The Spyglass Tree (24 page)

I sure do, I said, and he handed me one of the submachine guns and picked up the other two and I followed him out through the back door and up the steps to where the cars were parked and I guessed that the two he was carrying which he put into the trunk of his Cadillac were for the Pit and the Dolomite and that the one he took from me and put into the trunk of the Oldsmobile was for Flea Mosley, out at the Plum. Then on the way back inside, he said, the Boss Lady thinks a hell of a lot of you, my man, and I always trust her judgment about people. So look, he said as we came back down the steps, I’m sending her out to Flea and I really would appreciate it if I could get you to go along riding shotgun for her.

We were all back in the game room again then, and he said, Hey now look now if you have some concern about getting yourself in trouble with the school authorities, I can understand that. And I said, I’ll take my chances. And we both knew that it was not just a manner of speaking what with the general campus discipline and specific dormitory rules being what they were in those days, and he said, See there, she knew she could count on you. Boy, this
woman’s got judgment about people like old James P’s striding left hand.
She don’t hardly ever miss
.

She herself was still working on Will Spradley’s face and all she did was look up and give me a wink that was not a part of her nightclub Boss-Lady-at-the-microphone come-ons, and that was when Giles Cunningham put the clip in the .38 automatic and handed it to me along with the carbine and the musette bag containing a supply of .30- and .38-caliber cartridges. Then he also gave me a wink and feinted a left jab and went on getting ready to go.

I could already see myself in the right front seat beside her with the blue-steel automatic in my hand and the carbine on my lap and the musette bag on the floor between my feet, but before I had a chance to start trying to figure out all of the what-ifs and what-if-nots you had to be ready for, Will Spradley started talking again.

I had to make it to you, Gile, he said, because you the one he really got it in for, Gile, he said, because he came lighting into me like this, and took it out on me just because I was there when he got back from out there and didn’t get nowhere with you by himself and he working himself up to get a bunch of them to come at you. Now that’s what happen, Gile, and that’s how come I’m here. Because if I was one to try to turn it on you just to get it off of me, I wouldn’t be here, Gile. I’d be out there trying to get long gone somewhere from this whole place and never come back.

Hey like I said, Giles Cunningham said, I appreciate your concern, Poppa, but don’t worry about it. That somitch is mad with me because of what happened when he came out to the Pit. But Will Spradley said, Yeah, Gile, but I’m the one told him about you cashing my check and that’s how come he made it his business to come out there like that, and if they find that out they going to say that makes me a white man’s nigger. Because I know these folks, Gile, and Giles Cunningham said, Hey, take it easy man. What the
hell else could you tell him? You just told him the goddamn truth. Cain’t nobody blame you for that. I sure the hell don’t.

But you know these folks, Gile, Will Spradley said then. I mean, some of these folks. They get a hold of something like this and there they go, putting the bad mouth on somebody and making somebody a white man’s nigger and don’t know nothing about it, not a thing in the world. They going to say I’m that because I ought not to told him nothing. But that don’t make me that, Gile. Because I may be poor and got to take low sometimes, but that don’t make me no white man’s nigger. Because I ain’t never tattled nothing on none of us to none of them folks. Never in all of my born days.

I know what you mean, man, Giles Cunningham said, pulling on a single-breasted olive drab three-quarter-length raglan twill topcoat and gathering up the rifles and handguns he had come for. But come on now, man. I got to get on out of here and find out what these goddamn peckerwoods going to be trying to do. You go with the Boss Lady and the schoolboy.

Outside I took the shotgun seat and Will Spradley got into the back, and as we pulled out of the yard ahead of the Cadillac and headed for the secondary road that would take us to the route to the Plum Thickets, Will Spradley said, I never will forget you, Boss Lady, and I want to thank you again for giving me a chance to tell Gile. And then he said, Because the thing about the whole thing is that it ain’t about nothing. Some little old percent that ain’t nothing but some pennies and nickels and dimes. All of this about something like that and it ain’t nothing.

