Tales for a Stormy Night

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “Think so, Hank?”

  The next thing I heard, she got Anne Pendergast and the twins to tow the Studebaker and her back to the used-car lot. The two women sent the boys home and then sat in Clara’s car until the dealer finally came out to them. “Like I told your lawyer, lady, it’s too bad, but…” He said something like that, according to Anne, and Clara stopped him right there. “I got me another lawyer,” she said and jerked her thumb toward the back seat, where the old shotgun lay shining like it had just come off the hunters’ rack in Prouty’s. Anne asked him if he’d ever heard of Clara McCracken.

  Seemed like he had, for when Clara drove up to where I was painting the Red Lantern sign she was behind the wheel of a red Chevy roadster with a motor that ran like a tomcat’s purr.

  “How much?” I wanted to know. Her funds were going down fast.

  She opened the rumble seat and took out the shotgun. “One round of shot,” she said. “That’s about fifteen cents.”

  I didn’t say anything in the town about the partnership I’d drawn up so that Clara could reopen the bar in the Red Lantern. For one thing, I wasn’t sure when we’d get the license if we got it, even though Clara was moving full steam ahead. For another thing, I had to stop dropping in at Turtle’s Tavern. I just couldn’t face Jesse Tuttle after setting up in competition, even though it was a mighty limited partnership I had with Clara. I didn’t want to be an innkeeper and it riled that McCracken pride of hers to have to go outside the family after a hundred and fifty years. We wound up agreeing I was to be a silent partner. I was to have all the beer I could drink free. That wasn’t going to cost her much. Even in the days of Maudie’s Own Brew, I never drank more than a couple of steins in one night’s sitting.

  The license came through midsummer along with instructions that it was to be prominently displayed on the premises at all times. Clara framed it and hung it where you’d have needed a pair of binoculars to see what it was. By then the rooms upstairs had been aired out, the curtains hung, and all the mattresses and pillows treated to a week in the sun. Downstairs, the lounge was open to anybody willing to share it with a horde of insects. Prouty had ordered her some of those fly-catching dangles you string up on the lightbulbs, but they hadn’t come yet. What came with miraculous speed was a pretty fair order of whiskeys and a half dozen kegs of beer with all the tapping equipment. I asked Clara how she decided on which brewery she was going to patronize.

  She said the girls advised her.

  And, sure enough, when I spoke to Prouty about it later he said, “So that’s why Mrs. Prouty was asking what my favorite beer was. Didn’t make sense till now. We ain’t had a bottle of beer in the house since she got on the board of elders.”

  “Didn’t you ask her what she wanted to know for?”

  “Nope. I wanted to be surprised when the time came.”

  I suppose it was along about then I began to get a little niggling tinkle in my head about how friendly Clara and the women were. Most of those girls she spoke of were women ranging from thirty to eighty-five years old.

  Going across the street and up the stairs to my office over Kincaid’s Drugstore, I counted on my fingers this one and that of them I’d seen up there since Clara came home. I ran out of fingers and I’d have run out of toes as well if I’d included them.

  Jesse Turtle was sitting in my office waiting for me, his chair tilted back against the wall. I don’t lock up in the daytime and the day I have to I’ll take down my shingle. I felt funny, seeing Turtle and feeling the way I did about competing with him, so as soon as we shook hands I brought things right out into the open. “I hope you don’t take it personal, Jesse, that I’m helping Clara McCracken get a fresh start.”

  Jesse’s a big, good-natured man with a belly that keeps him away from the bar, if you know what I mean. It don’t seem to keep him away from Suzie. They got nine kids and a couple more on the hillside. “I know it’s not personal, Hank, but it’s not what you’d call friendly, either. I was wondering for a while if there was something personal between you and her, but the fellas talked me out of that idea.”

  I don’t laugh out loud much, but I did then. “Jesse, I’m an old rooster,” I said, “and I haven’t noticed if a hen laid an egg in God knows how long.”

