‘In a hurry?’ Pop says.
‘Yeah. Sometimes the shurf’s mighty aggravated when he goes by here. Run over three of my shoats already this year.’
‘Well, that’s too bad,’ Pop says.
The man kind of shook his head, like it was getting the best of him. ‘That’s the reason I’m chasing this hawg. Two of the shurf’s men is back in there now and I’m trying to get him penned up before they come out. Sure is hard on hawgs.’
Pop thanked him and we went on.
‘What did he mean, you could smell it?’ I asked.
He shook his head, kind of absent-minded, like he was thinking. ‘With Sagamore, there ain’t no telling.’
We went up over a long hill where there was lots of pine trees. The car began to get hot, pulling the trailer in the sand. After we ran along the top of it for a while and started down on the other side we went around a turn in the road and right up alongside another car pulled off in a little open place where there wasn’t any trees and you could see out over the river bottom. A man in a white hat was sitting on top of the car with his feet on the hood and he was looking through a pair of field-glasses like you watch races with. Pop put on the brakes and stopped, and the man let his field-glasses dangle on a strap around his neck and stared at us. I tried to see what he was looking at, but all there was was a couple of fields and then trees as far as you could see.
‘What you looking for?’ Pop asks.
There was another man inside the car, and he was wearing a white hat too. He got out and they looked at each other.
‘Airplanes,’ the man on top of the car says.
‘Sure enough?’ says Pop.
‘That’s right. We’re airplane spotters,’ the other man tells him. He had a gold tooth that showed when he grinned. ‘Never know when them Rooshians might take a notion to fly over this way. Where you fellas headed?’
Pop stared at him for a minute. ‘To the airport,’ he says, and started the car up. ‘I see any Russian planes, I’ll let you know.’
We found the ruts going off to the left, and went through the wire gate. It was downhill a little way through the trees and then all of a sudden we saw Uncle Sagamore’s farm.
Then we smelled it.
Pop slammed on the brakes, and the motor stalled. ‘Good God,’ he says, ‘what’s that?’
Sig Freed began to whine and jump around in the back seat. Pop took off his hat and fanned the air in front of his face, kind of choking a little. Then in a minute it wasn’t so bad and we could breathe again. There had been a little breeze blowing from where the house was, and it had quit.
‘It’s coming from over there,’ Pop says. ‘Right there at the house.’
‘What do you suppose is dead?’ I asked.
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 grey, 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 stovepipe 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 half-way 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 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 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.
‘It’s 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 Armageddon?’
‘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 of forgot, hisself.’
He climb 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 somethi
ng is dead up there?’ I asked.
Pop looked up towards the house, and 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 on 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 begin 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 waving his hat in front of his face. Sig Freed had run under the house and was whimpering.
Pop took a look when I fished one up again, and nodded his head. ‘Just tanning some cowhides,’ he says, like he wasn’t too surprised.
‘Is Uncle Sagamore in the tannery business?’ I asked.
Pop looked like he was thinking about something. ‘What’s that? Oh. Not that I ever heard of. Maybe it’s sort of a sideline.’
‘But what’s he got ’em up against the house for? I’d think he’d put ’em about two miles away.’
‘Well, I don’t know,’ Pop says. ‘Maybe he’s just trying to aggravate Bessie, or something. Anyway, I wouldn’t ask him about it, if I was you. Sagamore’s sort of peculiar about people asking questions. So when we find him, just kind of ignore the whole thing.’
I started to ask him how you was going to ignore anything as powerful as them tubs, but then I didn’t. When it comes to answering a lot of questions, Pop never figures to be laying up close to the pace hisself. Maybe it runs in the family.
I went on around the house, looking for Uncle Sagamore. The sun was straight overhead now, and it was hot. I could hear some kind of bug yakking it up in the trees. I was walking along the bare ground at the back of the house when I thought I heard somebody moving inside. I stopped and listened, but didn’t hear it any more, only that bug buzzing away down the hill.
The kitchen door was open. I walked up on the step, which was a block cut out of a big log, and looked inside. I didn’t see anybody, so I went on in. Sig Freed jumped up on the block and come in after me. There was a cookstove in one corner, and a table with oilcloth on it, and some chairs.
I noticed a pot sitting on the stove, and went over and lifted the lid, thinking there might be something to eat in it. There was. They was white, and looked like boiled potatoes. I got a spoon off the table and dug a piece out of one. It wasn’t a potato, though. It tasted more like a rutabaga. And it was stone cold. It wasn’t very good.
