Teeftallow/Chapter 32

THAT night, when Abner went to bed at the Sandages', his thoughts and emotions were filled with Adelaide Jones. Certainly she was the most unusual girl he had ever met. Her conversation with him had been as one man with another. She had not said anything particularly reprehensible, he pondered under his blankets, but still she had an air about her. On the drive back she had mentioned casually the number of children she meant to have. "That was a hell of a thing for a girl to say," he thought, more than half insulted, "'goin' to have six children'."

The young man fell asleep thinking about Adelaide, and after the irrational fashion of sleep drifted into a disagreeable dream of Nessie Sutton. Once or twice he started awake during the night and thumped the hot pillow under his head in an effort to beat away the vision of this woman who haunted him. Why did he dream of Nessie? It seemed to Abner that the milliner had died when she married Belshue. Nessie Belshue—he mused on her new name in the darkness. There was something funereal and bitter in it. The change of name was symbolic of the change in the woman. Nessie Sutton, the sweet simple girl whom he had known and whom he had loved so passionately and confusedly, was dead to him indeed.

He fell asleep in the gray of the morning and was awakened, it appeared to him, but a moment later by Aline, the Negro maid, calling him through the door, with disdain tincturing her tones, that the telephone wanted him.

Abner arose and hurried on his clothes without bathing, for, like Jim, he instinctively avoided the bathroom.

​He got down to a desk telephone in the hall with a clear-cut sense of adventure because he had never used a telephone before. He placed the receiver to his ear without knowing quite what to expect. For several minutes he heard a simple buzzing, then said aloud to the maid, "I can't understand anything." The next moment a queer metallic voice said in his ear, "Is that you, Mr. Teeftallow?"

"Yes," exclaimed Abner in surprise.

"Buckingham Sharp talking. Will you kindly call at my office at about ten?"

"Yes," said Abner, keeping his voice elevated and expecting the conversation to run to the indefinite length of all colloquys in the hills.

"I'll expect you, then, good-bye." There was a click, and the quality of the buzz against which this conversation had been cast changed somewhat.

"I declare," thought Abner, hanging up the receiver and looking at it, "he was pretty damn short. . . ."

At ten o'clock Abner entered Buckingham Sharp's office in the court square wondering what the lawyer wanted. Mr. Sharp sat at his desk, a short, rather heavy young man, with a round pink face and a soft pulpy look to his body. He would have appeared a nonentity with his round face and fat body had it not been for his eyes. These were slate-blue, shrewd, informed, and appeared to be appraising the world, planning how to use it to the best advantage for Mr. Sharp. The lawyer was always polite and impersonal. This morning he arose to meet Abner, smiled faintly as he shook the youth's hand, seated him in a chair, and then said in the softly accented English of the aristocratic Southern plantation owners, "I have just found out something about you, Mr. Teeftallow, which interests me."

"What's that?"

"Your grandfather, Judge Coltrane, came up here from Talledega, Alabama."

Abner nodded indifferently.

"he was one of the North Alabama Coltranes. He must ​have eddied up here in the hills just as I did—he married up here."

"Where did you come from?" asked Abner simply.

"I'm one of the Tuscumbia Sharps. You must have heard of Governor Sharp, Senator Dalrymple Sharp, and Horse-Racing Bob Sharp?"

Abner dragged out a "Y-e-s" in a tone that meant "No."

Mr. Sharp understood him to mean "no," for he smiled and said, "Well, there are such persons in the world, at any rate. Now to get down to business, what I wanted to see you about, Mr. Teeftallow, was your claim on the old Coltrane estate. The timber on this tract adjoins that which Mr. Ditmas bought, and he would like to arrange to work it off together with his own."

"I thought he had all he could handle in his new tract?"

"No," said Sharp drily. "There was some confusion about the amount of timber he was buying from Jones."

"How was that?" asked Abner with interest.

"There was less timber than Ditmas thought. He will have to purchase more now in order to work profitably what he has."

Abner became very interested, as all hillmen are in a business deal. "Just what did Railroad Jones do?" he asked, scenting one of the financier's coups.

