Uncle Sagamore and His Girls (11 page)

“Sure,” Pop says.

“Sagamore Noonan!” the Sheriff roared, “if you think this is a joke of some kind—”

“Joke?” Uncle Sagamore said. “Why, Shurf, you cain’t joke with a hungry hawg. He’ll swell up an’ won’t have nothin’ to do with you for a month.”

Him and Pop went over to the shed at the side of the barn, with the crowd still following. Pop got a bucket, and Uncle Sagamore lifted the gunny sack off one of the tubs so they could dip out some of the feed. Then he sniffed, and bent over to look closer at the stuff. “Hmmm,” he says, sort of puzzled.

“What’s the matter?” Pop asked.

“Why, it looks to me like it’s turnin’ sour,” Uncle Sagamore says. “Look at them bubbles, Sam, poppin’ right up to the top.”

“By golly, you’re right,” Pop says. He dipped up some in his hand and smelled it. So did Uncle Sagamore. They looked at each other kind of worried.

“You reckon it’s safe?” Uncle Sagamore asked.

Pop frowned. “I ain’t sure I’d trust it. Might give ’em heartburn.”

“Well, ain’t that discouragin’?” Uncle Sagamore says. “What you reckon we done wrong, Sam?”

Before Pop could say anything, there was a big commotion in back of the crowd, and Major Kincaid came pushing through. He stopped in front of the Sheriff, looking mad enough to bite him. “All right, what’re you waiting for, Sheriff?” he barked, jabbing a finger at the tubs. “There’s eight tubs of mash. Right over there’s the still. Are you going to arrest these men, or not?”

“You shut up, Kincaid!” the Sheriff roared back at him. “An’ stop telling me how to run this job. You think I’m dumb enough to fall for this? I don’t know what the hell he’s up to any more than you do, but if I arrest him he’ll be back here in less than an hour. That ain’t even a still until it’s hooked up. And when it is hooked up it ain’t illegal without there’s evidence he’s makin’ whiskey with it.”

Pop and Uncle Sagamore didn’t seem to pay the slightest mind to all this uproar. They was still studying about the hog feed. “Well,” Uncle Sagamore says, kind of discouraged, “I don’t see nothin’ to do but throw her out, Sam, and start over.”

“I reckon so,” Pop says. “Billy, you take the hawgs some of that corn you got shelled. That’ll have to do ’em for now.”

“
Making whiskey?
” Major Kincaid yelled at the Sheriff. His face was turning purple now. “
Evidence?
Good God in Heaven, what evidence do you want? Sagamore Noonan hasn’t done anything for thirty years but make whiskey! He’s got a still right there in front of your eyes! He admits it’s a still. There’s eight tubs of mash, already fermented!”

Pop and Uncle Sagamore picked up one of the tubs. They carried it off a little way from the barn and dumped it out. It sure smelled sour, all right. The juice part kind of bubbled and run into the ground. They came back and got another one. The people all stared and shook their heads like they couldn’t make any sense out of it.

Major Kincaid was screaming again. “Look!
They’re destroying the evidence!
Are you going to stand there like a fat jackass and let ’em pour it out?”

The Sheriff lammed his hat on the ground, and shook his finger in Major Kincaid’s face. “Don’t you call me a fat jackass! That stuff ain’t evidence in court unless it can be proved he’s tryin’ to make it into moonshine. And you don’t think any jury in its right mind would believe that even Sagamore Noonan would have the guts to try to make whiskey right out in the open in front of everybody in the county, do you? They’d laugh out loud at you.”

Uncle Sagamore and Pop carried out another tub and dumped it. Major Kincaid sputtered again, but just then Curly Minifee pushed through the crowd with a big grin on his face and took him by the arm. “I think the Sheriff might be right, Major,” he says. The Major looked at him like he’d gone crazy, but he let Curly lead him off to one side near the hog pen. I filled up a bucket with shelled corn and took it over to the two pigs. They started to eat.

Curly was talking to the Major. I heard him snicker. “Hey, wise up, Major,” he says. “You’re playin’ it all wrong. This whole thing’s like money from home, so don’t try to break it up. Just give it publicity.”

“But—but—” the Major sputtered. “He ought to be in jail—”

Curly grinned real nasty. “And where do you think he’s goin’ to be as soon as I take office? He’s goin’ to be in the pen so long and so often he won’t even bother to bring his clothes home when his time’s up. Now, you just get some good pictures of that still so we can go on nailing the Sheriff’s hide to the wall.”

