. As soon as spring escapes winter’s cold, damp dungeon, two activities become the primary focus of attention among patrons of Mark’s store: planting cotton and going fishing. Being a practical man, Mark capitalizes on both. He grows cotton and sells bait. Catfish catchers can buy chicken livers, gizzards and Uncle Bert’s Blood Bait; for bass anglers there’s plastic worms and marinated pork rinds; for bream fishers, night crawlers and crickets.
Everyone buys bait at Mark’s store, even Grady, his grouchiest, surliest customer. None of us ever figured out how Grady survived. Having neither family nor friends, he hunted until it warmed up enough to fish, and fished until it cooled off enough to hunt. In spring, when bream spawn and bite their best, he stopped at Mark’s every day to buy crickets, cold beer and sandwiches before heading to the lake. Without fail, he sneeringly asked, “You make these sandwiches three days ago, or four?” Although Mark prepared them fresh daily, he always parried the insult by answering, “Can’t remember.” We knew Mark was biding his time and would someday even the score with the cantankerous coot.
One morning Mark and I were cleaning a mess of Chinquapins, the largest of all bream, when Grady pulled up. “I’ll swunnee — where’d y’all catch them monsters! Whud they hit?” he asked. Mark winked at me...the luminous gleam in his eyes signaling revenge time had come.
“Caught ’em at Percy Blue Hole,” Mark replied. “They’re bedding around cypress knees. Woulda caught more, but run out of crickets.” “How could you run out? You got a cage full of ’em right here at your own store,” he snorted, eyeing Mark balefully. Gutting a trophy, Mark continued, “we learned something about Chinquapins today…they prefer female crickets.” Grady stared, wanting to believe Mark, but suspicious, his gaping, grizzled jaw inaudibly mouthing…female crickets….
Suddenly he shouted, “Shoot! Sell me some female crickets — I gotta git to Percy rat now!” “Can’t. Used ’em up,” Mark sighed. “But, best I can tell, the only difference in females and males is the stripe down the female’s back. I’ve got plenty males. Just draw a stripe on their backs with a magic marker before you put them on the hook. The Chinquapins won’t know the difference.”
Three words describe Grady’s gullibility: hook …line… sinker. Mark filled Grady’s bait box with “male” crickets, and off he roared, not even buying sandwiches. Hosing fish scales off the cleaning table, Mark asked, “You still got that zoom lens camera? We need to make a run to the blue hole.” Next time you stop at Mark’s for a freshly made sandwich, ask him to show you the photograph of Grady trying to paint a stripe on a wriggling cricket’s back, and get him to tell you the story about how he suckered him into believing female crickets catch more fish.
Sample Story Two - " Sixty-Fo' Bales A-Burnin' "
There are strange things done at cotton gins
By the men who bale white gold;
We ginners all have a tale or two
That’d make your blood run cold.
In long days and nights, we see strange sights,
But the strangest I ever did gaze
Was that night ole Jock parked at my dock,
With a load o’ bales — all set ablaze!
Cotton gin fires always put me in a panic. If a rib tag ignited, I imagined millions of sparks coursing their way through lint cleaners, battery condenser, lint slide, press… and that the whole plant would soon be a cauldron of cooking cotton and corrugated tin, caving in. Fires inside gins are hard to forget, but my most unforgettable one was outside. Early in my ginning career, bales were wrapped in jute bagging and bound by wide metal bands connected with square buckles. Because they were considerably larger than modern universal density bales, most trucks could haul only sixty-four of them.
Labor was short that year, so I ran the forklift. Truck driver Jock Jones was a pal of mine, but I must admit he was far from being the sharpest tool in the shed. That afternoon, after I put the last bale on his truck, he chugged toward town to visit Maggie — who was definitely not Mrs. Jones — before heading to his destination. Parking a truckload of cotton at the wrong address in one’s hometown clearly indicated Jock’s between-the-ears deficiencies.
Dunleith was so far out in the flat Delta countryside that one step in any direction got you closer to town. At night, the only indication civilization existed beyond our wide spot in the road was automobile lights on Highway 82, four miles distant. That unforgettable night, more than lights spangled 82. “Boss, step out on the dock,” Jaybird the pressman said.
When I did, I saw a roaring conflagration on the highway — moving! Behind it, cars stretched for miles. “Must be a truckload of cotton afire and the driver hasn’t noticed. Uh-oh, he’s slowing down.” “Yessuh, he’s slowing down all right… so he kin turn on the blacktop coming to this gin!” It was Jock. Though she remained exculpatory, there was much speculation that Mrs. Jones spotted Jock’s truck that night and stuffed a smoldering “billet-doux” between bales at the front of his load. Innocent of the impending inferno, Jock jockeyed up to cruising speed as the wind turned his rig into a rolling Roman candle.
Racing into the gin, I stopped the cotton flow, switched off burners and began moving trailers and bales. Even Jock’s Maker was probably surprised by his next maniacal maneuver, and it definitely convinced several hundred spectators and me that his cogitative capabilities equated a cabbage’s.
He backed up to the dock, leapt out the cab, and dodging traps and buckles flying in all directions from bursting bales, screamed, “Git them bales off my truck!” When dawn broke, Jock lacked three things he had the day before: job, wife… and truck.
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