Chism’s Dew had a reputation beyond the boundaries of Newton County, and there were even Little Rock politicians, lawyers, and bankers who obtained quantities of it for their personal use and to entertain guests, but the Chisms had never made any effort to market their commodity outside of Stay More…until the 1913 state “drought” created a demand, and the politicians up at Jasper saw a way to get rich from it. At the same time Sull Jerram became county judge, a friend of his got elected the new sheriff, a fellow from somewhere over in eastern Newton County named Duster Snow, who had worked his way up from assessor and surveyor, with a couple of years as a deputy revenue marshal, so he knew the liquor trade inside out. We got a new county clerk and a new county treasurer, and Judge Sull Jerram found himself presiding over a gang of courthouse liars and ruffians and mischief-makers who lost no time in cooking up a surefire scheme for getting rich: marketing Chism’s Dew to the outside world.
Judge Jerram was still Seth Chism’s son-in-law, which didn’t entitle him to a better price than anyone else—he paid the same two dollars per gallon—but he began to buy up every last drop that Seth and his boys could make, as fast as they could make it, and Sull had it hauled off to Jasper, where it was loaded onto a big newfangled vehicle called a motortruck and taken off to Harrison. The Chisms ran out of containers; every jug and gallon demijohn in Stay More had been rinsed and refilled and sold to Sull Jerram, and all the jugs and demijohns that he could bring in from Jasper, Parthenon, Spunkwater, Swain, Nail, Deer—whatever community might have a few—he rounded them up and the Chisms filled them and they found their way to Harrison. When all the jugs and demijohns in Newton County had disappeared, they began to use bean pots, cream pitchers, stone jars, wash pitchers, chicken fountains, soup tureens, punchbowls, compotes, gravy boats, even slop jars or thundermugs.
The Chisms ran out of corn. Or, rather, the Ingledews’ gristmill could not furnish any more cornmeal, having ground up everything the Chisms had raised. My father even made a little pin money selling the hard-dent corn out of his corncrib, and so did everyone else, until all of that was gone, and there were a lot of hungry hogs and chickens that winter. Sull Jerram arranged with whoever was buying the finished product in Harrison to start supplying the raw product, and the motortruck that was transporting the load of containers into Harrison would return with a load of corn or cornmeal.
What the Chisms didn’t know then was that Sull Jerram and his courthouse gang were buying the Chisms’ whiskey for two dollars a gallon and sending it to Harrison, where they were getting four, five, and then six dollars a gallon for it.
But one night in the spring of 1914, the Boone County sheriff and his deputies stopped that motortruck at the Boone County line and confiscated a whole load of whiskey, arrested and jailed the driver, and kept the motortruck. Sull Jerram’s entire bootlegging operation came to a halt. Our new sheriff Duster Snow talked to the Boone County sheriff, but the latter was incorruptible. Judge Jerram tried to work out a deal with the Boone County judge, but the latter was, while not incorruptible, unswayed by Sull’s terms.
Seth Chism, visiting his daughter Irene and her husband the judge at their new Jasper house, had been impressed with their improved standard of living. He himself had built a new barn, put a new roof on his still, replaced his thirty-five-gallon pot still with a hundred-gallon copper still, and replaced the old bedrock furnace with a snail shell furnace, all with the profits from his increased production. And his wife Nancy took to wearing Sears, Roebuck dresses to church. Seth appreciated these improvements, and he was sympathetic when he heard about the confiscation of the motortruck, and he said he’d talk to his boy Nail when Judge Jerram suggested that Nail might be willing to transport a load of whiskey inside his wagon of sheep’s wool, which was going to Harrison anyway.
Nail said he didn’t have any room, that his fleece wagon was loaded down with fleece and the axles would break if he took on a cargo of concealed whiskey. He was just telling the truth. He didn’t really object to his brother-in-law’s bootlegging, although he had resented the extra time he’d had to spend working the still, time spent away from his sheep, who needed him, especially now that shearing time had come. Nail liked making whiskey, and he liked drinking it, and he liked selling it, or he liked seeing his father sell so much of it that the farmplace was getting some improvements. But he just couldn’t see his way to risking a broken axle or two by carrying a load of whiskey inside the load of fleece.
