Texas, My Texas: Musings of the Rambling Boy

10. THE LIAR'S SKILL

+10+ T H E LI AR'S SK I LL WE ALL KNOW the type: the garrulous older gentleman who has been everywhere and done everything and is full of unwanted and usually ineffective advice. Homer pinned him down perfectly 2,700 years ago in the character of Nestor, who was fond of regaling the Greeks besieging Troy with long narratives of his own youthful successes in war and sport. Each of us knows someone like that, and we usually regard him with kindly tolerance . He is a universal. There is a subspecies of this type, however, that may be peculiar to the American West, and that is the man whose reminiscences are so improbable as to be unbelievable, yet when challenged always has an explanation that elevates the tale to new heights of improbability. In his delightful memoir of nineteenthcentury cowboy life in Montana, We Pointed Them North, Teddy Blue Abbott describes just such a person. He was a cowboy on a ranch where Abbott worked, an older man who had seen the elephant and heard the owl all over the West and was fond of relating his adventures to anyone who would listen. He was known as Old John. One day, according to Abbott, someone brought the mail to the main ranch house where the owner and his wife and Old John were sitting on the porch. The wife expressed delight that there were some ladies' magazines in the mail, saying that now she could see what the latest Paris fashions were. "Paris, huh?" said Old John. "I've been to Paris." "Oh, John, you haven't been to Paris," the owner's wife said. '''Course I have," Old John said. "Took a beef herd there." "How did you get them across the Atlantic Ocean?" the wife asked. "Didn't cross no Atlantic Ocean," Old John replied. "I went around by the divide." l ance knew a man much like Old John. His name was Jack Higgins, and he was a frequent visitor to my room when I was in the hospital in Fort Worth in }962 recovering from some broken bones. His wife was in the next room, and when he had finished his daily visit with her, he would come and see me. He was in his seventies, a tall, hawk-nosed, silver-haired countryman from Glen Rose, a little town southwest of Fort Worth. When he first dropped in he told me about his grandmother, who, although she lived in a log house with no electricity and no running water, was the wisest and kindest woman who ever lived. Her only vice was dipping snuff. Higgins was her favorite grandson. "When Granny got old and lost her teeth," he said, "I was the only one that she would let chew the ends of the little twigs she used to dip her snuff with, get 'em rough so the snuff would stick to 'em. I've still got the last J. B. Garrett snuff can she ever dipped out of, and the last stickshe used. They were in her hand when she died. I had them gold-plated and they're in my safety deposit box over at the Fort Worth National Bank." On subsequent visits he told me about his career as a steeplejack . He was the best steeplejack that ever worked in Texas. He had painted church steeples and mounted weathervanes all the way from El Paso to Texarkana. "}can climb anything," he told me one day. 'Why, when they were building that Chrysler Building in New York they couldn't find nobody to put the radio mast up. They looked all over New York and they couldn't find nobody who could do it. They called me and I went up there and had it done in a jiffy." I asked him how they happened to know about his skills way up in New York, and he said, "Why, the man that was in charge of putting that building up, Mr. Chrysler, he was from Glen Rose. He knew me since I was a boy. My daddy used to sell him whiskey." John Henry Faulk, Texas folklorist and storyteller, knew a man much like Jack Higgins in Austin in the 1930s. His name was Joe Whilden, and he worked for Faulk's father. Faulk loved to entertain his friends with stories about Whilden and eventually described him in an article entitled...