"Thousand Dollar Melon" (1959)

My stories are slightly future history, set just far enough into the future as not to get stepped on by the present. Yes, I hope the bits and pieces will fall into it. I am always out in the rain with a bucket and trying to catch something. Yes, sometimes I use the old trick of having stories connected by a common minor character or otherwise. Balzac was one of the inventors of this device a hundred and forty or so years ago. In his Human Comedy, he ran quite a few of his characters in and out of the hundred novels and novellas that made it up. Quite a few other writers have used the device since, and before (there is nothing wrong with imitating a thing in advance). Several sets of my people will know each other, even if they may not be on quite the same fictional or reality level. — Cranky Old Man from Tulsa: Interviews with R. A. Lafferty (Weston, ON: United Mythologies Press, 1990)

This was about forty years ago, no more than ten or twelve years after I began to follow the county fairs, and I was not yet motorized. I made about thirty fairs a year, giving no more than half a week to any except the biggest of them. I covered these with horse and wagon through late summer, fall, and early winter. In the later dead of winter I lived in the far southland as a gentleman should; and when spring touched the northland again I was with the first of the carnivals.

Before he was Willy McGilly, a name to put a twinkle in the eye of any Lafferty fan, he was Willy McGilley. Lafferty’s “Thousand Dollar Melon” is told in Willy’s voice. It is a whopper about him growing huge watermelons to win the hand of a country girl. There are many good reasons to avoid the view that the tall tale is the royal road to understanding Lafferty’s work, yet here is an exception to my bitchy rule. This one is a tall tale from stem to stern.

Moreover, it belongs to a familiar American subgenre: the early twentieth-century county fair story. That now extinct tradition goes back at least to Charles Egbert Craddock’s “Taking the Blue Ribbon at the County Fair” (1895). It then becomes American literature in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919). It receives an untold number of variations in word and on screen, true Americana. Finally, it achieves the American myth in E. B. White’s children’s classic, Charlotte’s Web. When Lafferty crosses it with the folksy hyperbole of Mark Twain’s 1865 “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” the result was this, a prenucleation Lafferty story if there ever was one.

This Willy is a traveling showman and con man. He visits the Clay County Fair and falls in love with an attractive butterball, Clarissa Clay. They met cute when she bought three seats for herself at his kooch show.

You can now understand with what joy I welcomed Miss Clarissa Clay. She was gorgeous. She would have made three of any of them. She was a sunny blonde with a smile as big as all summertime. She smelled like a field of sweet clover; and in area and scope the resemblance also was striking.

Along the way, we learn about Willy’s carnival circuit, with him mentioning a few cities. One, Berryville, is in Arkansas; others, Seligman, Golden, and Blue Eyes, are in Missouri. It seems as if Clarissa Clay is from Arkansas or Missouri, but her Ozark location stays one of the story's secrets. As Willy says, “As to what region or state it was in, that is a secret I will carry till I lay down all my secrets. There is still some gold of my sort to be mined in those hills.”

Regardless, Clarissa is the granddaughter of the county's founder, real Ozark gentry, but she is also tied to a perpetual endowment that awards $1,000 annually to the grower of the largest edible watermelon. Because the family farm is entailed to support this prize, she is in a bind. The way out is to marry the perennial winner, the watermelon king Walter Wildpepper. It will keep the money in the Clay family. The smitten Willy asks Clarissa to wait one year. He will grow a melon large enough to win the contest and her hand in marriage.

To do this, Willy has a plan. He secures seeds for a wild giant African watermelon that grows significantly larger than standard varieties. He plants the seeds in Clay County, and Clarissa tends to them while Willy goes back on the carnival circuit with his troop of Turkish harem girls. By the time of the fair the following year, the melons are huge—over four hundred pounds. Unfortunately, they are nearly inedible and wood-like in texture, and the contest has a sticky requirement: the melons must be edible. Willy has another plan. He uses a veterinarian's needle to inject the melons with a mixture of beef tenderizer, acid, scarlet dye, and sugar.

I reasoned that Dr. McGilley's Beef Tenderizer could not but be useful. And I had a little-known acid with the peculiar properties of attacking wood pulp, which was what the insides of the giant melons tasted like. Then I shot in a quantity of scarlet dye, and about thirty pounds of saturated solution of sugar into each of them.

The night before the judging, four of the melons explode. Willy thinks that Walter has sabotaged him, but it is, of course, his own watermelon injections that are the cause. Willy, being Willy, has a backup plan, a secret backup melon, the largest melon of all. To make it edible, he treats it with a triple dose of his chemical concoction.

On the day of the judging, the final giant melon explodes during the watermelon judging ceremony. It nearly takes out the fairgrounds and injures several attendees. We are told the deaths themselves were exaggerations. Willy realizes that his "Beef Tenderizer" pharmaceutical caused the explosion; he never knew why people who bought his nostrums exploded.

I had had patients and customers explode for many years, but had never found the cause of it, as I usually sell a mark my whole line of pharmaceuticals and not one item only. I had suspected the Old Homestead Stomach Sweetener. I had suspected the Kill Number Nine. I had even suspected the New World Bone Builder and Thorax Encourager... But I had never suspected the Beef Tenderizer.

As a result of the disaster, Willy’s watermelon is disqualified. Clarissa marries Walter Wildpepper. Willy leaves the county in a damaged wagon, tended to by one of his carnival performers, Frito (Hermione Huckle), whom he eventually marries as he continues his career as a con man. The story ends with him about to tell another tall tale.

"Thousand Dollar Melon" is a simple story in which what you see is what you get, made enjoyable by Lafferty’s verbal wit, but it is a story mainly for the completist. Lafferty leans into rural humor as well as the lumber of the formerly funny: fake Turkish harem girls, medical quackery, watermelons, fat women (Willy wants Clarissa to travel with the carnival as the fat lady). The subplot of harem girl Hermione Huckle (“Frito”) trying to win over the oblivious Willy is a nice touch.

Yet there is something odd about the idea of a married Willy McGilly. And there is something odd about any Willy McGilly narrating his own story, even this roustabout descendant of the Yankee peddler archetype. The absence of a more determinate watermelon Willy, equipped with a background and a marriage, from the published canon is probably salutary. It keeps open the shifty, unpindownable Willy we know. That one is, in his way, as much a Lafferty signature as Finnegan. To lock the quicksilver Willy McGilly into the “Thousand Dollar Melon” shape would impoverish that more memorable rogue. I'm glad this Willy exists in what Lafferty called its own fictional or reality level.