The Madman of Piney Woods

by Christopher Paul Curtis

“You called me, ma’am?”

  “I’ve asked you to keep your ears and eyes sharp for anything new and interesting happening in Buxton, no-o-o-o?”

  This didn’t sound good. I right away started wondering what I could have missed.

  I’d told her about the Johnsons’ two-headed calf, about Pa Dale getting his arm broken in the thrasher, about the Upper Ontario Forensics Competition that was going to be held in Buxton next month, about the Marxes’ prize hog going missing and how everyone was sure the Madman of Piney Woods had a hand in it. That was about it. But it was easy to see I’d missed something or she wouldn’t have called me in.

  “Yes, Miss Cary, I think I told you everything.”

  “Oh. Reeeallly?”

  Come on Benji, think, what had you missed?

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Then what is this?”

  It was one of the yellow flyers that had popped up like dandelions all over Buxton. The constable had taken them down soon after they were put up.

  “You hadn’t seen one of these?”

  “I had, ma’am, but I didn’t think this was important enough to report about in the paper.”

  “No?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Well, maybe not. But this is going to be your first assignment in reporting from the field. I want you to go to this snake-oil meeting and write an article describing what you see.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Oh, thank you, Miss Cary! I’ll write the best article I can!”

  “I would expect nothing less. Don’t for one moment harbour the notion that your work will be published in my paper. If that does ever happen, it won’t be for a very long time, but you must start somewhere. You’ve worked diligently and faithfully these past few weeks and you are a capable writer. I believe it’s time you took the next step on the long road of learning more about the real work of a newspaper.

  “Your deadline is Monday morning at nine.”

  She looked sharply at me. “You do know why they call it a deadline, don’t you?”

  “Not really, ma’am.”

  “It’s because if your article isn’t in the IN box by nine o’clock, your chances of being anything more than a cleaner and set-up boy in this office are officially dead.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I’m going to give you two hundred words, so use them wisely.”

  I wondered how she knew she was going to say exactly two hundred words. I took out my pen and pencil to take notes.

  She looked at me, wrinkled her brow, then almost smiled before her normal scowl came back.

  “No, Ben-jamin, I mean you have two hundred words to complete your article.”

  “Oh! Thank you, ma’am, thank you so much!”

  Some of the time, if you do something embarrassing, it’s best to hope no one noticed and act like you don’t know.

  I closed her door behind me and made myself a promise.

  Miss Cary didn’t know it, but she was going to publish my article. I was going to make sure. After she read my writing, she might even think about hiring me full-time as a reporter! She might even retire and let me start running this place like it should be run.

  When this was over, Mother and Father will have no choice but to give me the same looks of amazement they give Pay and Stubby. This time, they were going to gasp in surprise at something I’d done!

  Well, this time they’d be gasping about something I’d done that was good.

  * * *

  I’d debated with myself for much of the night about how I should act when I went to the snake-oil show. Should I try to be like a normal thirteen-year-old boy or should I put on my newsprint cap and apron so they’d know I was a reporter and take me serious?

  When I arrived at the Clearing, I was glad I’d decided not to do either of those things and just went as myself.

  I was in the third row of seats in the Clearing. There were chairs in the first two rows, but I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. There wasn’t a whole lot of excitement from the people who were sitting with me or from any of the people who worked for this Swami Hawley.

  Most of the people were men from Chatham, but there were some Buxton men here too.

  A white man and woman in front of me kept looking back at the white man two rows behind who was singing and laughing and taking long pulls from one of the bottles of elixir that were for sale at a booth behind the platform.

  The man said to the woman, loud enough so everyone could hear, “Scandalous! Used to be he was one of the best lawyers in Toronto but got run outta town and told he could never work in another court for the rest of his life. So he come down to Chatham and changed his name but botched that too. Now he’s living in the bottom of a bottle. Absolutely scandalous!”

  The woman snorted and they both turned away from the happy singing man.

  Mother had been concerned that I would see something at the sideshow that would disturb my sleep, but her concerns were wasted. The only thing that was disturbed was my appetite. And that was done by the man whose mother was an alligator from Eatonville, Florida, and whose father, the barker with the megaphone told us, was a poor, lonely dirt farmer from Tupelo, Mississippi.

  The alligator and the farmer named their child Gator-O.

  Gator-O was in the centre of the little platform that had been put up in the Clearing, his entire body covered by a long cloak and hood. Only two glowing little alligator eyes could be seen peeking out from under the hood.

  Standing behind him was a white man with no shirt, big muscles, and a little whip.

  The barker sounded very bored when he said, “Behold the tragic offspring of a alligator and a farmer. He inherited his father’s hair and eyes and his mother’s skin and nasty disposition.”

  “Here, for all to behold, is Gator-O, the half-human, half-reptilian horror.”

  The strongman pulled the cloak off Gator-O, and people gasped and looked horrified.

  He was a skinny, bright-red white man who turned his back to the audience. He wasn’t wearing a shirt and his back was covered from his neck down to his trousers with light-brown and red-and-gray patchy scales.

