by Jerry eBooks
“Well, it was the little girl’s death that got the town worked up so bad. The other eight people were all adults, and they should have had sense enough not to get in the way of a killer armed with a scythe. But the little yellow-haired girl—Anyhow, they called on Mr. Killer that night and they took him out of the jail. No fuss, no ceremony—they just took him right out and hung him higher than Haman’s headache on the nearest tree.”
Les said, “But how did they—”
“Oh, the jailhouse was a small one—not much bigger or stronger than ours, I guess. And then it seems the sheriff was an easy-going sort of man, too. You know the kind of man that wouldn’t shoot an egg-sucking dog or a ditto Maxey.”
Cotton tested the edge of the knife on a match he’d had clamped between his teeth. It still wasn’t sharp enough to suit him, though. “You mean there was no trouble at all?” said G.D. Harvison Murrow.
“Well, I guess a couple of rich lawyers blew off a little, but the county officials winked at each other and let ‘er ride. Some people thought it would have been better if they’d handled it that way when the gorilla-man drew his first blood—but like I was saying in the first place, I don’t hold with none of that. Men shouldn’t take the law in their own hands, not even when it’s a matter of protecting their homes and dear ones.”
“I’ve got four little tykes of my own,” yelled Lester Turnidge, “and, Chigger, I’m just sort of curious to know why! Yes, and one of’em’s a little yellow-haired girl, too! Little Sunshine, we call her, and only the other day she was saying, ‘Papa,’ she was saying, ‘don’t call me Little Sunshine any more because sometimes the sunshine—sometimes the sunshine goes—’ ”
“Well, Les?”
“ ‘—out,’ ” whispered Les. “Why, Chigger? Why? Why?”
“Just ain’t right, that’s all. Shows poor spirit . . . There you are, Les—clean as the rim of a bowl. Next pair of ears to be lowered!” G.D. H. Murrow ground his footprints into one of those sporty-looking women they have in the magazine. “Poor spirit, says Chigger! Poor spirit! But it’s fine and dandy for a whole slough of big-fat-bloated-plutocratic-multimillionaire-corporation-lawyers—yes, and upstate ones on top of that!—to come down here and lay every horror in the handbook on us! That’s all right, now ain’t it?”
“Easy does it, G.D. You don’t want to go around talking like a sorehead.”
G.D. shook his two fists at the stuffed raccoon. ‘Just like Claybaugh, that’s his trouble! Red-handed Frankensteen monster goes screaming in there with a gun in each hand and that big old cavalry sword in the other—and Claybaugh he’s too timid to do any more than spank him with a word-puzzle! Afraid to buck The System! Well, he’s a part of The System, that’s why—and I ain’t voted for him any of these past sixteen years without wondering when he’d show his hand!”
He got in the barber-chair panting a little. It was stuffy in there, you know.
I said, “You hadn’t ought to talk that way about Claybaugh, boys. Clay’s all right—it’s just that he don’t like to shoot at people he knows. Why, if a crowd of you was to go up there tonight and say, ‘Claybaugh, we can’t sleep a wink till we’ve taken care of Charlie’—well, like I say, what would happen? Why, Claybaugh he’d just only shake his head sadly and tell you: ‘Guess it’s your right, boys, but I hate to think of what the millionaires will say.’ She’s thin on tap, G.D.”
“Why wouldn’t it be? I’m only a poor man, not one of these big-fat-baldheaded—”
“But of course,” I said, “we don’t live in that kind of town. And Claybaugh probably wouldn’t be there, anyhow—he comes in at ten o’clock for his Sunday shave. Reminds me, I understand he may see Cotton Maxey’s pa tomorrow and make him promise to use a lighter bullwhip when his crippled old mother drags the plow.”
I picked up the straight-edge again. “And personally, boys,” I told them all, “I’m glad to be living in the kind of town where a sheriff can safely leave his jail. I’m glad for Charlie’s sake if nothing else—I wouldn’t want anything to happen to poor old Charlie . . . Something bothering you, Cotton?”
Cotton crouched low and put the point of his barlow knife slowly through the June bug’s middle. Just in time, too—another second and the bug would have found that crack in the door.
