by James Ross
The Monday after Christmas it started raining. It was a dreary rain. The sky looked like it was propped up on the tops of the trees and just full of water. It rained all that day and got dark early. We didn’t have half a dozen customers all day, and that night the only folks there were Dick, Smut, and myself. Matt had asked for that day off, and Smut let him have it. Sam had a cold that was so bad that Smut told him to stay in the cabin till the next day and maybe it would be better. Badeye was there till about three o’clock that afternoon. Then he took a notion he wanted his hair cut. He was a fellow that couldn’t rest when he had a notion, so Smut told him to go on to Corinth and get his hair cut. He snagged a ride into town with the bread truck and said he’d come back about night with the boy that brought the evening papers. But he missed the paper boy somehow, and it left us short-handed. Still we didn’t have any customers until about ten o’clock that night.
A car pulled up outside then, and Dick Pittman went out to see what they wanted. But they came in and Dick followed after them. It was Charles Fisher and Lola, and another couple that I didn’t know. They brought in a blast of cold wind with them, for it had stopped raining then and was getting cold in a hurry.
They went to one of the booths next to the wall and I went over to get their orders. Lola and Charles Fisher sat together on one side, and the other couple sat together, facing them. The strange folks were both young; the girl was a little blonde, with a page-boy haircut and a nose hat was turned up on the end. I don’t know whether it was naturally turned up that way, or if she didn’t like our roadhouse. The man with her was big, with a baby face and blue eyes about as big as green peas. All four of them had been drinking a little, and they weren’t used to it. The two men looked serious as a couple of bridegrooms. Lola and the other girl tried to look serious too, but giggled a little now and then. They ordered steamed oysters.
I gave their orders to Rufus and went back to the counter to talk with Dick and Smut. After a while I heard the buzzer from the kitchen. I got the oysters and carried them over to the booth. Charles Fisher took his platter in his hands; he held it out in front of him like he was holding a collection plate in church. ‘Yes, Corinth’s some town,’ he said. ‘Of course, the Southern writers exaggerate conditions, but you can find characters similar to theirs right around here, if you want to. They’re usually farmers, though. Conditions around the mills aren’t really so bad.’
Lola waited till he got through, then looked up at me. ‘Get me some ketchup,’ she said.
‘Yes, mam,’ I said, and I went after it.
When I brought the ketchup back I sat it on the table and asked if they wanted anything else right then. They said no, and I leaned against a booth a few feet away from them, so I’d be handy if they decided they wanted anything else. I guess these folks visiting the Fishers must have been from the North. They asked a lot of questions.
The baby-faced man poured half the bottle of ketchup on his oysters and put the bottle back in the center of the table. ‘How are the relations between the races in this section?’ he asked.
‘Why, not bad,’ Charles Fisher said. ‘We have no violence here. It’s much worse further south, of course. The niggers here know their places and don’t try to stir up any trouble. Some of the whites around here are worse than the niggers.’
‘Low type, are they?’ the pea-eyed man asked.
‘Well, yes. Ignorant and superstitious. I’ve heard of one old woman—a white woman—that claims she can talk fire out of a burn. A lot of the poor whites believe she can do it, too, and they go to her.’
‘What do you mean, “talk fire out”?’
‘She mumbles some little parable over the burnt part and goes through some obscure ritual. After that the place isn’t supposed to hurt.’
‘Is that a fact? And do the ones that are burned feel all right after she does that?’
‘Some of them claim they do. It must be the power of suggestion.’
The other man had his mouth full of oyster and ketchup. ‘It must be,’ he mumbled.
Lola and the blonde girl talked across the table in whispers so as not to break in on the men’s serious conversation. I couldn’t hear what they were talking about, but once in a while they’d giggle like a couple of schoolgirls. When they made a break like that Lola would look at Charles Fisher right quick to see if he’d noticed. Now and then she slipped in a look at Smut Milligan, who was sitting at the cash register, resting his chin against the top of the counter and looking off toward the side of the room.