She didn’t cut in while he was talking but as soon as he paused she said, Later for that, Will Spradley. What we got to do now is stay quiet and keep our eyes and ears open.

A
ugustus Strickland,
né
Edward Augustus Strickland II, was somebody I had been hearing about if only incidentally from the very outset of my freshman year. Indeed, unless you came onto the campus by automobile from Montgomery Fork as most students in those days did
not
, Strickland was a name you probably heard on the very same day you arrived, because the old antebellum mansion with its fluted columns and red-trimmed octagonal tower, concrete-patched trees, and wrought-iron fence called the Old Strickland Place and sometimes also referred to as Strickland Acres was the first thing you saw as soon as you came into the elm-lined curve less than a quarter of a mile beyond which was the entrance to the administration and academic end of the campus.

The first time I ever saw him in person, however, was one bright and breezy afternoon during the early part of that first November while I was standing on the corner by the Farmer’s Exchange Bank. I heard somebody say,
Gus Strickland. There he is. Gus Strickland ain’t but the one
, and I looked back across the street
to the square and saw him getting out of the Cadillac convertible that I had just seen pulling up to one of the diagonal parking spaces facing the Confederate monument, and as he headed toward the courthouse wearing a tan-and-green houndstooth-check sport jacket, olive green open-collar knitted shirt, tan whipcord slacks, highly polished jodhpurs and a tan porkpie hat with the brim turned down all around. I remember thinking that he looked as much like a retired British army officer as like the rich Southern sportsman that he was—to whom business matters were mostly handled as if they had long since become more occasional and incidental than a part of his daily routine.

As a matter of fact, he had been a colonel in the AEF and probably still was a colonel if not a brigadier general in the Army Reserve Corps. But nobody ever addressed him or referred to him as Colonel Strickland, the Colonel, or certainly not the Old Colonel (which many people, by the way, used to seem to think meant not one who commands a regiment but one who owns an antebellum mansion and what was left of an antebellum plantation).

He was addressed by local white people as Mister Strickland, and by local Negroes as Mister Gus, but they thought of him and referred to him as Ole
Gus
, which was not to say
Old
Gus or
Old Man
Gus, but rather the legendary Gus that you’ve been long hearing tell of, which was entirely consistent with the fact that as often as not, any time you heard anybody say Gus Strickland, it was just about always as if what was being referred to was not unlike some elemental sociopolitical force that could probably be expressed in relative degrees to the
nth
power.

By the time I saw him on his way to the courthouse that afternoon, I already knew that he was the sole owner and proprietor of the Old Strickland Place and also that he didn’t live there anymore. When he came back from the AEF, he had married a woman from Savannah and moved into another mansion, which I was not to see until sometime during the following summer and
then only from a distance, but which was out beyond the south side of town and was said to have two tennis courts, a swimming pool, a man-made lake for fish and waterfowl, a stable for riding horses, and kennels for hunting dogs.

I was also to find out that he traveled a lot, not just from border to border and coast to coast, but also overseas. It was easy enough to imagine him in New Orleans for Mardi Gras, in Louisville for the Kentucky Derby, in Virginia for the fox-hunting season, and down in the canebrakes on the Gulf Coast for duck season, and also out in the Gulf Stream for deep-sea fishing. But he and his wife and two youngest daughters were also said to spend several months every other year or so traveling in Europe or the Middle East, and he was also known to have been across the Pacific to Hawaii and the Far East more than once.

Not that I ever had any special and certainly not any specifically personal reason to concern myself with what was going on in the life of Augustus Strickland. Nor had I done so. But on the other hand, he was not somebody that you would not know about or not have any more than a casual or incidental interest in either, anymore than you were likely to have only a passing curiosity about the Old Strickland Place itself.
Even those ever so much better off than thou and ever so deliberately incurious students from up north whose admitted fear of being down south was such that the very sound of a white Southerner’s drawl seemed to make them feel as if being on the campus was, if anything, even worse than being foreign legionnaires in a remote desert outpost surrounded by murderous tribesmen wearing hooded sheets instead of burnooses, even they usually turned out to know exactly who he was, by reputation if not by sight. Whenever you heard another one of them saying so that’s Gus Strickland, there was always the same ring of familiarity but not the same overtone of outrage as when they said, So that’s Cat Rogers, as if saying So that’s a rattlesnake
.

