Uncle Sagamore and His Girls (16 page)

I called Sig Freed and started out. It was sort of quiet and peaceful up the hill in the pines, and you didn’t have to worry about being trampled on. Sig Freed ran out through the timber, looking for rabbits. I had about half the buckets collected when I heard him barking. It sounded like he was about a hundred yards away. I skinned through the fence and started to run over there, and then all of a sudden he went, “Yip! Yip! Yip!” like something had scared him, and I could tell he was running back toward the barn. It was funny, I thought; that was exactly the way he’d acted the night he woke us all up.

Then somewhere up ahead in the trees I heard a man’s voice say, “Damn dog!” I ran on, trying not to make any noise, and in a minute I saw him. By golly, it was Curly. There was another man with him, and they was easing through the woods, going downhill toward the bottom. It looked like they was sneaking around to stay out of sight of Uncle Sagamore’s place. That sure was puzzling. I followed them, staying back where they wouldn’t see me. In a minute they stopped to get their bearings, and I slipped up behind some bushes. I got a look at the other man then, and doggone if it wasn’t Harm Bledsoe.

“Only about a quarter of a mile now,” he said.

Curly grinned. “Boy! I can’t wait to see it.”

It beat me. I couldn’t figure what they was talking about. They went on, and I slipped after ’em. In a little while we was pretty well below Uncle Sagamore’s farm buildings, and they dipped down in a ravine sort of place that had dogwoods growing real thick along the sides. They turned right and went up the ravine a few steps, and stopped. Harm parted a thick bank of ferns growing on this side, and crawled in, with Curly following him. They disappeared.

I slipped over to the right till I thought I was above the place, and crawled out to the edge of the gully, parted the dogwood branches and looked down. There they was, with Curly laughing his head off, and it was the doggonedest sight I ever saw.

T
HE BANK WAS A
little undercut here, so it sloped back, and there was a spring in behind the big screen of ferns. And there sat four tubfuls of the soured hog feed, a little boiler, and a water tank with a copper tubing going down through it. Off to one side in the edge of the ferns was 18 pint fruit jars with lids on ’em, and a pint can of store-bought turpentine.

Curly looked around at all of it again, and went on laughing so hard he had to wipe his eyes. “Brother!” he says. “Have I got him, or have I got him.”

“All right,” Harm said. “Don’t forget the rest of my hundred bucks.”

“Here,” Curly says. He took some money out of his wallet and passed it over.

Harm stuck it in his pants pocket. Then he started cussing Uncle Sagamore. He was so mad his eyes kind of watered and his chin trembled. “That crooked sum-bitch!” he says. “You work for him, an’ he beats you out of your money an’ treats you like a dawg. He jest went too fur this time.”

Curly grinned. “You can say that again. But how the hell did the Sheriff miss it? It’s well hid, all right, but 400 men—”

“That was the simplest part of it,” Harm said. “He jest got the Shurf to search
first,
before he set it up.”

“Oh,” Curly says. “But, look—Them first pints of ’shine with a turpentiney flavor started showin’ up before they finished the big search.”

“I know,” Harm says. “It was a few pints he had left over from his last still.”

“But how’d they get the mash clear down here that fast?” Curly asked.

“They didn’t,” Harm says. “There’s a buried pipe runs from the corner of the barn down to the edge of the cornfield. It ends in some oil drums hid under the ground. After this still was set up, all they had to do was sneak it out of the drums at night and carry it down.”

Curly nodded. “I see. And getting it in the drums was easy.”

“Sure,” Harm said. “Them girls covered ’em the first time, of course. All they had to do was uncover the upper end of the pipe, slap in a funnel, an’ pour. Then they dumped out the corn meal that was left, so the Shurf could see it. The second time it was the fake gunfight. That was me and another feller. This time, they refilled the tubs with fresh water, jest to make it different. I been operatin’ it for him durin’ the day. The heater’s a little gasoline burner, so it don’t make no smoke at all. An’ then he’d put one drop of turpentine in each pint, so naturally ever’body swear it had to be comin’ out of that still up yonder, an’ they’d never look any more for another one. They also dumped a half-pint of moon in the condenser up there, to give it a little smell, and spilled a dab of mash under the firebox, to keep ’em occupied.”

Curly nodded his head again. “Not half bad, for an old peckerwood. If he hadn’t run into me, he might’ve gone on foolin’ the suckers for years. But here’s where I clobber him, an’ the way I’m going to do it—oh, brother!”