"I'm afraid I'm not informed enough to give you the details, I merely wanted to tell you Ditmas was in the market for more timber, and you might do well to see him."

"I'll see him," nodded Abner. "I'll look him up right away."

Abner arose, and Sharp got up with him and accompanied him to the head of the steps, where he stood ceremoniously until Abner reached the street below.

The ex-teamster moved off in the morning sunshine with his whole curiosity aroused within him. He wondered what Railroad Jones had done. He knew it would be something dramatic. It would be a new act in the life-long vaudeville which the wealthy man was spreading across the stage of ​Lane County—a new act, a striking act. Abner moved aimlessly along, smiling in anticipation of whatever it might be.

A group of hillmen were standing on a corner of the square, watching a man in their midst draw a figure in the dust with his whipstock. The whole group had the gnarled, almost grotesque faces developed by generations of illiteracy; the way the man in the centre stooped to the dirt and made his designs upon it spoke his familiarity with it. He was not finical about it. One knew he worked in it, turned it over, hoed, ploughed, scraped it. His companions were guffawing and wheezing in awkward hill laughter.

For the first time in his life Abner felt there might be a difference in the quality of these men and the more sophisticated county-site folk, such as Sharp and Jones and Ditmas. This critical feeling of difference vanished almost as quickly as it came, and Abner went up to the group. Already he was beginning to smile through sympathy with their mirth. The man with the whip was saying:

"This here line is Turkey holler. Here it heads into four other little hollers, like this"—he made marks in the dust at an angle to the main line. "They air all growed up so dang thick with trees, it's dark in there all the time: white oaks, poplars, black walnuts, purtiest you ever see. Well, what did ol' Railroad do but walk this damn fool Yankee up one side o' Turkey holler into one o' them little hollers headin' into it here at the top; the he clumb the hill, got over into the next holler, an' walked back down through Turkey agin. They turned aorund, went up Turkey agin, got into the next little holler, clumb another hill, started down it a third time . . ." Here the narrator became so convulsed he could not go on. His hearers were reeling around him wheezing, whooping, and gasping for breath.

"Well, I be dad-snatched—jest showin' him the same thing over an' over!"

"Yeh, ever' one of these little had hollers counted the whole thing! Made that damn fool Yankee b'lieve he was dropped into eight or ten square mile o' solid oak an' walnut!"

​"Thought he was buyin' the whole yeth!"

"Yeh, an' the nicest lot o' hollers to snake logs out of he ever did see."

All other explanations were lost in the yawping and whooping of the hillmen.

"What did it set him back?"

"Seventeen thousand dollars!"

This was the barb, the tang of the jest. The men stumbled over each other pounding backs, dashing away their own tears of merriment.

"God'lmighty! That Railroad Jones! He won't do! Oh, Lord!" the gasper went into convulsions again.

"We ort to send that man to Congress!" panted another, his face set in the mould of laughter, "brainy, wide-awake man, stid o' these little two-by-four lawyers."

"By heck, inside of a month he'd come back with the capitol buildin' under one arm and the guv'ment mint under t'other."

Abner was haw-hawing with his companions from the time he gathered the simple efficiency of Railroad Jones's ruse. There was something grotesquely humorous about it—the fat man leading Ditmas up and down one valley of trees, time and time again, making him think he was convering a wide territory of timbered hills and hollows. It was an exquisite game, this slipping up on the blind side of a purchaser and picking him off as the first pioneers had crept up on the Indians and picked them off! No wonder with such a father Adelaide was the smartest girl he had ever seen. The youth's heart warmed to Railroad's stratagem because he was Adelaide's father. There was something personal, intimate in this victory. Why he, Abner, could have done it himself if he had only thought of it in time!

He turned away from Railroad's admirers with an elated feeling and continued moving about the square with the restlessness of a man too excited with pleasure to remain still.

​Since Abner was walking without any objective at all, the little suggestion that Attorney Sharp had given him to see Ditmas presently took control of the youth's automatism and Abner found himself walking eastward from the square, down a rocky lane toward the engineer's boarding house. It was not until Abner came in sight of a drooping willow in the front yard that he realized this place was his destination.

