Published: December 26, 2007 02:12 am            

Part I: The Crimmus Mr. Pate shot his neighbor’s mule and cooked it

This past weekend I drove out to Segovia to deliver a load of manuscripts to Bob Winship and visit a little with my old pal Mr. Pate.

We were sitting on his porch knocking down hot toddies, since the weather was too cool for beer, and our conversation drifted to the matter of Joe Horn, that chap in Houston who shotgunned a couple of burglars who’d hit his neighbor’s house and were in the process of doing who knows what on his own property. Whatever it was, Joe felt it the proper thing to do to take them down.

The old man grinned and snorted, then said, “I just about take’n down a kid out here one time that was stealing deer corn from my barn.”

“Why haven’t you told me about that?”

“Ain’t crossed my mind to, but it just did.

“See, back a few years ago I had six hunters that come in here ever year to hunt, so I had feeders set up in the hills and fields, prolly a dozen or fifteen, and I used a hell of a lot of deer corn. I’d usually keep a hunderd bags or so in the barn in one of the cribs that I had lined with screen wahr to keep mice and rats outta the corn. You know, them thangs’ll . . .”

“What about the kid you almost shot?” That’s what I was interested in. I know what mice and rats will do to corn.

“Well, they’s this white-trash fambly that lives on the back side of my propty . . . .” He pointed to the south.

“Back over by the big highway. Got a trailer and a few acres of scrub brush and cedars and a oak or two. The guy works in Kerrville, or did, at a cement plant, and his wife, that’s bigger than . . . .” He nodded toward the kitchen, where Mrs. Pate was banging pans around.

“Mr. Pate, the boy that you almost shot?”

“Oh, yeah. Well, they got this boy, that at the time was prolly fifteen or so, prolly twenty now and serving 15 years in Huntsville.”

“He’s in prison?”

“Yeah, whut I heard. He got caught trying to steal a truck from a Ford place over in San Antone and got sent up. I don’t know for how long, but he’s still in, whut I heard.”

“So . . . .”

“They got two girls too, that works in Kerrville at Dairy Queens or something. They almost as big as they momma.”

“Mr. Pate, what about the time you almost shot the boy?”

“Yeah, yeah.” He swigged his toddy. “Well, like I said, I usually kept a hunderd bags or so of corn in that crib to fill them feeders all thoo the cool season, and they was stacked so that I couldn’t tell that somebody was taking sacks off the back side. Prolly wouldn’t knowed it till this day, except that one of my hunters, that had left his car up at the house, seen this boy with a sack of deer corn on each shoulder headed up that hill back there.

“When the hunter asked him where did he get the corn from, he said he found it on the side of one of the trails back in the mesquite where it must of fell off somebody’s truck, which is dog dookey, since when I carry corn out to the feeders, it's in the bed of my Tacomer, and I’d have to of turnt completely over to spill a bag of corn outta that truck.

“The hunter come on to the house and told me what he had run acrost, so I went down to the barn and checked around some and seen where somebody had been taking bags off the back side and then tightning everthang up to where I wouldn’t be able to tell until I worked my way back there, and by that time I woulda completely lost count of how many bags was left.

“Anyhow, he got me to checking on thangs a bit closer — you know, looking for tracks and keeping count of the bags of corn and all, and purty soon I realized that that boy was stealing at least two bags of corn a week, which might not sound like much, except that I pay six bucks a bag for that damn stuff and have it hauled in from Kerrville just about ever month.

“So it set me on edge, and I started figgering out when he was doing it, which was mostly real early on Saredy mornings, when I guess we was sposed to be asleep and he wudn’t in school, if he even went to school.”

“So what did you do?” I asked him.

“Well, I set to laying in the bushes out from the barn ever Saredy morning real early, and for a couple of weeks I didn’t see nothing going on, except on the third Saredy, a couple of days after Christmas, I heard some kinda motorbike coming from off the hill and down thoo the mesquite thicket back of the barn, and then there he was: that white-trash boy on a damn four-wheeler. And he pulled right into that barn like it was his own and stopped in front of the corn crib, hopped off, and crawled over the top of them bags of corn and started thowing sacks forward and then crawled back over and loaded five on thatere four-wheeler. And that’s when I come onto the scene, as they say.

“ ‘Howdy, neighbor boy,’ I said to him, but not until I had worked the slide on that twelve-gauge pump, a sound that the biggest, baddest man alive will perk his ears up to. ‘You doing a little deer corn shopping, are you?’

“He never said nothing, just started taking the corn off of the four-wheeler and chunking it back up on top of the stack in the crib. Then he crawled up and pulled’m back to where he had got'm from.”

“And then?”

The old man took another shot of his toddy. “And then, with that shotgun aimed right at him, I told him to drive it real slow out into the mesquite behind the barn, out maybe fifty yards or so, and it was downwind of the barn too, which was important.

“When he had it where I wanted it to be, I told him to get off of it and kill the engine, which he done, and to set down about 20 feet off to the side, which he done.

“Then I put two loads of buckshot thoo that four-wheeler, and he jumped up and yelled, ‘You done shot my Mule! My Crimmus gif’! You shot my Mule!’

“Well, I didn’t know that’s what it was called, a Mule, a Kowisocky Mule, but I sure as hell put two loads of buck thoo the thang, and gas was squirting everwhur.”

And here I have to stop the story, because I’m running out of space. I’ll finish next week.

        

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