Jayber Crow (33 page)

There was a letup then, and they felt their weariness. At rest, they felt the coldness of the wind. They had much work still ahead. For hours they had been walking by the exalted keg, leaving an empty space around it, a radius of maybe eight feet, as if from suspicion or respect. Now they looked at it.

Big Joe Ellis wiped his mouth on the shoulder of his ragged jacket. “Boys,” he said, “I don't know about you all, but a little warming right now would suit me mighty well.”

They were silent after that, all of them looking at the keg, until finally Mr. Fields said, “Well, maybe 'twould.”

They sent Athey to the house to bring the water bucket and dipper. When he got back they had drawn the bung. He watched the liquor pour from the keg in little gushes, saying, “Good-good-good-good-good.” He felt he had a duty of some kind, but he did not know what it was. Also he would have liked to drink from the dipper as it went around and then around again.

I asked him, “Why didn't you?”

“Aunt Molly,” he said. “She would have skinned me alive. Also I knew by then that a boy was what I was. I would have got skinned again when Father got home.”

Later he would learn the taste of Jim Pete's whiskey. “If it comes to whiskey,” he said, “I would rather have his than some of this government-approved.” But that may not have been a comment about the quality of the whiskey. Athey did not approve of government approval.

“Oh my!” said Lute Branch. “But don't that grease the axle of the old world?”

“Boys, let's get back to it now,” said Mr. Fields. “We got a long ways to go and a short time to get there in.”

They began blocking out the meat, laying the carcasses down on a table improvised of boards and trestles, removing the quarters, carving out the backbones and spareribs, carrying the pieces into the stripping room to be trimmed the next day, when they would also grind and sack the sausage and render the lard.

But as they worked now, they drank. There is an irresistible ease in dipping whiskey out of a water bucket with a dipper. It takes no time or trouble at all. And gradually the considerable skill that every one of them had been using all day became fumbling and unsure.

“Well,” they had begun to say in consolation or in gleeful complacency, “what you don't get on one piece you'll get on another'n.”

“Well, if it can't be ham, it'll just have to be sausage.”

They wielded their axes and knives with something like abandon, though strangely there was never a finger cut. Athey saw Little Joe Ellis draw forth a sparerib with hide and a few bristles on the outside, and presently he saw him pick up a middling with a hole in it that you could look through like a window.

Put Woolfork always walked with his knees bent, as if expecting to have to sit down in a hurry. He had his bottom closer to the ground now than usual. He was walking toward the stripping room, carrying a large ham skin-side-down. He hooked his right toe precisely behind his left ankle and fell, tumbling the ham meat-side-down onto the ground. “Well,” he said, “I'll eat it, I reckon, if nobody else will.”

Big Joe Ellis held up a gobbet of fat that he had either mistakenly or accidentally sliced from a middling and then dropped on the ground. He said, in excellent good humor, “Now, that there piece there now, would you call that there piece sausage or skin fat? Well, God bless it, I'm a-calling it sausage. The dirt on it looks just like pepper.”

Dewey Fields was warming himself by one of the scalding boxes, standing in the ashes. One of his overshoes had caught fire.

“Mr. Fields,” Stillman Hayes said, “it looks to me like your overshoes is on fire.”

Mr. Fields said, patiently, “These ain't my overshoes, honey. I borrowed these overshoes offen Isham Quail.”

They were nowhere near finishing that day's work by chore time.

“I do believe,” said Lute Branch, “that the women are going to have to do the milking.”

“And after that cook up a little mess of victuals, I hope, I hope,” said Miller Quinch.

“A virtuous woman,” Dewey Fields said, “is a crown to her husband. Her price is far above rubies.”

Pretty soon it was dark.

