Wrack and Rune (3 page)

It would come out of the pockets of Ames and Shandy, but neither was averse to stretching the facts a bit in a worthy cause and both had enough furrow mud on their own boots to realize what state the Horsefalls’ finances must be in. It was a miracle Henny had managed to keep the farm operating as long as he had. It would take another miracle, no doubt, to find a replacement for the dim-witted but willing Spurge. Lumpkin had most likely been working for his board and keep and a plug of chewing tobacco now and then; and chances were that was about all Henny and Miss Hilda could afford to pay.

That problem would have to be faced when the more immediate one was taken care of. “Who around here has it in for you, Mr. Horsefall?” Shandy asked.

The old farmer shrugged. “Don’t ask me who, but some bugger’s been pesterin’ the daylights out o’ me for the past three months. First it was kid stuff. Trash thrown around the dooryard an’ whatnot. Then it was limbs broke off the apple trees. I Suspicioned at first it might be that young hellion Billy Lewis, an’ threatened ’im with a pantload o’ rock salt from my old shotgun if he didn’t cut it out. He knowed I meant business, too, ’cause I done the same to his father thirty-two years ago.”

Henny hitched up his suspenders and scratched his left armpit. “But Billy swore up, down, an’ sideways he never, an’ I believe ’im. The Lewises might be hellions buy they ain’t liars an’ never have been. Anyways then it begun to get mean. Chicken wire tore away an’ dogs let loose in the hen yard. Killed all our best layers. Then a while later it was ground glass in the pig swill. Lucky for me I seen it glistenin’ when I went to slop the hogs an’ managed to head ’em off with a sackful o’ grain till me an’ Spurge could get the feedin’ trough cleaned out. Last week I set out a hundred tomato plants I been nussin’ along since March an’ bejesus if I didn’t come out two days later an’ find every dern one of ’em dusted over with snuff.”

“Great balls of fire!” exclaimed Shandy.

“What’s so awful about that?” said Cronkite Swope. “I thought nicotine was supposed to be an insecticide or something.”

“Tobacco is a member of the Solanum family,” Shandy explained, “the same as tomato plants, and it’s subject to a fungus that can be communicable. I don’t know whether dusting snuff over a planting of tender young tomato plants would spread a disease that could wipe out the entire crop, but it shows a damned nasty experimental bent on somebody’s part. And you’re quite sure it’s none of the Lewis family, Mr. Horsefall?”

“They wouldn’t do nothin’ like that. No call to. Hell, we been neighbors for three, four generations now. Kids actin’ up is one thing. This is somethin’ else.”

“It certainly is,” said the professor, thinking of what Spurge’s body had looked like by the time he got there. “You have no idea whatsoever who else might have done these things?”

“Cripes, if I had do you think I’d be standin’ here jawin’ instead o’ loadin’ up the old over-an’-under an’ goin’ gunnin’ for the bugger? I sure as hell wouldn’t be usin’ no rock salt this time, neither.”

“I understand how you feel, Mr. Horsefall.”

“The hell you do. Spurge an’ me, we worked these fields—” The old man choked up.

Tim took his friend by the arm. “Come on, Henny. You’d better go back to the house and have yourself a snort of Aunt Hilda’s headache medicine. The police will be along soon and they’ll want to talk with you.”

“Talk? Too damn much talk already, an’ not enough action.”

Nevertheless Hengist Horsefall allowed Professor Ames to lead him into the farmhouse. Young Cronkite Swope hung around looking hopeful.

“You going to detect something, Professor Shandy?”

“How in Sam Hill do I know? I detect you’re standing there with your tongue hanging out for a story that will get your by-line splashed all over the front pages of the
Berkshire Eagle,
if that’s any use to you. Who’s that coming? Not the doctor, surely?”

A massive heap of blue denim and orange whiskers was waddling toward them from across the road, waving the sort of straw hat that used to be worn alike by man and beast in rural areas.

“What’s goin’ on?” the slightly bogus-looking hayseed bellowed when he got more or less within earshot. “I ain’t seen so much commotion around here since the day Spurge got his shirttail caught in the cream separator. What’s he been up to now?”

“Why should you assume he’s been up to anything?” Shandy asked.

The newcomer spat into the dust and plunked his cow’s-breakfast hat back atop his ginger bush. “Just that he most gen’ally has. Spurge is the kack-handedest critter around a place I ever did see. Beats me how Kenny’s been able to stand him all these years.”

“Mr. Horsefall acted real upset to me,” said Cronkite Swope.

