Tales for a Stormy Night (31 page)

During the week I went over to the county seat with Clara to see if she could get a driver’s license. I let her drive the Chevy, though I nearly died of a heart attack. She had it kicking like an army mule, but we did get there, and she could say that she’d driven a car lately. I watched with a sick feeling while the clerk made out a temporary permit she could use until her license came. Then, without batting an eye at me, she asked the fellow if he could tell us who to see about applying for a liquor license. He came out into the hall and pointed to the office. Yes, sir. Clara had done a lot of planning in fifteen years.

It was on the way back to Webbtown that she said to me, “Somebody’s stolen Pa’s shotgun, Hank.”

“I got it up at my place, Clara. You sure you want it back?” It was that gun going off that killed Maudie and I guess this is as good a time as any to tell you what happened back then.

Clara was a wild and pretty thing and Maudie was encouraging this middle-aged gent, a paint salesman by the name of Matt Sawyer, to propose to her. This day she took him out in the hills with the shotgun, aiming to have him scare off Reuben White, who was a lot more forward in his courting of Clara. It was Maudie flushed the young ones out of the sheepcote and then shouted at Matt to shoot. She kept shouting it and so upset him that he slammed the gun down. It went off and blew half of Maudie’s head away.

I don’t think I’m ever going to forget Matt coming into town dragging that gun along the ground and telling us what happened. And I’m absolutely not going to forget going up the hill with Matt and Constable Luke Weber—and Prouty with his wicker basket. Clara came flying to meet us, her gold hair streaming out in the wind like a visiting angel. She just plain threw herself at Matt, saying how she loved him. I told her she ought to behave herself and she told me to hush or I couldn’t play fiddle at their wedding. Luke Weber kept asking her where Reuben was and all she’d say in that airy way of hers was, “Gone.”

I couldn’t look at Maudie without getting sick, so I went to the well and tried to draw water. The bucket kept getting stuck, which was how we came to discover Reuben, head down, feet up, in the well. When the constable asked Clara about it, she admitted right off that she’d pushed him.

“Why? Luke wanted to know.

At that point she turned deep serious, those big eyes of hers like blue saucers. “Mr. Weber, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you what Reuben White wanted me to do with him in the sheepcote this afternoon. And I just know Matt won’t ever want me to do a thing like that.” I pleaded her temporarily insane. I might have tried to get her off for defending her virtue—there was some in town who saw it that way—but by the time we came to trial I didn’t think it would work with a ten-out-of-twelve male jury.

But to get back to what I was saying about Clara wanting the shotgun back, I advised her not to put it where it used to hang over the fireplace in the bar.

“Don’t intend to. I got no place else for the moosehead.”

I took the gun up to her the next day and it wasn’t long after that I learned from Prouty she’d bought a box of shells and some cleaning oil. Prouty wanted to know if there wasn’t some law against her having a gun. I said I thought so and we both let it go at that. Clara bought her television from him. The first I heard of her using the gun—only in a manner of speaking was after she’d bought a used car from a lot on the County Road. It was a Studebaker, a beauty on the outside, and the dealer convinced her it had a heart of gold. The battery fell out first, and after that it was the transmission. She wanted me to go up and talk to him. I did and he told me to read the warranty, which I also did. I told Clara she was stuck with a bad bargain.

“Think so, Hank?”

The next thing I heard, she got Anne Pendergast and the twins to tow the Studebaker and her back to the used-car lot. The two women sent the boys home and then sat in Clara’s car until the dealer finally came out to them. “Like I told your lawyer, lady, it’s too bad, but…” He said something like that, according to Anne, and Clara stopped him right there. “I got me another lawyer,” she said and jerked her thumb toward the back seat, where the old shotgun lay shining like it had just come off the hunters’ rack in Prouty’s. Anne asked him if he’d ever heard of Clara McCracken.

Seemed like he had, for when Clara drove up to where I was painting the Red Lantern sign she was behind the wheel of a red Chevy roadster with a motor that ran like a tomcat’s purr.

“How much?” I wanted to know. Her funds were going down fast.

She opened the rumble seat and took out the shotgun. “One round of shot,” she said. “That’s about fifteen cents.”

