Copper Kettle

by Frederick Ramsay

  “That wasn’t what I was going to say, you smart aleck, and you know it. Besides, where in tarnation am I going to get ice for that box?”

  “Now you’re talking.”

  ***

  Jesse had arranged to meet Serena by the old Spring House on a tract of land that had once been called The Oaks and was thought to have belonged to Fitzhugh Lee. Legend had it that Lee’d built himself a hideaway on the mountain. That was the rumor. The facts of the matter were muddied by the number of men who, at the turn of the century, felt compelled to claim a familial tie to the Lees of Virginia and Maryland. The actual ownership remained a mystery. In any event, all that remained of the estate was the Spring House. It served as neutral ground. A kind of No Man’s Land, Jesse thought. Neither McAdoos nor Lebruns claimed it as their own.

  Serena waited for him in the shadow of an old black walnut tree. Jesse waved and without realizing it, began to size up the tree into useable lumber of various lengths, thicknesses, and widths. He smiled.

  “Something funny, Jesse Sutherlin?”

  “No. I was walking up here to say hi and even though I ain’t spent a day in my new job, I was counting the profit in that tree.”

  “You could, if you knew whose property it stood on. There’s a dozen of these trees around here but nobody has yet figured who of the hundreds of Lee decedents, real and imaginary, it rightly belongs to. You figure that out and R.G. will probably give you the Ford for free.”

  “Okay, I’ll get right on that. What have you got for me otherwise?”

  “I had a word with my brother. He thinks you’re plumb crazy to take this on, by the way. I agree with him on that score. He says reasonable conversations between us and you-all is a dream. I said, more like a nightmare.”

  “There’s a but in there somewhere.”

  “But, he said the news about your cousin being shot made the rounds and nobody over there knows anything about it. He talked to a bunch from all over, Jesse. They are as ignorant as to who pulled that trigger as you are. You should also know, be warned more like, that they are expecting a gang of McAdoos to ride over and start shooting. They are ready for you, Jesse. There won’t be just one dead man when this is over. There’ll be a dozen or more.”

  “I need to talk to someone over there who can help stop this.”

  “Let’s hope you aren’t too late.”

  Chapter Ten

  The sun slid down toward the horizon. Jesse turned and studied Serena’s profile in the fading light. They’d grown up together as children, but Serena wasn’t a child anymore. Back then, they’d been subject to their families’ disapproval. “Lebruns and McAdoos don’t mix,” they’d been told. Still they’d kept up as best they could. When Jesse turned twelve, he’d followed the path most of his contemporaries took and dropped out of school. His father’s farm didn’t produce much—some corn, potatoes, and beans. The land had played out and modern agriculture practice had not been introduced to the mountain. Nor would it ever be. His father signed on with a timbering operation in the valley and the farming had been left to his sons. In good years, they would have a pig to slaughter and chickens. Local rabbits, opossum, and wild turkeys supplemented the family’s protein intake.

  Serena’s contemporaries, her cousins and neighbors—if they were female they were assumed to be fit only for having babies and taking care of a house, and not much else—had all been married off and some were already facing their third pregnancy. Serena, on the other hand, had been allowed to advance all the way to the ninth grade before the pressure built for her to marry and get on with life. She’d avoided becoming a child bride like the rest because she’d convinced her parents she’d be more useful if she worked at a job. She was an only daughter and the apple of her father’s eye and he, to the consternation of his neighbors, had supported her. She’d taught herself how to type, file, and do simple bookkeeping. So now, at the ripe old age of nineteen and still unmarried, she had become the major wage-earner and consequently, the object of local gossip.

  “Jesse, you need to get off this mountain,” she said.

  “Me? I don’t think so, Serena. I am stuck here. You maybe can do it. You’re smart and can do things that folks will pay you for. I want Abel to get out, but not me. I’m stuck here for the rest of my days.”

  “That can’t be true. Why do you say that?”