  “That’s what we decided, but there’s one thing you learn in my business: don’t take anything a man says about himself for gospel. Even if he’s telling the truth, it might as well be a lie, for all you know listening to him. Same thing in your business, ain’t that so?”

  “Wouldn’t need witnesses if it wasn’t,” I said.

  I settled my backside on the edge of the desk and he straightened up the chair. I’d been waiting for it to collapse, all the weight on its hind legs. He folded his arms. “What’s going on up there, Hank?”

  “Well, from what she said the last time we talked, she plans to open officially when the threshing combine comes through.” We do as much farming in Ragapoo County as anything else, just enough to get by on. But we grow our own grain, and the harvest is a pretty big occasion.

  “She figures on putting the crew up, does she?”

  “She’s got those eight rooms all made up and waiting. She got to put somebody in them. I can’t see her getting the cross-country traffic to drop off the Interstate.”

  Turtle looked at me with a queer expression on his face. “You don’t think she’d be figuring to run a house up there?”

  “A bawdy house?”

  Tuttle nodded.

  I shook my head. “No, sir. I think that’s the last thing Clara’d have in mind.”

  “I mean playing a joke on us, paying us back for her having to go to prison.”

  “I just don’t see it, Jesse. Besides, look at all your womenfolk flocking up there to give her a hand.”

  “That’s what I am looking at,” he said.

  Every step creaked as he lumbered down the stairs. I listened to how quiet it was with him gone. I couldn’t believe Jesse was a mean man. He wouldn’t start a rumor if he didn’t think there was something to back it up with. Not just for business. We don’t do things like that in Webbtown, I told myself. We’re too close to one another for any such shenanigans. And I had to admit I wouldn’t put it past a McCracken to play the town dirty if she thought the town had done it to her first. I certainly wouldn’t have put it past Maudie. There was something that kind of bothered me about what was taking place in my own head: I kept mixing up the sisters. It was like Maudie was the one who had come back.

  Clara drove eighty miles across two counties to intercept the threshing combine—ten men and some mighty fancy equipment that crisscross the state this time every year. She took Anne Pendergast and Mary Toomey with her. Mary’s a first cousin of Prouty’s. And on the other side of the family she was related to Reuben White, something Prouty called my attention to. Reuben’s folks moved away after the trial…It wasn’t so much grief as shame. I didn’t like doing it, but it’s a lawyer’s job, and I painted the boy as pretty much a dang fool to have got himself killed that way.

  The women came home late afternoon. I saw them driving along Main Street after collecting all the Pendergast kids into the rumble seat. Anne had farmed them out for the day. I headed for the Red Lantern to see what happened. Clara was pleased as jubilee: the combine crew had agreed to route themselves so as to spend Saturday night in Webbtown.

  “And they’ll check into the Red Lantern?” I said. Ordinarily they split up among the farmers they serviced and knocked off five percent for their keep.

  “Every last man. Barbecue Saturday night, Hank.”

  “What if it rains?”

  “I got Mrs. Prouty and Faith Barnes working on it—the minister’s wife?”

  “I know who Faith Barnes is,” I said, sour as pickle brine. The only reassuring thing I felt about the whole situation was that Mrs. Prouty was still Mrs. Prouty.

  I came around. The whole town did. Almost had to, the women taking the lead right off. Clara invited
everybody, at two dollars a head for adults, fifty cents for kids under twelve. All you could eat and free beer, but you paid for hard liquor. I recruited young Tommy Kincaid and a couple of his chums to dig the barbecue pits with me. Prouty supervised. Mrs. Prouty supervised the loan and transfer of tables and benches from the parish house. They used the Number One Hook and Ladder to move them, and I never before knew a truck to go out of the firehouse on private business except at Christmastime when they take Jesse Turtle up and down Main Street in his Santa Claus getup.