I didn’t say anything in the town about the partnership I’d drawn up so that Clara could reopen the bar in the Red Lantern. For one thing, I wasn’t sure when we’d get the license if we got it, even though Clara was moving full steam ahead. For another thing, I had to stop dropping in at Turtle’s Tavern. I just couldn’t face Jesse Tuttle after setting up in competition, even though it was a mighty limited partnership I had with Clara. I didn’t want to be an innkeeper and it riled that McCracken pride of hers to have to go outside the family after a hundred and fifty years. We wound up agreeing I was to be a silent partner. I was to have all the beer I could drink free. That wasn’t going to cost her much. Even in the days of Maudie’s Own Brew, I never drank more than a couple of steins in one night’s sitting.

The license came through midsummer along with instructions that it was to be prominently displayed on the premises at all times. Clara framed it and hung it where you’d have needed a pair of binoculars to see what it was. By then the rooms upstairs had been aired out, the curtains hung, and all the mattresses and pillows treated to a week in the sun. Downstairs, the lounge was open to anybody willing to share it with a horde of insects. Prouty had ordered her some of those fly-catching dangles you string up on the lightbulbs, but they hadn’t come yet. What came with miraculous speed was a pretty fair order of whiskeys and a half dozen kegs of beer with all the tapping equipment. I asked Clara how she decided on which brewery she was going to patronize.

She said the girls advised her.

And, sure enough, when I spoke to Prouty about it later he said, “So that’s why Mrs. Prouty was asking what my favorite beer was. Didn’t make sense till now. We ain’t had a bottle of beer in the house since she got on the board of elders.”

“Didn’t you ask her what she wanted to know for?”

“Nope. I wanted to be surprised when the time came.”

I suppose it was along about then I began to get a little niggling tinkle in my head about how friendly Clara and the women were. Most of those girls she spoke of were women ranging from thirty to eighty-five years old.

Going across the street and up the stairs to my office over Kincaid’s Drugstore, I counted on my fingers this one and that of them I’d seen up there since Clara came home. I ran out of fingers and I’d have run out of toes as well if I’d included them.

Jesse Turtle was sitting in my office waiting for me, his chair tilted back against the wall. I don’t lock up in the daytime and the day I have to I’ll take down my shingle. I felt funny, seeing Turtle and feeling the way I did about competing with him, so as soon as we shook hands I brought things right out into the open. “I hope you don’t take it personal, Jesse, that I’m helping Clara McCracken get a fresh start.”

Jesse’s a big, good-natured man with a belly that keeps him away from the bar, if you know what I mean. It don’t seem to keep him away from Suzie. They got nine kids and a couple more on the hillside. “I know it’s not personal, Hank, but it’s not what you’d call friendly, either. I was wondering for a while if there was something personal between you and her, but the fellas talked me out of that idea.”

I don’t laugh out loud much, but I did then. “Jesse, I’m an old rooster,” I said, “and I haven’t noticed if a hen laid an egg in God knows how long.”

“That’s what we decided, but there’s one thing you learn in my business: don’t take anything a man says about himself for gospel. Even if he’s telling the truth, it might as well be a lie, for all you know listening to him. Same thing in your business, ain’t that so?”

“Wouldn’t need witnesses if it wasn’t,” I said.

I settled my backside on the edge of the desk and he straightened up the chair. I’d been waiting for it to collapse, all the weight on its hind legs. He folded his arms. “What’s going on up there, Hank?”

“Well, from what she said the last time we talked, she plans to open officially when the threshing combine comes through.” We do as much farming in Ragapoo County as anything else, just enough to get by on. But we grow our own grain, and the harvest is a pretty big occasion.

“She figures on putting the crew up, does she?”

“She’s got those eight rooms all made up and waiting. She got to put somebody in them. I can’t see her getting the cross-country traffic to drop off the Interstate.”

Turtle looked at me with a queer expression on his face. “You don’t think she’d be figuring to run a house up there?”

“A bawdy house?”

Tuttle nodded.

I shook my head. “No, sir. I think that’s the last thing Clara’d have in mind.”

“I mean playing a joke on us, paying us back for her having to go to prison.”

“I just don’t see it, Jesse. Besides, look at all your womenfolk flocking up there to give her a hand.”

“That’s what I am looking at,” he said.

