I want to share with you an excerpt from Conley Stone McAnally's new book. What a fun read!
He has that Midwest style reminiscent of Mark Twain. I think you'll enjoy it; suitable for the whole family!
“The Doodenville
Men’s Club”
An excerpt
Conley Stone McAnally
They
don’t talk about who has the best dog in town anymore. No sir, not
since last December.
It
was the middle of December and cold, gosh it was cold, and snow, I mean you
couldn’t see from the window of Jessie Miller’s General Store to the street
side of the wooden planks that make up our sidewalks here in
Doodenville. Everybody’s always said that it was the worse snow
storm ever to have hit these parts.
Even
though it was plumb miserable out, we all showed up about the same time we
always showed up at Jessie’s place. We had what you might consider a
men’s club. We didn’t call it that, but every Saturday about
sundown, or perhaps a little later, Steve Branson, Digger Johnson, Judge Johns
and myself would get together and play checkers, tell stories, and more or less
just brag to one another - which some might say was stretching the truth.
This
one December evening, the bragging turned to our dogs. No man in
Doodenville went anywhere without his dog. A man is judged somewhat
on what kind of dog he has and how he treats it and it him. Now
everyone cannot see how one is treating his dog all the time nor he him so we
felt like it was our duty that night to tell one another. That is
where the others always get into trouble because they exaggerate a mite and
this night they exaggerated a lot. Not me, of course.
The
checkers match had gotten over and we began to sip a little of the stuff behind
the counter that Jessie kept for snake bite. Jessie was always there
but he seldom joined in because he was too busy keeping track of how much we
were sipping and eating from the cracker barrel. Anyway, we were
doing what we always did when Steve Branson popped up and said during a lull in
the conversation, “Now we have been talking about our dogs for nigh onto three
hours and Lord knows how many nights we have been doing the
same. Let’s settle who has the best dog once and for all”.
Everybody
seemed to think it was a pretty good idea because each man thought he had the
best dog and would win any type of such a contest. We all thought a
little and tried to come up with some sort of criteria that could determine who
had the best dog.
Steven
Branson suggested that we could have them run a race but that idea was scuttled
because there was too much snow on the ground and too cold. “And
besides,” Digger Johnson said, “being fast don’t mean nothing anyway”.
He
was right, of course. We all knew that Crazy Jimmy Twofoot’s oldest
boy, Jimmy J., was the fastest thing on two legs in three counties and the boy
couldn’t find his way to the outhouse without someone helping
him. At least that is what Crazy Jimmy always said.
Then
Steve came up with another idea (he was always coming up with ideas, being an
engineer and all.) He suggested that we have the dogs bark real loud
and whose ever dog barked the longest and loudest would be declared the winner.
(I didn’t say all his ideas were good, though.)
That
idea was ignored because everyone knew that Jessie’s wife was sick with the
virus and noise would wake her and cause some discomfort. Steve must
have gotten the point also because he snapped his fingers like something had
just occurred to him and mumbled, “oh, yeah!” and sat back down. It
seemed as though in all the years that I had known Steve he was always snapping
is finger about something.
We
all sat around the stove and thought some more. Then Judge Johns
cleared his throat. Now when a man clears his throat, those in
hearing distance don’t pay much attention, but when Judge Johns cleared his
throat you knew he had something important to say. He was also real
smart so naturally we all started paying close attention.
“It
seems to me,” he began, “that we want to find out which one of us has the
smartest dog. The smartest dog, gents, not the fastest nor the
loudest, but the smartest. Intelligence, friends, is the true test
of greatness”. Judge Johns could always be counted on to get right
to the heart of the matter. “So it seems to me,” he continued after
grasping his lapels and clearing his throat again, “that each dog ought to be
judged on his reaction to a single command and whose dog reacts in the most
intelligent manner will be considered the best dog in Doodenville”.
We
all thought about that for a while and by and by it seemed fair
enough. But then Digger said, “You know each man here might think
that his dog done the best no matter what the other three dogs
did. If that happened, we would all be in a stalemate and be right
back where we were.”
That
sounded kind of correct. We knew we were all men of integrity, but
we also knew each other and understood how sometimes a man’s judgment could get
clouded in important matter like this one.
“Well,”
Judge Johns said after he cleared his throat, “it seems to me we need an
unbiased judge”. You know, to this day, I get plumb amazed on how
the Judge could always grasp things and have a solution so quickly.
The
natural judge, of course, was Jessie. I say ‘of course’ because
Jessie didn’t have a dog. At least not since last spring when Old
Clem Thurman’s horses kicked Jessie’s dog Cracker in the head.
Jessie
agreed to act as the judge and took charge right away. “Since there
are four of you,” while grasping his suspenders, “one of you will have to go
first and one will have to go last, and two of you will have to go in the
middle, one ahead of the other”.
I
sat there and blinked because he had lost me at first. I did not
think that was possible because we always thought Jessie was a mite
slow. He continued: “So it seems to me we ought to go by age,
starting with the youngest man. I will give you all five minutes to
decide what you want your dogs to do”. He fixed his one good eye on
the clock that hung over the Buster Brown sign that hung behind the counter.
The contest would
soon begin.
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