"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, he was Willy McGilley, a character for whom Lafferty readers feel a certain affection. Lafferty’s “Thousand Dollar Melon” is told in his voice. It is a whopper about growing massive watermelons. There are good reasons to resist the claim that Lafferty’s tall tales provide the master key to his work, but this one is a tall tale in the strict sense. “Thousand Dollar Melon” belongs to a recognizable American subgenre: the early twentieth-century county fair story. The story type goes back at least to Charles Egbert Craddock’s “Taking the Blue Ribbon at the County Fair” (1895), runs through Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, and its county fair, and is in the imaginations of kids nowadays through E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. Lafferty adds to that tradition something of Mark Twain’s 1865 “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.”

In this almost perfect example of a prenucleation story, Willy McGilley is a traveling showman and con man. He visits the Clay County Fair and falls in love with the attractive yet massive Clarissa Clay (she insists on buying three seats for herself at the carnival).

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.

Clarissa is Arkansas or Missouri gentry, one of the story's secrets. Berryville is in Arkansas and Seligman, Golden, and Blue Eyes are in Missouri. 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 of the state, Clarissa is the granddaughter of the county's founder, but she is 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 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 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. 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 requirement: the melons must be edible. Willy has a 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. But 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 ceremony. It nearly takes out the fairgrounds and injures several attendees. We are told the deaths were exaggerations. Willy realizes that his "Beef Tenderizer" pharmaceutical was the cause of 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.

"Thousand Dollar Melon" is a simple story in which what you see is what you get, made enjoyable by Lafferty’s verbal wit, but one mainly for the completist. Lafferty leans into rural humor, 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 kooch-show Hermione Huckle (“Frito”) trying to win over Willy is a nice touch. Yet there is something odd about the idea of a married Willy McGilly, and about a Willy narrating his own story, the roustabout descendant of the Yankee peddler of American folklore. The absence of this more determinate Willy, equipped with a background and a marriage, from the published canon is probably salutary. It makes possible the shifty, unpindownable figure who is, in his way, as much Lafferty’s signature as Finnegan; to lock Willy into the “Thousand Dollar Melon” archetype would impoverish the character. I'm glad this Willy exists in his own fictional or reality level.