Tall Tales and Big Bill
His eyes stared back at me from a black and white photograph atop Granny’s bureau for as long as I can remember. I was always a little reserved when I wandered into their view, sensing an impossible expectation in them that I must one day meet. The eyes belonged to a strapping, twenty something year old with thick, perfectly combed hair and a winsome face showing just the slightest hint of a smile. The young man was adorned in an expensive suit with a dark necktie which had three small diamonds stitched into it, but the eyes were the striking thing. The eyes held a bright lustre, a luster filled with a clarity and confidence that outshone the diamonds on the necktie, and almost hid the touch of deviltry in their set... almost.
But the man in the photograph was not the “Big Bill” that I can remember.
Big Bill died in 1969. I was three years old, he was sixty-two. The only physical memory I have of him is one of an ever smiling, hulk of a man who was nearing his end. Whiskey, cigarettes, and southern fried food had plied their seperate hells on him, but I can happily recall a booming laugh like Santa’s as he waved a ham-like arm reminiscent of John Wayne storming Iwo Jima while bellowing, “Come on, boy” so loudly that Granny’s knick-knacks rattled the glass shelves in their curio-cabinets. His given name was Charles Herman, but for some unknown reason he went by Bill. After my father was born everyone called him Big Bill, because that’s what he told them to call him. He would be Big Bill, his son Little Bill. Like many Southern boys with older sisters, “Little Bill” soon became “Bubba”, but the name Big Bill fit the big man, so it stuck. Besides all of that, he wanted to be called Big Bill, and he was not a man that people argued with.
Big Bill was a hometown legend. While my physical memories of Big Bill are few, I have an imprinted photo album in my mind filled with his adventures. Mississippians are natural born story tellers, and Big Bill’s doings fueled every tongue. Ever since I was that three year old boy tagging along after him I have been regaled with his tales, tales that people rejoiced in telling as though they were afraid to let them die, tales whose telling widened the eyes of those listening, tales that I could never get enough of. My family only made it back to my father’s boyhood home once or twice a year, but those visits were filled with stories of glory days past, and of a giant that lived and walked through them.
Big Bill grew up in economically depressed times. He paid his way through college by carrying 100 lb. sacks of concrete up wooden ramps and stacking them onto railroad cars by hand. He was a three year letterman for his Southern Conference football team, playing on both the offensive and defensive lines. He was one of the last men in the newly formed SEC to play without a helmet, and there are pictures to prove it. He was also a catcher on the baseball team, and never allowed a “passed ball error.” I believe that after college he was contacted by a pro team, but football was not a respectable profession in those days, so he declined, and instead bought the concrete company for which he had loaded all those railroad cars.
My grandmother’s name was Dorothea. Dot, they called her. Granny was at a “speak-easy” the first time she saw him. When prohibition ended most of the Deep South, or Bible Belt, remained dry. Their “bar” was a log cabin set back in the deep woods. Dot and her friends would come out on Saturday afternoons, leaving before it “got rough” after dark. It was improper for women to go inside so they would gather in the shade of the trees, away from the hot delta sun while they waited for some courteous, hopeful young man to carry out their whiskey-totties. Inside were only hard country men elbowed up to a crowded, plywood bar which offered only three options... real bottled whiskey, home-made jug whiskey, or a warm bottle of beer. No one drank the beer.
A stranger walked up to Dot’s group under the trees on one particular Saturday, a drunk stranger hunting trouble. One of the boys told the stranger that if it was trouble he was hunting, there was a packet of it toting a shock of blond hair standing directly inside, and bellied-up to the bar. “Go on in and try him on for size!” The trouble hunter headed that way. Dot didn’t see what happened, not being allowed inside, but word spread that with no warning whatever, that stranger shattered a whiskey bottle over the back of “Bill’s” head just prior to “Bill” beating the hell out of him. Granny maintained throughout her life that she didn’t know at the time who “Bill” was, but everyone else who was there that afternoon seemed to know him, as they began telling her all about him, so that her curiosity about him grew.
The next day Granny was at the hospital seeing after her invalid mother when she passed by a room where a large, nicely dressed young man knelt by the bed of a bruised, and patched-up rounder.
She wanted there to be no mistake that she knew what Bill had done, and that she disapproved. “It’s good of you to come pray for him after what you did to him yesterday.”
”Miss.” He told her. “Don’t you get the wrong idea. I don’t care much either way what happens to this S.O.B., I’m just praying he lives so I won’t spend the rest of my life weeding cotton over at Parchman Prison.”
She knelt down beside him, joining in his prayers, praying both for the stranger and for this man Bill, who certainly needed a prayer.