“You mean really upset,” Shandy snapped. “An adjective is modified by an adverb. If you don’t know what an adverb is, I suggest you look it up. Since you’re so obviously eager to rise in your chosen profession, young man, it behooves you to learn the rudiments of your craft.”

Cronkite took the rebuke with good-humored disdain. “Oh, nobody bothers much about grammar and stuff these days. It’s all common usage.”

“You are perhaps not familiar with Mark Twain’s observation that God must have hated the common man since He made him so common? In fact it is we who degrade ourselves by allowing our standards to be debased without a struggle.”

The stranger emitted something that might have been a derisive hoot and Shandy turned on him. “As for you, sir, the rube getup would be more convincing if you didn’t happen to have today’s
Wall Street Journal
sticking out of your pocket. Would you care to enlighten us as to your identity?”

“Not particularly.” The man spat again. “Man’s got a right to know what’s goin’ on in the world, ain’t he? Since you’re so free with information nobody wants, who the hell are you?”

Cronkite might be weak on his adverbs, but he clearly held strong views on lèse majesté. “This is Professor Shandy from the college,” he informed the offender in a voice of icy rebuke. “And this is Fergy, Professor Shandy. He runs Fergy’s Bargain Barn down the road a piece—I mean a short way. You must have passed it on your way here.”

Shandy did recall having averted his eyes in pain from what he’d at first taken to be a junkyard and then realized was some sort of open-air emporium. He’d been glad he hadn’t brought Helen along, since any place that advertised itself by means of a battered mannequin got up in a long skirt, bonnet, and shawl and had a lot of rusty hot-water boilers and bedsprings strewn about would have been sure to bring on that irresistible urge of hers to run in for a minute and see what they had.

Fergy nodded, animosity forgotten in the presence of greatness. “Thass right. I seen you burnin’ up the road as if Smokey Bear was on your tail. Nice car you got. Wouldn’t want to jazz ’er up with a genuine 1937 Pierce-Arrow radiator ornament?”

“No, I—er—think we’ll pass on the Pierce-Arrow. My wife has simple tastes.”

Fergy eyed Shandy’s unassuming figure up and down. “Stands to reason,” he grunted. “Well, can’t blame a man for tryin’, as my old man said to the doctor when he got his first look at me. No doubt Spurge’s folks felt the same about him. Say, you said Henny was upset, Cronk. What happened to Spurge, anyhow?”

“He got splashed with quicklime cleanin’ out the spreader. God knows how, but he got it smack in the face.”

“Gorry! That could kill a man.”

“It did.”

“I want to know!”

When a Yankee says, “I want to know,” he is not asking for information. He means, “I am expressing a suitable degree of amazement at the news you have already imparted.” Cronkite Swope knew that perfectly well, of course, but being a reporter, he continued to report, polishing up his journalese as he went along.

“Little did Spurgeon Lumpkin reckon the morning of June 18—say, I wonder if Spurge was descended from that Canute Lumpkin Miss Horsefall used to—I mean the one she said used to be interested in the runestone?”

“What runestone?” Shandy asked.

“The one over behind that swale where the big oaks are. Miss Horsefall was just taking me to see if we could find it when we heard this God-awful screaming and—I guess you know the rest of it. Spurge must have been just about the last of the Lumpkins, mustn’t he? Any more of them left around here, Fergy?”

“There’s my hated rival Nutie the Cutie.”

Fergy appeared to think this a great joke. So did Cronkite Swope. After a moment’s cogitation, Shandy realized whom Fergy meant. Helen had not long ago coerced him into visiting an overwhelmingly precious little antique shop called Nute’s Nook over in Lumpkin Center, on the flimsy pretext that they needed a new conch shell for the whatnot. She’d surprised her husband beyond words by walking out after a few minutes without so much as asking the price of anything. Afterward in the car she’d spoken her mind.

“What an odious man! Pretending to be a nice, innocent little homosexual and all the time giving me that old come-back-without-your husband look. I’ll bet you a first edition of Havelock Ellis that if you hadn’t been with me, I’d have wound up in a wrestling match on his bogus Queen Anne sofa. Don’t you dare ever try to get me back into that place.”

“Fear not, my love” he’d assured her, finding Nute’s brand of duplicity a queer one in every sense of the word but doubting not that Helen knew whereof she spoke.

“You mean that chap who runs the antique shop is also a Lumpkin?” he said to Fergy. “Then he and Spurge would have been related in some way?”

“First cousins, not that either one of ’em ever done much bragging about the connection.”

“How do you know? Are you acquainted with this Nute?”

