The Boys Who Woke Up Early Page 5
With my bloody knife I would cut Mary Lou’s bonds. She would be beyond fright by then, not tearful but wide-eyed with wonder—beyond modesty as well, a rose-tipped breast peeking from the torn white nightgown, her lithe, strong legs bare.
She would surely say, under those circumstances, “How can I ever thank you, Stony?”
And I would say, “Well, Mary Lou, since you asked …”
= = =
One reason I put up with Jack’s nonsense was that I was actually learning something about police work from the Early County Sheriff’s Department. Around Thanksgiving, Jack and I just started hanging out there. I had never quite realized, before Jack showed me at the sheriff’s office, that you could just walk into a lot of places, ask questions, and get answers you really had no business knowing. Jack taught me that most people find their own work interesting and will talk about it till it’s past milking time.
The sheriff’s department was on the first floor of the Early County Courthouse. The courthouse was the fanciest building in Early, built around the turn of the century when the town was rich from coal, lumber, and the chestnut harvest. It was made of granite blocks three feet long and more than a foot thick. A few stone steps rose up to the double front doors. The hallway originally had hardwood parquet flooring, but it had been covered with low-maintenance asphalt tile in my own, less prosperous time.
The staircase that rose along the right side of the hallway to the second-floor courtroom retained its original magnificence, its turned oak balusters supporting a polished oak rail six inches wide. The walls of the staircase were covered with oiled oak paneling. At the top, the landing opened on one side into the oak-appointed courtroom and on the other into Richard Conway’s fancy office. Conway held the elected office of commonwealth’s attorney, the same position called a district attorney in most other states.
At the back of the hallway was a plain, narrow stairway used to bring in prisoners for hearings. If the architectural statement of the public staircase said, “This is the Temple of Justice,” the back staircase said, more honestly, “Don’t get your hopes up.”
The door to the sheriff’s office opened off the hallway near the bottom of the prisoner stairs, and inside that door splendor ended entirely. The sheriff’s office had been modified so many times that all the polished oak had been covered or replaced with pine or plywood or wallboard. Upon entering you found yourself facing a green-painted counter behind which sat a receptionist who was also the department’s daytime radio dispatcher, the one female deputy who doubled as a jail matron, and—on the second and graveyard shifts—one of the male deputies. Nobody went through the swinging gate in this counter unless they worked there or were invited or were under arrest. The office behind it was hot from steam radiators and cramped with desks and filing cabinets. Every inch of wall space was covered with wanted posters and circulars for stolen cars and announcements of this or that new state statute or regulation. Sheriff Aaron Taylor preferred to spend his time riding the county in a police cruiser and talking to political supporters, so the office was actually run by Really Big Ben, the chief deputy.
When he was in high school, Ben Agee was pretty tall and strong for his age, so people got to calling him Big Ben; then another guy moved to town for a while and told everybody he was himself called Big Ben. The new guy bragged a lot but turned out to be mostly a bullshit artist, so folks started calling him “Sorta Big Ben,” and our own original Big Ben Agee became “Really Big Ben” to emphasize that he was the genuine article. Sorta Big Ben didn’t stick around long, but Really Big Ben’s new nickname did. When Jack and I started hanging around the office, Really Big Ben was thirty, about six feet three, lean and muscular, and had thick wavy brown hair. He wore a tan deputy’s uniform like it was custom-made for him. He kept the uniform spotless. I knew him already because he had arrested me once. He had let me ride to the sheriff’s office without handcuffs, and he had given me time to quit crying before he took me inside to face my parents and my consequences. Because he had preserved my dignity that way, I liked him.
We were standing at the counter one Friday afternoon watching Ben sitting at his desk cleaning his big chrome revolver. It was interesting to watch, but cleaning a revolver was such a dirty, monotonous job that every officer hated doing it. Yet they had to do it frequently. Most deputies in Early County had seen combat in Korea or World War II, and as a result they hoped to never fire another shot at a human being. But deputies patrolled solo, and each one knew that if he encountered trouble, and guns were involved, he would likely fight alone while his adversary might have an accomplice or two. Being a dead shot was the main way a deputy could improve his odds, so each practiced religiously.
