The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  There was no brush arbor meeting the next day. Hoppy learned from Art Bedwell that the preacher had been taken to the county jail at Clarksville, and the rumor was that he’d not only been caught with an underage female who had not been willing, but had also been intoxicated. This rumor had spread throughout the camp, and some of the campers had already departed. This did not include any of the spongers, who raided the dinner-on-the-grounds as if it were any other day.

  But the pitcher show went on as scheduled. Before it began that night, after Hoppy and Sharline had done their juggling and magic tricks, Art Bedwell asked Hoppy’s permission to make an announcement. The way he made the request gave Hoppy and Sharline the feeling that he had something important to say. Bedwell stood up in front of the screen tacked to the schoolhouse, and Sharline had the idea of turning on the projector without film in it, just to make a kind of spotlight for the storekeeper while he delivered his speech. Although a number of campers had decamped, the brush arbor could scarcely hold a fraction of those who remained. Not very many of them had actually paid admission, but Hoppy didn’t know how to enforce payment among a crowd that large. Sharline was able to refuse pokes of popcorn to anyone who didn’t have money to pay or something to barter, but she couldn’t stop them from snitching the candy she’d spread out on the concessionary table. The whole situation was so bad that it convinced Hoppy he would never have been able to join forces with the preacher. Camp meetings and pitcher shows simply wouldn’t mix.

  Art Bedwell wasn’t a practiced public speaker but he was the town’s leading citizen and his duty in making the announcement gave his voice an authority he didn’t know he had. He shielded his eyes against the glare of the projector and said, “Folks, the camp meetings and these pitcher shows has sure been a boon to one and all. On one hand we’ve seen a many and a many a soul get moved to repent and accept the Lord. On the other hand we’ve sure had some real pleasure watching these exciting shows. Refreshment for the spirit all around.

  “But folks, it has all just got out of hand. Most of you good people are law-abiding and considerate of one another, and do your share to keep everybody happy. But there are some no-good rascals and devils amongst ye who are just out for themselves, taking whatever they can get. The womenfolk of this town have complained to me that they have to work and slave to fix the food for everyone, and they don’t even have time to attend the sermons and the shows themselves!

  “And I’ve heared tell of things missing. You know they’s not a house in this town that has a lock on the door, because most folks don’t even know what locks are. Why, the doors to my store don’t even have locks on ’em, and I’ve commenced to notice things gone. Somebody has been just helping theirself to whatever they want, all over the place!

  “Considering that the camp meetings is supposed to be dedicated to the glory of God, and to bring salvation to the wicked, there has been an awful lot of transgression and mischief a-going on! And I aint even gonna mention what might have become of the preacher hisself. Others have committed not just thievery but drunkenness and cussing and fornication! Why, they’s no telling how many babies has been conceived out of wedlock!

  “My friends, is this a camp meeting dedicated to God or is it a den of iniquity? I aint pointing any fingers, and like I say I aint even gonna mention the preacher hisself. He might have had his weaknesses but he wasn’t responsible for the troubles that this gathering has had. I aint a-blaming Hoppy Boyd neither. It aint his fault that his pitcher shows has attracted undesirable elements like a cow turd draws flies.

  “But me and some of the other respectable citizens of this town, including Deputy Sheriff Higgins, who’s a citizen of this town hisself, has talked this over and we have decided that we’re going to have to close down this whole thing, just as soon as the last episode of ‘The Painted Stallion’ is shown tomorrow night.

  “Meanwhile, it is our duty to ask the bad’uns—and you know who you are—to get out of town! Before sun-up! If tomorrow there is one more act of thievery, or freeloading, or of drunkenness or other misconduct, including fornication, we will shut down this whole proceeding on the spot!

  “Sure, I know the whole country is suffering hard times, and lots of you folks don’t know where your next nickel is a-coming from. But that don’t entitle you to just take whatever you can get.

  “So we might as well start right here and now with all of you’uns who has come to this pitcher show without paying anything for it, not even barter. I want to ask such of you’uns who has sneaked into this show to kindly get up and walk out!”