CHAPTER THREE
“HERE COMES TOOKIE!”
Well, I don’t know. This is a kind of quiet little garden spot where nothing much ever happens after dark, though we do manage to scare up a bit of excitement at the fall street dances, and I guess there’s little or no point in my keeping the shop open so late on a Saturday. The twilight was nice. At dusk the wind had turned off to a whisper.
Cotton Maxey came upstreet putting one yellow shoe ahead of the other with the particular care of a cat on a clothesline. He was wearing an old carnival streamer around his green hat,—Out For a Good Time, was what it said—and even with the wind going north I could smell the green choc smell that came south.
“Chigger,” said Cotton. “Don’t mean to tell me you’re missing the party.”
I didn’t say aye-yes-or-damn.
“Chigger,” said Cotton. “I figured of course you had your invite, him being a special friend. I even brought him a something my own-self.”
It was a fudget I guess he’d picked up on the wheel o’ fortune for not more than ten or twelve dollars—a little black ball-shaped tiepin with the numeral eight on it.
“Wouldn’t want him to go tacky,” said Cotton. “When a man wears a tie only once in his life, seems like he’d ought to wear something on it.”
“Cotton,” I told him, “I hope some day you’ll drop around and open your barlow knife close enough to me so I can make twins of my favorite barroom poet. And bring your dog. If there’s a flea-trap cur sick enough to like your smell, I’ll provide a cur for each poet.”
The light of his cigarette blew across his eyes and they were crazy. “Oh, will you?” said Cotton. “Oh, peachy!” He crooked his wrists like an edgy girl and went on up towards the grove.
That would have been about half after nine, I’d judge. Yes, I remember it well now—I looked at the clock when I went back inside.
It was quiet and stuffy for a while after that, and there was nothing much to keep me interested but the new supply catalogue.
It was 9:55, as I recall, when I heard the first of the sounds. Smack! it went—smackety-smack!—about like that. It probably would have sounded much louder up-wind, but coming all four blocks downtown it merely had a kind of soft, flat note.
That soon shaded off into nothing at all; and it must have been anyhow five minutes before I heard this heavier noise which was more like someone beating the top of a barrel.
A man yelled once above the noise, but the wind had cracked his words to pieces long before they reached the corner of Main and Seminole. Or maybe he didn’t say anything in actual words; it sounded like G.D. Harvison Murrow uncorking a little rage. For the most part, however, there was only this tunkety-tunk effect and the various small sounds in the trees.
I sat where I was and didn’t say aye-yes-or-hell; but of course it was something a man couldn’t gloss over altogether. Even the ‘coon in the setback appeared to be edgy. The jailhouse was bound to give in before long.
Take it all in all, I was pretty well pleased when Claybaugh came in for his shave. A man likes company around him at such times, you know. That was close on 10:10, I believe, though Claybaugh insisted the clock was four minutes slow by evening alamo time.
He hung up his coat and his vest and guns and he got in the chair. “Not too heavy on the hot towels, Chigger. Seems like it’s hectic enough already with this bad harmattan going night and day.”
“Come twice?”
“Tramontane, mistral, levanter or sirocco,” said Claybaugh. “The wind that walks in the leaves, as the poet says.”
I laid on the towels and boiled him only to a scolded baby blush. I took off the towels and said, “You slung the bolts and
came up through the skylight, I gather. Well, personally, I think you done the right thing. No use a man’s going the roundabout way for trouble.”
We couldn’t very well pretend to ignore it, you know: that would just have embarrassed the both of us. Somewhere the boys had scared up what sounded to me like a crowd-sized ridgepole; and on that sleepy breeze it made a firm, whanging noise only a little more noticeable than the late drought. Dum-dum-dum—like that.
“Guess you’re right, Chigger,” sighed Claybaugh. “Anyhow, Charlie’ll soon be out of it all.”
“That’s how I look at it, too.”
“And it seems to be a good orderly crowd,” said the sheriff.
“Well,” I told him, “I could see ‘er coming this afternoon, Clay—there was some talk against Charlie right in here. But after all, what’s a man to do?”
