This tale of Uncle Billy’s smells a little fishy

If my Uncle Billy Crockett were still alive, I’d try to get him talking again about the 500-pound catfish that lived in Chicken Hawk Creek.

Uncle Billy was the chief storyteller in our family, and sometimes when he was in the middle of a tale, he’d make a casual mention of the catfish. But he never told the story with a beginning and a middle and a windup, the way all good stories want to be told.

So what I remember now comes from answers we got, when we’d sit on the porch after supper and pester Uncle Billy with questions about that fish. He was old as a mountain then. The way he talked is still pretty clear to me.

“Well, it was just a big cat,” he’d say. “Lived in a hole on the Chicken Hawk, at what we used to call Sycamore Bend, over here on the back side of the Cartwright place. They called him Big Blue, which he was — a blue catfish.”

How’d anybody know he went 500 pounds, Uncle Billy? Did they ever catch him and weigh him?

“Naw, they never caught him. Plenty of ’em tried, though. Some claimed they’d seen him, or seen his swirls anyway, when they’d float bait in the hole and get him to rise. Those Cartwrights, and the O’Briens, too, lived on the other side of the creek, those boys grew up fishin’ for that cat. They’d camp out there and bait the hole. Use half-inch rope for lines and big hooks made at the blacksmith’s.”

Did they ever hook him, Uncle Billy?

“Oh, I heard a pack of stories about gettin’ that cat hooked but it wasn’t no use, he’d break loose. The O’Briens had a hired hand, big fellow weighed close to 300 pounds, called him Moose. They said he could lift a bale of cotton.

He hooked up with the cat one night, and they had to cut the line because that fish was about to pull Moose in the hole. I expect that’s where they got the story about the cat weighing 500 pounds.”

We’d ask if a catfish could really be that strong.

“I couldn’t say. Maybe so. The Cartwrights used to claim they’d lose baby calves to that cat.”

Aw, come on, Uncle Billy. A catfish is gonna come out on the creek bank and grab a calf?

“Well, it didn’t need to come out. In dry years that little creek wouldn’t have enough water in it to make mud, except for the hole there at Sycamore Bend. Mama cows would come to the hole to drink and if their calves happened to wade out in the water … well, I reckon it could happen, a fish that big.

What did he think ever happened to that fish?

Uncle Billy would sit on that question a minute. Rock his chair a few times. Then:

“When I wasn’t no older than you boys, one time I rode over to the catfish hole behind my brother Bob, on a Sunday mornin’, early. The Cartwright boys, they were there, and the O’Briens, and a bunch of big old boys I didn’t know where they come from.

“They had a team of mules hitched to a fresno. They had shovels, and picks, and spades, and scoops, and grubbin’ hoes, and I don’t know whatall. Hadn’t been any rain for months and that little creek was flat dry, except for the catfish hole. What they had a mind to do was dig out the bed of the creek just below the hole and drain the water down to where the big cat was, and finely they’d get a look at him.

“Well, they worked at it most all day before they got the water drained out. When it was all gone, they measured and argued and finely figured that hole from top to bottom was a good 14 foot deep.”

Uncle Billy would stop here, to fiddle with his pipe, and wait until we’d plead for more. How about the fish? How big was the catfish?

“Oh,” he’d say at last, “there wasn’t no catfish in that hole, not a sign of one, big or little. What I reckon is, that cat buried itself deep in the mud, and was sleepin’ down in there all safe and snug, which I’ve read books that say catfish can surely do.”

I used to ask my father what he thought about this story. He said if there ever was anything in that hole, like as not it was an alligator. blog.chron.com/leonhale leon.hale@gmail.com Leon Hale P.O. Box 130828 Houston, TX 77219