A Bear Ate My Watermelons

In our part of Northern Tennessee you can grow most anything you’ve a mind to.  The Stubach family took advantage of this fact and settled most of what’s now Deerflat, Tennessee back in 1878 with an eye toward growin’ watermelon.  Harlon Stubach Sr. purchased close to 400 acres up near the Kentucky line and set to plantin’.  Why watermelon, I don’t know.  Harlon the third says his Granddaddy always loved a good melon so there ya go.  Personally I’ve always suspected that the lack of hard labor associated with raisin’ melons had a lot to do with it as most folks around these parts know the Stubachs to be a fairly lazy bunch.  No offense meant. 

Harlon the first, or the original Harlon as he’s referred to, was a no count salesman.  He couldn’t sell water to a man on fire though somehow he did manage to become the Watermelon King of Middle Tennessee, an actual award, and reigned as such for near 40 years.  When the original Harlon started out he was sellin’ his melons for 10 cent apiece, that is until about the third year he realized it was costing him almost 20 cent apiece to grow and harvest ‘em.  I guess that makes Harlon a slow learner as I believed I’d have noticed the shortage of funds at the end of the first years as would most other growers I know of.  Through the years the price of melons rose pretty steady like right up to the year the original Harlon passed.  That year melons was goin’ for 50 cent apiece and as a result, Harlon Sr. was considered one of the richest men in our neck of the woods. 

With the passin’ of his Daddy in 1946 just after the end of WWII, Harlon Jr. took over the farm with an eye toward continuing the tradition.  Not the melon growin’ tradition, the doin’ as little hard labor as possible tradition.  He turned out to be better at doin’ nothing than his Daddy ever was.  Under Harlon Jr. what was once almost 350 acres of melons dwindled down to a mere 50 acres and those were some of the saddest melons you’d ever hope to set eyes on.  They’s mostly yellow on one whole side as Harlon Jr. never saw to the turnin’ and most of ‘em weren’t no bigger that a good size quash. A body could sell most of the crop, at least the melons anyone’d care to buy, in one day’s time.  Things got so bad that by the time the 1950’s rolled around Harlon Jr. was forced to take a second job over to Herbert Paramore’s pumpin’ gas in order to support his wife Eula and the kids of which he had eight, each born lazier than their predecessor.  Oh, Harlon Jr. still kept turnin’ and tillin’ and plantin’ those 50 acres each year.  I think it was his way of honorin’ his Daddy’s memory.  Between you and me I think Harlon Sr. would be pretty ticked if he could see what is only son had done to the place.  Anyways, time passed and the Stubachs kept producin’ melons if you want to call it that.

Along about ’74 or ’75 Harlon Jr. retired.  Retired from what I ain’t sure but he quit workin’ and turned everything over to his son, Harlon the third.  Harlon Three or III as we call him but not to his face so much.  One thing I’ll say about Harlon III, he was indeed a businessman.  It wasn’t but a month after he took over the Stubach farm became Stubach Melons Incorporated.  Harlon III took to callin’ the place SMI if you can believe that.  Even though after his first year business was boomin’ and every squre inch of acreage was planted, Harlon III didn’t know squat about melons.  He just knew how to sell.  To him, anything that could be considered to have what appeared to be a rind was a melon.  He’d hired about 10 extra hands and had them plantin’ everything from squash to honeydews.  Harlon III was growin’ some things folks couldn’t even identify.  Didn’t matter that much to Harlon III long as the money was rollin’ in and it sure was.

Let me tell you a little about Harlon III just to set up the whole point of this story.  Harlon III was one nasty old man.  He was a braggart and a blowhard.  Matter of fact, he was the most unlikeable fella of all 212 citizens of Deerflat.  He’d tell ya himself as long as he had money he didn’t need friends.  He hated kids especially.  Didn’t have none of his own and didn’t want ‘em on his property.  Harlon III used to browbeat his wife Lucy so bad we took to prayin’ for her every Sunday morning as a regular part of Sunday services.  If you know teenagers then you know that Harlon III not wantin’ us on his property was nothin’ more to us that a direct challenge and that brings me to what I set out to tell ya’ll from the git go.

Three of us, me, Dinnie Russell and Poke Paramore, Herbert Paramore’s nephew, decided we was gonna have some fun with old man Harlon.  Seems Harlon III had a special patch of melons growin’ in a small lot right up to the house.  He’d imported, or so he says, these special melons all the way from California and he usually sold them at about $5 a piece.  The only thing Harlon III was proud of ‘sides makin’ money was those California melons.  Dinnie Russell’s mama had a bear footed umbrella stand, probably still does.  Where someone comes by a bear footed umbrella stand I have no idea but she had one.  The stand is what gave Poke his idea.  Normally Poke ain’t got a thought in his head but Dinnie and I both agreed this was a good ‘un.  Poke says here’s what we do.  We take that bear footed umbrella stand and we sneak over to old man Stubach’s side garden where he’s got those special melons.  He says we’ll park Dinnie’s truck down by the creek where it don’t show from the house.  When we get to the garden we make sure we walk on the rows between the plantings instead of in between rows so our prints don’t show.  We’ll take the bear footed umbrella stand and stamp bear pawprints all over the place and haul off as many of those special melons as we can without getting’ caught.  We could probably clean out most of the garden if we start around midnight.

Well, to shorten this story some, we done it.  We must have hauled off close to 150 melons as that’s about all Dinnie’s old truck would carry.  Next morning my Daddy came back from Paramore’s General Store as he’d gone out early for some diesel, and started tellin’ us how Harlon III was havin’ a fit down at the store.  Daddy said seems a bear got into Harlon’s garden during the night and took off with more than half his California melon’s.  Left tracks everywhere plain as day.  I even rode by Harlon’s on the way home Daddy says, to see for myself and there were a considerable amount of bear tracks for sure.  I didn’t say nothing to Harlon but two things came to mind right then that are sure curious.  When Daddy said that he turned and looked right at me.  Daddy said the first thing he noticed was that that bear was all left feet.  There wasn’t a right side print to be seen in the entire garden, course Harlon hadn’t noticed that hisself.  Another thing was, Daddy opined he’d never heard tell of a bear in these parts with a taste for melons and how he wondered if I or any of my friends knew any different? 

I told my Daddy that in school we’d learned that bear’s would eat most anything they could get their paws on but as far as only findin’ left pawprints, I had nothin’ to offer as an explanation.  I suggested that maybe it was just one of those unexplainable things that happens from time to time.  Well, my Daddy just nodded and said he guessed at least Harlon’d have a good story to tell for years down to Paramore’s about how a bear cleaned out his prize melons.  Daddy finished his coffee and told me to hurry on up and get to school.  As I was walkin’ out the door he told me to, by the way, let Dinnie know his left rear tire was showin’ quite a bit of baldness and that if young’uns ate too much California melon they’d get the runs.

Harlon III is now around 85 years old and if you’re around him more’n 5 minutes I guarantee you’ll hear about the bear that stole his prize California melons.