Claybaugh huffed out a scallop of lather. He drummed his fingers on the sides of the chair and said: “Not much of nothing, I guess. And how I look at it is this: if the jail can be torn down, county needs a new jail bad. Well, it’ll be a whole lot easier to talk up a bond issue when Charlie’s out of his misery at last and people start feeling low-down about the whole thing.”
“That’s a businesslike way to look at ‘er, all right.”
“Blade seems a little dull, Chigger,” said Claybaugh. “I’d feel sort of easier in my mind if Charlie had done more damage with his shooting-piece today; but there’s this much about it, Chig—a hang-rope jerks practic’ly any murder case out of the road. I don’t know—even the courts usually assume that the dead man was guilty as charged. Well; that’s human.”
They were really drumming old Charlie out of there for fair. A broken window-pane tittered high on the gust; but the only windows in the jail were well above a tall man’s reach. The thing that seemed to draw on your nerves was the steady beat of that big old ridgepole fighting at the door.
It worked a little on Claybaugh, too, though Claybaugh has never been the edgy sort. He traded stares with the stuffed raccoon and began to drone through his nose while I whipped a little new into the razor. It was that tired old down-country Johnny Allen tune that goes in one ear and always has such a hard time finding its way out the other.
Johnny, oh, Johnny, oh, poor Johnny Allen—
Why does he shudder and what does he fear?
Only a voice calling over and over,
Crying: Oh, Johnny, my bonny, my dear!
Crying forever to poor Johnny Allen:
Johnny, oh, bonny, oh, dear,
My dear,
My dear.
“Clay,” I told him, “that’s plain morbid for a Saturday night.”
“Don’t blame you much,” said Claybaugh. “Is kind of lonesome, ain’t it? There was another song you hated bad, as I remember. That was the one Cotton Maxey used to coo on the various pool-hall programs: ‘Looky, looky, looky! Here comes Tookie! See you later, boys’ . . . Wup! Nicked me a little.”
“That’s a bad mole, Clay. It ought to come off.”
“Didn’t it?” said Claybaugh. He twiddled his thumbs. “Well, Tookie was a pretty little thing, Chigger. Never forget how she used to dance her way downstreet with all that bright hair burning on her throat and just the right do on her mouth to make it look like fireweed honey tastes . . . Oh, she was pretty! But, Chig, there was more than once I wanted to reverse the order and spank her till she barked like a fox—and I guess maybe it was even worse for an edgy kind of man like you.”
I tapped a spot of lotion onto Claybaugh’s nick. “Tookie has her faults,” I told him. “As who does not?—I always say.”
“Still and all, Chigger, it couldn’t’ve been a whole lot of fun for you when Tookie came sneakfooting in with choc on her breath and her nice rozberry lipstick worn down to the quick. I felt for you, Chigger—I really did.”
I didn’t say aye-yes-or-what of it. It was like that line in McGuffey’s reader: The barber kept on shaving.
Claybaugh said: “Must’ve been particular hell, I should think, with the south wind singing that old, old song: I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now. You remember it, don’t you? Tookie used to whistle it sometimes when she played the piano . . . And you remember the wind, don’t you, Chigger?—that strange wind six summers ago—the slow dark wind that poured over the world like sorghum over a cake . . . Oh, by the way, Chigger, where is Tookie?”
“Puff out your cheek a little, will you? There. Oh, she went to Wichita, Clay—thought you knew. Understand she’s going with some big-millionaire-lawyer now.
CHAPTER FOUR
CRIMSON SPLOTCHES
The crowd upstreet seemed bigger and noisier now. While I wasn’t there at the time, of course, I have an idea the boys at the Club had broken up their pan game in a great big hurry when the news scattered out on the wind.
Cope Powers has always been quite an organizer, you know—he’s president of the Hustle Up dinner group here in town—and now you could hear somebody with Cope’s voice yelling: “Way-y back, fellows! Way-y back!” Then it would be whoom—rest—whoom—over and over that way till it seemed like the slam of old Charlie’s heart against his ribs.
“Can’t be much longer now,” I said.
Claybaugh pulled in a cheek muscle under the scrape of the blade. “And I’ll never forget the night Tookie left you, Chigger. ‘Claybaugh,’ you told me, bawling like a kid, ‘my Tookie’s gone and done ‘er at last.’ Didn’t surprise me a whole lot, of course.”
