December 5, 2002

The hardest problem storytellers face is that witnesses live forever. No matter how old the story is, or where the story was set, up pops a busybody who knows more than the writer does.

Write about ol' "Six-shooter" falling on a line camp cowboy named "Rowdy" in a 60-section pasture before the patenting of land, and darned if an eyewitness won't come forth to claim the horse's name was "Screwdriver" and the cowboy's name was "Percy."

And the way readers abuse writers, you'd think the license to create ended with the Mother Goose rhymes. Every week, I eat lunch with a table of guys as naïve as the treasurer of a Girl Scout troop. The first thing they want to know at the ending of a story is whether it's true. I became so discouraged, the last time I went to Austin I brought back a true story.

Please listen to the story first. The very exalted officer of the Austin Independent School District, the superintendent, was ticketed for driving 27 miles an hour in a school zone. According to the article on the front page of the Austin American Statesman, he called the news desk on his cell phone immediately and reported his crime. (Speeders have to drive faster than 27 miles an hour to hit an Austin kid, especially one raised close to the University area.)

Omitted in the news report but pertinent to the case is that the superintendent's confession was the first time since the founding of the township that a public figure failed to have an alibi at hand. For example, state legislators caught in embarrassing nocturnal activities often blame the cursed after-midnight shock that causes man to lose his memory in smoky taverns and questionable lodgings.

The only comment in my audience was, "I don't ever know when to believe you, Monte." They lost me there. Try as I could, I couldn't recall asking anyone to believe me. Look at this, please: the average age of the table is three quarters of a century, or 75 years old. Suppose I claimed to have witnessed the incident and said, "The superintendent, idling his red Mercedes blocking traffic, held a brown bottle in his right hand and slipped the cop a green-colored piece of paper with his left."

At the table are a land man, an auction owner, an ex-senator, a rancher, a doctor, an insurance broker, and a builder. Is a slight embellishment going to corrupt these august gentlemen, who passed their twenty-first birthdays close to the middle of the 20th century?

If I understood what they meant by saying they can't tell when I am telling the truth, I'd rewrite the story, researching the files of the Austin American for the exact wording of the article. But it beats me how you are going to tell a good story without adding some action.

I try to keep from being cornered. A scribe with the Fort Davis newspaper wrote asking the bloodlines of the stallions my Grandfather Noelke used on the hundreds of head of mares he ran on his lands. Nature of her craft made it risky making up a "Steel Dust" ancestry, or trumping up a line of "Blow Ditch" colts. ("Blow Ditch" was the famous race horse who lost a hind foot from kicking the Ferris wheel over at Sherwood one Fourth of July.) So I wrote her that by the time I came along the registration papers had disappeared. And all I could remember of the branded horses at the old ranch was that they trailed bridle reins real well and left a lot of cowboys on foot.

I referred her to Paul Patterson at Crane, Texas. He worked for my grandfather. I knew Paul spun yarns wound in tight enough balls to make the creator of Harry Potter think the ink was dry in her word processor. He said, "They were sorrels and duns, the mares showing a Spanish bloodline."

Paul helped drive 500 head of Granddad's horses from Monument on Spring Creek to across the Pecos River. The drive allowed time to study equine ancestry over his saddlehorn — a very accurate position from which to view the horse world. It was also an excellent opportunity to adjust to alkali dust and direct sunlight reflecting off alkali soil to peel the hide from a cowboy's nose.

Sad to think of corrupting a table of graybeards by enlarging the truth. Be too bad if I was a bad influence on those seasoned gentlemen, as well thought of as they are in the community and state. I imagine ol' Paul loaded the lady writer to full tilt on the horses. Wish there were more guys like Paul around. Sure would take a lot of pressure off my tales.

December 5, 2002

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