  Art Bedwell put his hands on his hips and waited for a response from the audience. Hoppy was tempted to speak up and say that he didn’t mind letting some folks in free, since it was the next-to-last night anyhow, but he was no good at all at public speaking. Along with everybody else, he could only tremble beneath Bedwell’s oratory.

  Few folks left, anyhow. Art went on standing there with his hands on his hips, looking around him at dozens of people who had scoffed the admission, but just a handful actually stood up and walked out, and several of those could be seen later, after the installment of “The Painted Stallion” began, standing on the edge of the crowd. Among those on the edge of the crowd, Hoppy recognized the unmistakable fake beard and mustache of the disguise of the disgraced preacher, who, Hoppy assumed, had been released or made bail.

  The show went on. In the projection booth, Sharline asked Hoppy, “Are you and me fornicators?”

  “Honey, we sure are,” he said. “But I don’t think Art means that we have to get out of town on account of it.”

  “I’m glad he spoke up,” she said. “They’ve cleaned me out of candy, and one woman tried to grab my fascinators.”

  Hoppy told her that he had seen in the back of the crowd a figure who was unquestionably Emmett Binns in his disguise. “I reckon they let him out, for some reason,” Hoppy said. “But we don’t have to worry. They’s just one more night to go, after tonight,” he said. “And then we’ll leave all these ‘Christians’ behind us.”

  Just as the pitcher show, “North of the Rio Grande,” was building up to the showdown between the good guys and the bad guys, the sewed-together bedsheets tacked to the schoolhouse suddenly developed some strange glowing rectangles which, Hoppy realized, were the windows of the schoolhouse behind the screen, and were glowing with light. A few of the audience realized the source of the glow, and someone shouted, “Fire!” which you should never do in a crowded theater, even if the theater is out of doors.

  The two-story wooden schoolhouse began to blaze. Hoppy figured that whoever had started the fire must have used some gasoline to help it along. Very quickly the whole building was engulfed in flames, and Hoppy’s bedsheet screen became burning rags that fell to the ground.

  People ran hollering every which way. A bucket brigade was organized, and Art Bedwell furnished all the galvanized pails he’d had for sale in his store, and all the dwellers of the camp furnished their buckets, and a long line of men ranged down to the spring to fill the buckets and pass them from hand to hand. The spring, however, was practically dried up. The line of the bucket brigade was shifted to Bedwell’s well, but that too was quickly dried up. The flaming schoolhouse ignited the brush arbor, and although the brush was still green the fire consumed it and roared out of control and quickly spread to the camp of tents and shacks and wagons, and people scrambled to save whatever possessions and livestock they had. Hoppy drove Topper up the road a safe distance from the fire, where, along with everybody, including the futile bucket brigade, he could only watch as the site of the schoolhouse and the brush arbor and its camp was leveled.

  Art Bedwell remarked to Hoppy, “I reckon I didn’t need to make that announcement after all. The Lord is taking care of the situation, and driving the transgressors out.”

  “The Lord wouldn’t burn down your schoolhouse,” Hoppy observed.

  Fortunately the town had one doctor, who was able to treat the numerous
people who suffered burns, although two or three had to be transported to the hospital in Clarksville.

  Hoppy remained suspicious that Emmett Binns might have been the arsonist. Later that night, when the fire was finished and nothing remained but smoldering piles that would continue smoking all night, an effort was made to find places for everyone to sleep. Hoppy moved Topper back into a part of the meadow where there was no smoke. He checked all of his film to make sure that none of it had been damaged by the heat, taking each metal reel down from its rack on the wall and opening the can and running a length of the reel through his fingers. This took a while. Then he and Sharline prepared for bed. Just as they were turning in, Topper’s back door sprang open, and there was the preacher, still wearing his disguise.

  He pointed his finger at Hoppy. “Satan!” he said. “You’re the devil hisself or else you’re one of Satan’s deputies, sent to tempt me and try me and bring me to ruin. You liquored me up and took away my good sense and then you showed me that lurid pitcher show to inflame my loins and force me into evil! Yea, though I have repented and asked the Lord’s forgiveness, yet am I determined to avenge your wickedness.”