“Oh sure. I was just kiddin’ about that rival stuff. Us dealers always trade among ourselves. We have to. See, what folks come to me for is junk. If I happen to get hold of a real good piece and put it out for sale at what it’s worth, my customers think I’m tryin’ to be funny. So I take it to Nute. He pays me a fair price, then turns around and sells it for maybe double that, which I could never do in a million years. Same with him. If he picks up stuff that ain’t good enough for his shop, he peddles it to me cheap and I make a buck or two on the resale. One hand washes the other, see? I can’t say me an’ Nute’s any great pals, but we see each other maybe once or twice a week when I’m around.”

“Nute’s real name is Canute, I suppose,” Cronkite ventured.

“Danged if it ain’t. How’d you know that, Cronk?”

“We members of the press do not divulge our sources of information.”

Cronkite had been itching to pull that line ever since he’d opened Lesson One of the Great Journalists’ Correspondence Course. It was a pity the circumstances were not such as to get him charged with contempt of court for saying it, but at least it was practice.

“Funny you should o’ mentioned that runestone just now,” Fergy rambled on, oblivious of the fact that journalistic history had just been made in Balaclava County. “Poor Spurge was shootin’ off his mouth about it a couple o’ nights back. He’d wander down to see me most evenin’s, see. Nothing’ much doin’ here on the farm after supper. Miss Hilda an’ Henny go to bed with the chickens. I used to have Spurge help me unload the truck, shift things around, odd jobs like that. You know how it is, you buy out a house after some old codger dies, you got to take everything from the garbage pail to the Aunty Macassars. Sometimes you get a few good pieces among the junk, mostly you don’t. Anyways, me and Spurge would maybe do a little work around the place, then I’d give him a beer or two or three. What the hell, he’d earned it. No sense in givin’ him money. He’d just lose it or throw it away on the first gewgaw that caught his eye. So we’d set an’ have our beer. He was company, in a way.”

“So he mentioned the runestone,” Shandy prompted. “What did he say?”

“To tell you the truth, I can’t remember. Most likely wasn’t listenin’ in the first place. I never did, much. Just gave ’im his beer and let ’im talk and he was happy. How in blazes did he ever get hold of quicklime?”

“You don’t happen to have any around your place?”

“Not so’s you’d notice it, Professor. I get kids comin’ with their parents an’ that stuff’s dangerous if they ever got into it. Besides, it’s heavy to lug and who’d be likely to buy it from me? I don’t know offhand who’d be apt to sell it around here, but all’s I can figure out is that Henny must o’ picked up the wrong bag when he went for supplies. Henny ain’t the man he used to be, not by a long chalk. Now me, I’m twice the man I used to be.” He slapped his beer belly and grinned.

“You haven’t any idea whatever what Spurge might have told you about that runestone?” Shandy insisted.

“Oh, I s’pose it might o’ been some foolishness about buried treasure. See, them Vikings was like King Tut an’ the rest o’ the heathens. When somebody died, they’d bury him with his bow an’ arrow or whatever he had so’s he could fight his way into Valhaller. If he was captain o’ the boat, say, or first mate or chief engineer or somebody important, they might throw in some dishes or a string o’ beads or somethin’ that the relatives didn’t particularly want. Some o’ them graves they dug up over in Norway an’ England an’ places had real nice stuff in ’em but, hell, you know as well as I do them Vikings never got as far as Balaclava County. Them so-called runestones ain’t nothin’ but some kind o’ freak geological formation. You bein’ an educated man, Professor, you’d know the name, I daresay. Anyway there’s these so-called runestones scattered from hell to breakfast all over New England. Every once in a blue moon somebody gets het up about one of ’em and starts diggin’. Find a few Indian bones or somethin’ and there’s a big stir, but it dies down soon enough.”

“Has anybody dug under this one?” asked Cronkite Swope.

“Not to my knowledge, Cronk.”

“But why not? I should have thought they would, just for the heck of it.”

“S’posed to be bad luck or somethin’, ain’t it? Like when they opened King Tut’s tomb and everybody died o’ measles or somethin’ an’ people claimed the spooks got ’em? Anyways, there’s an awful mess of poison ivy there in the summertime an’ it’s friz over in the winter an’ it’s all moonshine to start with. Well, I better be moseyin’ back in case somebody wants to buy somethin’ for a change. Tell Henny I’ll be over to my place if he wants any help. All he has to do is holler. Cripes, who’d o’ thought that damn fool Spurge wouldn’t even have had sense enough to haul his head out o’ the spreader!”