The diamond bikini - By Charles Williams Page 0,82

and see this. They can come around that side of the house, pass along here, and go back around the corner. Every man in the county is out here, so besides the still and the mash and the moonshine, we’re going to have eight thousand eyewitnesses.”

Booger frowned. And then he says, “But, wait. You can’t do that. You’ll have plenty of witnesses, but you won’t never be able to have a jury, because they’ll be disqualified.”

The sheriff shook his head, real gentle. “Boys, I told you you didn’t see the real beauty of it. Sure, all the men are out here. But how about the women?”

Booger’s and Otis’s jaw fell open.

I thought the sheriff was going to break down and cry again. He started to choke up, and tears was running down his cheeks, but he was smiling. “You see, boys? You see? There won’t be nobody eligible for jury duty but them women. The ones that would lynch him if they could get their hands on him right now. The wives of the men he’s been selling rotgut to and cleanin’ out in crap games for twenty years.”

Booger and Otis stared at him like Uncle Finley seeing the Vision. “I never heard anything as beautiful in my life,” Booger says, real soft.

The sheriff nodded. “All right, boys. Round ‘em up. But do me a little favor, first. Give me ten minutes here, completely alone. I’m getting along in years, and I won’t never have another moment like this. I just want to stand here and look at him settin’ there asleep between his mash tubs and his still. It’ll be something to take into my old age with me.”

They left.

I was worried. “What will they do to Pop?” I asked the sheriff. “And to Miss Caroline?”

He didn’t act like he even heard me. He just stood there with that dreamy expression on his face, and every once in a while he would whisper, “Wonderful.” And then, “Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.”

It was maybe five minutes before he looked around and even noticed I was there, and then I thought of one other thing that still puzzled me. Uncle Sagamore had got some clothes for Miss Caroline, but there she was wearing his old overalls. I asked the sheriff about it.

“Oh,” he says. “Those clothes of hers was what the dawgs was following back and forth across the bottom yesterday. He drug ‘em along the ground behind his mule. I knew that, but I just figured it was a pair of her shoes.”

In a few minutes men began to come pouring down the hill. The whole back yard was full of them. The road was open now, and the first thing to get through was three car-loads of newspaper reporters and photographers. They asked a thousand questions and snapped pictures. Everybody milled around, talking, and Pop and Uncle Sagamore and the three women slept right on like babies.

Booger shook his head. “It must have been some party,” he said. “At least a couple of gallons.”

There was a loud honking then, and a truck come around the house and began pushing up through the crowd. It stopped right under the chinaberry tree, and I saw it had a bunch of planks on it and that the sign on the side said, “E.M Staggers Lumber Co.” There was a big, pleasant-faced woman wearing a sunbonnet in the seat beside the driver. She got out and walked over and stood looking at all five of them still asleep. Then she looked at me.

“Billy?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

Tears came in her eyes, and she grabbed me. “You poor boy.” She picked me up and held me with my face pressed against her bosom.

“Get ‘em out of here, sheriff,” she says. “Get ‘em off this farm. This minute.”

“Yes, Miss Bessie,” the sheriff says. “They’re on their way right now.”

I stayed on at the farm with Aunt Bessie, and it was real nice except for being a little quiet now that Pop and Uncle Sagamore was gone. I went fishing a lot, and practiced swimming in the shallow water, and helped Aunt Bessie pick blackberries. She was real nice, and I liked her. Of course I missed Miss Harrington—I mean Miss Caroline—but I got a letter from her and she said she was doing fine. After she testified in the trial in New Orleans she got a job dancing in a nightclub in New York.

Well, that was in June, when they drafted Pop and Uncle Sagamore, and then about the end of August a funny thing happened. Me and Aunt Bessie was sitting on the front porch in the afternoon taking the shells off some beans when one of the sheriff’s cars come bucking and bouncing down the hill with a big cloud of dust boiling up behind it. For a minute it reminded me of the old days, and I was kind of lonesome for Pop and Uncle Sagamore, thinking about how it had always been so exciting with them around. But it wasn’t Booger and Otis in the car. It was the sheriff hisself.

The car slid to a stop and he got out and run up to the steps, where Aunt Bessie was watching him like he’d gone crazy.

They’re comin’ back!” he yells. He took off his hat and started mashing it up in his hands. “They’ll be here tomorrow—”

Aunt Bessie dropped the beans out of her lap. “What!” she says. “How did that happen? I thought—”

I jumped up. “Hooray!” I said.

The sheriff glared at me like he wanted to bite my head off. Then he kind of collapsed on the steps and shook his head.

“The Governor pardoned ‘em both,” he says, real hopeless and bitter. “Said they didn’t have a fair trial because I disqualified all the men on the jury panel and all the women was prejudiced.”

Aunt Bessie nodded her head. “I reckon that was a mistake.”

The sheriff threw his hat out in the yard and started to say a bad cuss word. He choked it off just in time. “No, no, no!” he says. “That ain’t it at all. That’s just the excuse.”

Aunt Bessie looked at him. “How’s that?”

“It’s that warden, dad-gum it all! He ain’t never liked me, and he’s the Governor’s brother-in-law. The two of ‘em cooked it up so they could get rid of him and throw him back on me.”

“You mean the warden didn’t want him up there?” she asked.

The sheriff turned his head and stared at her. “Bessie, how long you been married to him?”

She sighed. “I reckon it was kind of a foolish question.”

“There ain’t no doubt of it,” the sheriff says. “That dad-gummed warden just got tired of havin’ his prison in a uproar all the time, and he was jealous because the two of ‘em was making more money than he was, what with the still they set up in the boiler room to make moonshine out of dried prunes and potato peelings from the kitchen, and what with the horse-race bets. And then they sold the Bramer bulls from the prison rodeo to some dog food cannery—ain’t nobody ever figured out how they smuggled them out. Course, the sheet metal from the license plate shop was easy. They used the warden’s car for that...”

Oh, that was a fine summer, all right. Like Pop says, there ain’t nothing like wholesome farm life, and you just couldn’t find an all-round wholesomer farm than Uncle Sagamore’s. We’re going to stay on here, Pop says, and not even go back to the tracks at all, which suits me fine. Things are already beginning to hum, now that him and Uncle Sagamore are back. They’re sort of looking around for some new kind of business to go into, seeing that the leather didn’t turn out so well, and I expect the whole place will begin to get exciting again real soon.

That’s the nice thing about a farm. You never know what’ll happen next.