Lola looked at Charles Fisher and whispered something to the other girl. It must have been funny, for the other girl laughed. Charles Fisher looked at them like they weren’t being serious enough, and he went back to the problems of the South.
‘The main trouble down here is the improvidence of the native stocks,’ he said, ‘coupled with an ingrained superstition and a fear of progress. They are, in the main, fearful of new things.’
‘In the machine they sense an enemy,’ the baby-faced man said. ‘Something they fear will master them and leave them the machines of the machine.’
Charles Fisher picked up a piece of celery and nibbled it like a Belgian hare. ‘It may be that,’ he said, ‘but I think they merely dislike the pain that is attendant to all learning. They don’t want to learn anything new. It requires too much effort. Of course we have the pick of the natives in our hosiery mills. It isn’t like a cotton mill. We pay much better wages and we have a different type of hand altogether.’
‘The South interests me greatly. Particularly in regard to the relationship of the two races,’ the visiting man said. He sipped his coffee, a drop at a time, and tried to look like a man that’s powerfully interested in something.
‘Oh, that’s been exaggerated,’ Charles Fisher told him. ‘The main thing the South needs is to become mechanized. The methods of farming are very backward. The farmers themselves are not usually a very good type. They aren’t sanitary.’ He frowned, and went on: ‘Still, they sometimes manage to acquire money. Considerable sums of money. I recall one fellow who had over twenty thousand dollars in the bank in Corinth. Bert or Herb Ford, or something. I understand he’d had it in a bank in Charlotte and became uneasy. It was in 1932 and he knew that father had guaranteed the depositors in the local bank. It’s rather a small one, anyway. Well, this Ford, or Hord, or whatever his name is, was right about the bank in Charlotte. It went under. But when that happened he got nervous about all banks. He appeared in Corinth one day and demanded his money. The bank was entirely solvent, but you remember how things were at that time.’
The baby-faced man smothered a belch and said he remembered vaguely.
‘Well, the cashier got in touch with father and father asked this man Ward, or whatever his name was, to come to his office. He tried to persuade this fellow that his money was perfectly safe. But he was adamant. Finally father got up the money for him. When he left, father asked him what he was going to do with the money, now that he had it. The fellow told him seriously that he would bury it on his farm. I’ve no doubt but that it’s still buried there.’
I opened my mouth and listened while he was saying that. Twenty thousand bucks! I began digging it up in my mind. Then I started spending it. I decided I would throw part of it away on women to start with. Afterward I would put up a roadhouse of my own. But not around Corinth. With that much money I could go to town in more ways than one. I had about decided on the town for my roadhouse when Charles Fisher snapped his fingers at me.
‘Check, boy,’ he said.
I gave him the check and went up where Smut was standing. In a minute all four of them came up there, and Fisher paid the check. Lola Fisher winked at Smut when she started out the door. Smut bowed and said: ‘Thank you. Please come again.’ I don’t know whether he winked at her or not.
Come to think about it, he might not have winked back at her. He was discouraged that night. He wasn’t in a bad humor; he’d drunk almost a pint of liquor before
supper that night, and it mellowed him up for the time being. But he was a little discouraged. After I had carried the dishes into the kitchen I came back out front. Dick had left then, and Smut and I were alone. I sat down at the counter and Smut pulled up his stool and sat back of the counter, in front of me.
‘Not many days left to do my New Year’s borrowing,’ he said. He had a toothpick in the side of his mouth.
‘Hope you can borrow it,’ I said. ‘I would hate to be out of a job here in the dead of winter.’
‘Oh, if I can’t borrow it I’ll have the note renewed and let Astor LeGrand take the place over about next spring. The son-of-a-bitch!’
He threw the toothpick on the floor and sucked air through his teeth. ‘Don’t know how come me to come back to Corinth anyway. This is a hell of a place to try and make money. If you get started making it some bastard with the right politics comes out and cuts in on you, or runs you out.’
‘You think Astor LeGrand aims to have this place, do you?’
