The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [89]
The bullet entered Waymon low in the backbone. Sull’s second shot missed, and by then Waymon had turned and grabbed the automatic by the barrel and yanked it right out of Sull’s hand and then hammered him atop his head with the butt of it, nearly fracturing Sull’s skull. By the time the cousin reached them, they were both unconscious. He ran for a doctor. The doctor summoned another doctor. They tended to Sull first, because he was the county judge, the leading citizen of Jasper, well known to them both. After they had revived Sull, and Sull was busy telling his friend Sheriff Snow how he had shot Waymon in clear self-defense, the doctors decided to carry Waymon into one of the doctors’ houses, where they operated. Between the two of them, after several hours of cutting and gouging, they managed to get the lead bullet out without completely ruining Waymon’s spine. But they had to keep Waymon there in Jasper for the rest of the week and more.
Folks in Stay More were just about ready to declare war on Jasper. The Ingledews themselves were furious, and before you get an Ingledew riled up, you’d better have kinfolks two counties over who can keep you awhile. John Ingledew, our leading citizen, the same man who ten years before had assembled the lynch mob that took care of that desperado Ike Whitter, and who owned one of the two automobiles of Stay More (his brother Willis owned the other), was in favor of organizing the men of Stay More into an army, marching into Jasper, and taking control of the county government and law enforcement in a coup d’état. It was the time of year when most men didn’t have anything to do anyway: too early to plow, nothing to raise except Cain, and the chess-players around the stove in Willis’ store imagined they knew a way to capture the sheriff and checkmate the county judge.
One morning when Viridis was just a day short of one full week in Newton County, and had just about finished collecting all the signatures she could get for her petition, she was standing on the porch of the old woman’s house, with her sketchbook held in one arm and her drawing-pencil in the other hand, making a picture of the scene of activity on the storeporch across the road: the men of Stay More assembling, each with his best firearm, rifle, or shotgun, and even a flintlock or two, and the storeporch filling up with men, their wagons parked in the road and the yard, or the horses and mules tethered to trees and the porch posts. I was watching Viridis make her drawing, amazed that she could “freeze” that bustling motion of all the men and animals. Dorinda and the old woman were with me, the three of us silently admiring the drawing that Viridis was making. Viridis stopped drawing when she heard the noise; we stopped looking at her drawing and turned our ears toward the north, and the men around the storeporch stopped in their tracks too and listened. The noise grew to a roar, and we could see the cloud of February dust before we could see the vehicles coming into view, down the road from the north, with all the town’s dogs chasing them: the first car was Sheriff Snow’s Oldsmobile with deputies standing shoulder to shoulder on the running-board, followed by Sull Jerram’s Ford so loaded that feet were hanging out the doors, followed by a third car bringing that circuit judge, Lincoln Villines, who had sentenced Nail to the chair. As soon as the first car came to a stop in the middle of the road in front of Willis Ingledew’s store, all of the deputies jumped down and pointed their rifles and shotguns at the men of Stay More, who, we were told later, were kept from firing at the intruders only by the presence of us four females in the line of fire across the road.
The men of Stay More had to lay down their arms. Then the two judges, county and circuit, followed by the sheriff and his men, mounted the storeporch and took a commanding position in its center. Sull’s head was so wrapped up with bandages