I was worried. “What will they do to Pop?” I asked
the sheriff. “And to Miss Caroline?”
He didn’t act like he even heard me. He just stood
there with that dreamy expression on his face, and
every once in a while he would whisper, “Wonderful.”
And then, “Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.”
It was maybe five minutes before he looked around
and even noticed I was there, and then I thought of
one other thing that still puzzled me. Uncle
Sagamore had got some clothes for Miss Caroline,
but there she was wearing his old overalls. I asked
the sheriff about it
.
“Oh,” he says. “Those clothes of hers was what the
dawgs was following back and forth across the
bottom yesterday. He drug ‘em along the ground
behind his mule. I knew that, but I just figured it was
a pair of her shoes.”
The Diamond Bikini— 198
In a few minutes men began to come pouring down
the hill. The whole back yard was full of them. The
road was open now, and the first thing to get through
was three car-loads of newspaper reporters and
photographers. They asked a thousand questions and
snapped pictures. Everybody milled around, talking,
and Pop and Uncle Sagamore and the three women
slept right on like babies.
Booger shook his head. “It must have been some
party,” he said. “At least a couple of gallons.”
There was a loud honking then, and a truck come
around the house and began pushing up through the
crowd. It stopped right under the chinaberry tree,
and I saw it had a bunch of planks on it and that the
sign on the side said, “E.M Staggers Lumber Co.”
There was a big, pleasant-faced woman wearing a
sunbonnet in the seat beside the driver. She got out
and walked over and stood looking at all five of them
still asleep. Then she looked at me.
“Billy?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
Tears came in her eyes, and she grabbed me. “You
poor boy.” She picked me up and held me with my
face pressed against her bosom.
“Get ‘em out of here, sheriff,” she says. “Get ‘em
off this farm. This minute.”
“Yes, Miss Bessie,” the sheriff says. “They’re on
their way right now.”
I stayed on at the farm with Aunt Bessie, and it was
real nice except for being a little quiet now that Pop
and Uncle Sagamore was gone. I went fishing a lot,
and practiced swimming in the shallow water, and
helped Aunt Bessie pick blackberries. She was real
nice, and I liked her. Of course I missed Miss
Harrington—I mean Miss Caroline—but I got a letter
from her and she said she was doing fine. After she
testified in the trial in New Orleans she got a job
dancing in a nightclub in New York.
Well, that was in June, when they drafted Pop and
Uncle Sagamore, and then about the end of August a
The Diamond Bikini— 199
funny thing happened. Me and Aunt Bessie was
sitting on the front porch in the afternoon taking the
shells off some beans when one of the sheriff’s cars
come bucking and bouncing down the hill with a big
cloud of dust boiling up behind it. For a minute it
reminded me of the old days, and I was kind of
lonesome for Pop and Uncle Sagamore, thinking
about how it had always been so exciting with them
around. But it wasn’t Booger and Otis in the car. It
was the sheriff hisself.
The car slid to a stop and he got out and run up to
the steps, where Aunt Bessie was watching him like
he’d gone crazy.
They’re comin’ back!” he yells. He took off his hat
and started mashing it up in his hands. “They’ll be
here tomorrow—”
Aunt Bessie dropped the beans out of her lap.
“What!” she says. “How did that happen? I thought
—”
I jumped up. “Hooray!” I said.
The sheriff glared at me like he wanted to bite my
head off. Then he kind of collapsed on the steps and
shook his head.
“The Governor pardoned ‘em both,” he says, real
hopeless and bitter. “Said they didn’t have a fair trial
because I disqualified all the men on the jury panel
and all the women was prejudiced.”
Aunt Bessie nodded her head. “I reckon that was a
mistake.”
The sheriff threw his hat out in the yard and
started to say a bad cuss word. He choked it off just
in time. “No, no, no!” he says. “That ain’t it at all.
That’s just the excuse.”
Aunt Bessie looked at him. “How’s that?”
“It’s that warden, dad-gum it all! He ain’t never
liked me, and he’s the Governor’s brother-in-law. The
two of ‘em cooked it up so they could get rid of him
and throw him back on me.”
“You mean the warden didn’t want him up there?”
she asked.
The Diamond Bikini— 200
The sheriff turned his head and stared at her.
“Bessie, how long you been married to him?”
She sighed. “I reckon it was kind of a foolish
question.”
“There ain’t no doubt of it,” the sheriff says. “That
dad-gummed warden just got tired of havin’ his
prison in a uproar all the time, and he was jealous
because the two of ‘em was making more money than
he was, what with the still they set up in the boiler
room to make moonshine out of dried prunes and
potato peelings from the kitchen, and what with the
horse-race bets. And then they sold the Bramer bulls
from the prison rodeo to some dog food cannery—
ain’t nobody ever figured out how they smuggled
them out. Course, the sheet metal from the license
plate shop was easy. They used the warden’s car for
that...”
Oh, that was a fine summer, all right. Like Pop
says, there ain’t nothing like wholesome farm life,
and you just couldn’t find an all-round wholesomer
farm than Uncle Sagamore’s. We’re going to stay on
here, Pop says, and not even go back to the tracks at
all, which suits me fine. Things are already beginning
to hum, now that him and Uncle Sagamore are back.
They’re sort of looking around for some new kind of
business to go into, seeing that the leather didn’t
turn out so well, and I expect the whole place will
begin to get exciting again real soon.
That’s the nice thing about a farm. You never know
what’ll happen next.
The Diamond Bikini— 201
No comments:
Post a Comment