The Bride Wore Crimson and Other Stories
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Authors: Bryan Woolley
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The Bride Wore Crimson and Other Stories
Bryan Woolley
Dzanc Books
5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd
Ann Arbor, MI 48103
www.dzancbooks.org
Copyright © 1993 by Bryan Woolley
All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.
Nearly all the stories in this book originally appeared in
The Dallas Morning News
and its magazine,
Dallas Life
, some of them in a slightly altered form. “Glory Denied” as it appears here was published in
Nova
, but another version was in the
Morning News
. “West Texas” was published originally in
Westways
. I thank the publishers for permission to reprint my work here, and my friend Mike Maza for coming up with the title of the lead piece, which also became the title of the book.
Published 2016 by Dzanc Books
A Dzanc Books r
E
print Series Selection
eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-941531-43-3
eBook Cover Designed by Awarding Book Covers
Published in the United States of America
Again,
For Isabel
It's all I have to bring today -
This, and my heart beside
â¦
Emily Dickinson
CONTENTS
THE HANDS AND EYE OF TEXAS BILLY MAYS
WHERE HAVE ALL THE HORNY TOADS GONE?
INTRODUCTION
Nobody can upstage Molly Ivins's wonderful story in her introduction to his
The Edge of the West
(Texas Western Press, 1990), of having “waltzed across Texas” with Bryan Woolley in the
Dallas Times Herald
newsroom on the day Ernest Tubb died, but I did sit next to Bryan on the evening he taught Louis L'Amour a lesson about writing Western novels.
We were in Branson, Missouri, late in June, 1984, at the convention of Western Writers of America, Inc. This organization of 500 writers of novels and nonfiction works on the American West gives an award, called the Golden Spur, at its annual gathering, for the best Western novel, historical novel, short story, magazine article, juvenile work and movie and television script. The Spur is the Oscar of the Western writing world, and Bryan had been nominated for the award for his novel
Sam Bass
.
Among his competitors in the historical novel category was the redoubtable Louis Dearborn L'Amour, author of upwards of a hundred Western novels which had sold the equivalent of two or three copies for every man, woman, child and family pet in the United States, whose books were published by the prestigious Bantam Books of New York, who had appeared on “60 Minutes,” who had received a Congressional Gold Medal, a Presidential Medal of Freedom, a Buffalo Bill Award, two American Book Awards, four honorary LL.Ds and, more than likely, a Six Maids a-Milking and a Partridge in a Pear Tree award from somebody.
“I haven't got a shot at this,” Bryan told me as we found our Spur banquet seats that Thursday evening of the last day of the Branson convention.
“Louis L'Amour?”
he said. The unspoken part of this threnody was “Why
this
year? Why
me?”
L'Amour's nominated book,
The Lonesome Gods
, a more mystical novel, and a fatter one, than his readers-by-the-legions were accustomed to, had been elegantly jacketed and lavishly promoted by Bantam and had been warmly received by reviewers across the country.
Bryan's
Sam Bass
, published by the respectable but obscure Corona Books of San Antonio, had appeared in a grocery sack-like brown jacket, had no promotional money behind it, was well reviewed in Texas but nowhere else.
“Louis L'Amour?”
Bryan said.
Now, one element that makes the Spur Awards meaningful to those who receive them is that they come as a result of peer-judgingâhistorical book writers read and judge the history books submitted, novelists read and judge the novels, and so on. And these professionals are not influenced by big names, big promotional efforts, big reviews, colorful dustjackets or anything other than the quality of the book.
Bryan and
Sam Bass
won, easily.
There was a nice extra element, too. The stunned Bryan Woolley accepted his Spur that muggy summer evening in the Ozarks from C.L. “Doc” Sonnichsen, a beloved figure in WWA as he had been at Texas Western College when Bryan was one of his students in the mid-1950s. (In accepting his award, Bryan said, “Everything I know I learned from Doc Sonnichsen.”)
In 1974, I reviewed Bryan's first novel,
Some Sweet Day
, for an El Paso newspaper. I had never heard of Bryan Woolley and forget exactly what I said about his book other than that I regarded it (and still do) as among the best of all Texas novels. When we met for the first time a few years later, he reminded me of that review. I said something about how much I admired his
Time and Place
(1977). I discovered he had read a book or two of mine, that he had a passion for Jack London's stories, as I do, and that he remembered books and writers out of his childhood in the Davis Mountain country of West Texas which matched my own list of youthful passions in the flatlands of central IllinoisâEdgar Rice Burroughs, John R. Tunis, Harold Lamb, James Oliver Curwood, Jack O'Brien's immortal
Silver Chief, Dog of the North
.
We became friends.
The Branson episode proved something I'd known about Bryan long before he knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he would bow to Louis L'Amour in Branson: He has never known how remarkable it is that he can write novels as memorable as any written in Texas or anywhere else, can write short stories so fine they appear in the best of national magazines, and can write newspaper work of such quality that it has established him as a premiere figure in Texas journalism.
