Uncle Sagamore and His Girls (13 page)

The Sheriff started to choke. “You saw him dump the first tub. Then you fished a nekkid girl out of a lake and got back in time to see him dump the last one!
Get goin’!
”

“Yes,
sir,
” Booger says. He jumped in a car and tore off for town. The Sheriff yelled for the other deputy, and they ran up to the still. They unscrewed bolts and yanked the tops off the boiler things and looked inside, and then down in the fireboxes, and in the big water tank. I thought they’d gone crazy. Just then Major Kincaid came running down the hill from the pines. He shoved through the crowd and got hold of the Sheriff’s arm.

“There’s no wasp nests up there!” he barked. “I looked—”

“All right, I know that,” the Sheriff snapped.

“And I’ll tell you what else I found out, Major Kincaid said. “He’s been tapping pines on my property. If he sets foot across that fence again, I want him arrested for trespass!”

The Sheriff shook his fists over his head. “All right, all right,
all right!
Get offa my back, will you?” He ran down to the barn where Pop and Uncle Sagamore was still looking sort of mournful at the pile of spoiled hog feed. “You stay off Kincaid’s land!” he roared at Uncle Sagamore. “He says you ringed some pines on his side of the fence.”

“Why, shucks, Shurf,” Uncle Sagamore says, kind of sheepish. “I didn’t reckon he’d mind, for jest a little old dab of rosum.”

“Well, you heard me!” the Sheriff barked. Then he looked up and saw Mrs. Horne and Baby Collins and Miss McLeod walking down the hill. The two girls had towels wrapped around their heads, and had changed into some little romper suits. He went plowing up through the crowd and shook his finger in Mrs. Horne’s face. “If you ain’t off this place in five minutes I’m goin’ to throw the lot of you in jail!”

Mrs. Horne grinned at him. “Okay, don’t race your engine, Sherfie. If that’s the way you feel about it—”

She waved to Uncle Sagamore and Pop and went back up to the trailer. In a few minutes they drove off. The Sheriff and his deputy hurried back and started poking around in the machinery again.

Uncle Sagamore shook his head. “Well sir,” he says to Pop, “I don’t reckon I ever seen a man like that Shurf for gettin’ in a uproar over nothin’.”

“Ain’t it a fact?” Pop says. He looked at the pile of soured feed kind of despondent. “Billy, you start bringin’ some water so we can warsh out these tubs.”

“Are we goin’ to try another batch?” I asked.

“Why, sure,” he says. “We got to feed them hawgs, ain’t we?”

I began washing out the tubs. People was still milling around everywhere, and I heard one man say to another, “All right, give me my dollar.” It was the two that had made the bet this morning. “I told you he’d do it, didn’t I?”

“Ho-o-old it,” the second one says. “Not so fast. He ain’t done it yet.”

“Well, he got it out of the tubs, didn’t he? What you want, anyway? Lie there an’ drink it while it’s runnin’ out of the still?”

W
ELL, IT SEEMED LIKE
there just wasn’t any use arguing with ’em. They was bound and determined they was going to make eight full tubs of it again.

“But listen,” I says. “It don’t spoil till the third day. So if we only made one tub at a time, the pigs’d have it et up by then.”

“No sir,” Pop said, “we just can’t give up that easy. There’s something wrong, and we got to find out what it is.”

“And besides,” Uncle Sagamore says, “supposin’ it went ahead and spoiled
after
they et it? All them bubbles a-fizzin’ around inside ’em, them hawgs’d lose confidence in you right now. And there ain’t nothin’ as aggravatin’ to live with as a disillusioned hawg.”

So they mixed up another full batch. I thought it wasn’t any wonder all the people was shaking their heads like they couldn’t believe it. They’d already throwed out enough to feed the hogs a month, and here they was just going to do it all over again. The Sheriff went on running around the place poking into corners like a crazy man, and when Booger got back from town with two carloads of men he run out to meet them and started giving orders.

“Two of you watch the still,” he says. “The rest of you spread out and start searching. I want this place turned inside out.”

I couldn’t figure what they was looking for, but whatever it was, they didn’t find it. They swarmed all over the place till sundown. The Sheriff leaned against the wall of the barn and mopped his face. “All right,” he says. “Mebbe they
did
dump it out. Booger,
what in the name of God is he up to?
”

Booger shook his head. Then he brightened up. “Say, you know there’s one possibility we’ve never thought of. He might be doin’ just what he says he is.”

