Bowie County's Bounty of Bostons
January 14, 2009
page 4 of 4 pages
You can easily imagine the danger for those husbands before all the Bostons got sorted out. Hiram, off in the lower forty with the mule all morning pulling stumps, comes back to the cabin at noon walking behind the mule, ready for some tater hides and clabber milk. As he reins the mule to a stop, Cora comes to the doorway, a skillet in her hand. “Hiram, Maude Kettle came by this morning in her buggy while I was hanging out the wash and she said she was in Boston yesterday....” There’s a pregnant pause.
Hiram, who has raised the mule’s tail and is busy sniffing underneath it in an attempt to locate the source of the foul odor he had been smelling all morning, asks absent mindedly, “Say, do you smell something like fermented oats?”
Cora, intent on her own line of investigation, continues. “Now, Hiram, I want the truth. Yesterday, instead of going to Boston like you told me, were you really down at the still drinking corn liquor with that horse trader, Jake Spencer?”
Hiram is so surprised by the question that he drops the mule’s tail. “Why Cora, why ever would you think that?”
Cora is now choking the skillet handle and thumping her foot. “Maude Kettle said she was in Boston all day and she didn’t see you anywhere there.”
Hiram frowns, perplexed, while he studies the mystery. Then, in a moment, he brightens. “But, Cora,” he says, “Don't you see? I must have been at a different Boston.”
Cora stops thumping her foot, but she still grips the skillet. Hiram eyes it warily.
“Look here, Cora, having all these Bostons around here is just getting to be too dangerous. For the sake of marital harmony, as well as my own safety, let’s sort them out. From now on, when I say ‘Boston’, I mean the place where the chiggers are so bad. But if I say ‘Old Boston’, I mean the place with the quicksand pool. And if I say ‘New Boston’, I’m referring to the place where Jubal Hankins got hit by lightning.”
Cora considers the matter for a while before speaking. “Well, ok,” she says, lowering the skillet.
Hiram leans on the mule, relieved. The mule, raising its tail, is relieved too. Hiram thinks to himself, he’ll just never understand women. But there is one thing he’s now certain of: he knows the source of the fermented oat odor.
Cora turns and goes back into the cabin. She yells back, "Well, I'll swear! That skunk is as dumb as your brother Bufford. He’s stuck in the chimney again.”
Hiram is afraid to ask: is it the skunk, or Bufford, that’s stuck in the chimney again?
And that, I surmise, is the explanation for Bowie County's bounty of Bostons.
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