A deputy would fire at least thirty rounds every time he practiced, and the bullets were unjacketed lead, which left the revolvers very dirty. Ben pulled flannel patches through the barrel and six chambers of his gun, alternating dry patches and ones moistened with evil-smelling gun-cleaning fluid. He did this time after time until the patches finally came out as clean as they went in, and he had a pile of used patches two or three inches high. Then he used a toothbrush to clean the face of the cylinder and the back end of the barrel. After that he ran another dry patch through each chamber and the barrel, then did the same with a lightly oiled patch. Then he used a dry rag to wipe every brass cartridge from the gun and his cartridge belt, and then he pulled another clean rag through the belt’s cartridge loops.
“You polish the cartridges so the empties will come out of the gun quick if you need to reload fast,” Ben explained. “You clean the cartridge loops because brass corrosion builds up on the leather and can make the reloads hard to pull out.” He put six of the gleaming rounds into the pistol, returned the rest to the belt loops, then wiped the entire gun and put it in the holster. The whole job must have taken more than half an hour. “Glad that’s over for the month,” he said.
Now Jack said, “I’ll do it for you next time. I need to learn how to clean a gun the right way.”
The words were hardly out of his mouth before Rudy Sexton, the swing-shift dispatcher sitting at the radio controls, jumped to his feet wearing a wide grin and said, “You don’t have to wait a month. Come on back here and I’ll let you clean mine.” He did a short-stepping, high-elbowed, intentionally comic run over to the gate, opened the hidden latch, and admitted us for the first time to the office space itself.
Letting people into the office who didn’t work there was against Really Big Ben’s rules. Ben was still sitting at his desk, smiling faintly, considering, I thought, whether to throw us out. Finally he said, “Stony, I’d hate to see you miss any of the fun Jack’s going to have.” He went out to his car, unlocked his shotgun from its rack, unloaded it, and brought it inside for me to clean. I noticed that his khaki uniform was dirty from the cleaning job and stunk of gun-cleaning fluid. As soon as he got me started on the shotgun, he went down the hall and put on a clean uniform from his locker. He came back in a good mood, expertly knotting the black uniform necktie without the help of a mirror.
After that, we cleaned a lot of guns. Every deputy was required to be proficient not only with his revolver and shotgun but also with a rifle if he carried one in his car, and most did. Officers were required to shoot qualifying scores with those weapons only once a year, but they practiced much more often—once a month or more. Most also owned and practiced with some small pistol, which they carried in a pocket or boot as a backup weapon, or when off duty. The department safe contained extra revolvers and shotguns, as well as a launcher that shot tear gas shells, two Tommy guns, and a Chinese burp gun, a war trophy from Korea, which the sheriff had confiscated in a moonshine raid. Besides those, the department had assorted rifles it had accumulated over the years and kept around in case the sheriff ever had to arm a posse, which had not happened in decades. All that extra hardware was almost never fired, but it nevertheless had to be periodically cleaned and oiled.
I didn’t mind doing it, not at the time. And once we had taken over that despised task, the deputies began looking for other jobs they could hand off to Jack and me.
The office’s only secretary or clerk was the female deputy who doubled as the daytime dispatcher and tripled as the jail matron when there were any female prisoners to deal with, so she never had enough time at her typewriter. Jack and I took over her backlog of paperwork, and with all that practice we were soon getting As in our school typing class. Pretty soon the sheriff’s department began using us the way police departments later used Explorer Scouts—as unpaid volunteers doing almost everything except actually going on patrols, chasing speeders, and arresting burglars. Most of it was paperwork, but I also learned how to photograph a crime scene (at least up to the crude standards of 1959), to run the teletype machine on which crime information was transmitted to departments throughout the state, and to reload ammunition. When Rudy Sexton went to the bathroom or took an on-duty snooze in his swivel chair on a slow night, I sometimes got to operate the radio. I even learned to take fingerprints, and once, when the cook and most of the deputies had flu, Jack and I cooked for ten prisoners. We didn’t produce good grub, but it beat corn flakes.
