Tales for a Stormy Night (32 page)

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 made 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.”

“What’s the general subject?” I asked.

“You know as well as we do,” Jesse Turtle said.

“I reckon.” I stuck my right hand in the air as though the Bible was in my left.

“We were going to draw straws,” Pendergast said, “but Billy Baldwin here just volunteered.”

I pulled up a chair, making the ninth or tenth man, and waited to hear what Baldwin had volunteered to do. I haven’t mentioned him before because there wasn’t reason, even though Nancy Baldwin was one of the women that came whooping down the road after the fire alarm. Billy wasn’t the most popular man in town—kind of a braggart and boring as a magpie. Whenever anybody had an idea, Billy had a better one, and he hardly ever stopped talking. The bus route he was driving at the time ran up-county, starting from the Courthouse steps, so he had to take his own car to and from his job at different times of day and night. By now you’ve probably guessed what he’d volunteered for.

I made it a point to stay away from the Red Lantern the night he planned to stop there. I got to admit, though, I was as curious as the rest of the bunch to learn how he’d make out with Clara, so I hung around Turtle’s with them. The funny thing was, I was the last man in the place. Long before closing time, Pendergast, then Prouty, then Kincaid, all of them dropped out and went home to their own beds. Turtle locked up behind me.

The next day Baldwin stopped by the tavern on the way to work and told Jesse that nothing happened, that he’d just sat at the bar with Clara, talking and working up to things. “The big shot’s getting chicken,” Pendergast said when Turtle passed the word.

None of us said much. Counting chickens. I know I was.

Well, it was a week before Billy Baldwin came in with his verdict. As far as he could tell, Clara McCracken might still be a virgin, he said. He’d finally come right out and slipped a twenty-dollar bill on the bar the last night and asked her to wear the negligee she’d had on the night of the false alarm. At that point, Clara reached for the birch stick behind the bar and he took off, leaving the money where it was.

“You’re lucky she didn’t reach for the shotgun,” Prouty said.

We all chipped in to make up the twenty dollars.

Things quieted down after that and I continued to split my drinking time between Turtle’s and the Red Lantern. Clara would get the occasional oiler coming through to check the pumps, and the duck and deer-hunting seasons were good business, but she never did get much of the town custom, and the rumors about her and that negligee hung on. It wasn’t the sort of gear you sent away to Sears Roebuck for, but the post office in Webbtown was run by a woman then and I don’t think any of us ever did find out where that particular garment came from. Maybe she’d sent away for it while she was still in prison. Like I said early on, Clara had done a lot of planning in fifteen years.

Now I just said things quieted down. To tell the truth, it was like the quiet before a twister comes through. I know I kept waiting and watching Clara, and Clara watched me watching her. One day she asked me what they were saying about her in the town.

I tried to make a joke of it. “Nothing much. They’re getting kind of used to you, Clara.”

She looked at me with a cold eye. “You in on that Billy Baldwin trick?”

I thought about the oath I was supposed to have sworn. “What trick?” I asked.

“Hank,” she said, “for a lawyer you ain’t much of a liar.”

“I ain’t much of a lawyer, either,” I said. Then, looking her straight in the face, sure as fate straighter than I looked at myself, I said, “Clara, how’d you like to marry me?”

She set back on her heels and smiled in that odd way of having to work at it. “Thank you kindly.” She cast her eyes up toward the license, which I’d just about forgotten. “We got one partnership going and I think that ought to do us—but I do thank you, old Hank.”

I’ve often wondered what I’d have done it she’d said yes.

But I’ve come around since to holding with the Reverend Barnes. Everything was set in its course long before it happened—including Clara’s planning.

September passed, October, and it came the full, cold moon of November. You could hear wolves in the Ragapoo Hills and the loons—and which is lonesomer-sounding I wouldn’t say. I’ve mentioned before how light a sleeper I am. I woke up this night to a kind of whispering sound, a sort of swish, a pause, and then another swish, a pause, and then another. When I realized it was outside my window, I got up and looked down on the street.

There, passing in the silvery moonlight—a few feet between them (I think now to keep from speaking to one another)—the women of the town were moving toward the Red Lantern. By the time I got within sight of them up there, they’d formed a half circle around the front of the inn which was in total darkness. One of the women climbed the steps and went inside. I knew the door had not been locked since I unlocked it when I brought Clara home.

I kept out of sight and edged round back to where I had been the night of the false alarm. I saw the car parked there and knew it belonged to Billy Baldwin. If I could have found a way in time, I’d have turned in a false alarm myself, but I was frozen in slow motion. I heard the scream and the clatter in the building, and the front door banging open. Billy Baldwin came running out stark naked. He had some of his clothes with him, but he hadn’t waited to put them on. Behind him was his wife Nancy, sobbing and crying and beating at him until one of the women came up and took her away down toward the town.

Billy had stopped in his tracks, seeing the circle of women. He was pathetic, trying to hide himself first and then trying to put his pants on, and the moonlight throwing crazy shadows on the women. Then I saw Clara come out of the door on my side of the building. She was wearing the negligee and sort of drifted like a specter around the veranda to the front.

The women began to move forward.

Billy, seeing them come, fell on his knees and held out his hands, begging. I started to pray myself. I saw that every woman was carrying a stone. They kept getting closer, but not a one raised her arm until Clara went down and picked up a stone from her own drive which she flung at Billy.

He was still on his knees after that, but he fell almost at once beneath the barrage that followed. One of those stones killed him dead, though I didn’t know it at the time.

Clara went back up the steps and picked her way through the stones. She kicked at what was left of poor, lying, cheating Billy as hard as she could. The women found more stones then and threw them at her until she fled into the inn and closed the door.

Nobody’s been arrested for Billy’s murder. I don’t think anyone ever will be. It ought to be Clara, if anyone, but I’d have to bear witness that the man was still alive after she’d thrown the stone. She’s never forgiven the women for turning on her. She kept telling me how glad she was when they came to take Billy in adultery. And I wore myself out asking her what the heck she thought she was doing.

Along toward summer a baby boy was born to Clara. She had him christened Jeremiah McCracken after his grandfather. At the christening she said to me, “See, Hank. That’s what I was doing.” I’m going to tell you, I’m glad that when Jeremiah McCracken comes old enough to get a tavern license, I’ll be in my grave by then. I hope of natural causes.