  To my eye they had more of the look of sores than scales, but since he was part alligator, I’m pretty sure they were supposed to be scales. Dragging behind him was a very light chain attached on one end to his ankle and on the other end to nothing.

  The barker sounded half-asleep when he said, “Oooh, fear not, ladies and gentlemen, he is securely bound and the animal side of his nature rears its ugly head only rarely. Do not make eye contact with him and, please, I implore you, try not to provoke him by screaming so loud.”

  I didn’t hear any loud screams, just low, disgusted groans.

  The barker pointed to the muscleman who was on the side of the platform and said, “Don’t worry. If Gator-O becomes too riled, we have the world’s strongest man here to restrain the beast in him.”

  He patted the empty holster at his side and said, “And if Slugger can’t stop him, I won’t hesitate using this fully loaded pistol.”

  Something about those words made Gator-O’s animal side show up. He turned around and waved long, pointy, dirty fingernails at us while snarling and stomping from one end of the platform to the other. The front of his body was covered in scaly sores too.

  Not only had he gotten his mother’s skin and disposition, he got her teeth too. There were fangs hanging down from each side of his lips. But when he opened his mouth too wide, the fangs started falling out, so he mostly just stomped around looking angry and g-r-r-ing at us.

  Gator-O came to the front of the platform and brushed his right hand back and forth across his left arm. A little blizzard of scales and grayish dust rose up from his arm like snow off a dune on Lake Erie.

  He huffed and puffed and blew the scales out into the first two rows of chairs.

  The people sitting that close quickly filed out of the rows.

  The
man who used to be a lawyer stood up, holding on to his half-empty bottle of Swami Hawley’s Magical Youth Elixir, and screamed, “By Jiminy, that’s got to be the worst case of so-rye-uh-sus in all of Canada!”

  People must’ve felt cheated by Gator-O because the seats started emptying really quick. But another man walked onto the platform, wearing a turban and a white doctor’s coat. There was a stethoscope around his neck and a black bag in his right hand. He’d taken the megaphone from the barker and shouted, “Wait!”

  The strongman came onto the platform and put Gator-O’s cloak back on him and took him away.

  People began coming back.

  The man with the doctor’s bag said, “I know why you’ve come! I too once was tired and lacked vigour. I too once wondered how I’d make it from one day to the next. But today! Today, three weeks after my eightieth birthday, I have the strength and stamina of a twenty-year-old!”

  The swami did look a lot younger than eighty.

  “And what gave me my youth back? What makes me get up every morning at the crack of dawn and crow like a rooster?”

  The happy drunk lawyer hollered, “Whatever it is, I bet your neigbours find it really annoying!”

  The swami winked and said, “What, you may wonder, keeps my twenty-five-year-old wife so happy and cheery?”

  The lawyer yelled, “I don’t know, but if I were you, I’d keep my eye on old Gator-O. He looks like he might be a real ladies’ man!”

  The swami nodded at the strongman, who went and sat down next to the happy lawyer.

  “I’ll tell you what it is. It’s the secret elixir formula I was given by a dying mystic from Timbuktu many years ago.”

  The lawyer stood up and said, “What killed him, was it –” Then, looking as though he’d been dropped from twenty feet, he plopped back down in his seat, leaned his head against the strongman, and was very quiet.

  Swami Hawley said, “And now, even though the ingredients cost us five dollars a bottle to make and are clearly marked so on the bottle, if you get in line and tell my aide, ‘I too want to be young again,’ we will sell it to you for two dollars! Or three bottles for five dollars! Or a case of twelve for fifteen dollars.”

  He added, “Hurry, hurry, hurry, the supplies are limited. Don’t forget the magic words ‘I too want to be young again.’ ”

  And with that, the show was over.

  I was shocked at how quickly the seats emptied as people lined up to buy the elixir.

  The lawyer stumbled out, held up by the strongman. I picked up the empty bottle he’d been drinking from and put it in my pocket.

  It would be the proof I needed to write my article.

  I couldn’t wait to see the look on Miss Cary’s face when she saw my work.

  * * *

  Deadlines are terrible. Terrible and unfair.

  I don’t know how Miss Cary can expect a writer to get something done by a certain time. I was finding out it’s a lot of work to create an article and, doggone it all, the words didn’t want to cooperate.

  But I worked and worked and worried and worried and finally got my article finished.

  I put it in the IN box outside of Miss Cary’s door on Monday morning, right on top of the articles from her old reporters.

  When Miss Cary came in, she greeted me, picked up the IN box, and closed her office door behind her.

  That was the exact second the clock stopped. The closing of the door made time start playing freeze tag with me.

  A hundred hours later, at noon, I tapped on her door to let her know I was going to eat my lunch and give her a chance to talk to me about the article.

  “Miss Cary, I just wanted to tell let you I was going to be eating in the backyard if you want to talk to me about anything. I won’t be more than fifteen minutes.”

  She never looked up or said a word. The only way I knew she’d heard me was the tiny nod she gave. At least I think it was a nod. After I closed her door behind me, I started wondering if it might have been a hiccup. Or a burp.

  My lunch was miserable.

  So were the next two hundred hours that I dragged about the print shop.

