A NASTY WAY TO GO
ARDATH MAYHAR
BEING A CONSTABLE in a bump in the road like Hackberry, Texas, is mostly boring. Drunks and wife beaters and kids who steal watermelons are about the worst criminals you ever set eyes on. Burglars wouldn’t find anything worth stealing here in the middle of the East Texas woods in the middle of a Depression that busted even the single local millionaire. Old Buzz Gurley never spent a dime anyway, so nobody missed any business he might have sent their way, and nobody else had much more than a nickel for a can of Levi Garrett Snuff.
The Pindars, though—nobody had a clue how they were making out. In a town of two hundred people, everybody knows everybody else’s business, but the Pindars had been a mystery ever since the old man’s grandpa moved here over a generation ago. Nobody knew how he got the money he used to buy their farm, but there must have been enough to allow his widow to control her sons and their wives for over fifty years. And she drove those people like a hitch of mules, as if they had no say in their own lives. Long as she lived she held the whip hand over her grandsons too.
The question of the Pindar money, whether it existed or not, about drove a generation of old geezers at the barbershop crazy. Their sons were still at it when I was a boy, jawing away with guesses and getting no answers, and it looked as if their grandsons might still be doing it when they got old—if we all didn’t starve to death in the meantime. There were four Pindars still living, but two of those moved away up north as soon as their grandmaw died and never came back. We were left with Dennis Pindar and his wife, Gladys, and she was a pistol, you’d better believe.
She used to beat the bejeezus out of Dennis every Wednesday night after prayer meeting at the Baptist church, that being almost the only time they ever went off their own land. What there was about prayer meeting that always set her off, I couldn’t tell you. Nobody else could, either, because that was the only time they showed up, though the way the preacher kept mentioning tithing and offerings and slanting his eyes at them, we were all pretty sure they never gave him anything.
There’s nothing in the world, I’d guess, that frustrates folks like something they can’t have—or can’t find out. What little the Pindars bought in Hackberry they paid for in old, wrinkled, musty-smelling greenbacks. As not one of them had ever had a lick of work except on that farm, and as they never produced anything extra to sell, the townsfolk couldn’t figure where those greenbacks came from. There was talk of a trunk full of money somewhere on that farm, but as nobody ever succeeded in getting past the front porch, or at the most the front parlor, they couldn’t even guess where that trunk might be. If it existed at all, of course.
Being a kid in the early days, I didn’t pay much attention to the gossip in the barbershop or on the porch in the evening. Not until I was twenty-six and they got me appointed constable was there any reason for me to pay any attention to such things. But when the county decided to put a constable in Hackberry to cover the twenty miles of surrounding farm and woodland, the three old guys who ran things in town didn’t want that man to be an alien, which anybody from outside our exact area was considered to be.
I was the right age, the right size (big and strong), and not bright enough to realize what a bore the job would be. I was cutting firewood at the time to trade for garden produce or corn or whatever foodstuff folks could spare, because there were just no jobs to be had. I’d even thought about moving to one of the bigger towns, like Tyler or even Dallas, and I jumped at the chance to make that fifteen dollars a month. I have to admit that my job began pretty excitingly, too, thanks to Gladys Pindar.
You have to remember that this was 1933. Nobody that far out in the country had telephones or electric lights or any modern conveniences to speak of. So when little Uneeda Ralston came pounding up to Ma’s front door that Wednesday night, his eyes wide in his mahogany face, and yelled that Miz Pindar was likely going to kill her husband if somebody didn’t come right quick, I was pretty happy to be needed. I took Papa’s old Colt .45 and set out after the boy through a big patch of woods, across a creek and a field, and onto the Pindar property. Near as it was, I’d never been there before, because Ma didn’t like Gladys one bit.
That meant that I saw for the first time the famous windmill that pumped water into a tank on a tall metal frame, giving the Pindars running water inside the house. I had heard the rumors that they shit inside the house! Which seemed unreasonable to a boy raised with the old reliable privy, though Pa had explained the principle of a septic tank. It still seemed unsanitary to me.
I didn’t have time to gawk at the windmill, though, for it sounded as if a war was raging inside the big house with the dog-run down the middle. Screams, some of rage and some of pain, were mixed with bangs and clatters and the sounds of breaking glass. If they did this every week, I couldn’t see how they might have anything breakable left. Still, I gulped once, got out the Colt and checked the load, and moved toward the scene of battle. The boy crept behind me, at a safe distance.
As I climbed the steps, a fruit jar came whizzing out of the open door and shattered against one of the porch posts. I figured it was time to stop this, so I yelled, “Mister and Miz Pindar, this is Cal Hampton, the new constable. Please quiet down so I can talk to you. This is no way to settle anything. Come on out here—or I’ll come in, if that’s all right with you.”