  “Do you know what the flatland people call us? Hillbillies. I skinned my knuckles a time or two when they threw that at me and Solomon, but you know what? They’re right. We are just rubes, yokels, the world’s leftovers. We try to hold on to the only way of life we know, but it don’t fit into the way things are anymore. We have nothing to offer except being the object of their jokes.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It is. Look at me. I can barely read or write. Numbers only add up if they’re small. I am just another stupid hillbilly and that’s a fact.”

  “You are not stupid. Ignorant, yes, but not stupid.”

  “Oh really, Missy? Tell me the difference.”

  “Ignorant is when you don’t know something. That is not a bad thing. It is a…um, a circumstance. You can change that. Stupid is when you are ignorant and are proud of it, when you won’t fix it even if you could. You take your cousin Anse or the Lebruns generally. They are stupid.”

  “I’m not, you think?”

  “I think that if you don’t know something and you aren’t satisfied with that state of affairs, you will go dig out the information. That’s the opposite of stupid.”

  “Unh, huh. Well, that is as may be. Like I say, the only person I want off this mountain is my brother Abel. He can do better.”

  “Jesse, bless your heart, Abel ain’t never going to leave this place. You might as well give up that crusade.”

  “You’re saying he’s stupid like the rest of us?”

  “Not the rest and not stupid. He’s more like, backward.”

  “Backward? So, the difference is?”

  “Okay, stupid is ignorant and proud of it, Backward is ignorant and comfortable with it. Boys and men like Abel are happy where they’re at. They fit in like a pebble fits in the creekbed. They will stay wherever God puts them and never complain or look past it. Content.”

  “You don’t think I’m backward?”

  “No. Okay, here’s a question. We’re sitting on a tract of land. There’re all sorts of stories about who owns it and so on, but look around you. What do you see?”

  “In this light, not much.”

  “Then, before it got dark, what did you notice?”

  “Trees.”

  “Don’t go all pig-headed on me, Jesse. What did you see?”

  “Well, there’s a pretty good stand of hardwoods here. This tract is supposed to be ten acres and there is maybe ten harvestable trees on each one of them so, there is some money to be made if R.G. could get his hands on the timber rights.”

  “And?”

  “Nobody really knows who owns the land or if the rights is available.”

  “And?”

  “And a trip to the county seat might tell you all that.”

  “And?”

  “And what? You think there’s more? If it were me, I hop on over to the courthouse and find out, then…Okay there’re two possibilities. Land around here is selling for ten dollars an acre. Ten acres would be worth, um—”

  “One hundred dollars.”

  “Right. So, if it were for sale, and if I could scratch up that kind of money, I’d buy it and then sell the rights to R.G. my own self. I’d more than just get my money back and I’d still have me ten acres of pretty nice land. So, with the board feet I reckon you could take off this pace, I’d get money back four times over. Maybe even more, depending on how straight the trees is and how many there are. The second case, the land isn’t for sale but the rights are, then same deal. Buy an
d sell.”

  “There you go. You are not stupid. You are not backward.”

  “This is a good piece of land, ain’t it?”

  “Not for farming.”

  “No, but for living on. You clear out the timber, let the new growth come in. Plant a vegetable patch. It could be nice.”

  “For some, but not for me. Jesse, I said I think you need to move on. Me too. I am not going to die on this mountain.”

  “Where, then?”

  “I don’t rightly know.”

  “I’ve seen cities, Serena, Richmond, Baltimore, even Paris, France. They are exciting places for a visit, but I don’t want to live in one of them. Once you get past the lights and glitter and look around, you see they are hard places. You can find yourself lost and alone in a crowd. Here you can be poor as dirt, but you have, I don’t know, dignity. In the cities, you are also poor, but disposable like trash. If I’m going to die, I want to do it someplace where the air is clear and the water sweet.”

  “Roanoke?”

  “Still too big and the folks there are too much like the folks in the big cities that they want to be like.”

  “Well, I don’t know about you, but wherever I go, it won’t mean sleeping in a two-room cabin with a dirt floor and competing with the chickens for the corn.”

  “You let the chickens eat the corn. Over on this side, the still gets the corn. We compete with the chickens for greens.”

