They wasn’t there. There was nobody in the kitchen, and no baloney frying. The stove was cold. I lifted one of the lids and felt the ashes. They was cold too. Maybe I was going crazy. I stuck my head out the back door and looked up. There was the smoke all right, coming up out of the stovepipe. It was just like it had been that first day we got here—smoke coming up out of cold ashes.
I was too tired and too worried about Pop and Uncle Sagamore to puzzle over it. I went back out on the front porch and sat down on the step. In a few minutes Uncle Finley came up the hill and went around back of the house. There came a sound like nails being pulled, and then he hurried back through the yard with another board, headed for the ark. He sure figured the flood was going to hit here about sunrise, I thought. It was an odd-looking board, and I wondered where he was getting them now. It didn’t seem to make much difference, though.
The sheriff came down the hill looking like an old, old man. He sat down on the step and took off his hat and just looked down at his feet. He was whipped.
‘Pop and Sagamore have just disappeared,’ I told him.
He didn’t act like he even heard me.
‘Well, this is the end of everything,’ he says. ‘I’m finished. When they have to send in help to handle something I couldn’t take care of myself—’ He stopped and shook his head.
I could hear the wreckers moving the cars up by the gate, and then I saw Booger and Otis and the other deputy coming down the hill. It was full daylight.
The sheriff got up kind of slow and hopeless and walked around the side of the house, like he wanted to be alone and didn’t want his deputies to see him beaten down like that. Booger and Otis came on down through the yard and just collapsed on the steps. Nobody said anything.
Then, all of a sudden, the sheriff came flying back around in front of the house. I couldn’t hardly believe it was the same man. He was just scooting over the ground. Tears was running down his cheeks and he was making a funny sound way down in his throat.
Otis and Booger sprung up. ‘What is it?’ they asked.
‘… wug—wug—wug—,’ the sheriff says. He plucked at Booger’s and Otis’s sleeves and then backed away from them a little, pointing towards the house with the other arm.
His mouth worked, but nothing came out except ‘… ffffttt—ssssshhhhhh—’ It looked like he was laughing, or maybe strangling, and those great big tears kept rolling down his cheeks.
He pulled at their sleeves again and ran a little way ahead of them, like a dog trying to get someone to follow him. He was gasping for breath and I knew he was trying to say something, but the words just wouldn’t come out.
Booger and Otis looked at each other. Then Otis shook his head and looked down at the ground, ‘Damn it,’ he says, like he was about to cry hisself, ‘what could you expect, with all he’s been through?’
The sheriff’s upper plate fell out and he stepped on it. He put it back in upside down and tried to close his mouth over it. He stepped up real close to Booger and put his left hand on Booger’s shoulder, still holding the right one out to point at the house. It looked like he wanted to dance. Booger started to take a few steps with him, probably figuring it would be better not to get him angry.
‘Gwufff,’ the sheriff says. He broke away from Booger and ran back around the side of the house.
‘We better get them teeth away from him before he bites hisself,’ Otis says.
Booger frowned. ‘No. I think he wants us to follow him.’
Sure, that was it. That was what he’d wanted all along, only he just couldn’t say anything. We ran around the house past the tubs, and into the back yard. And there he was.
He was on his knees in the dirt with his hands clasped together down in front of him, looking at the rear wall of the house, or what should have been the rear wall. He was crying like a baby.
I looked. And I never saw anything like it in my life.
18
IT WAS LIKE A STAGE.
Uncle Finley had pulled about ten or twelve planks off the back of the house, and had opened up one whole side of a hidden room nobody had ever known was there. It was about three feet wide and ran the full length of that back bedroom, from the kitchen wall to this end of the house. There was no doors in it, and no windows, but there was a trap door in the floor. That was closed.
And there was Pop. And Uncle Sagamore. And Mrs. Horne. And Baby Collins. And Choo-Choo Caroline.
They was all sound asleep, sitting on the floor with their backs against the other wall, facing out this way. There was a lantern, still burning, hanging from a nail in the wall above their heads. It looked funny, burning that way in broad daylight. Uncle Sagamore was in the middle. Mrs. Horne and Baby Collins had their heads dropped on his shoulders. And Pop and Miss Caroline was on the outside, their heads resting on Mrs. Horne’s and Baby Collins’s shoulders. Baby Collins was wearing her romper suit, and Miss Caroline had on one of Uncle Sagamore’s shirts and a pair of his overalls with the legs rolled up. There was three empty fruit jars on the floor in front of them.
There was three tubs full of something way over at the left end, and at the right end of the little room there was some funny kind of apparatus I’d never seen before. It looked a little like a boiler, and it had a firebox under it with a little fire still burning in it. A piece of copper pipe come out the top of it and then bent over and went down, sort of coiled up, into a steel barrel that was full of water. There was just a short piece of it sticking out of the side of the water barrel down near the bottom, bent over a little, like a spigot. There was a thin sliver of wood stuck up into the spigot, and something was dripping off the end of it into a fruit jar that was full and overflowing onto the floor.
