Uncle Sagamore and His Girls (20 page)

I started to point her out to Murph, but just then he says, “Oh-oh! Hold onto your hat! I hope they cleaned all the rocks off this hillside!”

I looked back at the platform. Miss Emily was saying “—even in high school he was already showing those qualities of integrity and courage and great personal harm that mark him today.” It sounded like more of the same old malarkey to me, and I wondered what was exciting Murph. Then I saw it. Miss Emily’s hair was coming off.

The bun at the back of her neck was tipped a little off center, and along her left temple there was a dark line. She seemed to have black hair underneath the white. Pop and Uncle Sagamore hadn’t noticed it yet. They was just standing there with those big simpering grins on their faces like they was so proud of her and Curly both they could bust. Then she gestured to Pop that she needed some more medicine, but while he was pouring the water, she took a belt of it straight out of the bottle, and patted her hair again. The dark line got a little wider.

Then Uncle Sagamore saw it at last. The big proud grin kind of turned sick, and froze on his face. He tried to signal Pop, but with all those people watching, he couldn’t do much, and Pop just grinned at him and nodded real proud at Miss Emily.
Wasn’t she doing great?
he seemed to say. So Uncle Sagamore reached across like he was pouring her some more water, and sort of shielded his other hand while he put it on top of her head and pulled her hair straight again.

The only trouble was, he pulled it too far, and now Pop could see the dark line on that side, and his grin turned sick and froze. Or that wasn’t
quite
the only trouble; the other one was that he couldn’t get loose. Uncle Sagamore, I mean. He tried to take his hand away, and the whole works started to come with it. That puzzled me for a time, but then I figured out what the trouble was. It was that sticky pine sap they’d been working with for the past week.

So Pop reached out to adjust the microphone for Miss Emily, to sort of cover it, and put
his
hand on her head so Uncle Sagamore could get loose. That worked fine, except that now Pop was stuck. So they went through the whole thing again, and wound up with Uncle Sagamore again.

Only the ones that was up near the front could see the dark line at the edge of her hair, but the whole crowd was staring with their mouths open trying to figure out what the devil Pop and Uncle Sagamore was doing, and you could see some of them was getting mad. What did they mean, pulling and hauling on that sweet little old lady that way?

And the funny part of it was that out of 5000 people, the only one that didn’t pay any attention to it at all was Miss Emily. It seemed like if they wanted to lean on her and haul her hair back and forth across the top of her head, it was all right with her. She just took another snort out of the medicine bottle, and lit a cigarette. She flipped the match away, blew out a cloud of smoke, and says, “And now, I’d like to touch briefly on Mr. Finnegan’s war record—”

Pop leaned close to her ear and whispered, “Minifee!” He was too close to the microphone, though, and it came over the speakers.

The crowd was beginning to mutter. But just then a car came through the gate and shot down the hill. It was Harm’s. It stopped close to the platform, and Mrs. Horne and Curly got out. Pop and Uncle Sagamore looked at them, and their grins got sicker than ever. Then they looked at Miss Emily. It seemed like they was trying to decide which one would stay here and hold Miss Emily’s hair down while the other one went over there and held Curly up.

Mrs. Horne was in pretty good shape, but Curly was a mess. He’d lost his hat and had lipstick all over his face, and he was glassy-eyed and stiff-legged. The two of ’em leaned on each other, and started up the steps.

From then on there was so much happening so fast and it was so mixed up it was hard to tell who was doing what, and where he was. Pop was the one that was loose from Miss Emily’s hair at the moment, so he took Curly. “Oh, good Heavens,” he yelled. “His old war wounds are acting up again.” He jumped for the steps and kind of scooped Curly in as he made the last one and lurched out onto the platform. “He’s always in awful pain when these things seize him!” He was trying to prop Curly up with one arm and get him turned away from the crowd at the same time so he could wipe off some of the lipstick. With all this going on, Uncle Sagamore looked kind of silly just standing there with his hand on top of Miss Emily’s head.

Miss Emily took another pull at the medicine bottle, stuck her cigarette back in the corner of her mouth, and says, “Now, where’d I put all that jazz about his war record?” She pawed through her purse and found the piece of paper she seemed to be looking for, but she dropped it. When she stooped down to pick it up she caught Uncle Sagamore by surprise, and he was left standing there just sort of holding her hair in his hand.