“You’re jist afraid of gittin caught,” Sull Jerram taunted him.
“No, I aint afraid of that,” Nail protested. “Who’d stop me anyhow?”
“What’s wrong with makin two trips?” Sull wanted to know. “Or twenty, if you have to?”
“Yeah,” Seth said to his son, “you don’t have to take it all at once, and you could bring us back a load of corn.”
So Nail agreed to take a load to Harrison inside his load of fleece, although he’d be delivering only half as much fleece as the wool agent was expecting, and he’d have to explain that to the wool agent, and he’d have to deliver and unload the whiskey beforehand. He took his kid brother Luther for company and whatever help he might need, the two of them riding side by side on the buckboard the long trip, Nail telling the boy tales or entertaining them both with his harmonica, playing “Red Wing,” “Turkey in the Straw,” and “Paddy on the Turnpike.”
They didn’t have any problems on the trip into Harrison; but coming home, with the wagon piled high with sacks of cornmeal, a wheel broke and came off, and while they were trying to repair it, a sheriff’s deputy rode up and offered some help and then observed, “Thet shore is a mighty heavy load of corn you’uns is haulin. Whar ye headin with all such as thet?”
Luther, who was fifteen, answered politely, “Stay More,” before his brother could nudge him into silence.
The deputy laughed and said, “I hear tell Newton County is plumb out of corn. The eatin kind, that is.” The deputy helped them fix the wheel, and then he said, “I jist hope you fellers aint aimin to bring none of this here corn back to Boone County in another form. The sherf is real sot in his ways and he’d th’ow ye in jail so hard you’d never git out.”
They drove on and crossed back into Newton County. On the last stretch of road between Parthenon and Stay More they met Judge Sull Jerram in his automobile. Sull didn’t stop. He only waved, and he had a girl with him. The girl was Dorinda Whitter, on her way to Jasper at last. A cloud of thick dust billowed out from the rear end of the Model T and obscured the disappearance of the couple.
“Rindy,” I said to her later, “you were jist out of your fool haid. Don’t you know that everbody in Stay More is talkin about ye?” I guess I knew better than anyone else, except Miss Blankinship, just how dumb Dorinda could be.
“You should’ve seen them boys over to Jasper,” she said. “They hung their mouths open like they never seen a pair of tits before! And I jist wiggled my bosom at ’em! And Judge Sull, he jist took me ever place like he owned the town, and I do believe he does!”
There were some folks, later, who speculated that Nail Chism had had a crush on Dorinda for a long time. If that was true, he was certainly keeping it to himself. As far as I know, he never spoke to her before that June. Some folks were inclined to wonder if he had been “following” her, or at least itching for her. The fact that he was, at twenty-seven, still a bachelor did not of itself raise any eyebrows; we had plenty of single men in Stay More. It ran in families, even: all of the sons of banker John Ingledew were unmarried, six of the most eligible and handsome bachelors in town, and not one of them could get up his nerve to court a girl, let alone propose to one, and all six of them were past marrying age, except for maybe Raymond, the youngest, and I had my eye on him and was cooking up ways to get him to speak to me, or at least notice me. Nail Chism wasn’t like the Ingledew brothers, who were congenitally so shy of any female they couldn’t talk to their own sister Lola; at least Nail was able to talk to Irene…and he
did talk to her and asked her if she knew that Sull Jerram was fooling around with Dorinda Whitter, and Dorinda not but thirteen. Irene told her brother that all she knew was what everybody else seemed to be talking about.
Nail found Sull at the courthouse, and right there in the lobby, within earshot of lawyer Jim Tom Duckworth and Sheriff Duster Snow and whoever else was paying them any attention, Nail told Sull, “I aint runnin any more goods fer ye.”
“That so?” Sull said. “Got skeert bad this run, huh?”
“Naw, but me and Luther did have a little talk with a Boone County deppity.”