When you saw him on the campus, it was usually because he
had a standing invitation to head a local reception committee of his own selection to greet visitors of state, national, and international distinction. He was not and had never been a member of the board of trustees, because when the original Augustus Strickland had made the land available for the school’s first campus, he had decided in accordance with his own personal policy for the reconstruction of freedmen as productive citizens, that in order for slaves to prove to themselves that they could manage their own affairs, no member of the Strickland family would ever serve in any official capacity on a board or any other committee established to formulate policy and supervise operations. And yet the attitude of the family over the years had always remained such that officials fully expected the school either to inherit the Old Strickland Place one day or be permitted to acquire it at a giveaway bargain.

Giles Cunningham knew what he knew about Augustus Strickland, not only as a local matter of course but also as information that had been of direct concern to him as a local businessman for almost ten years. It was, after all, from Augustus Strickland that he had begun buying up the adjacent lots as soon as the Pit had begun to catch on as a not-too-far way off campus roadside rib joint, and five years ago he had bought the property where the Club now was because Augustus Strickland, who knew that he was looking for a site to build a dance hall to book headline road bands into, gave him an inside tip on plans to turn that area beyond Montgomery Fork into several residential subdivisions and had made him a special bargain deal because the kind of classy college-oriented dance hall and night spot he was known to be planning would be a very attractive selling point that developers could use to entice home buyers to settle that far away from the campus.

There was, to be sure, the usual local down-home gossip,
speculation, and insinuation about which mulatto and light-brown-skin families may or may not have been blood relatives of this or that branch of the Strickland family of whichever generation. But nobody ever would have said that Giles Cunningham’s special person-to-person business transactions with Augustus Strickland were connected in any way whatsoever with anything like that.

As far as Giles Cunningham himself was concerned, information about family bloodlines was not the sort of historical detail that mattered very much unless it had some direct bearing on obtaining clear title to a piece of real estate that he was negotiating to pick up. The relative purity or the degree of interracial mixture of family bloodlines as such was not something he bothered himself about at all. He just took it for granted that with the amount of passing for white he had come to know about over the years, most Americans, like it or not, admitted or not, come from an ancestry of mixed bloodlines.

It was usually as one businessman to another that he got in touch with Augustus Strickland, and once everything was in place that was also the way he felt about what he was doing when he called him and told him about Dudley Philpot that night, and when Augustus Strickland asked him if he had already called Cat Rogers, he said he had not and didn’t intend to since he was not going to try to swear out any warrant against Dud Philpot.

I just wanted to touch base with you so that if this turns into some real trouble, you know my position, he said, and Augustus Strickland said, Hell, Giles, let me see if I can find out what the hell got into that damn Philpot and what he thinks he’s up to and I’m going to have a word with Cat Rogers, too, Giles. After all, he’s the high sheriff and somebody got to see it that he gets a reasonable chance to discharge his responsibilities.

I’m not about to be the one to try to dispute that, Giles Cunningham said then. I just don’t want him to get that all mixed
up with doing me some kind of personal favor and expecting me to be grateful for it.

I’ll get right back to you as soon as I find out something, Giles, Gus Strickland said, and Giles Cunningham said, I appreciate that and I’ll be right here at the Pit unless he turns up over at the Dolomite.

W
hen we came through town, the streets around Courthouse Square were as empty as they usually were at that time of night. I didn’t say anything, but I couldn’t help wondering if that meant that trouble had already started out at the Pit or at the Dolomite or maybe even at both places. We circled around to the other side of the square and came on out along South Main Street to the city limits marker and through the outskirts and then we were on our way through the open country with the speedometer moving up to 50 mph and then 55 and beyond.