Copper Kettle

by Frederick Ramsay

  Jesse’s grandfather walked to a spot next to the creek. “Right about here. He was lying facedown and his head was nearly in the water.”

  “Umm. And the still was all busted up and lying next to him?”

  “No, more like in front of him in the creek. Them Lebruns…okay, okay, like you say, we don’t know for sure, whoever it was shot Solomon…They must have shoved the whole caboodle in the creek. He come up on them, says something, and he turns to get help. They get scared and they shoot him in the back, so he can’t.”

  “If that were the way it went, Solomon should have been lying over there a dozen yards in the other direction. How’d he end up by the water?”

  “Hell, I don’t know, Jesse. Maybe they drug him over or something.”

  “Why would anybody except a crazy person, even bother with that? Grandpa, listen. You said you sent him up here to tend the fire. So, let’s say he was standing about here.” Jesse took a position a few yards from the still. “Somebody sneaks up behind him and shoots. He falls forward and knocks all the apparatus over into the creek. Don’t that work better?”

  “It does. The problem I see, though, is why shoot him? He weren’t in anybody’s way. If busting the still was the plan, all they had to do would be wait ’til he went home and they could do that and nobody’d be the wiser.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So? Why?”

  “I, honest to God, do not know. That is what I aim to find out. Poor Solomon. He deserved a better hand than he was dealt.”

  “Yep. Um…Jesse, was he, you know, a coward in the war?”

  “Solomon a coward? Why would you think that?”

  “Well, he come back all shaky and like to go to pieces when a loud noise or a gun went off out of his sight. You seen that.”

  “I did. Listen, Grandpa, when it came time to go over the top—that’s what they called climbing out of that gol-’durned trench, and charge across No Man’s Land—Solomon would be the first to go. He fought like a crazy man.”

  “But all that loony business…”

  “It’s what they call shell shock. Try to imagine this. You’re hunkered down in a trench ’bout ten or twelve feet deep. That is in front. In the back trenches where the reserves was at and such, maybe not so deep. Anyway, say the brass hats is planning to attack, or maybe the other side is, or maybe just hoping to kill a bunch of us. So they start by lobbing in mortar rounds. That goes on for an hour. We send some back. Explosions, here, there, everywhere for hours and hours. It stops, ‘Whew,” you say. ‘We can get us some rest now.’ You ease back and it starts all over only this time some sauerkraut-eater six miles away starts lobbing in artillery shells from one of the big damned howitzers they have. Then maybe their cannons would try to blast your parapets down. Grandpa, this could go on for hours and get repeated for three, four nights, in a row, maybe a week. Imagine it…” Jesse pivoted and pointed to various spots in the surrounding woods. “Boom, ka-pow, ba-boom, a-a-a-a, maybe a whiz-bang or two come in. They scare the hell out of you. You only hear them a second before they explode and it’s too late to find a hole to hide in. All this goes on over and over again, hour after hour. Men cracked. Good men. Brave men.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “No, I didn’t. I come close a time or two. I guess I’m just too stupid to know any better. See, here’s how it was. We all knew that soon or late, we was going to die. Out there in the dark was a bullet with your name on it. Every single one of us, English, French, them Canadians and Aussies, everyone thought, ‘I’m going to die.’ That’s a certainty we all figured on, you know? We just didn’t know when. And if that bullet or piece of shrapnel didn’t kill you right off, the gangrene would. It were like that every damned day, see? Every damned day, Grandpa, every damned day! Men broke. Some went back for a rest and done a little better after that. Solomon? He just never got over it. He wasn’t a coward, Grandpa, he was a casualty.”

  Big Tom stared at the ground for a minute He scuffed his feet on the grass. “Poor soul. Well, I reckon he’s at peace now.”

  “Yep. Hard way to find it, though.”

  “Four days, Jesse. You got four days.” Big Tom turned and walked away.

  “Yes, sir, I know.”

  Jesse contemplated his grandfather’s retreating back for a moment. Then he began to walk the perimeter of the area. The still had been set up in a natural clearing. Some new pine and mountain laurel made dense under-foliage between tall, fast-growing tulip poplars. The still would be invisible from outside.

