Michaela Thompson - Florida Panhandle 01 - Hurricane Season (2 page)

Diana could be trusted to embarrass her father if she possibly could. She had undoubtedly lost him votes in the churches, where Gospel Roy was making the most of it. But if Diana had lost Snapper votes in the churches, it was possible she’d made up for it in the bars, where her acquaintance was widest. Most of St. Elmo, it seemed to Lily, swore by one or the other institution.

Gospel Roy had been out to Trulock’s Grocery & Marine Supply to discuss the matter. “I’m not one to talk about a man’s kin,” he’d said, leaning so close Lily had smelled the Vitalis on his wavy gray hair. “But I say, a state congressman has to set an example. When you got a weak link—well, Joe McCarthy’s been showing us what can happen when you got a weak link.” (Of Gospel Roy’s six children, one was a football star at Auburn, one was a lay preacher, and all the rest sang in the First Baptist choir.)

It hadn’t occurred to Lily that Diana Landis might be part of the International Communist Conspiracy, but she supposed she could see some logic in it. Diana
was
a weak link where men were concerned, and any male International Communist who visited St. Elmo could probably get well acquainted with her without too much effort. The best Lily could think of to do was give Roy a free NuGrape and say, “I don’t know, Roy, I got to have time to think it over.” And with that Roy had had to be satisfied.

The thwack of flesh on flesh interrupted Lily’s reverie. She turned to find Aubrey swaying, after a slap on the back from Snapper himself, who was wearing the red galluses and gaudy ascot of his preacher costume. Snapper’s blue eyes were bright in his ruddy face, and his slicked-back hair, Lily thought, looked suspiciously blacker than it had when he in his turn had been out at the store calling Gospel Roy “a good man—don’t get me wrong, Miss Lily—but being able to blow a pitch pipe and wave your hands around while a congregation sings ‘Rock of Ages’ ain’t a qualification for the state congress.”

“How you doing, young fella?” he said to Aubrey.

Aubrey pinkened. “What say, you snapping turtle?”

“What’s this I hear about you being laid up?”

“Heart attack last year.”

“You take care, now. Don’t let them bees get the best of you, old son,” said Snapper, his eyes sweeping the crowd. He winked at Lily. “Miss Lily, you look after my young friend here. Don’t let him get bee stung.” Before Lily could speak, he was off down the aisle, waving to someone else. Aubrey, Lily noticed, was still flushed with pleasure.

“Nice of Snapper,” Lily said.

“He’s a fine old boy,” said Aubrey, and Lily realized how seldom these days she heard him volunteer an opinion.

“You should go on down and speak to your friends,” she said, but Aubrey had lapsed into his usual uncommunicative state, eyes downcast and hands lying limply on his knees.

It was time to begin, anyway. Behind a screen down front Cora Baker, the only woman participant—no man in St. Elmo knew how to play the piano—launched into “The Wedding March.” A few giggles rippled across the auditorium, and the Womanless Wedding was under way.

Afterward, when the fuss had died down, many St. Elmo residents said the wedding had started out the best they’d ever seen. The parade of bridesmaids—each flinging “her” false curls about and daintily holding up skirts made of everything from red velvet winter curtains to croker sacks—had been better than ever. At the height of it, one of the balloons stuffed in Otis Walker’s blouse burst, and the laughter as half his bosom flattened could have been heard as far away as St. Elmo Island.

Snapper stole the show as the preacher. He clowned, forgot his lines, and worked the names of prominent St. Elmo citizens into the service. He pinched several bridesmaids on the behind, and J. D. Lyons, the matron of honor, hit him with J. D.’s wife’s beaded reticule. When the father of the bride marched down the aisle carrying his shotgun over his shoulder, Snapper brought down the house by trying to hide beneath the pulpit and then behind the bridesmaids’ skirts.

Then came the bride—Jasper Middleton, weighing two hundred fifty pounds at least, wearing a lace tablecloth for a veil. Jasper’s painted lips were pursed, he had a beauty mark on his cheek, and he minced along blowing kisses to the crowd, his hairy arms straining the seams on a pair of mitts his mother had crocheted especially for the occasion.

At just that high point, all hell broke loose. Over the laughter that greeted Jasper’s progress down the aisle, a hoarse and desperate-sounding voice cried from the back of the auditorium, “Help! Come help! The swamp is on fire!” and Bo Calhoun, his face and clothes smoke-stained, pushed past Jasper to the front of the auditorium.