Pop and Uncle Sagamore had finished dumping the tubs and washing them out, and they moved the truck over by the shed Mr. Jimerson had built. The Sheriff was talking to Booger and Otis and waving his arms like he was all worked up. People was still milling around in the way, and there was a half dozen hot arguments going on everywhere you turned.

“I tell you,” a farmer in a floppy straw hat was saying to another one, “he’s a-goin’ to run off moonshine right out there in the open in front of ev’body.”

“Hell, how could he?” the other one said.

Another one joined in. “Course he cain’t. Ain’t nobody can. All he’s doin’ is hoorawin’ the Shurf.”

A tall skinny man was cutting a piece of tobacco off his plug with a knife. “Hoorawin’ the Shurf, your butt,” he says. “You got any idea what them boilers and that sugar cost him? An’ you ever hear of Sagamore Noonan doin’ anything without he was makin’ money on it?”

That seemed to stop everybody. They stared at each other kind of blank. “By God, that’s right.”

It was getting late in the afternoon now, and a good many of the people was leaving to take care of their chores. We went in the kitchen to start heating the water for the new batch of hog feed. Murph came in while Uncle Sagamore was lighting the fire in the stove.

He lit a cigarette, and says, “We still might be able to get a bet down on Curly, by giving three-to-one.”

“Hmmm,” Uncle Sagamore says. “Why, I don’t reckon I’d do that, Murph.”

Murph looked at him real thoughtful like. “No? Why not?”

“Sounds like kind of a gamble to me.” Uncle Sagamore stuck a match to the paper in the stove. “Why, supposin’ Curly didn’t win.”

“Okay,” Murph said. “You don’t have to hit me with anything bigger than the First National Bank. But it’s going to take a Grade A miracle.” He kind of hesitated a minute, and then when Uncle Sagamore didn’t say any more he started out.

“Uh, Murph,” Uncle Sagamore says. “That there Miss Malone. Didn’t I hear tell she was sort of in the beauty shop business?”

“Yaah,” Murph says. “She runs a shop in town. Used to be a make-up artist in television a while back there. Why?”

“I was jest wonderin’,” Uncle Sagamore says. He blew on the fire to get it going.

“Curly had his eye on her,” Murph went on. “He was showing off a little on that tire deal, and that’s the reason he got so sore when you clobbered him right in front of her.”

“I kind of figgered that,” Uncle Sagamore says, scratching his head.

Murph left. We heated the water and mixed up another eight tubs of hog feed with about a dozen people standing around watching us. Uncle Sagamore says to Pop, “Well sir, I shore hope this here batch don’t spoil on us, like that other done.”

“Yeah,” Pop says. “Sort of expensive, havin’ to throw it out.”

“I tell you,” I says. “Why don’t we make it just one tub at a time? That way, the pigs’d get it et up before it had time to spoil.”

Uncle Sagamore studied about it. “Hmmm. But ain’t that kind of a piddlin’ sort of way to do things, fritterin’ around with little dabs? Man wouldn’t have no time left for the turpentine business.”

Well, seemed like the crowds we’d had so far wasn’t anything. The next morning they began pouring into the place before we’d even finished breakfast. When we started out to the barn there was four men lifting up the gunny sacks and peering into the tubs. They didn’t hear Uncle Sagamore come up behind ’em barefooted. He leaned against a post, picking his teeth with a long-bladed knife.

“Mornin’, men,” he says. “If you lost something mebbe I could help you find it.”

They whirled around, and jumped back from the tubs. “Uh—no—” one says. “We was jest admirin’ yore hawg-feed. Shore looks nice.” They kind of sidled away.

Uncle Sagamore went over and looked in the tubs, and nodded. “Well sir,” he says to Pop, “looks like we got the do on her, Sam. This here batch don’t seem to be spoilin’.”

They dipped a bucketful from one of the tubs and fed it to the pigs. That was all they could eat, and it still seemed to me like we’d made way too much. It’d take ’em two weeks to eat it all. We went up to the shed, where the truck was parked with all the machinery on it. Pop and Uncle Sagamore took crowbars and started skidding the boilers and the big water tank off onto the ground at the edge of the shed. A lot of men had gathered to watch now, and more was coming and going all the time, but they all stayed back out of the way. They went on moving the stuff into place under the shed. They put the two boiler things close together, and then the big tank in back of them, right over the water pipe.