"Why, sure," he thought to himself, "that's where Ditmas boards." He scrutinized the house. It was one of those self-respecting little cottages with a tiny front porch and two doors opening on to it, so that the guest room was entirely cut off from the rest of the household. A man sat on the porch in the comfortable sunshine, and as Abner drew nearer he was surprised to see that it was Zed Parrum. Abner stared at Zed for several moments before he agreed with his eyes that it really was Zed. Then he wondered why the teamster should be there. He could not imagine any business Parrum could have with Mr. Ditmas.

"Hello, Zed," he called. "What in the world you doin' up here?"

The labourer replied in the guarded tone one uses in the hearing of the sick, "I jest come up from camp with Mr. Ditmas."

A shock travelled through Abner. "What's the matter with Mr. Ditmas?"

Zed drew a long face. "Overwork."

"Overwork! An edjercated man overworkin'?"

Zed winked solemnly, "Overwork from drawin' corks."

Abner stopped at the gate, staring fixedly at Zed's rough-hewn face as the teamster's amazing implication seemed to swing around in his head.

"You don't mean to say—Mr. Ditmas is drunk. . . ."

"I didn't mean to tull you ast me."

"Well, I be dern—drunk! Mr. Ditmas drunk!" Abner stood at the gate, staring at Zed.

"Yep," grunted Parrum noncommitally.

​Abner opened the gate and came slowly up on the porch beside Zed.

"Where is he?"

Zed nodded toward the spare room.

"Can I see him?"

"Why, shore, jest walk in."

But Abner did not approach the door. He stood on the porch, looking out over the village, at a spire over the roofs, at the barred windows of the county jail which he could see in another direction. These were narrow windows in a blank brick wall and looked grim and sinister, although now and then prisoners broke jail and escaped.

"Why don't you go in?" asked Zed at last.

"I don't want to," said Abner, for at the thought of seeing Mr. Ditmas drunken and degraded a queer pain had arisen in the youth's heart. In reality an idol of Abner's had fallen, and the young man shrank from looking at its prostrate form. Why he had set up Ditmas for an ideal, when he had done it, he did not know; but now, somehow the thought of Mr. Ditmas drunk was as harrowing as would have been the thought of a drunken sister.

"How's ever'thing in Arntown?" asked Abner in a mechanical voice, to hide his strange and surprising pain.

"All right. Of course, you know Perry Northcutt's suin' the railroad."

"Yep."

"They all say he'll shore git it. They say Railroad Jones is squirmin' like a eel tryin' to git up the money, but they say he kain't make it; no other banks won't let him have no money."

"When did you bring him up here?" Abner nodded toward the room in which Ditmas lay.

"This mornin' frum camp. We ain't more'n four mile east o' here now. We jest about got her connected up."

"Why won't the other banks let him have no money?"

"Well, they kinder stan' in with each other. When one banker decides to cut a man's th'oat, the others gin'rally ​lend a han'. If a man had any heart he nachelly wouldn't be a banker."

"Naw, of course not."

"He'd go broke if he did."

"Nachelly."

"You kain't blame Perry for cuttin' Railroad Jones's th'oat if he can an' when he can."

"No, of course not."

"Railroad would his, I guess."

"Nachelly."

The two hillmen stood a moment staring at the windows of the jail after this exposition of finance as it was known to them.

"By the way, Abner," said Zed, gravely in one of those flares of intimacy which come at such moments as this, "when you see how your lan' claims air workin' out an' air certain to disaccommodate Perry Northcutt like they air shore to do, can you blame Perry for gittin' you flogged an' tryin to run you out o' the county? After all, Ab, a man's got to look after his investments the best he can."

"Shore, I'd thought of that. I guess it whets him the wrong way that the boys didn't hang me."

"'Magine so. After all, a man plays his han' fer what it's wuth."

"Nachelly. I've 'bout quit bearin' him any grudge."

After another moment Abner nodded at the room again.

"Him, was it losin' his money that made him?"

"I reckon so."

"It was Perry pinchin' Railroad that made Railroad pinch him?"

