too late,” he says, kind of shouting and waving the hammer in Pop’s face.
“Too late for what?” Pop asks. He backed up and bumped into me.
“No use coming around now. I tried to tell you. All of you. But nobody’d listen. Everybody chasing the almighty dollar and drinking and lying and fornicating back and forth, and now it’s too late.”
“Where’s Sagamore?” Pop says, yelling in his ear.
“Whole world’s busting with sin and corruption. It’s a-coming. I tried to tell you. Armageddon’s a-coming.”
“Pop,” I says, “what’s Armaggedon?”
“I don’t know,” Pop says. “But he sure as hell ain’t going to hear it when it gets here, unless it runs over him.”
Then Pop leaned over and put his mouth right against the man’s ear and yelled, “I’m looking for Sagamore Noonan. I’m his brother Sam.”
“It’s too late,” the man says, waving the hammer in Pop’s face again. “I ain’t going to take none of you sinners. You can all just drowned.”
Pop sighed and looked around at me. “I think I know who the old skinhead is now. It’s your Aunt Bessie’s brother Finley. Used to be a sort of jackleg preacher. Deaf as a post. He ain’t heard hisself in twenty years.”
“What do you suppose he’s building?” I asked.
Pop shook his head. “No telling. From the looks of it, he must have forgot, hisself.”
He climbed down the ladder and I jumped down after him. Just then we got another whiff of the smell coming from up at the house.
“You suppose something is dead up there?” I asked.
Pop looked up towards the house, then I looked. We didn’t see any sign of anybody. “Maybe it’s one of his mules,” he says.
The man up on the scaffold was still hammering away and muttering to hisself when we got in the car and drove back up the hill. Pop eased up real careful and stopped the car and trailer under the big tree in front of the house while we got ready to hold our noses. But when we got out it seemed like there was a little breath of air blowing up from the lake behind us, and we didn’t smell anything. Not at first.
It was real quiet. It was so still you could hear your breath going in and out. I liked it fine, because it was so different from all the noise around big cities like Aqueduct. I looked around. The front yard was bare dirt, beat down flat and smooth, and there was a walk marked off with square brown bottles set in the ground. The front door in the middle of the porch was open, but we didn’t see anybody inside. There was still a little smoke coming out of the stovepipe, but not as much as there had been at first.
“Hello!” Pop called out. “Hello, Sagamore!”
Nobody answered.
“Why don’t we just go in?” I asked.
Pop shook his head. “No. We might surprise him.”
“Ain’t it all right to surprise people?”
“Maybe some people,” Pop says. “But not Sagamore.”
“Well,” I says, “I don’t think there’s anybody here.”
Pop looked around, real puzzled. “Well, you’d think Bessie would be, anyway—oh, sweet Jesus!” He grabbed his nose and started fanning the air with his hat.
I began to choke too. “Pop,” I says, “it’s coming from over there. You see all them tubs, over there by the well?”
He waved an arm. “See if you can get close enough to find out what’s in ‘em.”
After you’d had a whiff or two you got a little used to it and you could breathe without choking, so I walked over towards the well. It was off beyond the end of the porch. There was a clothes line strung up between two posts, and the tubs was sitting in the sun just this side of it. There was six of ‘em, washtubs, strung out in a row along the side of the house. When I got up close I had to hold my nose again.
There was something in ‘em, all right. I couldn’t make it out at first. It looked like sort of brownish water with some scum and old thick bubbles floating on top. Then I saw there was something underneath the surface. I got a stick and poked around inside until I could fish part of it up. It was a cowhide. The hair was slipping off it. When I dropped it back, the whole mess bubbled. It was awful.
I looked at the other washtubs and they was all the same. I yelled and told Pop. He come over, still