The third complication of that day came in the several persons of the Regulators. These were a kind of Ku Klux Klan, an imitation Ku Klux Klan maybe, for they wore sheets and hoods but their business (so far as Athey knew) was not Negroes, of which there were not many in the Port William neighborhood even in those days. The great interest of the Regulators was in sins against domestic tranquility. They were very hard on drinkers, sellers, and makers of whiskey (which they called “the demon rum”), with the perfectly logical result that every maker and seller of whiskey within a radius of several miles became a Regulator, and the actions of the Regulators were nearly all against new or outside competitors. They had a fairly free hand, for the law was in Hargrave, the roads scarcely existed for a good part of the year, and river transport was expensive and slow. And of course they caused trouble.

“If the Devil don't exist,” Athey said, “how do you explain that some people are a lot worse than they're smart enough to be?”

Though they disguised themselves, and thought or pretended themselves disguised, the Regulators' “secrecy” was a useless glamour. They were no more secret or anonymous than the town dogs of Port William, for they rode upon horses and mules that were known to every boy above the age of five. Peg Shifter went so far as to nail a shoe to the end of his wooden leg before riding out with this local whiskey monopoly (which is really what it was)—but that too was only comedy, for as he rode his sheet worked up, confirming the truth already revealed by his mule.

When the Regulators came filing up the long lane past the house and into the barn lot, carrying torches and lanterns, the hog-killing crew did
not try to run or hide. They just quit, each one right in the midst of whatever motion he was making, and stood and looked.

BigJoe Ellis said, “Did you ever see the like? Well, I never seen the like!” The Regulators encircled them. Every man who did not carry a light held a shotgun or a rifle. Athey knew them all. They were the Hench twins, Felix and Festus, old man Tucker Thobe, Peg Shifter, Noble Crane, Jim Doyle, Gid Lamar, Guiney McGrother, U. S. Jones, and Jim Pete Markman.

I asked Athey, “What was Jim Pete doing there?”

He said, “I couldn't tell you everything even if I was to make some of it up.”

“Well, gentlemen,” old man Thobe chirped through his hood, “we done found you all in breach of the peace and the public good. I reckon you all know, now, that we can't let this sort of doings go on unmolested. No woman nor child would be safe. We're impounding this liquor, and we're going to put you away in that stripping room while we decide on further measures.”

“I need to be getting on home now,” said Put Woolfork, who was standing and swaying with his legs apart. “I ain't killing no hogs. I ain't even here. I got my cow to milk.”

“Even if you knew how to milk, your women would have already done done it for you,” Felix Hench called out from inside his hood.

The hooded men all laughed. So did some of the others.

He knew them all, but Athey never quite got rid of the shiver it gave him to hear those hooded men speaking. Though they spoke in their own voices, they were not speaking for themselves.

They drove the hog-killing crew into the stripping room and latched and propped the door. There were windows above the bench all along the north side. Did the Regulators think of the windows? If they did, they assumed that no man there would break a window belonging to Carter Keith. Maybe, since it was too dark to see the windows, the hog-killers were too drunk to remember them. Athey made no move to go in, and the Regulators did not make him go.

They emptied every stall in the barn, turning the guest mules and horses out into the pasture with those belonging to Carter Keith, making work for somebody besides themselves, and stabled their own.

They brought wood from the woodpile and made a fire.

“What're you all doing?” Athey said.

“What we don't have to tell you,” said Festus Hench, looking through eyeholes over the dipper, which already was passing around. He was holding the bottom of his hood above his mouth so he could drink.

They sent Athey to the house for salt and a skillet.

“And just a leetle dab of meal,” Peg Shifter called after him. “About a gallon.”

“Two skillets,” Guiney McGrother shouted to him, “and two gallon of meal.”

Aunt Molly helped him get the things they had asked for. She was furious, though maybe not now at him. He was furious himself.

“They say the bottom rail shall be the rider,” Aunt Molly said. “But it's the foam and the filth that biles to the top.”

He brought them the skillets and the salt and meal. They began to slice meat from the joints and middlings that had not yet been carried to the stripping room. They took the tenderest cuts—hamstrings, tender-loins, slices of ham and shoulder—and greased the skillets with fat and started frying the meat. They made corn pones and dropped them into the grease.