  They heard a crashing in the brush and Abel stumbled into the clearing, “Holy Ned, Jessie, why’d you pick this spot to go sparking?”

  “Sparking? No, we ain’t…It’s not that. We were talking about what to do with the problem and—”

  “If you say so. Grandpa sent me to fetch you. He says you got to come quick. Some of the boys are hooting and hollering about doing something about the shooting. They’re fixing to ride on over and who knows what they’ll liable to do. They’re packing their rifles.”

  “Who?”

  “Well, Anse and them. They found a jug and done got themselves all likkered up and they saying they are going over to the other side of the mountain or get them a Lebrun or two and settle up with them. You have to stop them.”

  “Me? Where’s Grandpa? Where’s Uncle Bob?”

  “They tried talking to them, but they won’t listen.”

  “And you think they will listen to me?”

  “You have to try, Jesse. I ain’t against shooting a couple of them that shot Solomon, but drunk shooting is the worst way to go about it. You have to stop them.”

  “And all the grown-up men can’t stop a clutch of drunk boys and they think I can, why is that?”

  “Because you are a man who commands respect, is why,” Serena said. “You didn’t get to be an officer on your good looks and education. Men listen to you, Jesse.”

  Jesse heaved himself to his feet and turned to Serena. “You might want to hop over to your side of the mountain and tell them folks to lay low for a while. I’ll go see if I can slap some sense into Anse and his drunk buddies. You’re right. I need to get off this mountain.”

  Chapter Eleven

  It took Jesse nearly twenty minutes to find the clearing where Anse McAdoo and his friends had gathered. Things were considerably worse than Abel had led him to believe. He’d got the drunk and crazy part right. He left out the part about the hostage they’d taken and who now perched on a horse, his hands tied behind his back and a noose around his neck. The rope ran upward and around a branch of an oak tree. Jake Barker was about five seconds away from being lynched.

  Jesse stepped to the horse’s head and grabbed the lead away from Sam Knox. Sam tried to grab it back and Jesse backhanded him to the ground. He steadied the horse which had begun to sidle. Too far one way or the other and Jake was done for.

  “Nobody move.” Jesse said and glared at Anse.

  “Like I said, this boy ain’t got grit,” Anse said. His words were slurred. He staggered to the horse’s rump and slapped it hard. It was all Jesse could do to hold the beast in place. As it was, it shied and nearly lost its reluctant rider.

  “Abel, get over here and cut this man loose.”

  “Jesse, are you sure?” Abel had counted the number of men in the clearing and he and Jesse were outnumbered five to two.

  “Do it and if any of these knuckle-heads give you a hard time, kick them where it hurts. Now cut him loose.”

  “Goddam traitor,” Anse screamed. “You’re both traitors. That man’s a Lebrun.”

  “His name is Barker and is as much a Lebrun as your Great-aunt Maudie who, if you remember, was married to Sly Lebrun after the Civil War. Now, Abel, cut him free.”

  Abel quick-stepped up and sawed through the rope on the Jake Barker’s wrist. Once the hands were free, Jake jerked the noose from his neck. Jesse handed him the reins.

  “You’d better ride, son, and fast.”

  “Yes, sir.” Jake wheeled the horse and galloped off into the twilight.

  “What in hell were you birds thinking? You were going to hang someone because he sort of belonged on other side. You want to go to jail for murder? Are you that stupid?” Jesse remembered Serena’s definition of that word and realized he’d answered his own question. “Okay, I reckon you are.”

  Anse balled his fists and took a step toward Jesse. “I think we should be stringing you up, Jesse Sutherlin. You ain’t no McAdoo, no more. You turned that boy loose and that makes you a damned Lebrun. What do you say, boys? Shall we string up this traitor?”

  The other four murmured. Abel stepped up close to Jesse. “What’re we going to do, Jess?”

  “Do? Nothing. These boys haven’t the gumption to try anything more complicated than gigging bullfrogs. They are stupid, but not that stupid.” He spread his hands wide, palms up. “Okie dokie, which one of you is going to be first?”