Her real hair was jet black. She knocked the microphone over while she was scrabbling around for the paper, and it fell clear off the front of the platform onto the ground. Then she lost her tinted glasses. I looked at her when she stood up, and doggone if it wasn’t Conchita McLeod. Well, it almost had to be, I thought; she was the only one left.

She straightened out the paper and started reading Curly’s war record, or whatever it was, just as calm as you please and not paying the slightest attention to the absolute bedlam that was going on all around her. She sure wasn’t easy to fluster. Of course, nobody could hear a word she said, with the microphone gone and the crowd roaring and booing.

All this actually hadn’t taken more than two or three seconds. Uncle Sagamore decided there wasn’t much point in fooling with the hair business any longer, now that she’d jumped out from under it, so he leaped to help Pop. Pop was yelling for water so Curly could take some of his pills to ease the pain, but with all of them jostling around it seemed like Curly got the whole glass of water on his face and clothes. He pulled a big pink handkerchief out of his pocket to mop at it, and some brass knucks and two or three pairs of dice fell out at the same time and bounced around on the platform.

When Mrs. Horne saw the handkerchief in his hand, she let out a shriek. “Give me them!” she said, and snatched it away from him and clapped it into her handbag.

Things began whizzing through the air and spattering against the sound truck and the sides of the platform. It was Uncle Sagamore’s tomatoes he’d hoped to sell to the people. Curly lurched forward, and there was a pistol and a Four Roses whiskey bottle slid out of the breast pocket of his coat. I never saw anybody that could carry more things around in his clothes. You wouldn’t think he’d be able to walk. The whiskey bottle smashed on the floor, and Pop yelled, “Oh, good Heavens, there goes his medicine! He’ll have to have that prescription refilled—”

Just then he heard a shriek behind him and saw Miss Malone running up the steps of the platform in that crazy double-decker dress with her arms outstretched toward Curly and yelling, “Curly, darling! Thank, God I’ve found you again, and we can get married!” He was trying to wrestle her down off the platform and stop her from yelling when Baby Collins and the big red-faced man came rushing past him. Baby Collins was shrieking, “That’s him, Paw! The cute one in the white suit!”

The noise was awful now, and tomatoes was spattering all over the platform. One caught Uncle Sagamore on the back of the head, and another splattered in the middle of Curly’s shirt. Then Curly leaped off the back of the platform and went running up the hill with tomatoes falling around him like rain. One got Pop under the ear. “
Get the crooks!
” somebody was yelling, and for a minute I thought they might all be lynched. And then right in the middle of the platform in all the uproar was the Sheriff.

He was holding two pint fruit jars up over his head, and you could tell he was yelling because his mouth was opening and closing, but with that roar going on you couldn’t even hear his voice, let alone the words. Booger and Otis was wrestling with the microphone, and in a minute they had it set up on the platform again, and the Sheriff was yelling into it.

“
Hold it, everybody! Stop it! Sagamore Noonan’s under arrest!
”

The loudspeakers cut into the noise, and when the crowd saw who it was and caught onto what he was saying, they stopped, and it got dead quiet.

“
I solved it! I caught him!
” the Sheriff was shouting. He was still holding up the two fruit jars, and tears was running down his cheeks. “I got Sagamore Noonan’s still! Look!”

The crowd turned where he was pointing, and there was a truck with the little boiler on it and the water tank and the gasoline stove, and the rest of the pint jars of moonshine. Booger and Otis had clapped handcuffs on Uncle Sagamore, and he was standing there just in back of the Sheriff, looking down at his feet as sheepish as anything.

The Sheriff was holding up something else now. “Turpentine!” he yelled. “It was there by the still. He was puttin’ a little in each jar to make people think the moonshine was comin’ out of that phony turpentine still, so we wouldn’t look any more for the real one, and to make me look bad so Minifee would win the election. And all that hooraw with the tubs of mash was to get me to search the place
before
he set up the still. It was in a ravine, behind a big bank of ferns, not over a half mile from the house, because he figgered I’d fall for the trick and not search any more, but I outsmarted him—”

“He did like heck!” I said to Murph. “Harm told him all that.”

