Don't Tell Mom

Lake Cherokee, Fourth of July.
Granddaddy’s two-story house. Wraparound screen porch. A hundred Warr kin. Eleven aunts who could start a dance or a riot with equal skill.

Then Uncle John rolled in on a 1947 Harley-Davidson Knucklehead.

Chrome fishtails. Potato-potato thump. Leather and oil. Every man on the place went quiet and walked to the front drive like the bike had called their names. Dad talked his way onto that seat. I was five. I would not get off. I told him I’d tell Mom.

Ten seconds of tar road, wind, and lean. Then gravel. Then wreck. Dad let go of the bars, wrapped me up, and took the road on his own hide. I did not have a scratch. I ran straight to the aunts and told the whole story before he could wipe the blood off me or swear me to Don’t Tell Mom.

What came next was not a wreck. It was a lynch mob. Aunt Dovey at the ankles. Aunt Lovey tying a knot. And then Mama, redheaded and crying mad, splitting the crowd like a grizzly.

Dad jumped in the lake. The aunts threw rocks till he was out of range. When he came back bragging on how tough his boy was, I finished the job the women started.

The Lynch Mob is a true Warr family tale of a Knucklehead, a five-year-old salesman, and the day the women of Center, Texas, nearly hanged a Marine.

Don’t tell Mom.

JE Warr writes West Texas the way it was lived: loud engines, worse ideas, and the kin who love you enough to chase you into the lake.