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THE WIDOW’S REVENGE: THE GENESIS AND DEVELOPMENT OF A TALE IN BELL COUNTY by Kenneth W. Davis  In a good year in Bell County, roasting ears are ready by June 19. Bulls don’t know that June ’Teenth has festive connotations. They do know that fresh roasting ears are good, along with a bit of a salad from the tender leaves on corn stalks. The Widow Malvern’s bull had only a good meal on his mind when he jumped out of his pasture and went to a nearby corn patch to eat his fill of forbidden fruit on June 19, 1943. This bull planned to have a feast and then return to his small harem of Herefords, over whose welfare he presided with a majesty befitting his English ancestry. But like the fox who ate the grapes, he found jumping back over the fence impossible because of the extra weight several hours of doing violence to a corn patch added to his rotund frame. If he made any other attempts to return to his wives and family dear, he soon gave up and sauntered out of the corn field to disappear for months in the pastures by the Salado Creek. I learned of the bull’s escape late in the afternoon. The Widow Malvern came up to our kitchen door from our bottom pasture and asked in delicate terms—so as not to offend my patrician mother—“Has any of youall seen my male animal?” In those days, no one ever affronted the ears of a lady with the word “bull.” My mother called my father from the supper table to ask him about the animal. He had not seen it, but promised to inquire in town the next day. He assured the widow that her creature would come home, but the widow was inconsolable; she suspected people down the road were trying to get the services of her bull for free. The widow might have become hysterical, but my mother appeared with a soul-calming glass of iced tea laced with mint. She invited the Widow Malvern to have supper. The widow took the 233 tea, but declined the meal with several “much obliged, nevertheless ” statements. She protested that she had some pastures to scour before dark in her search for the bull, one of the few registered Herefords in the neighborhood. The word “scour” had two other meanings for me at the time: people used Brillo pads to scour pots and pans. And baby calves got the scours from too much rich milk. I didn’t quite know what image to conjure up from the widow’s plan to scour the pastures. The next day, my father inquired about the widow’s bull when we went to town and he was getting his monthly haircut. He first asked the spit-and-whittle boys who were sitting as usual under the sheet-iron awning in front of Buschland’s Hamburger Stand and Café. They showed a powerful interest in the matter. By the time my father was in the barber chair, the June heat drove them into the relative coolness of the shop whose tall Emerson fan kept the air stirred up. Here, the many fascinating accounts of the bull’s long absence began to develop. My father asked the barbers where the bull might be. The tellers of tales then took over. A short, near-sighted man, a former dollar-a-year constable who thereafter was known as “Shurf Tawm,” cleared his throat, a sure signal that he was about to pronounce great legal truths. He waited for the drawls of his cronies to stop, and then he began. “Well, sir, I reckon the Widow Malvern ain’t got no legal problems onless, and this is a important ‘onless,’ she didn’t make shore and certain the gate to that air pasture were shut tight. Now, if she or some of them kids that sorry man of hers give her has left that gate open agin, she ain’t got a case at all.” In this snippet the yarn acquires details totally unrelated to the original incident. The retired constable soon added that the Malvern woman was not really a “widow.” To the assembled crowd he explained patiently yet again, that old Bob Ed Malvern up and left his wife when things were so difficult in the Depression just before “Mr. Roosevelt got us in the war to boost the economy.” He went on to say...

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