  “Well, go on, someone,” Anse shouted.

  Sam Knox jammed his hands in his pockets. “I ain’t so sure about this. He learned all that hand-to-hand combat in the Army, Anse.”

  “There’s four of you and two of them and the kid will melt like butter in July.”

  “Well, boys, what’s holding you back? See, I got no knife, no gun, nothing but a mean disposition. And Abel? He’s ready to join up with the League of Nations, he’s so peaceable. So, who’s it going to be?” Jesse leaned first left and then right. “Come on, boys. Lordy, I seen Fritzies with trench foot and a serious case of cooties that had more backbone than you five. You, Anse, you’re the leader. Leaders lead. Ain’t that right? Instead of prodding these boys like moving cows to the barn at milking time, why ain’t you stepping up? Now, I am wondering if all your talk about someone with no grit is you talking about yourself. Am I close?”

  Anse glowered at Jesse. Then, realizing he had been set up, reached into his belt and drew a knife. “Well, we’ll just see about that.” He charged Jesse, his knife held high.

  There was a whirl of bodies and Anse landed facedown on the ground, his wrist broken and his knife stuck in the bole of the oak tree from which the lynching rope still dangled.

  “Which of you brave lynch mobsters is next?”

  Sam Knox took a step forward and thought better of it. The four turned and started to leave.

  “Whoa, you all ain’t done here. You pick up your brave captain and take him to Big Tom and explain how he got his wrist broke. Miss Emma will put on a poultice and splint it.”

  They dragged a whimpering Anse McAdoo away into the night. Abel stared wide-eyed and open-mouthed at Jesse. “Lord love a duck,” he said after he’d managed to collect himself. “How’d you do that?”

  “Do what? You mean separate Anse from his pig sticker? It ain’t as hard as it looks, Abel. When someone comes at you with a knife held high, you just duck under it, throw a forearm across the knife arm and slip your other one in behind. Then you yank
it backwards, the knife either comes out or the attacker gets his shoulder knocked out of joint. Sometimes both.”

  “But Anse’s wrist was broke, not his shoulder.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s a story for another day.”

  “Well, then, suppose he didn’t come in high like that but had that knife down low, say waist-high?”

  “Then you better hope you thought to bring a gun along.”

  “A gun? You mean shoot the man?”

  “Best way I know to handle that situation. Listen, Abel, what you need to learn here is that this mountain has got itself a culture that is not healthy. If you plan to be anything more than another yokel, old and toothless at forty, dead by sixty, you need to do some serious planning about your future. There’s better things to occupy you than moonshine, dirt farming, and fighting.”

  “Aw, now you’re joking.”

  “No, no joke. Okay, you trot on down to Big Tom’s and make sure he’s getting the true story of what happened up here tonight. You let Anse tell it, and there’s no way any good can come of this. He’ll have the whole clan armed and marching in an hour. You get on down there and make sure that don’t happen.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Me? I am going to sit down under this little tree here and wait ’til my heart stops pounding like some out of control Indian tom-tom. Then I am going have me a think. I need to figure out what I have to do next to pinch off this mountain war before it blows the lid off things.”

  “You were scared?”

  “Abel, any time you get in a position where someone is fixing to kill you or carve you up, at least, and you ain’t scared, you’d best check your pulse. You’re probably already dead. Now, git, and let me ponder a while. I only have three days left.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Work at the sawmill began at six-thirty, rain or shine, summer or winter. Jesse arrived at five-thirty and walked the lot. The trees to be cut into furniture lengths and sizes were stacked separately from those slated for veneer. Jesse knew more about long cuts of various sizes and widths than he did about veneers. He’d need to do some quick learning on that end of the business. He hoped that his lunch break would give him enough time to run the Ford over to the county seat and dig out the deed to The Oaks. If he could find that out, he’d ask Serena to help him figure out how to write up a contract for the timber rights. She’d know because working at the mill she must have seen a slew of them that R.G. had collected over the years.