Uncle Sagamore and His Girls (15 page)

How the hell do I know how he’s doin it? All I know is you could set Sagamore Noonan down in the middle of a desert with three dry raisins and a tin cup, and he’d have a quart of moonshine run off before you had time to figure out two of the raisins was yours in the first place, and now you thought about it, the cup looked kind of familiar too—

The Sheriff wanted to run ’em all off and barricade the road out at the highway, but Booger finally convinced him they’d need the militia to keep ’em out because they’d just leave their cars blocking the highway and sneak in through the timber. It would look suspicious anyway, and would be bad politics, keeping ’em away. Maybe if enough of them got to examine the still and saw there wasn’t any way on earth the old wart hog could be making moonshine in it they might be convinced.

And, anyhow, they had to let the reporters and photographers in, and the truck from the television news, so they might as well leave the road open. Flash bulbs was going off all around, and men was holding up big shiny reflectors to throw sunlight under the shed for the movie cameras the television people brought. Reporters interviewed people all around, and checked over the machinery right down to the last piece of pipe, and then asked the Sheriff why everybody was so dead certain that moonshine was being made in it when you could see it just wasn’t possible.

“You’d have to be a local resident to understand,” the Sheriff says, “and familiar with local history and traditions. Or to be exact, familiar with Sagamore Noonan. I’ll tell you what you do. Go out there in that crowd and pick out a dozen men, any of ’em at random, and try to get an even-money bet that Sagamore Noonan can’t pour corn meal and sugar in your left ear and make whiskey come out of the top of your hat, and if you find one that’ll take you up on it, I’ll—I’ll—” He thought about it, and then he says, “I’ll buy you a new hat. And have a drink with you.”

Pop and Uncle Sagamore didn’t pay any mind to any of it, of course. They was too puzzled about what was happening to the turpentine, and too busy tearing the machinery down and putting it back together. They started the fire a couple of times, but there never was any turpentine come out, so they’d throw water in the firebox again. It was hard to tell which was the worst, the smoke when it was running or the ashes and steam when they put it out.

They was just getting ready to fire it up the third time, along about noon, when Pop says, “Doggone it, I keep
smellin’
turpentine.”

Uncle Sagamore nodded. “Seems like I been smellin’ it too.”

They started looking all around, with the people watching ’em, and then Pop says, “Hey, it’s in here! In the condenser tank!” He leaned over the tank and dipped up a little water in his hand and sniffed. “Yeah! It’s leakin’ into the water some way. That’s the reason it’s not coming out at the end.”

I remembered then. “Well, look,” I says. “You got six pieces of copper tubing going in, and only five coming out at the bottom. One got lost.”

Everybody counted. Uncle Sagamore says, “Well, I’ll be dadburned. How you reckon we done that, Sam?”

“I sure don’t know,” Pop says, “but we’ll find her.” He grabbed a wrench and began unscrewing the intake pipe from the spring, the one at the bottom. Water gushed out, and everybody had to move to keep from getting their feet wet. You could smell the turpentine stronger now.

And then all of a sudden somebody yelled, “Say, I smell whiskey too!”

“By God, yes,” another one shouted.

Everybody dabbed his hands in the water and sniffed. It seemed like some could smell just the teeniest odor of whiskey along with the turpentine in the water, and others wasn’t so sure. There was a big squabble, and two men squared off at each other, ready to fight. Booger broke it up. The Sheriff sniffed and said he couldn’t smell anything.

“Mebbe you got a cold,” somebody shouted.

“He ain’t got a cold,” another one yelled in the back of the crowd. “He’s got a friend.”

The Sheriff’s face turned red, and he started to cuss. Then somebody discovered what the smell was. It wasn’t whiskey; it was a little dab of the soured hog feed the water had washed out from under the firebox of the boiler.

“Sagamore Noonan!” the Sheriff barked, “how did that get up here?”

Uncle Sagamore bit off a chew of tobacco. “Why, shucks, Shurf, likely somebody jest tracked it in on his feet.”

Everybody looked at the firebox, that was about a foot off the ground. “Yeah, I think I seen him,” somebody says. “Kind of a short, heavy-set feller, about eight inches high. He was wearin’ a green raincoat and smokin’ a Robert Burns cigar.”

“That’s the one,” somebody else said. “Matter of fact, I seen the stuff on his feet, but I jest figgered it was more horse—”

“That’ll do!” the Sheriff roared.

