Tell Me a Story

Crooked Mick Meets Paul Bunyan

"Tell us a story, Uncle Mick."

My Mom's brother, Mick, had come from Australia to visit us in America.

"Yes, please do," my siblings echoed.

"Now don't go fillin their heads with your tall tales all night, Mick," Momma told him. "They have a busy day tomorrow." She kissed us all goodnight and went back downstairs to join the other grownups. A round of laughter floated up in the still air.

"What do you want to hear?" Uncle Mick asked. His voice deep but mellow with a slight accent that felt deliciously foreign to us. "There's the time Oi rasseled that dust devil in the Speewah..."

"Nooo," we all groaned.

Houzza bout that time Oi ..."

"Tell us about the time you met Paul Bunyan," my younger brother, Bobby, said.

"Oh," said Uncle Mick. Then, "Hmmm." He cleared his throat and began the tale. I noticed his voice now sounded more like an American Cowboy.

"I got me this letter in the mail from a fancy New York lawyer, sayin they wanted to bring me to America for a contest. Course they didn't tell me then that I would be contestin agin Paul Bunyan. I might justa said "No thanks." But, I came.

"You might not know this, but in them days the middle of the United States was covered with a great forest. The lawyers said they needed that land cleared for people to put down farms and grow crops. That sounded like a reasonable request to me at the time. The idea was Paul Bunyan would start in North Dakota and I would start in Texas and we would work towards Nebraska, clearin the trees from the flatlands. The man that got there first would win a hunnert dollars. Now I didn't know nuthin bout loggin. My particular talent is sheep shearin. So I decided to watch ole Paul for a week or two, see how this business is run.

"Furst thing I noticed is you gotta have an axe. They didn't tell me that. So I ordered me one from the Big and Tall shop at Sears and Roebuck and while I waited for it I set to observin the legend hisself. I could tell he was happy in what he did. He was grinnin like a weasel in a henhouse. An he would sing while he worked. Sounded like a donkey with a bad cold, but who am I to judge?

"I had found myself a good seat in the Black Hills where I could observe Paul without bein in the way. While I was waitin on my axe I got to carvin away on a rock next to me. When I got up to leave, the locals could see what I had been doin. They were so appreciative they called that rock 'Mt Rushmore'.

"After observin old Paul in North Dakota I figured I had a handle on this loggin business so I mosied on down to Texas and commenced to clear some trees. I got through Texas pretty quick but got slowed down a might in Oklahoma. They was always havin these little wind storms. One day when the sky cleared I looked up over the trees and could see a big flurry of leaves and branches hoverin over South Dakota. I figgered old Paul was getting close. So the next windstorm that come along, I got my arms around it and swung it around so the pointy end was focused on the trees. The tell me later they called those winds tornadoes but I reckoned I had just invented the first vacuum cleaner.

"Well, kids I sucked my way through Oklahoma and Kansas in good order and then the lawyers came out and shut me down. They told me I wasn't stacking the logs they way they wanted them. I had rigged my knife to the top of the twister and was cuttin them logs into boards and stackin em for the farmhouses. Them lawyers, said they didn't need boards. They needed timbers for the railroad beds and to burn in their engines. I looked into it and found that they had also been buying the land as soon as we cleared it and planned to sell it to the ranchers and the railroads, not give it away to the farmers. Them lawyers lied to us. They were so crooked they could swaller nails and spit out corkscrews.

"Didn't seem right to me so I got together with old Paul and came up with a plan. We worked it so we met exactly in the middle of Nebraska at the same time. Those lawyers had to declare the contest a tie and pay us each a hunnert dollars. Then, at the ceremony, Paul announced that by the authority of the homestead act, he and I were claimin all the land we cleared. From the Canada border down to Texas, it was all ours according to law. And we were givin it back to the American people to farm and live on. No lawyers were allowed.

"So that is how I met Paul Bunyan and created the Great Plains. Would you like to hear how I met Pecos Bill?" Mick looked at the sleeping children and said softly, "Well, maybe another time."