The diamond bikini - By Charles Williams Page 0,39

seems to me like the right thing to do. Then, if they say you didn’t mix the juice just right to begin with, you can start over with a new batch without having to wait all that time.” I felt real proud of myself. They’d seen I was right.

Uncle Sagamore nodded. “That’s just the way me and Sam saw it. You got a good head on you.”

“And you’re going to ship her in those four jars?” I ask. “You reckon they’ll need that much?”

Uncle Sagamore pursed up his lips. “Well, we don’t rightly know just how much the Gov’ment usually has to have for tests like this, so we figured to be on the safe side we’d ort to send ‘em two gallons.” He stopped and looked at me. “That strike you as about right?”

“Yeah,” I says. “Sure. If it don’t cost too much to ship it.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” he says. “We’ll send her collect. Ain’t no strain about that.”

Pop got a water bucket and a dipper out of the kitchen. Circling around to get upwind of the tubs, because there was a little breeze beginning to blow now, he fanned the air with his hat in front of his face while he swished back the foam and bubbles a little and began dipping some of the juice out into the bucket. When he trotted back to the chinaberry tree with the bucket full his eyes was watering and he was choking a little.

“Startin’ to be a little on the ripe side,” he says.

Uncle Sagamore nodded. “She does seem to be gettin’ a little tang to her.”

Sig Freed whined and ran down towards the barn. I didn’t blame him much. Pop got a strainer out of the kitchen and began filling the four jars. The strainer caught the bubbles and strips of cowhide so the tanning juice in the jars was clear.

“Got to remember to wash them utensils out before Bessie gets back,” Uncle Sagamore said. “She gits provoked about usin’ ‘em for things like this.

“Hadn’t you ought to put in a couple of pieces of the leather?” I asked. “Maybe they’ll want to analyze it too.”

Uncle Sagamore shook his head. “No. I reckon not. The solution’s the only thing the Gov’ment is interested in. That’s what does the work an’ tans the leather, an’ when they find out what I done wrong when I mixed her up we’ll be all set.”

He picked up one of the jars real easy and held it up to squint through it at the light.

“How is she for color?” Pop asked.

“Real good,” Uncle Sagamore says. “She just couldn’t be better. Like a regular carmel job.”

I couldn’t see what difference the color made. You could see it was about like weak tea but, heck, what did the Gov’ment care about that?

Uncle Sagamore slipped a rubber ring around the neck of each one of the jars and got ready to screw on the caps. “Got to be sure we seal her good and tight,” he says.

“We got just the thing out in the trailer,” Pop says. He went through the house. In a minute he came back with a tube of clear cement. He smeared some on both sides of the rubber sealing ring and a little on the edges of the caps, and they screwed ‘em down firm, holding on to the shoulders of the jars with their other hand. Pop threw what was left of the juice back in one of the tubs, and washed out the bucket. Then they washed off the outsides of the jars, you couldn’t smell it now, except what was coming from the tubs themselves.

Uncle Sagamore went and got a cardboard box and packed the four jars in it real careful, stuffing wadded paper all around them so they couldn’t touch each other and break. Pop took the box out and put it in the back of our car.

“You goin’ to take it to the post office now?” I asked.

“Sure,” Pop says.

“Can I go, Pop?”

“Sure, I reckon so,” he says. “Come to think of it, haven’t you got a lot of old dirty clothes we ort to take to the laundry while we’re goin’?”

“Yeah,” I says. “I’ll get ‘em.”

I went to the trailer and found the laundry sack behind the printing press. It was full of my stuff and Pop’s shorts and levis and shirts and socks and things. Some of ‘em hadn’t been sent to the laundry since we was at Bowie. There was a lot of