There was a big hullaballoo that went on for nearly an hour while Otis got in the water tank and traced copper tubing around through the spaghetti tangle. There wasn’t any secret pipes, and still no way on earth they could be making moonshine. He did find out, though, what had happened to the sixth piece of tubing. It just ended there in the mess because they’d forgotten to bring it out with the others. That explained how turpentine was getting into the water. Two of the others was mashed so flat that nothing could get through. Otis got out, and watched while Pop and Uncle Sagamore started fixing it.

The Sheriff leaned against a post and mopped his face. “Three days till election,” he says, real bitter. “I ain’t got a chance, Booger. I didn’t even get to do any campaignin’. Minifee’s out making speeches to the voters—”

Then he stopped. “Voters?” he says. “Good God, Booger, if I’d just stopped to think—”

Booger looked out at the cars parked solid all over the hill and the crowds milling around everywhere. “Sure. You can talk to more voters here in fifteen minutes than Minifee can all day.”

The Sheriff squared his shoulders. “We ain’t whipped yet. Shag into town an’ get the sound truck.”

Pop and Uncle Sagamore kept working on the tubing, with a big crowd pressing in on every side to get a look at the machinery. In about thirty minutes Booger got back with the sound truck. He parked it just up the hill where the loudspeakers could cover the biggest area around the shed and the barn. The Sheriff stood on the running board with the microphone.

“Friends,” the loudspeakers boomed out, “this is the Sheriff speaking—”

There was a few boos and whistles, but a lot of others yelled for them to shut up. “Mebbe he can explain this mess,” somebody shouted. “Give him a chance.” Everybody faced in his direction, and moved up a little closer, and the noise quieted down. I upended a box down near the barn and climbed on it so I could see. It looked like Churchill Downs on Derby day.

“Friends and fellow citizens,” the Sheriff went on, “as some of you may recall, before all this madhouse started, I’m runnin’ for re-election, and I’d like to discuss the issues with you. I mean,
the
issue, of course, since we never have but one in this county.

“I’m under fire for not arrestin’ him for this uproar out here. Well, under the Constitution of this country, to arrest and try a man he has to be charged with some
specific
crime. It don’t cut any ice in court that all his waking life has been a continuing series of outrages against the human race. The Founding Fathers was trying to write in some safeguards, and anyway you could excuse ’em on the grounds that up to that time there hadn’t been a Sagamore Noonan.

“So I haven’t arrested him for the simple reason that there’s no valid evidence he’s breaking any law.”

There was a few shouts and boos out through the crowd. The Sheriff held up his hand. “Hear me out, fellers. I realize it’s a rash man that’d fly in the face of the law of averages by sayin’ that Sagamore Noonan wasn’t committing a crime at any given moment, but I’ve been watching him like a hawk for five days and nights, and it’s the honest truth.

“You all think he’s makin’ moonshine. That’s a reasonable assumption, I grant you, since he’s been making it all his life, but this is one time he’s not, and I think I can prove it to you. We’ll get to that in a minute.

“As to what he
is
doin’, I don’t know. Maybe it’s like the story about the doctor that discovered a cure there wasn’t any disease for; he could be just simply trying to invent a new crime of some kind, maybe in the hopes they’ll name it after him, or trying to have something declared a crime and get a law passed against it just on the theory that even though there don’t appear to be any particular harm in it, if he’s doin’ it, it must be against the best interests of society and mankind in general.

“But to get back to the moonshine. If he’s making any, there’s only two possibilities. He’s making it in that still, or in some other one that’s hidden around here. All right.
There is no other still on this place.
Just ask any of the 400 men that put in eleven hours helping me search every square inch of it. So what’s left? Just that still right over there. And all I can say about it is—
go over there and look at it.

“It’s all right there in the open and there’s no place to hide anything. It’s got six or eight extra pieces of pipe and copper tubing that don’t do anything except help confuse people who don’t know much about stills, but that’s just the Noonan sense of humor and not intended to fool anybody who
does
know what a still is. It has two units. One is empty, and the other has pine sap in it. Hundreds of you know that, because you seen inside both of ’em. So there’s no place to put in any mash, and makin’ moonshine in it is an absolute impossibility. I want every one of you to examine it, till you’re satisfied—”

There was some loud cuss words just to my right, in the back of the crowd. I looked around, and it was Uncle Sagamore and another man in an argument. Uncle Sagamore had a pasteboard box under his arm, and it looked like he’d just come out of the barn and was going over to the truck, near the well.

