none of this is prob'ly true

Went walking with my friend Bill, the carpenter today, down by Horseshoe Lake. I wanted to take some pictures before it got too hot. We were in Ms. Runette's yard. The old lady lives in a retirement home and folks come every so often to cut the grass and pick the blueberries. A path winds along the lake front and we walk it, looking for photo-ops.

Bill's's been borrowing books from a set of crime encyclopedias I have had forever, one of those Time Life things. It's an alphabetized listing of all nefarious things ever, from Abduction (The Lindburgh Baby) and Fatty Arbuckle to Emelio Zapata and Women Who Kill and all dark hearted individuals in between, ending sometime in 1997, when I stopped getting the yearbooks. That last one I got covered Kevorkian and Susan Smith and the tragedy at Waco.

Anyway, I digress. I was trying to catch a turtle or a muskrat or something on 'film', when my friend starts talking about William the Conqueror (now somewhere in the back of my mind I remember him telling me he was a descendant of William the Conquerer, which would explain a lot where he's concerned, but that is a whole 'nother set of stories). I am often surprised at the extent of his interest in and knowledge of things other than contractor stuff and HBO.

Apparently, William the Conqueror was the most brutal ruler ever back in the whenever time of Normandy and the invasion of England and all kinds of Anglo-Saxon agony I had to learn about in high school and promptly forgot as soon I pulled down my anxiety driven C on the subject. He was the last person to invade England completely. He was King William the I. He was vindictive and surly and greedy. And apparently not the same ancestry as the people he was invading.

So the carpenter tells me that mean ole William's last name was Ballou (or at least that is the way I heard it) and because the Anglo-Saxons hated his guts and would never follow a leader with a French name, he changed it to Bellows and hence the legacy I am presented with here today as I try to snap a picture of a fish furling in the shallows, without falling into the lake or busting my ass on these rolling sweet gum balls. The fish leaves a trail of silty bubbles among the frog eggs and rotting water hyacinth and I get a picture of nothing but mud. Our neighbor has poisoned the hyacinth in the pond, which, though it is beautiful, it is as invasive as kudzu and would choke the lake and all its sisters if it were allowed to continue. This too is another story

Pause. Bees bumble through a neglected border of tiny flowers growing along a row of abandoned flower pots. Someone told me the lady that owned the house has a kiln inside.

"They killed him anyway," says the carpenter matter-of-factly. "Didn't do him a damned bit of good."

I thought this was a particularly good ending to the story. Never thought it would be a work of fiction - I mean, c'mon? He's is always calling himself simple.

Now that I think about it, I remember him telling me how his grandmother and grandfather went to England and traced the heritage back to ole William. Seems they bought this terrifically expensive Sheltie that was a direct descendent of the Conqueror's dog. Turns out the thing was more hyper than a Jack Russell.

So, you know, I wanted to spell that last name correctly before I started talking about it anywhere so I looked the dude up. Turns out he didn't even have a last name as far as I could tell. He was William of Normandy, but earlier in life he was William the Bastard 'cause his daddy was the Earl of Whatever and his mother was a scullery maid or little match girl or something. He knocked off his enemies before he ever started on England. He did have a half brother named Oda or something like that, who ended up being the Bishop of Bayeux, who commissioned a tapestry to be made memorializing the adventures of his half brother. There are Bayeux tapestries for sale on the internet today.

As far as the peasants rising up and slaying their dragon? William fell off his horse all by himself, with no help from the local populace. He suffered fatal abdominal injuries from contact with the pommel of his saddle. On his deathbed he remained the total son of a bitch he had always been, splitting up the kingdom between his sons in such a manner as to cause contention for many years.

Personally, I like the carpenter's story better.