“Remember,” Harm says, “I get to be a deputy. That was part of the deal.”

Curly give that nasty grin of his, and clapped him on the shoulder. “You’re practically wearin’ the star right now. Here’s the way I work it. The election’s day after tomorrow. So tomorrow evenin’s when I drop the bomb.”

“Yeah,” Harm says, “but it’ll be the Shurf that gets to arrest him.”

Curly held up a hand. “Your trouble is, Harm, you got no scope or imagination. You don’t get the picture. This is goin’ to be an absolute work of art. Listen—” He stopped to light a cigarette, and hunkered down by the boiler with the big grin on his face. “This thing’s being read about and talked about all the way from North Carolina to Texas. And here in this county they’re so worked up over it, arguing and tryin’ to figure it out, that the Governor’s threatened to send troops if it don’t quiet down. So mebbe you think that when one man solves the mystery for ’em, single-handed, he ain’t going to be the biggest hero this state ever had. Sure, the Sheriff’ll make the arrest. But I get the credit, and the election, and all he gets is the humiliation of having me hand him the answer right out in front of all the voters in the county after he’s been knockin’ his brains out for ten days. He’ll be ashamed even to vote for himself, that one vote’ll look so silly in the returns.”

“But how you goin’ to get that many out here?” Harm asked.

“Simple,” Curly says. “I’m goin’ to hold a rally up there by the barn tomorrow evenin’ at one o’clock. And distribute about ten thousand handbills between now and then, advertising it, and hinting that I just might clear up the whole thing. There won’t be enough people left in the rest of the county to get up a pinochle game.”

“But, listen—” Harm says. “Sagamore ain’t goin’ to let you hold no rally on his place. He’s already stopped you once.”

“You just watch,” Curly says. “I keep tryin’ to tell you, the old sap’s overrated, because he never run into a real operator before. Any dumbbell that’d make an enemy out of the man who knows where his still’s hid sure ain’t very sharp. I just butter him up a little, and maybe promise him a deputy’s job. Both of ’em like to ham it up, anyway, so I’ll slip ’em the old grease about sharin’ the speaker’s platform and bein’ introduced. That way—” It got too much for him, and he doubled up laughing again. Then he went on. “You see the beauty of it now? Both of the dumb clowns’ll be standing up there, right in full view of five thousand people, when I lower the boom. Can’t you just see their faces?”

Harm grinned kind of cold. “I wouldn’t miss it for nothin’. Looks like I was sure right, tellin’ you instead of that Shurf. Prob’ly he’d of messed it up some way.”

Curly stood up and clapped him on the back. “He wouldn’t have give you a hundred bucks, either, or did you even give that a thought? Well, let’s get going. I’ll pick up my truck and drive in to see the geniuses.”

They eased out through the ferns, and I heard them going away. It just didn’t seem possible there could be such double-crossers in the world, I thought. That Harm was lower than a snake. And it scared me, thinking of what’d have happened if I hadn’t found out about it. I had to tell Uncle Sagamore, and do it fast. When I couldn’t hear them any more, I skinned out, straight over toward the fence, climbed through, and went running up toward the cornfield.

They wasn’t anywhere in sight There was hundreds of people milling around, and it was hard to see, but they wasn’t over at the machinery. I started to ask the Sheriff, but from the things he was saying about Uncle Sagamore at the moment I judged it was better not to mention his name.

They wasn’t anywhere around the barn. Just then I saw Curly’s sound truck driving in up at the gate; he’d probably had it parked on the sand road where it goes on around and runs down toward the bottom through Major Kincaid’s place. I ran toward the house. It was just a little after noon, and maybe they was having dinner. I came tearing in the kitchen door all out of breath, and they was slicing the baloney.

“Pop—” I says. “Uncle Sagamore—I got to—I got something to tell you—”

“Well, slow down an’ get your breath,” Pop says, putting six or eight slices on some bread. “Where you been all this time?”

Just then there was footsteps on the front porch, and Curly said, “Hello, inside.”

“Pop—!” I said.

He shushed me. “Later, Billy.” Then he says, “Come on in.”

Curly kind of hesitated in the door from the front room. He looked at Pop and Uncle Sagamore like he was sorry about something, and says, “Men, my old daddy used to say the true measure of a man was in bein’ able to admit he was wrong. I come to apologize.”

“Why, ain’t no call for that,” Uncle Sagamore says. “Pull up a cheer an’ have a bite of vittles with us.”