“Sure,” Murph said. “But don’t you think he’s entitled to a little poetic license, after what he’s been through?”

There was a big cheer went up from the crowd, and I looked back at the Sheriff. He was holding up something else now. It was a white cowboy hat. “This is one more item that was found at the still,” he says. “I don’t know whether anybody knows who it might belong to, but it’s got the initials J.L.M. stamped in the band. If the owner will call at the Sheriff’s office, we’ll be glad to turn it over to him.”

There was another big roar from the crowd. “Hey, he ought to do that!” somebody yelled. “He’d get to see what the inside of the office looks like!” The crowd gave a tremendous cheer.

“I knew I’d do it some day,” the Sheriff was saying into the microphone, with the tears running down his cheeks again. “I knew the Lord wouldn’t have brought the human race this far along the road to civilization and the brotherhood of man just to have one man bring it to a complete standstill and head it back into the trees again.
Take him away, boys!
”

The crowd started yelling again, and then it was roaring, and they drowned him out. They was cheering the Sheriff. They began swarming up the steps and right over the sides of the platform to get to him and shake his hand.

Nearly everybody was gone now. Me and Murph and Miss Malone was sitting in the convertible while Uncle Finley tore down the platform to get the planks for his ark. I felt terrible. Well, Uncle Sagamore
couldn’t
win, with both of ’em after him. He’d whipped that sneaky Curly, but then the Sheriff had got him. So Pop was arrested. They hadn’t put handcuffs on him, but they’d taken him.

“But look, Murph,” I said. “If the still never was moved, why did Harm tell Curly it was?”

“So they could take over the rally, naturally. Harm was working for Sagamore.”

“He was?”

“Sure. All the time. That fight they had when Sagamore dropped the four jars of moonshine was just a phony for Curly’s benefit.”

“Then why did Harm finally tell the
Sheriff
where it was? Why’d he double-cross—?”

“He didn’t,” Murph said. “He was still carrying out instructions. Look—Sagamore’s got $800 riding on the election, at ten-to-one, and for eight thousand bucks you give it the full production.”

“But now they’re arrested—”

Miss Malone lit a cigarette. “They’ll be home tomorrow, Billy.”

“
What?
”

“Sure,” Murph said. “I began to get it about the time you told me how many jars there were and where you said the still was. It wasn’t on Sagamore’s land. Remember, you went through a fence? It was on Kincaid’s land.” Murph shook his head, and sighed. “Kincaid. Oh, brother! But, anyway, it wasn’t on Sagamore’s place, Sagamore wasn’t anywhere near it when they found it—he’s got five thousand witnesses to that effect—and there’s nothing to indicate it was his or that he ever saw it in his life.

“But Harm told him—”

“The Sheriff’s already announced to five thousand people that he solved it all himself.” Murph thought about it for a minute. “There’ll probably be another gimmick, too, but we’ll have to wait till tomorrow to find out.”

I let out a big sigh. “Well, I sure hope they never go into politics again. But, Murph, why did you ask me how many jars there were, and about the lids?”

“That’s when I knew for sure that Sagamore wasn’t even making whiskey, and never had been from the first.”

“
What?
” I said.

“I bought him 24 pints in Potter County, about eight days ago. When you told me, I added it up with the four Sagamore had smashed, and the one Curly had and that other that Booger got from the drunk. It came out an even 24. So Sagamore never had made any. The hidden still was just a booby trap.”

“Well, I’ll be darned!” I said.

He lit a cigarette. “But I don’t think I’d look for ’em tomorrow until late in the afternoon.”

“Why?”

“Well, the Sheriff’s basically an honest man, but he’ll probably figure Sagamore owes him that much. So when they discover they haven’t got a case, the story probably won’t leak until after the polls close.”

Murph was right. It was after dark the next evening when they got home.

Mrs. Horne and the girls came by the next day and Uncle Sagamore paid them for all their trouble. They was real happy about it and said be sure to let ’em know if he ever decided to go into politics again.

But most people around the county seem to hope he won’t. They say that even if he
was
sort of dragged into the campaign, it ought to be a lesson to everybody to be real careful in the future not to drag him into another one. He’d be just as happy, I think. He never cared much for politics anyway.