  Saturday came as clear a day as when there were eagles in the Ragapoo Hills. Right after lunch the town youngsters hiked up to the first lookout on the County Road. It reminded me of when I was a kid myself and a genuine circus would come round that bend and down through the town. I’d expected trouble from the teenage crowd, by the way, with Clara coming home. You know the way they like to scare themselves half out of their wits with stories of murder and haunted houses. The Red Lantern seemed like fair game for sure. Maybe the Pendergast twins took the curse off the place when they scrubbed the steps, I thought, and then I knew right off: it was their mothers who set down the law on how they’d behave toward Clara. In any case, it would have taken a lot of superstition to keep them from enjoying the harvest holiday.

  Along about four o’clock the cry came echoing down the valley, “They’re coming! They’re coming!” And sure enough, like some prefabricated monster, the combine hove into view. Tractors and wagons followed, stopping to let the kids climb aboard. Behind them were the farmers’ pleasure cars, women and children and some of the menfolk, dressed, you’d have thought, for the Fourth of July. The only ones left behind came as soon as the cows were let out after milking.

  There was a new register on the desk and one man after another of the harvesters signed his name, picked up the key, and took his duffle bag upstairs. They came down to shower in the basement, and for a while there you couldn’t get more than a trickle out of any other tap in the house. By the time they were washed up, half the town had arrived. I never saw our women looking prettier, and I kept saying to myself, gosh darn Turtle for putting mischief in my mind. Even Clara, with color now in her cheeks, looked less like Maudie and more like the Clara I used to know.

  The corn was roasting and the smell of barbecued chickens and ribs had the kids with their paper plates dancing in and out of line. There were mounds of Molly Kincaid’s potato salad and crocks full of home-baked beans, great platters of sliced beefsteak tomatoes, fresh bread, and a five-pound jar of sweet butter Clara ordered from the Justin farm, delivered by Nellie Justin. Clara sent her to me to be paid her three dollars, but Nellie said to let it take care of her and Joe and the kids for the barbecue. Neither one of us was good at arithmetic. Peach and apple pies which any woman in town might have baked were aplenty and you can’t believe what a peach pie’s like baked with peaches so ripe you catch them dropping off the trees.

  It was along about twilight with the men stretched out on the grass and the women sitting round on benches or on the veranda, dangling their feet over the side, when I tuned up my fiddle and sawed a few notes in front of the microphone. I never was amplified before and I don’t expect to be again, but Dick Moran who teaches history, English, and music at the high school set up a system he’d been tinkering with all summer and brought along his own guitar. We made a lot of music, with everybody clapping and joining in. Real old-fashioned country. You might say people danced by the light of the moon—it was up there—but we had lantern light as well. I’d called round that morning and asked the fanners for the loan of the lanterns they use going out to chores on winter mornings. And when it finally came time for these same farmers to go home, they took their lanterns with them. One by one, the lights disappeared like fireflies, fading away until the only outdoor light was over the hotel entrance, and it was entertaining a crowd of moths and June bugs, gnats and mosquitoes.

  Most people who lived in town weren’t set on going home yet. Tuttle had closed up for the evening, not being a man to miss a good meal, but he said he thought he’d go down now and open up the tavern. Turtle’s Tavern never was a place the womenfolk liked to go, but now they said so right out loud.

  Without even consulting me, Clara announced I’d fiddle in the lounge for a while. The women took to the idea straight off and set about arrangements. The old folks, who’d had about enough, gathered the kids and took them home. The teenagers went someplace with their amplifying history teacher and his guitar. The men, after hemming and hawing and beginning to feel out of joint, straggled down to Turtle’s. By this time the harvesters, with their bright-colored shirts and fancy boots, were drinking boilermakers in the bar. I didn’t like it, but they were the only ones Clara was making money on, and she kept pouring. Prouty hung around for a while, helping move furniture. I asked him to stay, but he must have sneaked away while I was tuning up.

  It gave me a funny feeling to see those women dancing all by themselves. I don’t know why exactly. Kind of a waste, I suppose. But they sure didn’t mind, flying and whirling one another and laughing in that high musical trill you don’t often hear from women taught to hold themselves in. A funny feeling, I say, and yet something woke up in me that had been a long time sleeping.

