The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [13]
Jim Tom and the Sheriff moved a little closer, to hear better, but Nail didn’t elaborate upon his conversation with the deputy. Sull said, “Well, Nail, son, I’m sorry to tell ye, but you aint got any choice. Everbody’s dependin on ye to run that stuff.”
“Find somebody else to depend on,” Nail said calmly, but he was beginning to get angry.
“Aint nobody else with a wagon full of wool,” Sull said.
“I want ye to stop sparkin Dorinda,” Nail said.
Sull laughed. “You sweet on her?”
“Naw, but I’m sweet on Irene, and I don’t want ye treatin her like that.”
“Yo’re welcome to Irene,” Sull said. “Nobody else wants her.”
Nail hit Sull. According to Jim Tom, who told it later around Stay More, Nail just clenched a fist and lifted it faster than anybody could watch and caught Sull under the chin with it and lifted him about a foot off the floor and slammed him up against the wall. Just one punch, and Sull sort of peeled down the wall and into a heap on the floor. Nail turned and walked off, and Jim Tom and Duster Snow lifted Sull into a chair and worked him over to get him awake, and to pacify him Sheriff Snow said to Sull, “I’ll have a little talk with ole Seth fer ye.” And that night the sheriff came to Stay More for the first time and rode his horse up to the Chism place up there on the mountain and sat on the porch with Seth Chism until well past dark, and even spent the night, at Seth’s invitation.
The next morning, as the sheriff was saddling his horse, Nail Chism came down from the pastures where he’d spent the night with his sheep, and walked right up to Duster Snow and said, “Sheriff, you and Sull aint about to make me run any more goods fer ye.”
“We’ll jist see about that, son,” Duster Snow said.
“Yeah,” said Seth Chism to Nail, “you’d best listen to what I got to tell ye, boy. We don’t want to make Mr. Snow mad. He could bust up our still, ye know.”
Nail became very angry. “Go ahead and dust it, Buster!” he snarled at the sheriff, but corrected himself: “Go ahead and bust it, Duster! You bust our still, and I’ll tell the federal law the names of everbody who’s been runnin liquor to Harrison.”
“Reckon yo’re under arrest, boy,” Duster informed him. The sheriff arrested Nail on a charge of assault and battery against the county judge, Sull, and took Nail into Jasper and put him into that big stone jail that’s still there, off the square. Jim Tom tried to bail him out but couldn’t get Nail to meet the condition: to retract his threat to expose the bootleggers to the federal law. So the sheriff let Nail stew for a week in the jailhouse. Jim Tom said the courthouse politicians, of which he was not one himself, were scared of Nail. The politicians, especially the county judge himself, were scared Nail might carry out the threat, he might try to contact Raiding Deputy Collector John T. Burris of the U.S. Revenue Service, or (they hoped Nail was too ignorant to know of the existence of the legendary Burris) he might at least have a chat with Isaac Stapleton, Stay More’s own former deputy collector and onetime assistant to Burris, recently retired from a long career of working downstate busting up stills in Perry and Scott counties. If Stapleton told Nail how to contact Burris, that might blow the lid off the bootlegging operation.
Nail said he wouldn’t have minded staying in the Jasper jail, awful as it was, except that there was nobody to take care of his sheep. His brothers Waymon and Luther visited him, and he tried to explain to them how to do the many little jobs that a shepherd must handle in the month of May, but it was clear that Waymon and Luther didn’t know anything about sheep. The law couldn’t keep Nail in the Jasper jail forever, and Jim Tom convinced Sull and the courthouse gang of politicians of that, so they “released him on his own recognizance,” whatever that meant, but first the entire courthouse gang took him into the jury room and sat around the table with him and talked to him for half the night, and then Sull Jerram told him they would let him