“Wish you wouldn’t talk so much when I’m trying to make you presentable for—for church. Sets me on edge a little.”
“There was something kind of odd about the house, though,” said Claybaugh. “Queer. I didn’t even notice it at the time, Chig, but later on it came back to me and plagued me now and then for years. Sort of like an old word puzzle you’ve had to put away unworked . . . If Tookie was going to leave him, I says, why would she have bothered herself to drag that big hooked rug out from under the divan and move it clean over to yonder side the room?
I gave the straight-edge a lick and a promise. “Women are strange things, ain’t they? Like Pa Deems used to say: Never marry a woman.”
Claybaugh said: “A man’s mind keeps on playing with problems even after something dark spills over his word puzzle. I think I solved that one tonight at half-past eight by evening alamo time.”
“Did you, now, Claybaugh?”
“Yes. That was when I found myself all-a-sudden moving an old scatterrug over to hide that great big red-ink stain on my office floor. It looked so much like blood.”
The wind ran in the brown catalpas and clashed them together like rattlebones ticking off the beat of a song. Bonny, oh, dear, my dear. I hate those old sad pieces. Give me something lively every time.
“Must have been a bad spot on your parlor floor,” said Claybaugh. “Oh-h, it must have been bad—and especially so if lye and sandpaper and a porcupine brush wouldn’t scour it out of your thoughts . . . Where is she, Chigger? Where’s Tookie cooling off her little heels, Chigger Deems?”
I said: “Wish you wouldn’t talk about her like that. She knew how to laugh, Clay. She knew how to play the piano. I don’t know—maybe she knew how to live.”
“And it’s too dam’ bad she had to die in order to prove it. I guess you know you’re under arrest, Chigger.”
“And I guess you know you’re under a razor,” I said.
It went—whoomety-whoom—sort of like that. Practically any barber might have a bad accident with so much noise going on upstreet. And then, too, people around here know I’m the nervous type. Have been for years. As Colonel Murfree sometimes says, “He jests at scars who was never shaved by Chigger.”
Claybaugh’s hands lay big and flat and still on the arms of the chair. He turned his blue eyes up to mine and they were chiding. “Chig,” said Claybaugh, “alongside you the meanest Maxey smells sweeter than baby’s breath to me. You’re a wicked little man, Chigger Deems.”
“She’s been quite a
sirocco, Claybaugh.”
“That’s like a man blaming his weakness on the liquor he drinks to get weak on. I could excuse you Tookie, maybe—she was the kind of girl that whistles her way to a lonesome grave. But there’s old Charlie, a man that thought more of you than of Bolivar Bear.” Whoom went the maul.
“And there was Miss Eubanks up on the Hill, a poor old thing trying to fill her life with jonquils because she had a set of teeth that once scared Harvison Murrow witless in a kissing game. Never got over it, either—listen to him howl!”
I opened a button on his shirt. “I tried to reason with her, Claybaugh.”
“And I never saw a more convinced corpse.”
“Wish you wouldn’t talk like that, Clay. ‘Miss Eubanks,’ I says to her kindly, ‘you don’t want to stump out all those lovely crab-apple trees. Why, there’s good rich shade there,’ I says to her. ‘Plant you some ginseng roots between the trees and you can make yourself a mint of money when the Chinese market opens up again.”
“And then?” said Claybaugh.
“Oh, no, not Miss Eubanks! It was posies or nothing for her. ‘Ginseng isn’t pretty,’ she kept insisting. ‘Ginseng isn’t pretty,’ she screamed and I guess she was still screaming it some even when I—”
“Take note you’d fetched up her axe from the chopping-block just in case. So Tookie’s under the crab-trees, is she? Thought so.”
“Won’t have people digging there, Claybaugh.”
His eyes were round and steady on mine. “Seems like you’d have done a little digging your own-self when you lost that piece of land to the bank.”
“I’ll tell you, Clay. I hate all this like billy hell, and maybe you’ll think less unkindly of me if I—if I tell you the whole thing before I—It’s Tookie’s voice. It lives on and on in the crab-tree, Clay, and I know it’s there because Charlie Weller heard it his own-self.”