“No sir, I appreciate it, but I better get along,” Curly says. “Just wanted to set the record straight. I been sayin’ all over the county you was makin’ moonshine in that still, and I’m sorry—”

There was nothing to do but wait till he left. He went on, telling one whopping lie after another while you’d think butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, and the awful part of it was Uncle Sagamore and Pop just took it in like it was the Gospel. They was kind of put out with that pig-headed Shurf, they said, the way he was interfering with men that was just trying to squeeze a living from a little old shirttail of a farm, and by golly if Curly wanted to hold his rally out there he was more than welcome.

Curly looked like he was about to cry. “Men,” he says, “I just feel like a dirty dawg, meetin’ this kind of Christian charity after the things I said, and you can sure believe I’m goin’ to do everything I can to straighten out this tragic mistake. By God, I’ll say right in my handbills that I’m goin’ to clear up the whole thing. And you’re goin’ to be my guests on the speaker’s stand, while I introduce you and own up like a man that I was wrong.”

A little more of it, I thought, and I’d get sick. Then it looked like Uncle Sagamore was going to cry. It sure did his heart good, he says, to know they was going to have a fair and honest Shurf that didn’t spend his time pickin’ on the workin’ man that was just struggling to keep his taxes paid. They shook hands all around and then Uncle Sagamore brought a quart fruit jar out of his bedroom, so they could all drink to it.

“Mind you, I don’t allow it on the place, as a rule,” he says, “but I jest happened to have this because the doctor prescribed it for Bessie when she was ailin’ this spring.”

The jar went around once. By this time I was beginning to feel like I’d bust open if I didn’t get to talk pretty soon. I stood on one foot and then on the other, like somebody that had to go to the bathroom. Uncle Sagamore started to say you couldn’t fly on one wing—Then he looked kind of sheepish and explained that was an expression he’d heard a feller use one time an’ he thought it meant you ought to take two drinks. Curly didn’t seem like he wanted any more, but he took it anyway. He looked kind of flushed after this one, like he had that other time, and he grinned and clapped Uncle Sagamore on the back and said he’d better be going. They followed him out.

I was beginning to jump up and down now, with all the news jammed up inside me trying to get out. I started after them. “Pop—” I says.

“You stay here,” he told me. “And stop interruptin’ when grownups are talkin’.”

“But, Pop—!”

“You heard me, Billy.”

They went up to Curly’s truck, and talked for another minute or two. The minute he started to drive off, I headed for ’em on the run. But with all the parked cars and the crowds milling around, I couldn’t keep them in sight. When I got there I couldn’t see ’em anywhere. I’ll start screaming in a minute, I thought. I zigzagged through a whole forest of legs, headed for the shed. They wasn’t there. Or at the barn. I ran back to the house. They must have gone back to finish their sandwiches. They wasn’t in the kitchen. I was running out through the front room like a crazy man when I heard the truck start up, out by the well.

They was just driving off. “Pop!” I screamed at the top of my lungs, and leaped off the porch. They didn’t hear me. I ran toward the truck, still yelling, but it went on up the hill.

A man came up to me. “They was lookin’ all over for you,” he says. “Said for me to tell you they likely wouldn’t be back till tomorrow. But not to worry.

By sundown the Sheriff had most of the people off the place. They was all arguing with him and with each other and didn’t want to leave because they was afraid they’d miss something. The machinery was still torn to pieces, and nobody could figure out why Pop and Uncle, Sagamore had driven off, but that just made it all more mysterious.

I didn’t pay any attention to it. I was wondering if I’d go crazy before tomorrow. I
had
to tell them about that double-crossing Curly before the rally started, and suppose they didn’t get back in time? There was no way I could find ’em, even if I could get to town; I didn’t have the faintest idea where they’d gone. There wasn’t anybody else I could tell. And nothing I could do. I might hide or break the jars, but I judged that wouldn’t do any good as long as the boiler and the rest of it was still there, and I sure couldn’t move that.

I fried the baloney for supper, but I wasn’t very hungry and Uncle Finley ate most of it while he went on and on about all the sinners hanging around to get on the ark. He was sure as hell going to enjoy watching ’em drown, the way he sounded. When I unrolled my pallet and Sig Freed curled up beside me, it was a long time before I got to sleep. I was scared, and wished Uncle Sagamore would quit making evidence, but guessed it was like some people are about cigarettes; he’d been doing it so long he couldn’t break himself of it.