up with the shotgun under his arm and walked over to the end of the porch. He stepped down and lifted the old cowhide out of the end tub with a stick and threw it over the clothes line, kind of spreading it out. Then he took the next one and spread it on the line too. They began to drip brownish water onto the ground.
They was bad enough before, but now when they was out in the air it was awful. They was only ten or twelve feet away, and with the air circulating around ‘em. I could feel my eyes watering and my breath choking up in my throat.
Booger and Otis was looking a little sick. They would breathe real slow and easy, and fan with their hats, and then they’d look at Uncle Sagamore and quit fanning and just try not to breathe any more than they had to.
Uncle Sagamore come back and sat down with his back against the door jamb and the shotgun over his knees. He didn’t seem to notice the smell at all.
“I was kinda wantin’ to show you boys my tannery,” he says. “Bein’ in the Gov’ment, so to speak, you’re probably interested in new industries and the like, and the different ways a man can scrabble around and break his back to make enough money to pay his taxes. What with them pussel-gutted politicians settin’ around in the court-house just waitin’ for him to scratch another nickel out of the ground, so they can swoop down on it like sparrows after an oat-foundered horse, a man’s got to do something or he’d get desperate and start runnin’ for office hisself. So I figured I’d go in the leather business as kind of a sideline.”
“Why, that sounds like a real good idea,” Otis says, wiping the sweat off his face.
Uncle Sagamore nodded his head. “Sure. That way, I figure I might be able to eat something once in a while to stay alive so I can manage to get in town once a year to borrow enough money to make another crop, and kinda keep goin’, so none of them fat bastards would ever have to do anything real desperate, like goin’ to work. You couldn’t have nothing like that. If them Rooshians ever heard things was so tough over here that politicians was goin’ to work, they’d attack us in a minute.”
“Yeah, I reckon that’s right,” Otis said, like he didn’t really think so but figured he ought to say something just to be polite.
The conversation kind of died then and we all just sat there. You could see the heat waves dancing out along the hill, and once in a while there’d be some hammering from down where Uncle Finley was.
Pop nodded his head down that way, and asked Uncle Sagamore, “Don’t he ever knock off?”
Uncle Sagamore puckered up his lips and shot out a stream of tobacco juice. It sailed out flat and straight, right between Booger and Otis, and landed ka-splott in the yard.
“No,” he says. “Only when he runs out of boards. Things is kind of slow right now, since he used up the last privy, but he manages to keep busy with a little patchin’ here and there.”
We all looked at Uncle Finley.
“Just what’s he building, anyway?” Pop asked.
“A boat,” Uncle Sagamore says.
“Boat?”
Uncle Sagamore nodded. “That’s right. The way Finley figures, it’s goin’ to start rainin’ like pourin’ water out of a boot any day now. And when the day comes he’s goin’ to go sailin’ off like a bug on a whiteoak chip and the rest of us sinful bastards is going to be drowned. He thought for a while of maybe takin’ Bessie along, being she’s his sister, but after she raised so much hell about the privies, he finally told her he’d takened it up with the Vision and the Vision says the hell with her, let her drowned like the rest of us.”
“What kind of a vision is this?” Pop asked.
I was sort of wishing he wouldn’t keep asking about it, so we could maybe get off the porch and away from that smell, but it seemed like he was anxious to hear about it now and Uncle Sagamore was real anxious for all of us to stay there so he’d have somebody to talk to. Anyway, that’s the way it looked, so I didn’t say anything about wanting to move. Sig Freed was the only one that was comfortable. He went