The Sheriff patted him on the shoulder. “You’ve had a tryin’ day. And you better go get into some dry clothes.”

“No, look,” Booger says. “I mean it. Don’t you see, that’s the one thing that would fool
everybody.
”

“Sure,” the Sheriff said. “But there wouldn’t be any profit in it. And did you ever hear of Sagamore Noonan victimizin’ the human race just for fun? They got to pay him for it.”

“Yeah, I forgot about that,” Booger says.

In the morning by a little after sunup there was cars parked all around the hillside and more was coming all the time. Everybody was excited because this was the day we was going to start up the still. We looked at the hog feed first. It was still nice and clear.

“Hmmm,” Uncle Sagamore says, real pleased. “That’s better.”

“Yes sir,” Pop says, “mebbe we solved her.”

I wasn’t so sure. This was still just the first day. We went up to the shed. Otis and another deputy was sitting on a couple of boxes watching the machinery. Uncle Sagamore said the first thing was to collect the rosum, so we went up to the slashed pines and brought back the buckets. They was about half full of this sticky stuff.

I watched, real fascinated, while they started in. It was the first good look I’d had at the machinery since they finished hooking it up. There seemed to be pipes and copper tubing running everywhere. There was several that ran back and forth between the two boilers, all with valves and petcocks, and it looked like six pieces of tubing that run from the boilers down through the water tank. These all had petcocks too. They wound around inside the tank all tangled up like spaghetti, poked out through the wall of the tank near the bottom, made a little bend, and stopped. But it seemed like there was only five of these little ends. That was funny, I thought. I tried to trace them through the tangle to see if one had got lost, but the tank was filling up with water now and it was hard to see. They’d opened the valve on the pipe coming from the spring. It went into the tank down near the bottom, and there was another pipe on the other side near the top for an overflow.

Pop and Uncle Sagamore took the cover off one of the boilers, poured in a little water, and then dug the pine sap out of the buckets and scraped it in. Otis watched every move they made. Before they put the lid on he looked inside. “What’s in the other one?”

“Nothin’,” Pop says. “It’s just a spare, till we get in full production.”

“Open the lid,” Otis says. “We’ll see what’s in it.”

Pop opened it. You could see it was empty. He closed it again. By now the big water tank was full. Uncle Sagamore hunkered down and began putting paper and kindling in the firebox at the bottom of the boiler. The crowd pushed in a little closer. It sure was exciting, I thought. The turpentine business was ready to start.

Well, it seemed like they had nothing but trouble with it right from the first minute. There was the smoke, to begin with. I never saw so much smoke. In the back of the firebox there was a place for a stovepipe, but they’d forgot to get one, so the smoke just rolled out, run into the tin roof, and swirled around everything. It seemed like the wood was a little green too, and when Uncle Sagamore kept adding pitch pine to make it burn it just made more smoke. Part of the time you couldn’t see anything of Pop and Uncle Sagamore except their feet.

But the worst part was that there wasn’t any turpentine come out. Not a drop.

Pop and Uncle Sagamore came out after about half an hour, coughing and wiping tears out of their eyes. “She sure ort to be runnin’ by now, Sam,” Uncle Sagamore says, sort of puzzled.

“You reckon we made a mistake in the hook-up?” Pop asked.

“Mebbe we ort to check again.” They went back and started groping around at the pipes and tubing. Otis got as close as he could and peered through the smoke, watching them. I looked around, and Murph was standing behind me, looking worried. He tossed me the paper he had in his hand. It was the
Blossom County Bee.

The whole front page was just big headlines and pictures again. Clear across the top in three-inch type it said:

BLOSSOM COUNTY FOLLIES CONTINUED—

There was more pictures of the still and the hog feed. And right in the middle of the page was the one the Major had taken of Booger and Conchita McLeod. She had her arm around Booger’s neck, and he was grinning kind of stupid, with his hair plastered down in his face. Down below it said: “
Sheriff’s Deputy in hilarious moment at Noonan farm.
”

Down at the bottom of the page in bigger print, it said, “
These are not doctored photographs. If you don’t believe a man can ferment mash and operate a still out in the open in full view of our entire Sheriff’s Department, go out and see for yourself. Then vote for the man who can clean up this mess—J. L. (Curly) Minifee.
”

Just then Uncle Sagamore came out of the smoke. Murph handed him the paper. Uncle Sagamore looked at it, and Murph says, “Curly’s hauling in the votes like a ole fashion clambake. Around town they’re betting six-to-one he’ll take it by a landslide.”