Sheriff Taylor came in the office in the mornings but was usually gone when we got there after school. He was a six-foot-tall fat man who, by privilege of rank and being an elected official, never wore a uniform. That winter his usual outfit consisted of black wool hard-finish hunting pants and a red-and-black plaid wool shirt with his badge pinned on it. You couldn’t see the badge, usually, because he wore a brown hip-length leather jacket over it. He wore black Wellington boots and a brown cowboy hat.
Another privilege of rank he had given himself was the gun he carried. The issued revolver in the Early sheriff’s department was a Smith & Wesson Heavy Duty Model .38 Special with a long barrel. The Heavy Duty was built to shoot the extra-powerful ammunition police might need to fire through auto bodies, so it was bulky and heavy to carry. In this sheriff’s department, Taylor alone didn’t have to carry one. When he took off his coat we saw a revolver so small it looked like a toy in the cross-draw holster on his fat middle. That seemed lazy to me.
= = =
An incident that happened after I started hanging out at the sheriff’s office made me dislike Sheriff Taylor even more. My father and I had a friend named Jim Hazlewood, an old man. He was a corn-fed, tobacco-chewing hillbilly who had served two prison sentences for moonshining. He had no sons, and his daughters had married respectable men, lived in other counties, and didn’t often get home to see him. Twenty years earlier, he had buried his wife in his front yard, as a lot of old-time mountain people did. Jim’s unique tribute to her was planting a dogwood tree on the fresh grave so that as long as he lived he could see it from a chair on his front porch, blooming every spring with its white blossoms shaped like crosses and the rust-colored stains on each petal, like the True Cross, all of it a reminder of the Resurrection to come. By the time my father started taking me up to Jim’s place, it was a big tree, full of bloom every spring, its branches seeming to shelter the gray granite tombstone beneath it. I hoped I would someday find a woman I would love as much as Jim had loved the one buried under that dogwood.
The last time Jim had been caught making whiskey, the judge noted that putting him in prison hadn’t cured his whiskey-making in the past, so this time the judge made a different proposal. He agreed to let Jim go free, on probation of course, if he personally promised the judge he would never make alcohol for the rest of his life. It was a great act of faith on the judge’s part, but once Jim gave his personal word, he kept it.
When Jim grew too old to farm, he let his place go back to brush to shelter quail, rabbits, and deer, and he let some people, including my father and me, hunt there. Because they were the only company he got, the hunters were important friends to him.
Some of Jim’s near neighbors were the Jepsons, who were famous moonshiners and poachers. I had gone to grade school with a Jepson boy, Buddy, who often used to sneak up behind one of us other boys and sucker punch him in the spine or kidney. It hurt so bad you couldn’t move for a minute or two afterward. Buddy would run away laughing. Once, when I was still hurting from a punch late one night, I crawled up beside my dad on the couch and asked him why Buddy would do that to me. I hadn’t ever done anything mean to Buddy.
“He does it ’cause he’s a Jepson,” my father said. “It’s just how they are. And they don’t like us Shelors. It’s best to just stay away from ’em.”
None of the Jepsons attended school any longer than they legally had to. Buddy never darkened the schoolhouse door on or after his sixteenth birthday, and the rest of us in his class were glad of it.
Once, when Dad and I were talking with Jim Hazlewood on his front porch, I asked him something or another about his Jepson neighbors. Jim, who was normally talkative, looked at my dad as if asking permission to answer. My father said, “Jim, can you still play that fiddle? Would you play ‘The Wagoner’s Lad’? And sing it?”
So Jim went in the house and brought out his fiddle. The instrument looked to be as old as he was, and it rustled when he handled it because he kept two or three rattlesnake tails in it, which was supposed to protect it from the damp. He tucked the fiddle under his chin, applied the bow, and sang in his old cracked bass voice.