Although Athey was hungry, he stood away from the fire. But when the good smell of the frying meat came to him he had to holler out: “Why don't you all cut some mouth holes in them things if you aim to eat like mortal humans?”

“Because we ain't got one of them little old mouths that runs like a calf's ass,” Felix Hench said.

And Guiney McGrother waved his pistol at Athey and said, “Get to the house!”

He made as if to go but went instead and let himself quietly into the corncrib, where he could watch them through the slats.

He could see that somebody in the stripping room was sober enough to have found a match and started a fire in the stove. Otherwise there was no sound from there. They were sleeping.

The Regulators had laid their weapons down and removed their hoods. They feasted on the free pork and drank what to all of them but
Jim Pete Markman was free whiskey. Jim Pete was drinking hard in order to reduce his loss. When they finished eating, they dutifully covered their heads again with their hoods to make themselves official. They talked and laughed, sitting and then leaning and then lying around the fire. It was too big a fire, for the firewood also was free to them. Finally they too quieted down and went to sleep. Athey watched and watched, cold and determined—determined to do what, he did not know. He was no longer a boy who thought himself a man. He was a boy trying unsurely to make up for his failure to be a man when a man was needed. It was the first time he ever was awake all night long.

Now that he was a boy no longer thinking of himself as a man, the spirit of his father seemed to be telling him what a man ought to do. When the fire had died down almost to coals, he slipped out of the crib and went over to where the Regulators were sleeping. He knew how to squirrel hunt, and with what seemed to him in his fear the patience of the moving stars, he took their guns two at a time and buried them in the wheat in the granary. After that, he warmed himself at the coals of the fire, ready to run if anybody moved. It was way into the night by then. Before long it would be morning. And soon the gray of it rose among the eastward stars.

In a while he heard a little tapping from the inside of the stripping room. He went over and leaned to the wall. “What?” he said.

“Athey?” It was Webster Page.

He said, “Yessir.”

“Are they asleep?”

“Yessir.”

“Where's their guns?”

“I put them away.”

“Where?”

“In a place.”

“What about Guiney's pistol?” This was Lute Branch.

“I put it away too.”

Somebody back in the room groaned and muttered something, and Lute Branch said, “Damn your head! Stir yourself!”

“Athey,” Webster Page said, “are you listening?”

“Yessir.”

“Unfasten this door. Now, wait! Listen! As soon as you do that, let loose all their mules and horses. Run 'em out! Hear?”

“Yessir.”

And that was what he did. He unlatched the door and took the props away, and then ran to the barn. He opened every stall and drove the beasts out into the dimness.

Somebody among the Regulators cried “Whoa!” and then he heard a great gibberish of cries and curses as the forces of temperance and family order awoke. Before he was out of the barn again he heard the hooves swerve past the waking sleepers, cross the lot, go through the gate and on out the lane past the house.

When he came out of the barn, he saw the little man called Tomtit square himself in the posture of John L. Sullivan in front of a tall gangly Regulator who was probably Guiney McGrother. In their hoods and apart from their horses and voices, it was harder now to tell which Regulator was which. Tomtit danced and sparred impressively in front of the big Regulator and then made the mistake of trying to get close enough to hit him. Long before Tomtit got the Regulator within his reach, he came within reach of the Regulator, who hit him in the face with great force but also indifferently, as he might have swatted a fly, and Tomtit went down as if he had no bones.

And then Guiney, if that was who it was, wound up like a pitcher and swung at Webster Page, and missed, and Webster Page knocked him down.

And then one of them, maybe U. S. Jones, came running at Mr. Fields and tried to jump over a log two steps before he got to it, and then stumbled over the log—and Mr. Fields, of all people, knocked him down.

Given the numbers involved, it really wasn't much of a fight. The hog-killing crew were on average a good deal younger than the Regulators, they were more offended, and they weren't wearing hoods. A hood is far from an ideal garment to wear in a fistfight. Several of the Regulators had trouble aligning their eyes with their eyeholes.