  He knelt, even stretched out flat on the ground for a minute. He picked up a branch, stripped off its limbs, and began poking the bushes. He studied a patch of ground behind one of them. He wished he had one of those newfangled Brownie cameras from the Kodak people that some of the men had brought to the war. Of course, he’d have to come up with the two dollars one cost, and then there’d be more money to get the pictures delivered or whatever they did. No matter. It wasn’t going to happen. He was busted and hadn’t a notion where you went to get the pictures out of the darn thing anyway. He’d just have to remember what those footprints looked like somehow.

  He was sitting on a stump, working out what must have been the angles and locations of Solomon and his attacker, when Abel wandered into the glade.

  “Hoo boy, Jesse, there’s a passel of folks that is pretty steamed at you right now. I think Cousin Anse is ready to call you out.”

  “He’s all swagger, Abel, like a banty rooster. He’s all about strutting and crowing, but ain’t much good for anything else. But if he does screw up enough courage to really do something and I ain’t died of old age by then, I reckon we’ll just have to deal with it. Come over here.”

  Jesse walked him over to the bushes he’d been studying earlier. He pushed the branches aside with his stick. “What do you see?”

  “Foot rints. Any fool can see that.”

  “Right and you ain’t no fool. Whose do you suppose they are?”

  “Holy Ned, how am I supposed to know that?”

  “They are bare feet, right? And not too big.”

  “Boys, girls, women? Shorty McCarter’s got them really tiny feet.”

  “And so does Grandpa. We know for sure he didn’t shoot Solomon, so for now, it’s just feet. So what does it tell us otherwise?”

  You got me there, Jesse. All I see is footsteps. Oh, you mean there’s two sets.”

  “That, for sure, yes. Otherwise, the only important thing at the moment, Abel, is they belong to someone who wasn’t wearing shoes. If they belong to our shooter, it means one thing. Then again, if they don’t, and if they are recent, they’d belong to witnesses. Either way, we know they’re local. We find the owners of these feet and we got us a killer.”

  “That’s a bit of a stretch.”

  “It is, but right now, it’s what we got. We’re looking for some bare feet, Abel. You study them real good. We’re going to have to match them from memory. For example, do you see how that little toe on the left set is squinched over? How many folks hereabouts have a toe like that?”

  “You got me there.”

  “Time to start looking.”

  Chapter Six

  Jesse circled the area one more time and found traces of the footprints he believed were made by the two people leaving the glen. Farther on, they overlapped with what appeared to be the same prints coming from the other direction.

  “Come on, Abel, we’re going to track us a pair of skunks.” They followed scuffed leaves and bent branches through the underbrush to the creekbank. A dozen yards further on, they disappeared. He glanced and the creekbed. “This here is a shallow. I reckon this is where they crossed over. There should be more of the prints on ’tother side.” They splashed across the creek and picked up the trail a few yards downstream. The track twisted through the wood until it joined a reasonably marked path. The earth h
ad been packed down hard from the goings and comings of hundreds of feet over the past months and the prints became more difficult to follow.

  “Jesse, you see which way they are headed, right?”

  “You mean east?”

  “Yep and that means Grandpa is right, it has to be the Lebruns.”

  “Abel, think a minute. One, these prints could sheer off anywhere along this path and we’d never know it. They might even double back. If I was a shooter and just killed somebody, I surer’n hell would make a beeline to where I’m going to hole up. Unless these prints belong to a pair of idiots, figuring the way they’re headed is telling you where they’re going ain’t worth a Confederate ten dollar bill. Two, do you know anybody except Lebruns who live over on the east side? ’Course you do. There’s Barkers and Eveleths, there’s Pennys, and Walkers, though I ain’t so sure about them as being necessarily innocent. There’s all sorts of folks over there who have a problem with all of us who’re related to McAdoos.”

  “Well, sure there is, but none of them is a likely shooter.”

