Texas, My Texas: Musings of the Rambling Boy

27. AUNT BESSIE

+27+ AUNT BESSIE W H ENEVER my cousins from Wharton County and I get together, we invariably start telling stories about Aunt Bessie. Aunt Bessie was actually my great-aunt, my grandmother's little sister , and she lived most of her life on a ranch outside of Hungerford, Texas. Aunt Bessie had inherited some oil and gas income from her husband, who died when she was still a relatively young woman, and she was a sort of Auntie Mame to her grandchildren and her grandnieces and grandnephews. Aunt Bessie was born in 1882, so by the time I was old enough to form an impression of her, she was in her sixties. She was short and plump, and her round blue eyes gave her an uncanny resemblance to the aging Queen Victoria. She was far from Victorian, however. She loved parties and she loved trips, and she flung herself enthusiastically into both. She once decided that her grandchildren needed to see the Calgary Stampede, and she put them in her car and headed to Canada without any luggage and without bothering to tell their parents where they were going. Instead, she called them from Dallas when she stopped at Neiman-Marcus to buy clothes and other necessities for the trip. VVhen she got to Calgary, she went to the Stampede offices and said, "I'm Mrs. Joel Hudgins from Hungerford, Texas, and I'd like tickets for myself and my grandchildren for the rodeo." They were so impressed by her demeanor that they gave her complimentary box seats. Aunt Bessie bought a new Cadillac every other year and she loved to drive. She did not like to be confined to roads and she frequently took off across pastures and old rice fields to show her pas- sengers something of interest, which is one reason she needed a new car every two years. She was also blissfully unaware of speed limits and was frequently stopped by highway patrolmen. I recall one of her narratives of such an encounter. "I was on the Boling Highway and was doing about eighty and I saw this red light flashing behind me, so 1 pulled over on the shoulder and looked in the rear view mirror and I saw this young man in a uniform get out of his car. Well, 1 locked the car doors and I took off my watch and my rings and I locked them in the glove compartment and then 1 rolled down my window and said, 'Young man, whatever do you want?'" She usually got away with a warning ticket. Toward the end of her life, she hired a young man named Fred Lara to drive for her, and he bravely followed her instructions to drive across pastures and into cotton fields. I spent the summer that I was fifteen at Aunt Bessie's ranch, getting to know my cousins and absorbing Aunt Bessie's stories about Wharton County's past. When 1grew older, 1 realized that some of those stories were tinged with a romanticism that may have come from having seen Gone With the Wind too many times. Aunt Bessie owned several small cotton farms which she referred to as her "plantations," although none of them was larger than two or three hundred acres, and she was fond of saying things like, "I was driving from my upper plantation to my lower plantation when a tire blew out." One evening we were sitting on the porch with my grandmother and my great-uncles, and Aunt Bessie was telling me that their mother's father had once been wounded in a duel. One of her brothers said, "Now, Bess, you know it wasn't a duel. He accused a neighbor of stealing his pigs and the man lay for him with a shotgun and shot him in the arm." A duel figured in another of her stories. There was a big tumble down house not far from her ranch that was known as the Old Hood Place. I asked Aunt Bessie about it one day and she told me wo + that Mr. Hood had been a very wealthy planter who had killed a man in a duel and had to leave the state. Since the house dated from the 1850s, I assumed that the duel had taken place sometime before the Civil War. It was not until I read Horton Foote's account of his youth...