  Hoppy stood up to him. “How do ye aim to do that?” he asked. “Tomorrow at the meeting I’ll confess what you done and what you made me do, and I’ll ask the congregation for their pardon for my misbehavior, and then I’ll ask them to stone you out of this camp!”

  “This camp?” Hoppy said. “Look around out there, preacher. There aint no camp no more. You burned it to cinders!”

  “What?” Binns said, then softened his tone. “Do folks think it was me that set the fire? I swear, it wasn’t me done it. What cause would I have had for doing such a thing?”

  “Burning your bridges,” Hoppy suggested.

  “Huh? No, it wasn’t me, I swear to ye. It must’ve been some of those riffraff that got riled up by Art Bedwell’s little speech.”

  “Well, the camp meeting has been burned out,” Hoppy observed. “If you want to preach against me tomorrow, you’ll have to do it to a standing audience in the hot briling sun. All the seats burned.”

  “Are you fixing to finish the pitcher shows?” Binns asked. “What will folks sit on?”

  “Well, they’ll be so eager to see the last episodes of ‘The Painted Stallion’ that they won’t mind sitting on the ground.”

  “We’ll have to see about that,” Binns said.

  Chapter twelve

  The next day Emmett Binns made a sorry spectacle of himself. Most folks who had come from a distance were headed on back out of town anyway, having decided not to stay around for the last episodes of the serial. Most of the town folks agreed with Art Bedwell that God Himself had brought down the fire upon them, to burn out the evil and wrongdoing. Emmett Binns made an attempt to stop some of the families departing, telling anyone who would listen that the camp meeting would go on, the brush arbor would be rebuilt, and he himself had not only repented and received the Lord’s blessing but would solemnly promise never to touch another drop of liquor nor to lust after any females. But all of his haranguing of the various departers failed to persuade a single one of them to stay.

  Of course there was no dinner-on-the-grounds. Any people still remaining were responsible for feeding themselves, and Hoppy wouldn’t let Sharline fix him a dinner but was content to revert to his customary lunch of Vienna sausages with crackers.

  At what would have been the usual time for the commencement of the brush arbor meeting, Emmett Binns stood on the blackened earth where the pulpit had been and held his arms aloft and boomed, “My friends! Forsake me not! Come and listen to a sinner beg for mercy!” A couple of dogs and one small boy observed him, but were his only audience. Binns mumbled onward for a while, then gave up.

  He ambled over to where Hoppy and some kids were hanging the alabastine duck canvas between two trees to make a screen for the night’s show. “I hope you get a better crowd than I did,” he said morosely.

  “I reckon a few will show up,” Hoppy said. “At least I owe it to ’em to show the rest of the serial.”

  “And then where are you going?” Binns wanted to know.

  “Uh, I don’t rightly know. I reckon me and Sharline will just hit the open road and see where it takes us.”

  “North, south, east or west?” Binns asked.

  “I don’t rightly know that neither.”

  “Have you give up entirely on the idee of me and you becoming partners? I know I’ve disgraced myself as far as this town’s concerned, and probably as far as all of Johnson County is concerned too, but there are other towns all over the Ozarks where nobody knows what a fool I’ve been, and I could make a fresh start and build a new brush arbor, and bring in folks from far and near to hear me and to hang around for your pitcher shows.”

  For a moment Hoppy told himself that Binns was absolutely right, and that a partnership with Binns might possibly bring in a fat lot of coin for both the camp meeting and the pitcher show. But then he had to remind himself of two things, one, that he wasn’t in this racket for the money, and two, Sharline didn’t like Binns. “Preacher, I just don’t think it would work out,” he said. “Sorry, but we’re fixing to go our own way.”

  Binns glowered at him. “Don’t you feel no guilt for putting me in this jam?”

  “Naw, because you put yourself in it.”

  “If it hadn’t been for your whiskey and your goddamn obscene pitcher show, there’d be hundreds of people in this meadow right this minute listening to me lead them to salvation.”

  “Maybe not. Maybe the feller that started that fire was feeling insulted by what Art Bedwell said. Maybe the camp would’ve burned out regardless of the trouble you got into.”