The stranger lived, and Bill won the girl, but this is only one of a ton of Big Bill stories I have heard over the years, many when I was very young that have grown misty with time. Many had surely been stretched before they were told to me, and many have probably grown after.
Here are some of my other favorites:
A man Big Bill didn’t like came looking for a job at Bill’s concrete company. When Bill said no, the man drove by his house later that same afternoon and shot Old Timer, Big Bill’s best hunting dog. Big Bill took up his pistol, drove to the man’s house, and demanded through the locked door that his wife send her husband out so he could shoot him for killing his dog. She insisted that her husband wasn’t home, so Big Bill sat down on the steps to wait for him to either come out, or come home, whichever the case called for. The woman called the sheriff, who drove right over and told Bill that you couldn’t shoot a man for shooting his dog. Big Bill pointed to a step and told the sheriff to sit down, because he was fixin’ to prove to him that you damned sure could. Not knowing what else to do, and knowing Bill, the sheriff drove off, only to return thirty minutes later with two bottles of whiskey. In what was surely a case of top-notch police work, the sheriff got Big Bill so drunk he was able to somehow pour him into the squad car and drive him home. Today we would call that a “dedicated driver.”
In high school Big Bill and some school mates took the School Principal’s Ford Model “T” apart and reassembled it on the auditorium’s roof.
Some boys from a rival school picked up some Mississippi girls and took them back to Alabama to a dance. Big Bill and some friends saw it happen, followed them across the state lines, and for a “joke” used their trucks to pull the rival schoolhouse right off of it’s floodwater stilts... during the dance... with everyone still inside.
Granny had to start cooking every morning as soon as she woke up, because every day Big Bill would stop at the railroad yard on his way home for lunch to pick up every hobo who was hungry. She never knew how many would be at her table, so she just cooked a lot. When I was a boy it never occurred to me why my dad was so popular at the train yard, or why he so liked to go over there, but now I can see that those men must have had a soft spot for “Little Bill,” having watched him grow up as they gathered around Big Bill and Granny’s table.
Big Bill hated funerals because he always cried aloud at them, embarrassing him. When his aunt died she was in her front porch rocker. Her body had stiffened up in a sitting position so that they had to strap her down to keep her in her casket for the funeral. When a strap came loose and dead Aunt Edna sat up during the service, Big Bill jumped from his seat and ran all the way home, never to attend a funeral again as long as he lived. My father swears to this day that Big Bill wasn’t really afraid, he just saw an excuse to get out of going to any more funerals, but Granny, in her polite Southern twang only said, “he‘d better not have done it!”
Bill suffered from narcolepsy, and would fall asleep while driving. He would stick his arm out the window with an upward crook, so that when it fell it would wake him up. There were many close calls, but he never crashed that I know of.
He bought a motorcycle and drove it over gravel and dirt roads from Memphis to Baton Rouge to see an Ole Miss - LSU football game. He was so exhausted when finally he got there he had no intention of riding the old Indian back, so he sold the motorcycle for half his purchase price and bought a train ticket home.
He was fifty-three years old, a steady smoker and drinker, and already leaning toward the heavy end of the scale when my dad (his son) was quarter-backing for his high school football team. Big Bill challenged, and then whooped Little Bill in a quarter mile foot race just so Little Bill wouldn’t get too full of himself. (Don’t tell my dad I said it, but the lesson never took.)
... and my personal favorite!
I was in my late thirties when a crinkled up, copper skinned old man with snowy white hair, a collared shirt and tie under light blue cover-all’s, and steely gray eyes which surveyed me as if I would never measure up approached me at my Granny’s funeral and shared this with me. The old man might have been bent with age, but his step was quick and sure, and there was still power in his grip. He must have been quite a man when he was younger.
”They tell me you’re Bubba’s (my father’s nickname that stuck) boy?”
”Yes sir.”
“Then Big Bill was your grandfather?”
”Yes sir.”
”Were you old enough to know him?”
”No sir.”
The old man’s eyes misted over at that. “Well, that’s too bad. Big Bill Morris was the finest man I ever knew. I ain’t too proud to say it, neither. He was really somethin’. I sure wish’t you could have knowed him.”
”I’ve heard some stories.”
He gave me an angry look. ”You ain’t heard the-half, boy, and shouldn’t pretend to. Bill Morris was a man!”
And away he tramped, his boots dropping clods of red clay on the carpet. I never did know who he was, but I believe he was right.
Big Bill Morris was a man, and I am lucky to have known him, even if only through the eyes and voices of those who loved him.
(Sidenote: This story is mostly fact with a whole lot of fiction. Some names were changed, but few were innocent. Only one animal was injured in the writing of this story, and he deserved it for continually begging for his supper while I was “in my writing zone.”)