  “No? The trouble with this whole family is we got Lebruns on the brain. Something goes wrong in our lives, it must be the Lebruns causing it. We lose a two-bit piece, the Lebruns must have stole it. A tree falls down in the road, Lebruns pushed it over. Bad as they are, man and boy, they ain’t the only skunks in the woodpile. I want them to be guilty as much as the next man, but I want to be sure it’s them before I start throwing lead their way.”

  “Gol’ by damn, I swear, Jesse, you are the most pig-headed man in the whole durn state.”

  “Maybe I am. But I will not be the horse led to the glue factory for bucking off the wrong rider. You think about it.”

  Abel raised his hands in the air. “Jesse, what’s to think? We have to stand together.”

  “Abel, listen to me. You do not want to end up a sad old man on this mountain. I don’t reckon I’ll ever find my way off, but you’re young and got opportunities. Chose them, not ‘I’m a McAdoo, I let someone else do my thinking for me.’ Be your own self.”

  “Jesse, I don’t understand. Living here is the best, for sure.”

  “No, Abel it is the second-worst place I ever lived.”

  “The second?”

  “Them trenches was a hundred times worse. This is not the life you want. It don’t lead anywhere. You know that old railroad track they built when the logging was big business? A train ain’t rolled on it in forty years, but it’s still there. You know where it leads? Nowhere. It is a dead end. Life on this mountain is like that. It will get you nowhere, Abel. It’s from another time and it ain’t going get you anyplace except old, and tired, and broke. You don’t want to end your days scratching a living off of land that played out fifty years ago or running moonshine, maybe going to jail and, worst of all, living in ignorance like a blind pig rooting for acorns, just like your brother and cousins. Don’t do it. Get out.”

  They spent the next hour in an unsuccessful attempt to pick up the trail of footprints. By mid-afternoon Jesse admitted they’d hit a wall. By then the scowl that Jesse’s tirade had put on Abel’s face had disappeared. Everyone knew he loved his brother, but sometimes, the folks who knew him best, wondered about Jesse. Must have been the war that turned him.

  Jesse sent his brother on home. He wanted some time alone. Too much time with Abel and he found himself ready to smack him along side of his head. He loved his brother and he worried about him. There were times when that boy like to drive him crazy. Of all the clan, Abel had a chance to be something more than just another mountain yokel. The city slickers had a name for people like him and Abel. During boot camp, some men from up north called Solomon and Jesse “hillbillies.” They did so for two or three days until Jesse walked them behind the barracks one evening before taps. The next morning four recruits from New Jersey showed up for inspection with shiners the size of flapjacks. “Hillbilly” disappeared from the vocabulary of Company B from that day on. But, if he was honest, Jesse knew that hillbillies was exactly what they were—backward, ignorant, and slow-thinking men who would be used and ill-used throughout their lives by people with power and money. Jesse figured he could manage alright, but his younger brother deserved a better life than that. Jesse hoped it wasn’t too late.

  He found a fallen tree trunk and sat. Some birds sang in a tree nearby and a light breeze stirred the leaves. Light filtered through the canopy of new growth trees and at that moment, Jesse thought, if this was all there was to living on the mountain, then maybe Abel had it right. The simple truth, however: it wasn’t like this. It was hard and cruel and uncertain. He pulled his thoughts back to his problem. There was something all wrong about Solomon’s killing, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. If it had been anyone else, you might be able to put a cause-and- effect story together, but Solomon was a lost soul, a threat to no one in any way, shape, or form. People ridiculed him, but no one disliked him. So, why kill him? Why not Big Tom, or Anse, or him, even? Anse McAdoo had been begging for a bullet ever since he learned to talk, and not just from the Lebruns.

  Jesse needed someone to talk to. In the Army, he’d discovered that when he spoke a plan out loud to someone, he could right off hear the problems in it. Who would listen to him talk? None of his relatives, for sure. They would just start arguing with him and hollering “Lebruns musta done it.” It was like they had ear wax so bad that was the only word that got through. He looked skyward to estimate the time. A little past three, if he figured it right. If he hurried, maybe he’d be lucky and get to the mill before R.G. Anderson got back from Roanoke. then maybe Serena Barker would hear him out. Women, he had to admit, made better listeners than men, except maybe preachers. Though this latest preacher that headed up the little church down near the road wasn’t one of them that did. Serena, on the other hand, would. He hoped she would, anyway.