There was a door on the left side of the kitchen, and one straight ahead, going into the front. I looked in the room on the left. There was a bed in it, but it was kind of a storeroom. Some sacks of sugar was sitting on the floor, and there was a lot of old harness and clothes hanging along the walls. I came out and started to go into the room in front of the kitchen, when I stopped, remembering something that was funny. It was that white rutabaga. It was cold. But the pot was on a stove with a fire in it.
I went back and looked in the pot again. Then I felt the top of the stove. It was cold too. But I’d seen smoke coming out of the pipe. I stepped back out in the yard and looked up. By golly, there wasn’t any smoke now. But there had been. I was sure of that.
I went back in the kitchen, still trying to figure it out, and raised one of the stove lids and put my hand down on the ashes in the firebox. They was as cold as the rutabaga. There sure was some funny things happened around Uncle Sagamore’s, I thought.
I could hear Pop yelling hello again, and then calling me, so I went into the front room. It was the living-room. There was a big mud fireplace on the right, with a shotgun lying on some forked sticks up above the mantel. Most of the chairs had bottoms wove out of strips of cowhide with the hair still on. Besides the door that went out on the front porch there was another one on the left that went into another bedroom. I looked in there before I went out. There was nobody in it. The whole house was empty.
When I stepped out on the porch the smell hit me again. It seemed to be worse there than anywhere else. I ran down the steps and out by the car. Pop was there, still fanning the air with his hat and cussing bitter and disgusted like.
‘Why in hell didn’t I have sense enough to go to Narragansett Park?’ he says.
‘Aw, Pop,’ I says. ‘I like it here. Except for the smell.’
‘Yeah, but what are we going to do? Sagamore ain’t here. He’s probably been drafted. Nobody around except that old squirrel down there hammering boards together. Nowhere else around here we can go.’
Right behind us somebody said, ‘Howdy, Sam.’
We whirled around, and there was a man standing in the front door, leaning against the jamb with a shotgun hanging in the crook of his arm. I just stared at him. I couldn’t figure out how he’d got there. The house had been empty less than a minute ago. And we hadn’t heard a sound.
He was a big man, taller than Pop, and he was dressed in overalls and an overall jumper without any shirt. He had kind of small, coal-black eyes and a big hooked nose like an eagle, and his face was covered right up to his eyes with sweaty black whiskers about a quarter of an inch long. His hair was black and grey mixed, growing kind of wild and bushy over his ears, but he had a big bald spot that went from his forehead right across the top of his head. The black hair on his chest showed up past the bib of his overalls and stuck out along his neck where the jumper was open.
Those hard, shiny, button eyes seemed to be kind of grinning while they looked at us, but they made you think of a wolf’s grin. There was a big lump in his left cheek, and then without moving his head or anything he puckered up his lips and a big stream of brown tobacco juice sailed out across the porch, kind of bunched up and solid like a bullet. It come on and cleared the front steps and landed ka-splott in the yard.
‘Visi
tin’?’ he asked.
‘Sagamore!’ Pop says. ‘You old son of a gun.’
So that was Uncle Sagamore, I thought. But I still couldn’t figure out where he had come from, or how he’d got there in the door without us hearing him.
He put the gun down against the wall and said, ‘Ain’t seen you in quite a spell, Sam.’
‘About eighteen years, I reckon,’ Pop says. We went up on the porch and they shook hands and we all hunkered down on our heels around the door.
‘Where did you come from, Uncle Sagamore?’ I asked. ‘I was just there in the house and I didn’t see you. And what’s the man building down there by the lake? And how come you didn’t put those cowhides further away from the house?’
He turned his head and looked at me, and then at Pop. ‘This yore boy, Sam?’
‘Yeah, that’s Billy,’ Pop says.
Uncle Sagamore nodded. ‘Going to be a smart man when he grows up. He asks a lot of questions. He’ll probably wind up knowing more than a justice of the peace if anybody ever answers any of ’em.’
3
UNCLE SAGAMORE GOT UP AND went in the house. When he come back he had two glass jars with him, and they was full of some kind of clear stuff like water. He set one down just inside the door and handed the other one to Pop, and then hunkered down again. Pop was still fanning the air with his hat, but he didn’t say anything about the smell from the tubs.
He took a drink out of the jar and then handed it back to Uncle Sagamore. He gasped a little, and tears come to his eyes.
‘Old well ain’t changed a bit,’ he says.
They didn’t fool me any, of course. I knew it wasn’t water but I didn’t say anything.
Uncle Sagamore took the big wad of tobacco out of his cheek and threw it out in the yard. He tilted the jar up and his Adam’s apple went up and down. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. It didn’t make any tears in his eyes, though.
‘By the way,’ Pop says, ‘there was a couple of airplane spotters up on the hill as we come in. Looking down this way with field glasses.’