‘Oh, hell, yes. If I could pay up everybody I owe right now, he’d find some way to get me closed up. Then he’d buy me out and open up again. That’s a slick rascal.’
‘You don’t think you got a chance?’
‘Not a chance. He’s Ahab and I’m Naboth.’
‘He’s who?’
‘Ahab.’
‘Ahab?’
‘Yeah. King Ahab. You know, in the Bible it tells about King Ahab wanting a vineyard that belonged to a one-horse farmer named Naboth. In the long run Naboth got the works and Ahab got the vineyard.’
‘I remember,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know you were acquainted with the Bible.’
‘By God, I ought to be,’ Smut said. ‘Old Lady Milligan used to read me a chapter every night, just before she whaled the tar out of me. I got a lot of them Bible stories impressed on me.’ He raised up and rubbed the seat of his pants like he was still a little tender down there.
‘If LeGrand does close you up, what you aim to do then?’ I said.
‘Hell, I’ll do something. Anything except work. Nuts to work. The workingman starves in this neck of the woods. I’d get in politics, but that line’s already crowded. The trouble is I’m a Democrat and everybody else is too. There ain’t sufficient gravy for all us Democrats.’
‘Turn Republican and be patient till after the next election. Maybe you can be postmaster in Corinth if the Republicans win,’ I said.
‘I’ll just starve,’ he said. ‘What gripes me is that I could work up a good thing out here if I was let alone. I’m getting a batch of regular customers worked up. Sometimes I get visited by folks of high social caliber. Such as Mr. Charles Fisher, and wife, and tourist friends.’
‘Have they got a high social caliber?’ I asked him.
‘Sure. The biggest bores in town,’ he said. ‘They’d been drinking a little tonight, hadn’t they?’
‘Smelled like it,’ I said. ‘Talked like it too.’
‘What was they talking about?’ Smut asked.
‘Various things. The South and the niggers and the sharecroppers. You know. The man with him was from the North, I think.’
Smut yawned and put his hand over his mouth, in a polite way. ‘Horrorfied, was he?’
‘Well, not so much. He took kind of a scientific attitude toward it.’
‘If they were talking about things like that they must not have been so very drunk.’
‘They talked about other things. Fisher told the story about Bert Ford burying his money.’
‘Is that a fact? What’d he say about that?’
I told him what I’d heard Fisher say. When I got through he stuck his hand under his chin. He looked off toward the wall on the other side of the room. ‘H’m,’ he said.
I got up then and added up the day’s receipts and locked the cash register. It was eleven-thirty when I went out of the room. Smut had turned around and was sitting in front of the counter, with his chin in his hands. He was looking at the coffee urn.
9
THE NEXT DAY WAS a clear one, but so cold that the sun looked like a little ball of muddy ice. The needles on the pine trees looked black, and there was a wind out of the north that made everybody hunt shelter.
Toward night the wind died down, but things didn’t warm up any. Smut and I closed up the place about midnight and made for the cabin we slept in. The ground between the roadhouse and the cabin was frozen hard as a rock.
It was cold in the cabin. There was a little heater in there, but there hadn’t been a fire in it all day. I undressed and got under the blankets.
Smut didn’t seem to be noticing the cold. He hadn’t paid much attention to anything that day. He came over to my bed and sat down at the foot. He shut one eye and looked at the floor.
‘How’d you like to make some money on the side, Jack?’ he asked.
I could tell he was serious. I sat up in the bed and pushed the pillow back.
‘What you mean?’ I asked him.
‘I mean what I said. How’d you like to make some money? Plenty of money.’
‘What’s it doing?’ I said.
‘I can’t tell you about it right now,’ he said, ‘but it won’t take long and it won’t be such hard work. You needn’t worry about it, but there’s money in it for you if you’ll take my word for it.’
‘How much money?’
‘Plenty.’
‘How much you call plenty?’
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘How much money you got now?’
‘None, except the twenty-five a month you pay me,’ I said.
