Pop shook his head. “Ain’t nothing could ever get that dead.”
We looked around at the farm. At first we didn’t see anybody. There was a log barn off to the right, and straight ahead in the shade of a big tree was the house. It was kind of gray, like old wood, and didn’t have any paint on it anywhere. There was a big porch across the front. White smoke was coming out of the stove-pipe on the far side of the roof, but we didn’t see Uncle Sagamore anywhere.
Then we heard a hammering sound, and looked off to the left. It was downhill that way, and at the bottom of the hill we could see a lake that went off into the trees. And about halfway down the hill a man was working on something. It was the funniest-looking thing I ever saw. I couldn’t tell what it was.
“Is that Uncle Sagamore?” I asked Pop.
“Working like that? In the sun?” Pop shook his head and stared at the man and the thing he was nailing boards on. It was about fifty yards away and you couldn’t see what the man looked like except he was kind of shiny on top like he didn’t have much hair.
“That’s not Sagamore,” Pop says. “But maybe he knows where he is.”
The breeze was still stopped and we didn’t get any more of that awful smell, so Pop started the car again and we eased down the hill. I kept watching this thing the man was working on, trying to figure out what it was, but I didn’t make any sense out of it. It looked a little like he’d started out to build a boat but changed his mind and wanted to make a house out of it, and then somewhere along the line he’d decided, aw, the hell with it, he’d just go ahead and nail her together and see what it was after he got through.
The bottom part of it was a big box about the size of a small house trailer, and on top of that was another box. None of it was finished yet, and you could see all the way through it in places. A lot of the boards had big holes in them. Some of the holes was round and some was shaped like a new moon. The man was standing on a scaffold about as high as the top of the car, with his back to us, nailing a short board over the hole in another board.
He didn’t seem to hear us. Pop stopped the car right in back of him and leaned out of the window. “Hey,” he says, “where’s Sagamore?”
The man didn’t even look around.
“Hey, you, up there!” Pop yells.
The man just went on hammering. Pop and I just looked at each other. We got out of the car, and Sig Freed jumped out and started running around, stopping now and then to look up at the man and bark.
Pop reached in and honked the horn. The man didn’t pay any mind. In a minute he stopped hammering and leaned back a little to look at the board. He shook his head and started pulling it loose with his claw hammer. He moved it over a couple of inches and nailed it down again.
Pop went wonk! wonk! wonk! on the horn. The man looked at his board again, but he didn’t like it there either and started pulling it loose once more. The board was getting chewed up by now.
“We ain’t getting anywhere here,” Pop says, rubbing his hand across his face. “We want to talk to him, I guess we got to go up there.”
Pop climbed up the ladder and got on the scaffold. I went up behind him. We could see the man from the side here, which was a little better than not seeing anything but his back. He was older than Pop, and he didn’t have any shoes on. He was wearing overalls and a white shirt with the sleeves cut off, and he had on a high stiff collar and a tie. The tie stuck down inside the bib of his overalls. There was a little ring of white hair around his head just above his ears, and when he turned towards us his eyes made you think of a man yelling at cars in a traffic jam. Sort of wild-like. Only he didn’t act like he saw us.