  Clara came across the hall from the taproom now and then, hauling one of the harvesters by the arm and kind of pitched him into the dance. His buddies would come to the door and whoop and holler and maybe get pulled in themselves. I kept thinking of my chums, sulking down at Tuttle’s. I also thought Clara was wasting a lot of the good will she’d won with the barbecue. Man and wife were going to have to crawl into bed alongside each other sometime during the night.

  Along about midnight Clara announced that it was closing time. Everybody gave a big cheer for Hank. It was going to take more than a big cheer to buoy me up by then. I could’ve wrung out my shirt and washed myself in my own sweat.

  I couldn’t swear that nothing bawdy happened the whole night. Those harvesters had been a long time from home and some of our women were feeling mighty free. But I just don’t think it did, and I’ll tell you why: Clara, when she pronounced it was closing time, was carrying a long birch switch, the kind that whistles when you slice the air with it, and the very kind Maudie had taken to Reuben White one night when he danced too intimate with Clara.

  I was shivering when I went down to bed. I thought of stopping by Turtle’s, but the truth was I didn’t even want to know if he was still open. I’d kept hoping some of the men would come back up to the Red Lantern, but nobody did. I did a lot of tossing and turning, and I couldn’t have been long asleep when the fire siren sounded. I hadn’t run with the engines for a long time, but I was out of the house and heading for the Red Lantern before the machines left the firehouse. I just knew if there was trouble that’s where it was.

  I didn’t see any smoke or fire when I got to the drive, but Luke Weber, our same constable, waved me off the road. I parked and started hiking through the grass. The fire trucks were coming. I started to run. When I got almost to where we’d dug the barbecue pits, something caught my ankle and I fell flat to the ground. Somebody crawled up alongside me.

  “It’s Bill Pendergast, Hank. Just shut up and lie low.”

  I couldn’t have laid much lower.

  The fire trucks screamed up the drive, their searchlights playing over the building, where, by now, lights were going on in all the upstairs rooms.

  Pendergast said, “Let’s go,” and switched on his flashlight.

  A couple of minutes later I saw maybe a half dozen other flashes playing over the back and side doors to the inn. By the time I got around front, Clara was standing on the veranda with the fire chief. She was wearing a negligee you could’ve seen daylight through if there’d been daylight. The harvesters were coming downstairs in their underwear. A couple of the volunteer firemen rushed up the stairs, brandishing their hatchets and their torches.

  By then I’d figured out what was happening and it mad
e me sick, no matter what Turtle and them others thought they were going to flush out with the false alarm. Not a woman came down those stairs or any other stairs or out any window. They did come trooping down the County Road, about a dozen of them. Instead of going home when Clara closed, they’d climbed to where they could see the whole valley in the moonlight. The fire chief apologized for the invasion as though it had been his fault.

  “I hope you come that fast,” Clara said, “when there’s more fire than smoke.”

  I was up at the Red Lantern again on Sunday afternoon when the harvesters moved on, heading for their next setup in the morning. Clara bought them a drink for the road. One of them, a strapping fellow I might have. thrown a punch at otherwise, patted Clara’s behind when she went to the door with them. She jumped and then stretched her mouth in something like a smile. I listened to them say how they’d be back this way in hunting season. They all laughed at that and I felt I was missing something. When one of them tried to give me five bucks for the fiddling, I just walked away. But I watched to see if any extra money passed between them and Clara. That negligee was hanging in my mind.

  A few nights later I stopped by Tuttle’s. I figured that since I’d laid low with the fellows I might as well stand at the bar with them, at least for half my drinking time. I walked in on a huddle at the round table where there’s a floating card game going on most times. But they weren’t playing cards and they looked at me as though I’d come to collect the mortgage. I turned and started to go out again.

  “Hey, Hank, come on back here,” Pendergast called. “Only you got to take your oath along with the rest of us never to let on what we’re talking about here tonight.”