‘If I was to fire you you wouldn’t have that,’ he said. ‘Try getting a job in Corinth. Just try it. The cotton mills run on half time. They don’t pay but twelve dollars a week when they run full time. Even if you could get a job with the hosiery mill they’d make you work three or four months learning and wouldn’t pay you a dime while you was doing it. What you going to live on while you was learning?’
‘Maybe I could get in the CCC,’ I said. ‘Now that I’ve lost my farm I don’t have any visible means of making a living.’
‘I doubt it,’ Smut said. ‘Even if you do they put a boss over you that works you just like you was on the chain gang. You got to get up when they say get up; go to bed when they say go to bed; eat what they hand you to eat, and swallow it when they say swallow; they let you go to town every other Saturday night and give you a prophylactic when you come back, whether you looked at a woman or not.’
‘It’s not as bad as going hungry,’ I said.
‘It’s worse,’ he said. ‘It’s a place for natural-born cannon fodder. It ain’t a place for you. You ain’t a fellow that likes to have somebody plan every hour of your life for you. I’ve studied you. Come on, make up your mind. You want to come in on this with me, or not?’
‘I’ll take it if you’ll shut up,’ I said. I pulled the pillow in place and got under the blankets again. Smut got up then and turned off the light. Most nights he bothered me with grinding his teeth together, and sometimes with his snoring, but he was quiet that night. I don’t know whether he couldn’t sleep, or what.
The next day I thought about Smut’s proposition. I kept wondering how much money. But any money would help me. I wondered what it was he had in mind. We were just about out of liquor, except for corn liquor. I thought maybe he was aiming to steal a load of government liquor that was going to pass through on the way to the South Carolina liquor stores. That’s a risky business unless you can manage to have the drivers fixed. It’s no cinch then. Sometimes I wondered if he was going to break into a freight car somewhere and steal a load of merchandise. But I didn’t think he would risk a thing like that for no more money than there was in it. He said there was plenty of money in it for me. If that was so there was bound to be a great deal in it for him.
The next day seemed a little warmer, but I reckon we were just getting used to it by then. Matt still had his cold and he felt pretty bad. He talked Smut into taking him to his mo
ther’s house in Corinth. They left early that morning.
Smut stayed away most of the day. When he came in he began drinking. It wasn’t good dark when he called me to the kitchen and offered me a drink.
‘Take a slug, Jack,’ he said. ‘It’ll warm you up.’
I didn’t make it a habit to drink out there except late in the night after the customers had gone home, or were mostly drunk. I hesitated a minute.
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘Go on, drink it. You might need it before the night’s over,’ he said.
I took a stiff drink and chased it down with some spigot water.
It was a good thing there weren’t many people out that night. Smut started pouring the liquor down Sam and Badeye. Sam couldn’t handle very much, and by ten o’clock he was pretty drunk. Badeye drank every night, of course, but Smut generally allowanced out his liquor. This night he let Badeye have all he wanted. That was a lot of liquor and by ten o’clock he was tight as a drum. Smut called me back in the kitchen then. When I got there he pointed to a bottle that was half full and sitting on the table before he stove.
‘Take a big one, Jack,’ he said. ‘It’s about time for us to take a trip.’
I took a good-sized one, and went back out front.
Rufus Jones always went home about eleven o’clock except on week-ends. He stayed with a brother of his hat lived about a mile from the roadhouse, in the direction of Corinth. Johnny Lilly usually stayed till we closed up the place, and sometimes after that. But this night Smut let him off before midnight. Johnny had an old car and went back and forth to Corinth every night. He lived with a high-yellow woman in the Shantytown section.
Sam passed out about then and Smut toted him to the cabin where the help stayed at night. While Smut was gone Badeye got to polishing glasses, and his eyes looked like glasses that had been polished good. When Smut got back Badeye said: ‘Well, Milligan, I think I’ll take it away. Put it to bed.’ He stood behind the counter, polishing a glass with a dirty towel, and looking off toward the picture on the other wall.