  He stood and made his way back down the mountainside toward the road and the mill. He made sure that none of the McAdoos or the associated families saw him.

  Chapter Seven

  As it happened, R.G. Anderson had returned from Roanoke and now occupied a desk in the corner behind Serena. She had not moved except she’d taken off her hat and had donned black sleeve stockings. She looked up at Jesse through lowered eyelids and thick lashes. Jesse thought he spotted a hint of a smile. No doubt about it, she was a looker. He paused at the doorsill, unsure how to proceed. Having a chat with her about killings and retribution was not going to happen now. R.G. leaned forward and squinted through his thick glasses.

  “Is that Jesse Sutherlin?”

  “Yes, sir, it’s me alright.”

  “Well, look at you. War sure seemed to have done you some good. All that marching and such. Gotta build a man’s character and body, ain’t that right? I think being a soldier should be every able-bodied man’s duty. I’m just heartbroke my bad eyes kept me from the action over there. Boy, I bet you shot a passel of them German devils, didn’t you?”

  “I can’t rightly say, Mister Anderson. It’s a pretty confusing time when folks is shooting and the cannons are going off right and left.”

  “Now, I now you’re just being modest. Here, sit down. Miss Barker tells me you would like a job here at the mill. Is that right?”

  “Yes sir, I would. I’m a good worker and a quick learner and—”

  “I ain’t worried none about that. You served in the war. Boys like you need to be took care of. So, how’s stepping in as foreman sound?”

  “Foreman? Mister Anderson, I worked this mill for one summer when I was fifteen. What I learned then don’t qualify me to be a foreman.”

  “Nonsense. It isn’t a complicated business. The sawyers have all been doing their job for all their growed up lives. You just nudge them along, that’s all. Here, Miss Barker will walk you around. You have a word or two with the men, look at the layout, then comeback and we’ll sign you on. Alrighty, Missy, up
and at ’em.”

  Serena stood and pulled the sleeve protectors free, retrieved her hat, and started toward the door.

  “Follow me, Mister Sutherlin.” She pointed toward the door and gifted him with a grin.

  When they were well away from the office building, Jesse turned to her. “What in all that’s holy is your boss going on about? I ain’t no foreman.”

  “That’s where you are wrong, Jesse. Okay, there’re two things you have to consider here. Number one, you don’t have to know a whole lot to boss these men around. It helps if you can show a new hire how to do his job, but it’s not that important. What is important is the men have to respect you and know they can trust you, know you will stand with them. You do all that, and you can be the foreman. You were an officer in the Army, isn’t that right? Same thing. Besides, most of these boys, they’re pretty set in their ways and they’d rather not take on the responsibility.”

  “Okay, maybe that’s true. What’s number two?”

  “Two? Oh, two, Mister Anderson is a hero worshipper. He wanted to sign up for the war but he’s, like, blind as a bat without his specs. He heard about some of your doings over there in France and he, I don’t know, wants to stand in your shine, I guess.”

  “Stand in my…he don’t have a notion what went on over there, does he? He’s one of those flag waving, ‘War is heroic and grand,’ people ain’t he?”

  “That isn’t fair, Jesse. It’s just that he joined up as a boy when we fought the Spaniards. He said he was with Roosevelt on Kettle Hill. Back then his eyes weren’t so bad, I guess, and besides, Teddy Roosevelt had bad eyes then, too, so I guess they were okay with that. They told him this time he was too old and his eyesight too bad and turned him down. Anyway, Jesse, the newspapers were all filled up with stories written by men who claimed they were over there and they did make it sound pretty glorious. You even got a mention now and again.”

  “Me? What them papers say I did?”

  “Well, if I remember right, there was the time you jumped in a German trench and killed all the men who were shooting one of those machine gun things and took a slew of prisoners. That was true, wasn’t it?”