Lily thought at first that Bo’s entrance, ill-timed as it was, was part of the show, perhaps some sort of blackface interlude. It took her a second or two to realize that Bo wasn’t even a member of the lodge. And when he raced past her, she smelled smoke on his clothes and saw sweat and what looked very much like tears, although this was hard to credit, on his face.

Probably more than half the audience, when they heard Bo say the swamp was on fire, knew he meant his family’s moonshine still, the biggest in the county. Bo hadn’t reached the stage before many were on their feet. One of the wedding party—the fire chief, who was playing the mother of the bride, wearing a mop for a wig, started to run, stepped on the hem of his long skirt, and fell to his knees, knocking the mop askew. “You watch out, Harold! That’s Mama’s Eastern Star dress!” screamed his wife from her seat in the third row.

“The swamp’s on fire!” Bo yelled again. He glanced around wildly and ran back up the aisle.

By this time, people were heading for the doors. Jasper, the bride, who hadn’t quite reached the stage when Bo arrived, dropped his bouquet of baby’s breath into someone’s lap, yelled, “You-all come on!”, and charged up the aisle in Bo’s wake. This galvanized the rest of the wedding party, which, grabbing off wigs and pulling up skirts to expose hairy legs and feet shoved into high heels, stumbled after him.

The casualties, totted up later, were not serious: several broken shoe heels, a bottle of bourbon smashed when it fell out of a flower arrangement, a sprained wrist, and a broken collarbone resulting from a fall off the stage. The stage was clear inside of ten minutes and the auditorium was half-empty. Somebody had the presence of mind to pull the curtain, and Cora Baker struck up the recessional.

Lily had no trouble figuring out what had happened. Bo had discovered the fire at the family’s still, and—failing to rouse the volunteer fire department, or knowing in the first place nobody would be there—had come to the place where he could summon the most manpower the quickest.

“Guess the Calhouns’ still blew up,” she said to Aubrey. From outside came the sound of tires screeching. A few remaining members of the wedding party milled about. The “country cousin” removed flaxen braids and scrubbed morosely at blacked-out front teeth, and one of the bridesmaids mopped his face with a lace hankie.

“My Law,” said the woman sitting next to Lily. “It sure does look like to me they better do a minstrel show next time.”

Lily stood up and beckoned to Aubrey. “We might as well go on home,” she said. “I reckon that does it for another Womanless Wedding.”

“What time is it?” asked Bo Calhoun.

He was standing in the tiny cabin of Diana Landis’s boat in his undershorts. He was a powerfully built man with auburn hair, freckles across his nose and shoulders, and a bony face.

It was two days after the Calhoun family moonshine operation had been destroyed by a fire that, the Calhouns agreed among themselves, had been started by dynamite. They had had enough stills dynamited by the law to know the signs. This time, though, it hadn’t been the law.

“You hear me?” Bo said.

The cabin had a bunk on one wall, a counter with fishing equipment strewn over it on the other. Diana Landis lay naked on the bunk, her elbow crooked over her eyes. “Oh my God,” she said.

“Don’t start up,” said Bo. “I asked you a question.” Diana removed her elbow and turned her head toward him. “You want to know what time it is? I’ll tell you what time it is,” she said. “It’s time you did something about this situation, that’s what time it is.”

“Didn’t I ask you not to start up?”

“You don’t understand.” Diana sat up, huddled in a corner of the bunk. “I love you, Bo.”

Bo didn’t move.

“Things are different now. It’s a lot more important now,” she said. “There may be reasons why I have to get out of town.” Her voice shook on the last words, and she put her hand over her mouth.

“What are you talking about?” Bo walked to the bunk and sat down.

Diana slid near him. “I can’t tell you,” she said. “I just have to be with you. You told me how mean Sue Nell is, and how I make you happy. Now I need you, really bad.”

Bo picked up cigarettes and matches from the floor beside the bunk and lit up, squinting against the smoke. “Have you done something?”

She pounded the bunk with her fist. “What if I have? Why should you be with that ugly red-headed bitch and not with me?”

His upraised hand moved swiftly toward her face, but in the end he simply grasped her chin and shoved it to one side. “Watch out,” he said.

Diana’s eyes were red. “Please tell her, Bo.”

“Tell me what you did.”

She shook her head. “Nothing. Nothing. I just want to be with you so much.” She bent her head.