  At the end of the day, I saw Miss Cary wasn’t going to talk to me about the article. I went back and tapped on her door.

  She grunted me in.

  “I’m going home now, Miss Cary. Do you need anything more?”

  “Will you be working tomorrow?”

  “No, Miss Cary. Remember, I told you I’m helping my mother all day?”

  “Oh. Yes. I’d forgotten. See you next week, Ben-jamin.”

  Instead of slamming my fists on her desk and screaming, “That’s it? ‘See you next week?’ What about my article?” All I said was, “Yes, Miss Cary,” and closed the door behind me.

  I put on my traveling apron and cap and gathered all of my things.

  I was almost out of the door when Miss Cary called, “Ben-jamin, please come here a moment. I’d like to discuss what you’ve written.”

  I knew it! She was waiting until the end of the day to give me the good news!

  My first clue that this wasn’t going to be a heaping on of praise was when she said, “You do understand you’ve made several major errors, do you not? Please point any one of them out to me. It should be very easy to do.”

  That didn’t sound so good.

  She slid my article across the desk to me.

  I read through it, hoping the mistakes would jump out at me, but nothing; everything seemed to be perfect. I know I have a lot of trouble making commas behave, but even they looked fine.

  Maybe Miss Cary was trying to trick me by pretending there was something wrong with this article when there really wasn’t.

  Maybe she was jealous!

  With that in mind, I read through it again.

  The poor souls of Buxton, Canada, many of who have already had their backs bowed by the cruel yoke of slavery, found theirself in another horrible pickle when they were exposed to a bilking cheater who took their money and sold them overpriced bottles of cheap liquor called a Magical Youth Elixir.

  This con man crook goes by the name of Swami Hawley and he is shameless with his lies. He deceived everyone who came by saying he could make you feel young again. This fleecer, fraud, and mountebank put on a carnival sideshow first that was harmless to watch. But the scamming shark’s true colours showed up when he bullied people into buying his vile elixir. This reporter, Benjamin Alston, and everyone else there was shocked, shocked I say, by the sharpie shyster’s greed and avarice.

  One and all should be advised that this smoothie and swindler is very convincing and has a heart of stone. This is one horrible, horrible, horrible person who should be thrown right in jail.

  Swami Hawley is so low that he even takes advantage of a man with a skin condition. Benjamin Alston and everyone else who was there pray the man’s not contagious.

  Doggone it all, it was perfect.

  I’d even given it to Mother to read over, and it seems if there was something wrong, she’d have told me. All she’d said was, “I don’t ever remember reading anything in a newspaper that seemed this … well … this mean, Benji.”

  I’d smiled and told her, “That’s because most reporters are afraid to write the truth, Mother. I’m not. ‘Let the chips fall where they want’ is my motto.”

  I remembered the bottle of elixir I’d picked up. Maybe it would make a difference with Miss Cary.

  I reached into one of my apron pockets and pulled the bottle out and put it on her desk.

  “What’s this?”

  “I thought if you wanted Mr. Dickerson to draw an illustration for the article, he could use this.”

  She opened the bottle and sniffed.

  “My word! No wonder some people love this. It’s pure alcohol.”

  “I know, that’s what my father said.”

  She dropped it in the trash basket next to her desk and reached her hand toward me.

  I gave the article back to her.

&n
bsp; “The easy things first, Ben-jamin. Just on a hunch, I counted the words in the last paragraph: thirty, correct?”

  I nodded.

  “Which means the rest of the article is exactly one hundred and seventy words long, correct?”

  I smiled and did my best to look humble.

  “Which means the only purpose of the third horrible and the final paragraph was to get you to two hundred words?”

  Before I could say anything, she kept on, “And every adjective you’ve used to describe this Swami Hawley is a synonym of con artist, so we have bilking cheater, fleecer, fraud and mountebank, scamming shark, sharpie shyster, and smoothie swindler.

  “Which leads me to ask, did the thesaurus end at the letter S or did you simply grow weary?

  “I do note you were kind enough to keep the synonyms all in alphabetical order.”

  This wasn’t going like I thought it would.

  “Those are among the most glaring of the minor errors. For the major errors, your first is one for the ages. It’s when you equate slavery with, and I quote, ‘another horrible pickle.’ ”

  She sighed and rubbed her eyes as though my article was exhausting her.

  “Your next major error is just as fatal to your article, Ben-jamin.”

  After a pause, she said, “You don’t like this Swami Hawley very much, do you?”

  “No, ma’am, I think he’s cheating people out of their money.”

  “So you don’t have much respect for him, do you?”

  “Well …”

  “How can I explain this to you? This Swami Hawley may be a scoundrel and worthy of ridicule, but you must keep in mind that he and I are in the exact same business.”

  What? I know it wasn’t what she meant, but it sure would make a great headline if I found out Miss Cary made extra money working in a snake-oil show!

  “We’re both in the business of words. He has chosen the spoken word, and I work with the written word. However, there is a real and important difference in the way we use our words. We both use words to influence but go about it in very different ways.

  “I believe the written word is immeasurably more important.”

  Miss Cary waved her hand at her office.

  “I recognize my bias. But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. How is your French, Ben-jamin?”