Jim Tom and the Sheriff moved a little closer, to hear better, but Nail didn’t elaborate upon his conversation with the deputy. Sull said, “Well, Nail, son, I’m sorry to tell ye, but you aint got any choice. Everbody’s dependin on ye to run that stuff.”
“Find somebody else to depend on,” Nail said calmly, but he was beginning to get angry.
“Aint nobody else with a wagon full of wool,” Sull said.
“I want ye to stop sparkin Dorinda,” Nail said.
Sull laughed. “You sweet on her?”
“Naw, but I’m sweet on Irene, and I don’t want ye treatin her like that.”
“Yo’re welcome to Irene,” Sull said. “Nobody else wants her.”
Nail hit Sull. According to Jim Tom, who told it later around Stay More, Nail just clenched a fist and lifted it faster than anybody could watch and caught Sull under the chin with it and lifted him about a foot off the floor and slammed him up against the wall. Just one punch, and Sull sort of peeled down the wall and into a heap on the floor. Nail turned and walked off, and Jim Tom and Duster Snow lifted Sull into a chair and worked him over to get him awake, and to pacify him Sheriff Snow said to Sull, “I’ll have a little talk with ole Seth fer ye.” And that night the sheriff came to Stay More for the first time and rode his horse up to the Chism place up there on the mountain and sat on the porch with Seth Chism until well past dark, and even spent the night, at Seth’s invitation.
The next morning, as the sheriff was saddling his horse, Nail Chism came down from the pastures where he’d spent the night with his sheep, and walked right up to Duster Snow and said, “Sheriff, you and Sull aint about to make me run any more goods fer ye.”
“We’ll jist see about that, son,” Duster Snow said.
“Yeah,” said Seth Chism to Nail, “you’d best listen to what I got to tell ye, boy. We don’t want to make Mr. Snow mad. He could bust up our still, ye know.”
Nail became very angry. “Go ahead and dust it, Buster!” he snarled at the sheriff, but corrected himself: “Go ahead and bust it, Duster! You bust our still, and I’ll tell the federal law the names of everbody who’s been runnin liquor to Harrison.”
“Reckon yo’re under arrest, boy,” Duster informed him. The sheriff arrested Nail on a charge of assault and battery against the county judge, Sull, and took Nail into Jasper and put him into that big stone jail that’s still there, off the square. Jim Tom tried to bail him out but couldn’t get Nail to meet the condition: to retract his threat to expose the bootleggers to the federal law. So the sheriff let Nail stew for a week in the jailhouse. Jim Tom said the courthouse politicians, of which he was not one himself, were scared of Nail. The politicians, especially the county judge himself, were scared Nail might carry out the threat, he might try to contact Raiding Deputy Collector John T. Burris of the U.S. Revenue Service, or (they hoped Nail was too ignorant to know of the existence of the legendary Burris) he might at least have a chat with Isaac Stapleton, Stay More’s own former deputy collector and onetime assistant to Burris, recently retired from a long career of working downstate busting up stills in Perry and Scott counties. If Stapleton told Nail how to contact Burris, that might blow the lid off the bootlegging operation.
Nail said he wouldn’t have minded staying in the Jasper jail, awful as it was, except that there was nobody to take care of his sheep. His brothers Waymon and Luther visited him, and he tried to explain to them how to do the many little jobs that a shepherd must handle in the month of May, but it was clear that Waymon and Luther didn’t know anything about sheep. The law couldn’t keep Nail in the Jasper jail forever, and Jim Tom convinced Sull and the courthouse gang of politicians of that, so they “released him on his own recognizance,” whatever that meant, but first the entire courthouse gang took him into the jury room and sat around the table with him and talked to him for half the night, and then Sull Jerram told him they would let him go if he’d keep his mouth shut.
But Nail refused to make any promises.
“Oh, Latha, he loves me!” Dorinda exclaimed to me one morning in June on our way to school. It was the last week of the seventh grade for us, and Miss Blankinship was quitting after that, and we’d get us a new teacher the next year, and we could hardly wait to see her go, and meanwhile the weather was beautiful and cool for that time of year, although it was very dry and hadn’t rained since May 4th and wouldn’t rain again for the rest of the summer.