Bo looked at her. His face changed. He put his arm around her shoulders and drew her close. Minutes passed before he said, “I can’t do it, Miss Di.”

She shuddered but said nothing. At last she said, “Not today. But soon.”

He didn’t respond. Burying his hand in her hair, he said, “Did you write me another poem?”

She nodded.

“Read it to me while I get my clothes on?”

While he put on khaki pants and buttoned his shirt, she read from a school composition book:

The hot rain pounds the sandy shore,

The gulls shriek in the sky.

The smothering air can harm me less

Than knowing I have to lie.

“That’s real nice ” Bo began soothingly, but Diana cut him off:

I have to share what can’t be shared

Forget what ought to be.

The gulls may scream for grief or loss—

her voice choked—

I think they scream for me.

Diana sat swallowing and blinking, her eyes fixed on the book.

“Now, that’s mighty pretty,” said Bo. “How you can make those rhymes I just don’t know.” He raised her face to his and kissed her. “I got to go.”

Diana listened to his footsteps fade out along the dock. She sat on the bunk a long time before starting to get dressed.

By Labor Day, St. Elmo had almost stopped talking about Bo Calhoun’s interruption of the Womanless Wedding and the destruction of the Calhoun family still. The elections were taking a lot of attention. Snapper and Gospel Roy sniped at each other daily, and on the national scene St. Elmo was wondering whether to vote for Eisenhower or Stevenson.

“I feel bound to warn you that you will have trouble getting votes down in this part of the country,” Lily Trulock wrote to Adlai Stevenson. “But it is still my belief that once a Democrat always a Democrat.” She enclosed two dollars in the envelope. Other St. Elmo citizens, however, planned a motorcade up to Birmingham to hear Ike speak on September third.

When anyone did mention the Calhouns’ still, it was to wonder where they’d build it next time. The Calhouns had been making whiskey in the swamp for as long as anyone could remember. Each of the four Calhoun boys drove a late-model Oldsmobile, and before the tragedy they had been going to Georgia with a load once a week. Anyone who knew could spot them on the highway. Bo would be driving lead, Sonny with the load—a trunk and specially constructed back seat full of five-gallon demijohns (the Calhouns called them “jimmy johns”)—Lester on the tail, and Purvis on shotgun, to decoy the law. Purvis’s job was to drive erratically and fast, so that if the highway patrol was around they’d find him more interesting than his brothers, who observed the speed limit strictly. The system worked well, with only an occasional speeding ticket for Purvis.

Although the law, including County Sheriff Woody Malone, had been out to fight the fire, and it was obvious that the barrels and cookers going up in flames were a setup for moonshine, nobody had felt it worthwhile to prosecute the Calhoun brothers. In the first place, the Calhouns were generous contributors to Sheriff Malone’s reelection campaigns, and also, if a deer happened to wander across their property and one of them shot it, the sheriff always got a quarter of it for his freezer.

It was over a Labor Day dinner of barbecued venison that the sheriff confided to his wife’s parents, Lily and Aubrey Trulock, that Bo Calhoun suspected the still had been sabotaged. “It could of just exploded, of course,” he said, helping himself to more yams. “Bo was on his way there, but he said he heard it go boom, boom, boom, just like that and up she went. It was like dynamite was set at three different places. Stop that bubbling, Junior, or I’ll take a strap to you.”

Junior Malone, eight years old, glanced at his father and momentarily stopped blowing into his tea with his drinking straw.

“What do you plan to do about it?” asked Lily.

Woody smirked. “There isn’t much I can do to somebody for destroying an illegal still, Mother Trulock. It’s what I would’ve done myself, if I’d found it first.”

Lily hated to be called “Mother Trulock,” and she suspected Woody knew it. “I suppose the Calhouns are mad.”

“Yes, ma’am, I reckon they are. Bo says if he catches who did it—”

“Can’t we talk about something more suitable for a family dinner?” put in Wanda, the Trulocks’ daughter. “More venison, Daddy?”

Lily ignored her. “He’ll what?”

“Fill his rear full of buckshot, at the very least. Probably worse. Wanda, that was mighty fine. I’m full as a tick.”

Lily cleared away the dishes while Wanda sliced lemon meringue pie. “Who would want to blow up the Calhouns’ still?” Lily asked Woody, who was picking his teeth with the corner of a cardboard matchbook.