"Oh, I guess he'd uh pinched him anyway," suggested Mr. Parrum generously. "By the way, Abner, had you heard that Tug Beavers is a-preachin' now?"

"The hell he is!"

At this moment a voice from the sick room called out Zed's name.

"Want anything?" inquired the teamster.

​"Is that young Teeftallow out there?" asked a thick voice.

"Yes, sir."

"You boys—come in here."

With a last flinching that he must see him after all, Abner followed Zed inside.

The room was darkened by green blinds drawn to the bottom of the windows. Mr. Ditmas lay in bed, white and drawn from his debauch. He looked at the two men with unfocussed eyes.

"Abner," he began in his thick tones, "you—surprised at me, I fancy. . . ."

"A little, Mr. Ditmas," said Abner, pained and embarrassed.

"M-m, I can't acchept the loss of sheventeen thousan' an' not feel it, Abner. Had frien's back up—Ohio-way—went in with me—losht their money too. Man can't get his frien's in trouble an' then—then—" He lay staring at the two men at the foot of his bed, apparently pondering deeply; finally, with difficulty he asked, "Wh-what was I talkin' about, Abner?"

"Losing your money, Mr. Ditmas," said Abner in growing depression.

"Oh, yes, money—trouble down here in the hills, Abner, business methods barbarous—game of tricks. Contrack never means what it says—ever' sentence ambush these fellers hide behin' to—to waylay somebody. Tain't right, still, it—it's the way the game's played—down here. . . ."

Again he lay thinking, staring past the heads of the men with a swimming gaze, then with an effort he went on:

"Law's the same way, Abner—civil law, a game of sand-bagging between the clauses of a contrack. Criminal law—a sieve of tec-technicalities that lets ever'thing through. No wonder there are whitecaps; no wonder you got beat in inch of your life, Abner. In land where there's no law people must use other and less precise methods of ret-retribution. S' necessary." He wobbled his head solemnly at the boys

​"Would you like a drink, Mr. Ditmas, to pick you up?" offered Zed.

"N-never drink, Zed, sank ye—t-t-teetotallar.—What was I about to say, Abner?"

"Something about the law, Mr. Ditmas."

"Law. . . . Oh, yes, yes. I see, and I want to—to impress this on you, Abner, 'press this great fack on you. This—dis-this—disingenuous method of l-law and business here in South been a long gradual development, Abner—ver' long, an' ver' gradual. I see it all before me, Abner—hist'ry of the South." Mr. Ditmas made a weaving gesture. "Look at slavery. Slavery committed the South to stress the ex-exact words of a contrack above the ax-actual human rights it contained, Abner. Declaration of Independence did-didn' 'clude niggers. Constitution Newnited States didn' 'clude niggers. Property rights in a human bein', Abner, p-prevailed over natural right of man to his own life. You—you see, in the ver' beginnin' the South obtained unfair advantages through con-contrack. What result? She made a great point of ad-adhering to the letter of the law, not the spirit. What result? Her laws are a maze of technicalities that won't convict anybody for anything—technicality—get out on technicality. What result? Whitecaps, mobs, posses, lynchin's, burnin's, beatin's. You've seem 'em; you know, Abner. . . ."

He lay staring with uncoördinated eyes past the boys at his sinister vision; then he went on thickly: "An' it's spreadin' all over our nation, Abner—ever'where—technicalities—precedent—losin' the spirit of the law in the letter—an'—whitecaps. But—but nobody's to blame. Since there's no law of right, there must be one of might. Mobs and whitecaps, all over our nation. North and South, East and West, anywhere, ever'where—but there's nothin' to do. That's what I want to 'press on you, Abner; nothin' to do. You're a citizen of the South, and of the United States, Abner, and don't you do nothin' a-tall about it, Abner—f' th' ain't nothin' to do. . . ."

​His hands dropped and his eyes closed. His message was delivered. Sweat stood out on his white face. The two hillmen stood looking at the figure.

"He shore is drunk," said Zed slowly.

"Shore is," agreed Abner in a gray voice.

So this alcoholic candour passed away with the words that formed it, and no one was the wiser or the better or the worse.