The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [4]
The sheep were his principal peculiarity. Not that sheep were so rare in the Ozarks (they weren’t at all in those days), but that a genuine shepherd was. If a man wanted to make a dollar or two every April from selling the wool, he’d keep a ewe (anybody who had one pronounced it “yo”) out behind the house where the dogs couldn’t get it. He wouldn’t think of eating it; nobody ate mutton, let alone lamb, in the Ozarks, where “meat” meant only pork, nothing else. (Pork can be salted and cured and preserved, but mutton cannot.) When the ewe got too old to be sheared, fourteen or so, and hadn’t died of natural old age, its owner would just let it go to rot or rust through neglect, and bury it, or take down the fence separating it from the dogs.
Nail Chism was the only man anybody knew, or even heard of, or read in the papers about, who kept a whole pastureful of sheep, and he spent most of his time, when he wasn’t tending the vegetable patch or helping his brothers with the whiskey still, living with the sheep and watching after them. We could hear him up there a mile off calling, “Sheep! sheep! sheepsheepsheep!” He knew everything there was to be known about sheep. He knew how to get the yolk just right—for anybody else, that meant the yellow part of an egg, but Nail would explain it was the soapy or greasy stuff on the fleece: too little yolk, and the sheep wasn’t getting the right mix of greens or else had been sired by an inferior ram, and the fleece would be dry and coarse; too much yolk, and twenty pounds of sheared fleece would weigh only four pounds after the first washing.
Every April, Nail Chism rented from Willis Ingledew’s livery a wagon, which he loaded with fleece to the sky, or at least to the lowest tree branches, and drove to Harrison, a week’s journey there and back, where he got the best dollar for his “crop.” Some folks wondered why Nail Chism even needed to join his brothers in the manufacture of illicit vernacular bourbon (those weren’t their words for the stuff) if he made a downright good living year in and year out from what he got at Harrison for his fleece. The answer, if you troubled to ask him, was simply that the Chisms had been making the best drinking-whiskey in the Ozarks ever since Nail’s grandaddy had come from Tennessee back in 18 and 39.
It was a family tradition, which Seth Chism had elevated to just about the acme of quality and repute and had instilled in his sons from the earliest they’d been able to plow the corn or fire the biler. Nail, Seth’s middle boy, had been made superintendent of the biler at the age of fourteen and had become a professional moonshiner long before the day he became a captive audience for a traveling peddler, name of Eli Willard, who was trying to unload a pair of Cotswold lambs he’d been swapped for out of something in Kentucky.
In those days the village reached its top size, the closest Stay More ever came to being a real town, with the Ingledews running a big three-floor general store as well as the post office and the gristmill, and getting competition from no fewer than three other general stores; there was almost a genuine Main Street of the kind associated with the motion picture called a western (although the surrounding countryside looked nothing at all like the stark badlands of the westerns: it was too green, had too many shades of green, was too lush and too uplifting, the hills rising steep and pastured and forested and bluffed), and along this Main Street there were two doctors’ offices and two dentists as well as Jim Tom Duckworth’s law office and at least three blacksmiths with the latest tripod gear-driven quickblast forges, and even, by the time this story really gets going good, a bonafide bank waiting to be robbed, and around the corner you’d find such things as Murrison’s sawmill and William Dill’s wagon factory, making some of the best horse-drawn vehicles still competing with the just-arrived automobile.
Eli Willard hadn’t yet discovered the automobile when he arrived in the thriving village with two Cotswolds in the back