“Hmmm,” Uncle Sagamore says. “Six-to-one? Is that a fact?”

“Maybe I’m losing my grip,” Murph says. “But I just don’t seem to follow you this time.”

“Why, ain’t no cause to fret, Murph,” Uncle Sagamore says. “They ain’t goin’ to vote today, are they?”

Just then a Sheriff’s car came tearing down the hill, and behind it was a sound truck. The Sheriff came pushing through the crowd to where Otis was.

“Nothin’ comin’ out of it at all,” Otis says. “And there was nothin’ went in it but pine sap.”

The Sheriff held up his hand. “Never mind. I’ve got it figured out now. I know what he’s doin’.”

He shoved back through the crowd and stepped up on the running board of the sound truck with the microphone in his hand. “Folks,” he says, “listen—”

There was a lot of boos and whistles. People crowded around, jostling each other and yelling.

“Why don’t you arrest the old crook?”

“Shut up and let him talk!”

“Mebbe we can find out what the hell’s goin’ on here!”

“Shurf, is he makin’ whiskey in that still, or ain’t he?”

The Sheriff held up his hand. “Listen! That’s what I’m trying to tell you. He ain’t. You can go over there and see for yourself.”

“
Then what the hell is he doin’?
” somebody roared.

“He’s making whiskey in another still somewhere else,” the Sheriff boomed out through the loudspeakers. “This is just a fake, to keep us from looking for the real one—”

“Hey! How about that?” somebody shouted. “By God, the Shurf’s probably right!”

Some of them cheered. The Sheriff held up his hand again. “But don’t forget I already searched this place once, so it’s well hid. You know Sagamore Noonan. I want 200 volunteers. The County can’t pay you, but I’m putting up a hundred-dollar reward out of my own pocket.”

A big cheer drowned him out. “Hmmm,” Murph says, “he’s not so dumb at politics himself.”

That was really a search. By the middle of the afternoon I figured he must have nearer 400 men than 200, after word began to get around the county about the hundred dollars. The timber was swarming with men so thick they was bumping into each other. He even had 8 or 10 perched on top of the house and barn with binoculars watching for smoke. And none of them found anything.

Pop and Uncle Sagamore didn’t pay the slightest mind to any of it. They put out the fire under the boiler and checked the machinery all over again, and fired it up once more. Smoke poured out, but there still wasn’t any turpentine. Along about sundown they killed the fire and gave up for the day. You could tell they was dejected as everything. And when we walked down to feed the pigs, it was worse. In every one of the tubs you could see a bubble or two coming up through the juice.

“Sam, I jest don’t like the looks of that,” Uncle Sagamore says.

“Oh, a bubble or two don’t mean nothin’,” Pop says, trying to cheer him up, but you could see he didn’t really mean it.

In the morning they began pouring into the place before we even got up, and by the time we’d tried the baloney and had breakfast I figured from the cars parked around there was already 300 helping the Sheriff search and more coming every minute. There was more bubbles in the hog feed. Uncle Sagamore and Pop tried to buck each other up, but you could see they was plenty worried about it. And the turpentine machinery still didn’t work. Just smoke all over the place and not a drop of turpentine.

At noon the Sheriff gave up and called off the search. A truck showed up that was loaded with hamburgers and five-gallon cans of coffee. He made a speech over the sound truck.

“It’s no use, men. I was wrong, and there just ain’t no other still. Yesterday and today we’ve put in close to 4000 man-hours and covered 6000 to 7000 man-miles across every foot of this land. That settles it. I don’t know what he’s doing, but we’ve proved one thing. He sure as hell ain’t making whiskey.

“I’m sorry nobody got the reward, but I’ve done the next best thing. There’s $150 worth of hamburgers and coffee on that truck, so dive in and help yourselves.”

The men cheered and made a break for the truck, and I ran over and got a hamburger myself. When I came back, the Sheriff was standing over to one side talking to Otis. Pop and Uncle Sagamore was still groping around in the smoke, trying to figure out what was wrong.

“There ain’t a drop of anything coming out of it,” Otis says.