Every step creaked as he lumbered down the stairs. I listened to how quiet it was with him gone. I couldn’t believe Jesse was a mean man. He wouldn’t start a rumor if he didn’t think there was something to back it up with. Not just for business. We don’t do things like that in Webbtown, I told myself. We’re too close to one another for any such shenanigans. And I had to admit I wouldn’t put it past a McCracken to play the town dirty if she thought the town had done it to her first. I certainly wouldn’t have put it past Maudie. There was something that kind of bothered me about what was taking place in my own head: I kept mixing up the sisters. It was like Maudie was the one who had come back.

Clara drove eighty miles across two counties to intercept the threshing combine—ten men and some mighty fancy equipment that crisscross the state this time every year. She took Anne Pendergast and Mary Toomey with her. Mary’s a first cousin of Prouty’s. And on the other side of the family she was related to Reuben White, something Prouty called my attention to. Reuben’s folks moved away after the trial…It wasn’t so much grief as shame. I didn’t like doing it, but it’s a lawyer’s job, and I painted the boy as pretty much a dang fool to have got himself killed that way.

The women came home late afternoon. I saw them driving along Main Street after collecting all the Pendergast kids into the rumble seat. Anne had farmed them out for the day. I headed for the Red Lantern to see what happened. Clara was pleased as jubilee: the combine crew had agreed to route themselves so as to spend Saturday night in Webbtown.

“And they’ll check into the Red Lantern?” I said. Ordinarily they split up among the farmers they serviced and knocked off five percent for their keep.

“Every last man. Barbecue Saturday night, Hank.”

“What if it rains?”

“I got Mrs. Prouty and Faith Barnes working on it—the minister’s wife?”

“I know who Faith Barnes is,” I said, sour as pickle brine. The only reassuring thing I felt about the whole situation was that Mrs. Prouty was still Mrs. Prouty.

I came around. The whole town did. Almost had to, the women taking the lead right off. Clara invited everybody, at two dollars a head for adults, fifty cents for kids under twelve. All you could eat and free beer, but you paid for hard liquor. I recruited young Tommy Kincaid and a couple of his chums to dig the barbecue pits with me. Prouty supervised. Mrs. Prouty supervised the loan and transfer of tables and benches from the parish house. They used the Number One Hook and Ladder to move them, and I never before knew a truck to go out of the firehouse on private business except at Christmastime when they take Jesse Turtle up and down Main Street in his Santa Claus getup.

Saturday came as clear a day as when there were eagles in the Ragapoo Hills. Right after lunch the town youngsters hiked up to the first lookout on the County Road. It reminded me of when I was a kid myself and a genuine circus would come round that bend and down through the town. I’d expected trouble from the teenage crowd, by the way, with Clara coming home. You know the way they like to scare themselves half out of their wits with stories of murder and haunted houses. The Red Lantern seemed like fair game for sure. Maybe the Pendergast twins took the curse off the place when they scrubbed the steps, I thought, and then I knew right off: it was their mothers who set down the law on how they’d behave toward Clara. In any case, it would have taken a lot of superstition to keep them from enjoying the harvest holiday.

Along about four o’clock the cry came echoing down the valley, “They’re coming! They’re coming!” And sure enough, like some prefabricated monster, the combine hove into view. Tractors and wagons followed, stopping to let the kids climb aboard. Behind them were the farmers’ pleasure cars, women and children and some of the menfolk, dressed, you’d have thought, for the Fourth of July. The only ones left behind came as soon as the cows were let out after milking.

There was a new register on the desk and one man after another of the harvesters signed his name, picked up the key, and took his duffle bag upstairs. They came down to shower in the basement, and for a while there you couldn’t get more than a trickle out of any other tap in the house. By the time they were washed up, half the town had arrived. I never saw our women looking prettier, and I kept saying to myself, gosh darn Turtle for putting mischief in my mind. Even Clara, with color now in her cheeks, looked less like Maudie and more like the Clara I used to know.

The corn was roasting and the smell of barbecued chickens and ribs had the kids with their paper plates dancing in and out of line. There were mounds of Molly Kincaid’s potato salad and crocks full of home-baked beans, great platters of sliced beefsteak tomatoes, fresh bread, and a five-pound jar of sweet butter Clara ordered from the Justin farm, delivered by Nellie Justin. Clara sent her to me to be paid her three dollars, but Nellie said to let it take care of her and Joe and the kids for the barbecue. Neither one of us was good at arithmetic. Peach and apple pies which any woman in town might have baked were aplenty and you can’t believe what a peach pie’s like baked with peaches so ripe you catch them dropping off the trees.