you at five o’clock,” I said to Miss Harrington, and started down that way with Sig Freed to see what he was doing.
Just before I got there he straightened up, and I saw he had a tin can in his hand. It looked to me like he must have been draining some gasoline out of the tank. He went on around the corner of the house, and then I saw Uncle Sagamore coming up from the barn carrying four jars.
I wondered what they was going to put gasoline in fruit jars for, and why they needed four big ones like that for just one little can full. I had to grab my nose when I got down close to the tubs, but I went on and looked around the corner of the house. It was funny what they was doing.
There was a little table sitting in the back yard in the shade of the chinaberry tree. Uncle Sagamore had put the four glass jars on it, and Pop was dipping a piece of white string in the can of gasoline. When it was good and wet, he took it out fast and tied it around the middle of one of the jars. Uncle Sagamore struck a match and touched it to the string. It blazed up and made a ring of fire around the jar for a minute before it went out. Then they did the same thing to the next one, with another piece of string. I watched. There didn’t seem to be any sense to it. They kept on till they had done it to all four of them. Then they took off the charred string and rubbed the jars clean with a cloth, handling them real gentle.
I walked up behind them. “Hey, Pop,” I says, “what you doing?”
They both whirled around, and looked at me and then at each other. “Doing?” Pop says. “Why, uh—we’re testing these jars. Ain’t that what it looks like?”
“Testing ‘em?” I says. “Why?”
Uncle Sagamore pursed up his lips and spit out some tobacco juice. “Well sir,” he says, “it’s just like I was telling you, Sam. A boy ain’t never goin’ to learn nothin’ less’n he asks questions. Now, how would a young boy know you don’t never send nothin’ to the Gov’ment in jars you ain’t sure of? He got any way of knowin’ what would happen if one of them jars busted along the way, or after it got there? He don’t know nothin’ about how the Gov’ment operates.”
He stopped and shifted his tobacco over into his other cheek and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Then he looks at me real solemn and goes on, “Now you take if one of them jars was to happen to bust, you got the whole goddam Gov’ment in a uproar. Before you know it, they’re faunchin’ around like a pen full of hawgs after a rattlesnake, with everybody millin’ around askin’ questions and trying to figure out what happened. Then somebody gets a burr under his crupper and starts a investigation, so you got all them high-priced people tied up wastin’ time just because some pore old ignorant boll weevil that didn’t know no better sent ‘em something in a rickety fruit jar that wouldn’t hold together. And that ain’t all. Right in the middle of all this hulla-balloo, somebody discovers the Gov’ment ain’t even got a regular fruit-jar testing department. So two more people start a investigation to find out how come they ain’t, and four others start a investigation to find out how come the first two ain’t investigated this already, and in the meantime some janitor sweeps up the busted fruit jar and throws it out, so everybody drops everything and come chargin’ in to investigate and the first thing you know the whole thing’s like a fire in a whorehouse.”
“And that makes taxes go up “ Pop says.
“Yes, sir,” Uncle Sagamore says, “that’s exactly what it does.”
“Oh,” I says. “Are you going to send something to the Gov’ment?”
“That’s right.” Uncle Sagamore nodded his head. “Me an’ Sam got to thinkin’ about what you said about all the time we’d waste lettin’ this leather run its course, so we figured maybe we ort to kind of hurry the thing along a little by sendin’ some of the juice now an’ letting ‘em see if maybe they could tell us what was wrong. We’re goin’ to have some of her analyzed by the Gov’ment.”
“Well,” I says, “that