I stared at the stovepipe that came up from the firebox under the boiler. It bent and went out over the ceiling of the kitchen. So that was the reason for the smoke coming out when there was no fire in the cookstove. They both used the same stovepipe.
I looked around at Booger and Otis and the sheriff. The sheriff was still down on his knees. He wiped the tears out of his eyes with his sleeves, and started to laugh. Then he was crying again. Booger and Otis was just standing there, shaking hands. Booger went over and stuck a finger into the jar of stuff under the spigot and tasted it. He looked at the other two and nodded, smiling from one ear to the other. Then he came back and him and Otis shook hands some more. Otis went over and got two of the six or eight jars that was sitting on the floor near the one that was overflowing. They had caps on them. He uncapped them, one at a time, and tasted the stuff that was inside. Then he nodded real solemn to Booger, and they shook hands again. Then they put their hands on each other’s shoulders and danced a jig. I never saw such crazy people.
‘Gwufff,’ the sheriff said. He was pointing at the tubs, and at the boiler, and at the stovepipe.
Booger and Otis reached down and took out his upper plate and turned it around and popped it back into his mouth. He didn’t even seem to notice. But when he tried to talk now, words came out.
‘Boys,’ he says. ‘Boys—’ He broke down then, and started the crying and laughing stuff again.
‘Those stinking tanner tubs was to keep us from smelling the mash,’ Booger said. ‘And the smoke—well, who pays any attention to smoke coming out of a kitchen stovepipe? And that’s the reason he brought Choo-Choo Caroline in here. He knew the dawgs couldn’t get her scent over that tannery smell. It was the only safe place to hide her until he’d milked those searchers for all the money they had. And look—’ he pointed at the steel water barrel— ‘you see he’s got gravity flow water coming in there all the time, probably from a spring somewhere up the hill. And the outflow goes down into the lake.’
So that was the funny warm spot in the lake, I thought. And of course it was there only when this apparatus was working. I looked to see why I’d never seen the pipes under the house when I was playing around with Sig Freed, and darned if they didn’t go down right through one of the blocks the foun
dation timbers was sitting on. It was really clever.
‘What is it?’ I asked Booger.
‘A still,’ he says. ‘For making moonshine.’
The sheriff had stopped laughing and crying now, and had got up and was just standing there kind of quiet, like a man in church. ‘Boys,’ he says, sort of whispering, ‘I don’t think you’ve seen the real beauty of this thing yet. Now, listen.
‘What I want you to do is go out there and round up that whole crowd. All eight thousand of ’em. Use the public address system, and don’t let anybody get away. Make ’em all come over here and see this. They can come around that side of the house, pass along here, and go back around that corner. Every man in the county is out here, so besides the still and the mash and the moonshine, we’re going to have eight thousand eyewitnesses.’
Booger frowned. And then he says, ‘But, wait. You can’t do that. You’ll have plenty of witnesses, but you won’t never be able to have a jury, because they’ll be disqualified.’
The sheriff shook his head, real gentle. ‘Boys, I told you you didn’t see the real beauty of it. Sure, all the men are out here. But how about the women?’
Booger’s and Otis’s jaw fell open.
I thought the sheriff was going to break down and cry again. He started to choke up, and tears was running down his cheeks, but he was smiling. ‘You see, boys? You see? There won’t be nobody eligible for jury duty but them women. The ones that would lynch him if they could get their hands on him right now. The wives of the men he’s been selling rotgut to and cleanin’ out in crap games for twenty years.’
Booger and Otis stared at him like Uncle Finley seeing the Vision. ‘I never heard anything as beautiful in my life,’ Booger says, real soft.
The sheriff nodded. ‘All right, boys. Round ’em up. But do me a little favour, first. Give me ten minutes here, completely alone. I’m getting along in years, and I won’t never have another moment like this. I just want to stand here and look at him settin’ there asleep between his mash tubs and his still. It’ll be something to take into my old age with me.’
They left.
I was worried. ‘What will they do to Pop?’ I asked the sheriff. ‘And to Miss Caroline?’
He didn’t act like he even heard me. He just stood there with that dreamy expression on his face, and every once in a while he would whisper, ‘Wonderful.’ And then, ‘Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.’
It was maybe five minutes before he looked around and even noticed I was there, and then I thought of one other thing that still puzzled me. Uncle Sagamore had got some clothes for Miss Caroline, but there she was wearing his old overalls. I asked the sheriff about it.
‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Those clothes of hers was what the dawgs was following back and forth across the bottom yesterday. He drug ’em along the ground behind his mule. I knew that, but I just figured it was a pair of her shoes.’
In a few minutes men began to come pouring down the hill. The whole back yard was full of them. The road was open now, and the first thing to get through was three car-loads of newspaper reporters and photographers. They asked a thousand questions and snapped pictures. Everybody milled around, talking, and Pop and Uncle Sagamore and the three women slept right on like babies.
Booger shook his head. ‘It must have been some party,’ he said. ‘At least a couple of gallons.’
There was a loud honking then, and a truck come around the house and began pushing up through the crowd. It stopped right under the chinaberry tree, and I saw it had a bunch of planks on it and that the sign on the side said, ‘E. M. Staggers Lumber Co.’ There was a big, pleasant-faced woman wearing a sunbonnet in the seat beside the driver. She got out and walked over and stood looking at all five of them still asleep. Then she looked at me.
‘Billy?’ she asked.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ I said.
Tears came in her eyes, and she grabbed me. ‘You poor boy.’ She picked me up and held me with my face pressed against her bosom.
‘Get ’em out of here, sheriff,’ she says. ‘Get ’em off this farm. This minute.’
‘Yes, Miss Bessie,’ the sheriff says. ‘They’re on their way right now.’
I stayed on at the farm with Aunt Bessie, and it was real nice except for being a little quiet now that Pop and Uncle Sagamore was gone. I went fishing a lot, and practised swimming in the shallow water, and helped Aunt Bessie pick blackberries. She was real nice, and I liked her. Of course I missed Miss Harrington—I mean Miss Caroline—but I got a letter from her and she said she was doing fine. After she testified in the trial in New Orleans she got a job dancing in a nightclub in New York.
Well, that was in June, when they drafted Pop and Uncle Sagamore, and then about the end of August a funny thing happened. Me and Aunt Bessie was sitting on the front porch in the afternoon taking the shells off some beans when one of the sheriff’s cars come bucking and bouncing down the hill with a big cloud of dust boiling up behind it. For a minute it reminded me of the old days, and I was kind of lonesome for Pop and Uncle Sagamore, thinking about how it had always been so exciting with them around. But it wasn’t Booger and Otis in the car. It was the sheriff hisself.
The car slid to a stop and he got out and run up to the steps, where Aunt Bessie was watching him like he’d gone crazy.
‘They’re comin’ back!’ he yells. He took his hat off and started mashing it up in his hands. ‘They’ll be here tomorrow—’
Aunt Bessie dropped all the beans out of her lap. ‘What!’ she says. ‘How did that happen? I thought—’
I jumped up. ‘Hooray!’ I said.
The sheriff glared at me like he wanted to bite my head off. Then he kind of collapsed on the steps and shook his head.
‘The Governor pardoned ’em both,’ he says, real hopeless and bitter. ‘Said they didn’t have a fair trial because I disqualified all the men on the jury panel and all the women was prejudiced.’
Aunt Bessie nodded her head. ‘I reckon that was a mistake.’
The sheriff threw his hat out in the yard and started to say a bad cuss word. He choked it off just in time. ‘No, no, no!’ he says. ‘That ain’t it at all. That’s just the excuse.’
Aunt Bessie looked at him. ‘How’s that?’
‘It’s that warden, dad-gum it all! He ain’t never liked me, and he’s the Governor’s brother-in-law. The two of ’em cooked it up so they could get rid of him and throw him back on me.’
‘You mean the warden didn’t want him up there?’ she asked.
The sheriff turned his head and stared at her. ‘Bessie, how long you been married to him?’
She sighed. ‘I reckon it was kind of a foolish question.’
‘There ain’t no doubt of it,’ the sheriff says. ‘That dad-gummed warden just got tired of havin’ his prison in a uproar all the time, and he was jealous because the two of ’em was making more money than he was, what with the still they set up in the boiler room to make moonshine out of dried prunes and potato peelings from the kitchen, and what with the horserace bets. And then they sold the Bramer bulls from the prison rodeo to some dog food cannery—ain’t nobody ever figured out how they smuggled them out. Course, the sheet metal from the licence plate shop was easy. They used the warden’s car for that …’
Oh, that was a fine summer, all right. Like Pop says, there ain’t nothing like wholesome farm life, and you just couldn’t find an all-round wholesomer farm than Uncle Sagamore’s. We’re going to stay on here, Pop says, and not even go back to the tracks at all, which suits me fine. Things are already beginning to hum, now that him and Uncle Sagamore are back. They’re sort of looking around for some new kind of business to go into, seeing that the leather didn’t turn out so well, and I expect the whole place will begin to get exciting again real soon.
That’s the nice thing about a farm. You never know what’ll happen next.
THE END
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copyright © 1956 by Charles Williams
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