My horses ain’t hungry, they won’t eat your hay.
I’m loaded and ready, I’ll be on my way.
When Jim finished my father said, “Could you play that third verse again?” So Jim did. That’s the verse that goes,
I work for my living, my money’s my own,
And them that don’t like me can leave me alone.
My father had him play that same verse twice. And Dad said to me, “That’s a verse you should remember.”
Dad didn’t have to draw me a picture. I had long since decided to leave the Jepsons alone. But the Jepsons didn’t leave Jim alone. The winter I started hanging around the sheriff’s office, two of Buddy’s older brothers, Will and Ab Jepson, told Jim Hazlewood they wanted to put a whiskey still on his farm. The sheriff and the federal revenuers and the state ABC men kept their eyes on any land the Jepsons owned, but since Jim really had quit making whiskey and everybody knew it, the Jepsons reckoned nobody would think to look for a still on Jim’s farm.
But Jim refused, because that would have meant he could no longer let people hunt on his land, and the hunters were about the only company he got. The Jepsons put a still on Jim’s land anyway, hid it well, and operated it for several weeks before one of the hunters found it and told Jim. Jim didn’t report the still to law enforcement because the lawmen would have staked it out and tried to arrest the Jepsons. Jim had been to prison and didn’t wish that on anybody. So he tore up the still himself, shooting the boiler and cap full of holes with his .22 rifle. And he poured out the mash and broke a lot of new fruit jars waiting to be filled with liquor, just like the lawmen would have done.
Will and Ab Jepson went to Jim Hazlewood’s house and beat him up, and left him lying in the dirt in his front yard. As they were leaving, Ab Jepson saw Jim’s chain saw hanging on a big nail on the outside wall of the house, in the shelter of the front porch. He grabbed that chain saw, cranked it up, and cut down the dogwood growing on Mrs. Hazlewood’s grave. He did it right there in front of Jim, this old man who couldn’t do anything about it but sit in the dirt and cuss at them.
One of Sheriff Taylor’s deputies took a crime report on the incident; I know because I typed it from the deputy’s handwritten notes. Yet after a week had gone by, there had been no arrests. I asked Rudy Sexton why not. He made no answer at all until I asked him again, and then it was just one word. “Reasons,” he said. He wouldn’t even joke about it, which was unusual for Rudy. When I asked again, he pressed the transmission button on the department radio and made an unnecessary location check on the units in the field.
My father wasn’t mayor that year, and occasionally got to spend an evening in his workshop making furniture. He loved that hobby so much that this particular day he went down there in the basement and started working on the wood lathe without even taking off his good wool office pants or his white shirt. He did take off his necktie and his rings, a wedding ring and a Masonic one, so they wouldn’t get caught in the machine. He was happy there, watching a spinning walnut two-by-two melt away until there was nothing left but a beautifully proportioned table leg.
When I asked him about Jim Hazlewood’s case, he pulled the chisel away from the table leg but didn’t look up, just as Rudy Sexton had not looked up from the radio. I could see he didn’t want to talk about it, but then he did anyway.
“Sheriff Taylor and Rich Conway have an understanding,” he said. “Taylor and his men don’t make arrests if they have reason to believe Rich won’t prosecute. It’s supposed to save the taxpayers’ money. But it also allows Rich to talk people like old Jim Hazlewood into filing a civil suit instead of pressing criminal charges.”
“Why would Rich want him to do that?” I asked.
Dad looked at me over his bifocals. “They don’t call him ‘Slick Rick’ for nothing. In a small county like Early, a commonwealth’s attorney is allowed to also have a private practice. If Rich converts Jim’s complaint to a civil case, Jim has to pay a lawyer, and Rich will work it out so he’s the lawyer Jim pays. As commonwealth’s attorney, Rich’s job is prosecuting criminal cases, and he gets paid the same if he prosecutes a hundred cases a year, or none. He won’t make anything extra for actually prosecuting the Jepsons, so to Rich’s way of thinking, why do it?”