“Sagamore Noonan, I want the rest of my money!” the man shouted. He was kind of lanky, with pale eyes and sandy eyebrows and hair, and was dressed in khakis. His face was flushed, he was so mad.

“I don’t owe you no money, Harm,” Uncle Sagamore says. He tried to push past him.

Harm blocked his way. “You ain’t goin’ to gyp me no more!” he yelled. People was beginning to look around. Uncle Sagamore put his free hand on Harm’s chest and shoved him out of the way, and started to the truck. Harm cussed, and grabbed at him. The pasteboard box started to slip, and Uncle Sagamore lunged for it, but it got away from him and fell. There was a sound like breaking glass, and something began to pour out.

People was yelling and running toward it. Uncle Sagamore looked at it real funny, and grabbed Harm by the shirt with both hands and almost lifted him off the ground. “I told you to stay off’n my place, Harm Bledsoe!”

But it seemed like the people was more interested in the box than in Uncle Sagamore and Harm. They lunged for it and tore it open, and I could see there was four pint fruit jars, all of them shattered. They dabbed their fingers in the stuff and sniffed ’em. “Moonshine!” somebody yelled. They was all swarming around now, and the Sheriff was coming as hard as he could run. Booger was shoving his way through the jam.

Uncle Sagamore had turned loose of Harm’s shirt to look around, kind of blank. “Moonshine?” he asked. Then he grabbed Harm again and shoved his face right into his, and shouted, “What you mean, bringin’ your rotgut moonshine on my place? Why, I ort to beat you to death!”

The Sheriff was still trying to fight his way through the crowd, and he yelled to Booger, “Catch enough for evidence!” Booger was trying to shove people out of the way and find a part of a jar that still had something in it. But there was hardly any left. It seemed like the jars had just come all to pieces. The Sheriff got to the middle of the uproar. He pointed a finger in Uncle Sagamore’s face.

Uncle Sagamore was still shaking Harm. “Shurf, I want this man arrested! Bringin’ his rotgut likker on my place, an’ me a taxpayer with a real good name in the community—”

“Shut up!” the Sheriff roared.

Harm jerked loose from Uncle Sagamore. “I’ll kill you!” he yelled. He was so mad he was trembling. “You done me dirt the last time you’re ever a-goin’ to, Sagamore Noonan!” Uncle Sagamore tried to grab him again, but Otis and two other men got between them. And just then Booger and the other people who has bent over the spilled moonshine let out a yell.

“
Turpentine!
You can smell turpentine in it!”

That did it. From then on, it was just bedlam.

A lot of people didn’t go home all night. When I went out in the morning some was still asleep in their cars, and a steady stream of new ones was coming through the gate. The Sheriff and Booger and Otis looked like they hadn’t slept in a week. They’d searched the whole place again, but they hadn’t found any more of the moonshine. Then they’d started on the still. They took it apart, and moved all the pieces and looked under them, and even got shovels and dug the dirt away underneath, searching for hidden pipes, and there just wasn’t anything except the parts that was right out in the open. They tapped on the boilers, and measured them inside and outside to see if there was a trick about ’em somewhere, like secret compartments, but they couldn’t find a thing.

Some of the people coming in had copies of the big-city newspapers, and there was even stories in them. “
BLACK MAGIC
?” one of the headlines said. And another one carried a picture. Down below, it said, “
Mystery still. Hoax, or new scientific discovery? Where is whiskey coming from?
”

Everybody was baffled, and madder than wet cats. Uncle Sagamore was making whiskey right there in front of the whole county, and still they couldn’t catch him at it. I puzzled over it till I had to give up. It didn’t make any sense at all. They all blamed the Sheriff. I heard one man say, “If he gets two votes on Tuesday, they could arrest him for voting twice.”

I fed the pigs, and went up to the shed. Pop and Uncle Sagamore was discouraged and grumbling about all the uproar, and trying to sort out the pieces of the still so they could fit it back together. There must have been 300 people watching them and making sarcastic remarks to the Sheriff and Booger and Otis, who was still digging around for hidden pipes. Around noon Pop said why didn’t I go up and collect the pine sap? Maybe if all this crazy hullaballoo ever died down they might get started making turpentine at last.