  Binns hung around for another hour, arguing with Hoppy and practically begging for a chance to go with him to whatever town he was going to next, just as a “trial,” to prove that it would work, that Binns would draw a huge crowd, that they could get along just fine, and everybody would live happily ever after.

  By and by Sharline joined them. She listened to Binns ranting on about going with them, and then she said to Binns, “Do you recollect the first thing I said to you when you showed up to make your brush arbor just the other day? I said, ‘You’ve always been liable to just take whatever you please, whether it belongs to ye or not.’ And now you’re trying to take our next town, wherever we go from here. Mister, you’ve got another think a-coming to ye.”

  “Slut!” he said to her. “If it wasn’t for you, I’d have no trouble at-all getting Hoppy to be my partner.”

  “He’s already got a partner,” she said.

  And that should have been the end of the discussion. But Binns got the last word. “I’ll ruin you’uns yet!” he declared. “The day will come when not a town in the Ozarks will want you and your miserable shows!” And he stormed off.

  But he showed up that night for the final run of episodes in “The Painted Stallion,” and even paid his ten cents to get in. He didn’t bother to wear his fake beard and mustache. Some of the town’s kids had gathered and rounded up more tomato crates and planks to make benches replacing those lost in the fire, and Sharline had given them free tickets. She gave another performance with her chiffon fascinators. When it came time for their final magic show, she told Hoppy he ought to make Binns disappear. Hoppy laughed and said, “We’re going to disappear ourselves in the morning.”

  There wasn’t a considerable crowd, mostly just townspeople, but that included everyone who had attended the first episode of “The Painted Stallion” and were now eager to see how the whole journey of the settlers to Santa Fe would turn out. Sharline remarked to Hoppy while the last episode was showing, “Their journey was a little like ours.”

  He thought about that, and understood what she meant. “And you’re the pretty lady on the painted horse, who has been our guardian angel,” he said. “And we’re going to ride off into the sunset together.”

  The next morning, sleeping late, they mis
sed the chance to ride off into the sunrise. It was Sunday. Although the town was large enough to have its own doctor, it didn’t have its own parson, and Emmett Binns offered to conduct the worship services, but Art Bedwell let him understand that he wasn’t welcome. That ought to have been enough to send the preacher packing, but he still hung around, and Hoppy knew he was just waiting for a chance to try to follow Topper to the next town they were going to.

  Just as he had done in the previous towns on the last Sunday of his stay, Hoppy took all of the various things he’d collected for barter—dozens of eggs, gallons of butter, chickens, slabs of bacon and two live piglets—to Art Bedwell’s store in order to redeem them. Bedwell topped off Topper’s tank with gasoline and gave Hoppy thirty dollars and enough credit for Sharline and Hoppy to have a pleasant hour wandering around the big old general store selecting odds and ends of foodstuffs and house wares. After they’d loaded all this loot into Topper, Art Bedwell invited them to Sunday dinner, a substitute for the dinner-on-the-grounds that was usually held in Hoppy’s honor as his last meal in all the towns he visited. “We’ve had enough of them,” Bedwell remarked. Mrs. Bedwell was happy not to have to feed a multitude, and she gave Hoppy and Sharline a real fine roast pork dinner. As they were finishing up the various desserts—custards and cobblers as well as cakes—Art Bedwell went to the dining room window and looked out, and remarked, “He’s still out there, parked right behind Topper.”

  “Sure,” Hoppy said. “He’s just waiting for us to take off, so he can foller us to the next town.”

  Bedwell suggested, “I could get Deputy Higgins to detain him for something, if it would help give you’uns a head start.”

  But when dinner was all over and they said their long goodbyes to the Bedwells and got into Topper’s cab, Binns was no longer around. His Ford coupe had completely disappeared. Still, as Hoppy drove east up the road that would take them to Catalpa and Salus and thence into Newton County, he stopped occasionally and waited to see if the black Ford might be following. Once, because there was plenty of time, he pulled off into a side road that was concealed from the main road, turned around with Topper pointed toward the main road, and they waited there for a while, maybe half an hour, to see if Binns would come along. But he didn’t.