“That there’s the condenser,” I heard one of the men say. “The worm goes down through the water in the tank, an’ the likker comes out at the lower end—”

“You mean the turpentine,” another one said. Somebody snickered. Uncle Sagamore straightened up and looked over in their direction while he bit off a chew. The snickering stopped. Just then a Sheriff’s car came shooting down the hill from the gate. It slid to a stop at the barn, and the Sheriff and Otis and another deputy got out, along with a man in a business suit and panama hat.

The men watching nudged one another. “Hey,” one says, “that’s Robert Foss with ’em. He’s the Prosecutin’ Attorney.”

All four of them looked in the tubs and then come stalking up to the shed. They looked mad. “Why, howdy, men,” Uncle Sagamore says. They just glared, and didn’t answer. Mr. Foss looked at all the machinery, and nodded his head.

“What about it?” the Sheriff asked him. “What can we do?”

“Well, there’s just no precedent,” Mr. Foss said. “Beyond any doubt it’s a complete moonshine outfit, all right—”

“Goddammit!” the Sheriff says. “I know all that. Of course there ain’t no precedent. There’s only been one Sagamore Noonan since the human race clumb down from the trees. And any jackass can see it’s a complete moonshine operation.
But can I arrest him?
”

Mr. Foss shook his head kind of bitter. “No.”

“No way at all?” the Sheriff asked.

“I don’t see any,” Mr. Foss says. “A distilling apparatus in itself is not illegal except when it is used, or intended to be used, for an illegal purpose. He’s not making whiskey with it at the moment, so it’s a question of proving intent, and how in hell can we do that? Do you think we could convince a jury he intends to make illegal whiskey out in the open, in full view of several hundred witnesses, including law enforcement officers? Hah! The defense would laugh us out of court.”

The Sheriff took a deep breath, and rubbed his hands across his face. “All right. So the only way is to catch him.” He turned around to Otis. “From now on I want two men here ever minute, day and night, one watching this still and the other watching the mash. And when that mash starts to ferment,
don’t let it out of your sight for one second!
”

Uncle Sagamore and Pop just went on unloading the pipe and copper tubing. The Sheriff and Mr. Foss got back in the car and dusted up the hill. Otis went down and sat on a box by the tubs and the other deputy stayed here where he could watch the machinery.

One of the men watching bit off a chew and looked around at the others. “I wouldn’t of missed this for nothin’ on earth. Now, jest how the hell is he goin’ to do it?”

“He cain’t,” another one said. “Ain’t no way in the world—”

The first one pulled out a dollar. “This here says he will. That’s Sagamore Noonan, an’ he’ll do her.”

W
ELL, THE REST OF
the day it sure was interesting. There was more and more people coming and going all the time, especially after the paper came out with the front page covered with pictures of the still. Major Kincaid and his photographer showed up and took some more of Pop and Uncle Sagamore working on it. Curly drove out and looked it over again with a big grin, and left. Pop and Uncle Sagamore didn’t pay any attention to any of it at all. They just went on cutting pipe with a hacksaw and threading it and hooking up the parts of the still.

Along in the afternoon Uncle Sagamore got together a flock of little buckets, some pieces of tin, and some nails and a handaxe, and went up to the pine trees on the hillside just above the shed. I watched while he cut V-shaped notches in the sides of the tree trunks, stuck a piece of folded tin in the bottom of the V for a sort of trough, and hung one of the buckets under it by driving a nail into the tree.

“That’s where we catch the rosum,” he says. He notched several and crawled through a fence and notched some more on the other side until he’d used up all the buckets.

About sundown we fed the pigs. The feed still smelled all right, but when Pop dipped out a bucketful I thought I saw a bubble coming up through the juice. “I still think we ought to make it in smaller batches,” I says.

They didn’t say anything, but I could see they was worried. Naturally they wouldn’t make any profit at all on the hog-fattening if they had to keep throwing out spoiled feed. By the time it was dark all the watchers had gone home, but Booger and another deputy was still there, one watching the feed and the other one the still. Sometime during the night two more took their places. The next day it was the same. Pop and Uncle Sagamore went on working on the still, not paying any attention to the crowds. I went up and looked at the little buckets hanging on the pine trees, and there was some kind of sticky juice beginning to run into them from the notches in the tree trunks.

But it was the hog feed that everybody seemed to be interested in. And by the middle of the afternoon you could see that this batch was going sour too, just as sure as anything. Bubbles was beginning to come up through the juice in every one of the tubs. Hundreds of people went over and checked it, and then they’d look at each other and nod. “Tomorrow,” I heard one of ’em say.