He does not know how good and versatile a writer he is but the proof is in any of his books.
In
The Bride Wore Crimson
we see both the journalist and novelist at work. This is not to say that there is fiction in these Texas pieces, but the
techniques
of fiction are in every one of them: characters we remember long after the story and the book have been read, descriptive lines, color, a sense of time and place, plot (in Woolley's hands, a magazine article is plotted; it is a
story
, after all, even if a true story), pace, suspense, rising and falling actionâall the techniques only a novelist can employ successfully.
Small wonder, then, that the title story in this book reads like a vintage murder mystery with all the characters, events and evidence presented for the reader to judge; or that “A Family Nightmare” can leave us so horrified and frustrated; or that in reading his “The Death of Austin Squatty” we are left wonderingâbut somehow knowingâwhat happened to that strange and irrepressible Texan, John Jenkins.
John Graves of Glen Rose, Texas, comes to life in Bryan's story as he never has before, even to those who have admired and studied those Texas classics,
Goodbye to a River
and
Hard Scrabble
. The same may be said of the story on the late Senator John Tower and that on the Seminole Scouts.
Even in his lighter pieces, people and things spring to life, as they do in the best of fiction. Shuffleboard
meister
Texas Billy Mays (“He's so wiry he could be mistaken for scrawny,” Bryan says of him) is not just a saloon hustler who slides metal weights down a 20-foot-long slab of waxed rock maple, he is a living, breathing and interesting
character
. Those who searched for Tangle-Free Tom in the Lake Texoma Crappiethon have dimension, as does the fish, and the
phrynosoma cornutum
isn't just an ugly little lizard, it is the
Horny Toad
, friends, and you really do get concerned about where they have all gone.
Bryan Woolley is one of my two favorite Texas writers (Elroy Bode of El Paso is the other) and my single best accomplishment as director of Texas Western Press was to be able to publish books by both these splendid writers.
The Bride Wore Crimson
is the second of Bryan's books to appear under our imprint. I'm hoping there will be others.
âDale L. Walker
THE BRIDE WORE CRIMSON
You get a strange feeling when you discover - even half a century after the fact - that your uncle once stood trial for murder, and that the victim was his wife. Such knowledge becomes a burden, and you feel compelled to do something about it. So I'm telling the story
.
D
OROTHY
M
ARIE
W
OOLLEY,
A
BRIDE
OF
TWO
MONTHS
AND
SIX
DAYS,
was lounging on her bed in her new honeymoon cottage on Ellsworth Avenue, trying to solve the puzzle posed by “Ripley's Believe It or Not” in the comics section of the Sunday paper:
“There are two volumes of a novel, each two inches thick, with covers one-fourth of an inch thick. If the volumes are upright side by side and a bookworm starts eating on the first page of the first volume and eats straight through to the last page of the second volume, how far will he go?”
It was 9:30 a.m. The breakfast dishes were washed, the garbage had been carried out, the beds had been made. November 5, 1933, was drizzly in Dallas, a good morning to be at home and reading the paper.
Dorothy was a pretty young woman, blond, slender, blue-eyed, just 20 years old. She was dressed as a woman might dress on a Sunday morning when her marriage was still newâa pink teddy, silk stockings, slippers, a delicate pink smock. She was lying on her side, propped on her left elbow, her left hand against her face. Her head was near the foot of the bed. Her feet were resting against the arm of a rocking chair close beside the bed.
Dorothy's sister-in-law, Mina Woolley, also 20 years old, also pretty, was sitting in the rocker, reading another section of the paper. On the other side of the bed, near its foot, Dorothy's husband, Toy Woolley, sat on the vanity bench that had come with their new dresser. He was handsome, blond, blue-eyed and slender, too, and eight years older than his wife and his sister.
Toy was facing away from the bed, holding a shotgun across his lap. It was a new Browning automatic, given to him only the day before by his wife. Dorothy had bought it as a Christmas gift, but she had presented it to him early so he could go hunting with it before the duck season ended.
On the floor beside the bench lay a Remington .22 rifle, Toy's own early Christmas gift to his wife. Near the rifle were a cleaning ramrod, an oil can, and some rags.
The way Toy was holding the shotgun, its barrel protruded back toward the bed under his left arm. Its muzzle was only a couple of feet from Dorothy. With his right hand, Toy was rubbing the gun with a rag.
“It went off,” Mina would testify later. “Toy threw the gun down and jumped. As he did this, the back of his knees sent the bench across the room several feet. At first I thought he had shot himself.”
But it was Dorothy who had been hit. All the shot and even the wadding of the shotgun shell entered her body just above her heart. The arm that had been propping her collapsed, her head dropped, her blood poured over “Ripley's Believe It or Not.”
Toy Woolley was my uncle. I say “was” because he has been dead for quite a few years. But even if he were alive I would say “was.” After my parents were divorced, when I was eight years old, I never had contact with my father's side of my family. But I have a few hazy memories of Uncle Toy, and they all have guns in them.