“Who does?” I asked. I wasn’t sure but what she might have heard some of the gossip about Nail Chism having a crush on her, as his motive for hitting Sull Jerram.
“Sull!” she said. “The judge! He told me so! Well, he didn’t come right out and use that word, but he said to me, says, ‘Rindy, sugar babe, you shore make my ole heart beat fast!’ and guess what? He plans to up and leave that Irene for good!”
“Rindy honey sister sweety dear,” I said as nicely as I could, “you have just got to be careful, I know in my bones that a feller like Sull Jerram just wants to get under your dress.”
“So?” she said. “I aint skeert. He’d do it real nice, and I’d even enjoy it myself, I bet ye.”
“And you’d find yourself swole up with a woodscolt!”
“Then he’d dist have to marry me!”
“He’s already married, you fool!”
But trying to talk some sense into Dorinda Whitter was like teaching a kitten to eat apples. She didn’t give a hoot what the world thought of her, and I doubt she cared for my opinions either. When we were still children, she had said to me, “You’re whole lots smarter than me, and that’s how come I lak ye so, but dist don’t never try to tell me what to do.” No use trying to convince her that she was pretty enough to get the best husband in the country if she’d only take her time and behave herself instead of chasing after the first man with an auto to come to town. Sure, Sull Jerram was handsome and sightly, and smart and smooth, and now he was rich to boot, but I wouldn’t have gone into the bushes with him if he’d had three silver balls!
A few days later, after school let out, Dorinda and I were taking a shortcut up through the woods toward our playhouse on the south slope of Ledbetter Mountain. There’s an old cowpath runs up through that copse of chanting walnuts, and we were just tripping along one behind the other up that cowpath when here come Nail Chism, nearly running over us, except he wasn’t running, just walking the way he did, with long, gangling strides.
“Howdy, girls,” was all he said, and grinned bashfully in that woman-shy way that bachelors have.
Rindy and I were so astonished to find somebody on that old cowpath in the woods that we didn’t say anything, and he walked around us and went on his way, and we went on ours, but Rindy kept looking back over her shoulder, as if he might have turned, and once when she did that I challenged her: “You think he’s follerin us?”
“Shhh,” she hushed me, and whispered, “I know he’s follerin us!”
I said, “Why would he do that?”
“Shhh! Why do you think, you silly?!” she whispered, and said, “Ess go!” and began running. We ran all the way up the hill out of the woods and into the meadow and kept running until we reached our playhouse. We got ourselves inside of it, and Rindy knelt at the one little window and peered out, panting and watching, panting and watching. I looked around me, at the poor interior of our old playhouse, and realized that we had outgrown it and would soon be having
to give it up.
“Nail Chism wouldn’t foller us,” I declared.
“You don’t think so?” she demanded. “Then tell me who’s that, Miss Smarty! Santy Claus?” She pointed, and there, down at the edge of the woods, edge of the meadow, far off, stood a man. He was just looking up the hillside toward our playhouse. My heart skipped a couple of beats. Was it Nail? He wasn’t close enough to tell for sure, and you couldn’t tell by his clothes: the men all dressed alike in blue denim overalls and a store shirt and a felt hat. Even those courthouse politicians dressed that way. He just stood there, looking in our direction. We waited. I said to her that whoever it was, he wouldn’t come up to our playhouse and bother us, because there were two of us and we could handle him, but I think I was just talking to myself, not to her.
Finally he disappeared back into the woods. We stayed in the playhouse for a long time, but we were too old for play, and when we left it, we were leaving it for good. Dorinda asked me if I’d come spend the night with her. Sure, I said. “Go ask your mother,” she said. I said she could come with me while I asked my mother. She said no, she’d go on home and do her chores and tell her mother to set out another plate for supper, and for me to just come on whenever I was able.
I went home and told my mother I wanted to spend the night at Dorinda’s. My mother didn’t mind, but I had to slop the hogs and milk the cow before I went. I did, and then I went to Dorinda’s.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1 Page 154