There was no answer, but the noise stopped, so I took that as an invitation to come in. That room was a mess! Broken glass, furniture upside down, they’d spared nothing. It was a good thing the coal oil lamp that lit the place was way up on a shelf or they’d have burnt the house down. I squinted through the dimness to find some human shape, but one poked me in the chest. I looked down and there was a tiny little woman, still young, who weighed maybe eighty pounds; she was glaring up at me with black eyes that could have drilled through cast iron.
“What business is it of yours, boy?” she shrilled.
Behind her there was movement, and a lanky young man dragged himself onto a battered sofa and groaned. “How ’bout savin’ my life?” he croaked. “That seems to be somethin’ the law should take some notice of.”
I never really heard anybody grind their teeth before, but she did, and it wasn’t a nice sound at all. She drew back her arm, and I didn’t like the look of her fist. I could see its marks all over her husband, and I didn’t want to carry her brand on my hide, so I reached down and lifted her and set her down beside Dennis. It was like handling an angry cat, but I managed without getting scratched or bit, which was something of a marvel all by itself.
Well, that was my first encounter with that pair, and I managed to get them settled down without any more bloodshed. But I knew it wouldn’t last, and it didn’t. Dennis wouldn’t leave his family farm, and she wouldn’t quit wiping up the floor with him every Wednesday night, so I quit bothering with them at all. I figured if they killed each other it would be a good thing, all around.
Things rocked along normally after I quit trying to tame the Pindars. The public works programs began to hire men to build some roads and bridges and even put up nice little roadside parks, with stone tables and benches, and people stopped having to live on catfish and possums and garden sass. I got married and moved into my own home, had a few kids, and kept an eye out for moonshiners and watermelon thieves.
’Course there were always families like the Peddys and the Venders, who took advantage of every chance to make trouble, but I knew how to handle those. I’d just grab the first Peddy or Vender I could locate and whip the bejeezus out of him, and the rest would settle down for a month or two. It was a shame I couldn’t do that to Gladys Pindar, I often thought, but the one thing that was knocked into me from my first birthday was that you couldn’t go hitting a girl or a woman. Just couldn’t seem to get over that, though I knew many a man who whipped his wife regular and never got any jaw about it.
By the time the Second World War came along, I was just beyond the draft age and had a family, so the draft board let me be. Nobody else wanted my job, as I now made only about thirty dollars a month, which was just about survivable if you raised your own vegetables and meat. All in all, I was better off than anybody I knew had been for a long time, and though there were now kids who drove their dads’ cars too fast on our dirt roads and wound up in ditches, things were fairly calm.
Then the government decided to put a prisoner-of-war camp in the middle of the woods about six miles from Hackberry. In a way, that was good. They needed workers to build the road to it as well as a narrow-gauge railroad line to carry away the timber those prisoners were supposed to harvest. There were a lot of mixed feelings about that. The old geezers in the barbershop, all of them past doing any work to speak of, were mighty skeptical about lodging a bunch of young, strong Germans way out here where our young women had never known anybody but neighbors and kinfolk. Most of us married cousins of some kind, simply because there wasn’t anybody else to marry, and gasoline was rationed so nobody traveled much. And with the draft taking all the young men into the army, even I could see that having so many strangers so near might be a problem the government never thought about.
I never dreamed what a problem it would be. I spent a lot of time rounding up girls who were out picking blackberries (even when they were out of season) and got themselves hung up in sawvines and thickets. I spent some time locating POWs who had no problem getting out of the stockade around the prison camp—one reason it was placed out here was that there was noplace to go. Once they were in the woods, they had no idea how to handle themselves in the sort of wild woods East Texas produces. Even the ones who had been country boys were used to tame forests, and they were mighty glad to be taken back home to their camp, believe me. They might have been hunting girls, but what they got was chiggers and water moccasins and bobcats.
All this meant that I didn’t get around to the barbershop and the Baptist church nearly as much as I used to, and for a year I didn’t think once about the Pindars. That was why it came as a shock when Mattie, my wife (and third cousin), said one evening at supper, “You know, Cal, the Pindars haven’t been to prayer meeting for a month. Miz Carey even suggested we send somebody out to check on ’em, but we couldn’t get anyone to volunteer. Gladys is such a mean little woman, we can’t know what she might do.”
That came as a bit of a shock. The weekly Pindar appearance at prayer meeting and the follow-up beating were as much a part of our world as the mosquitoes and the heat.
“You want me to go out there and see about ’em?” I asked her. “That would be a nice change. I’m just about worn out with chasing girls and Germans through the woods, I have to admit. It will surprise me if we don’t have a crop of big blond babies in the next year, ’cause there’s no way one man could keep up with what’s goin’ on.”
She leaned over and squeezed my hand. “I’d appreciate it, Cal. Somehow when something that has seemed as regular a sunrise all of a sudden stops happening, it shakes you up. Maybe one of them is sick, or she has finally killed him….” She went silent, as if her own words had scared her.
The next morning I set out for the Pindars. I now lived in Hackberry instead of on Papa’s farm, so it took me a while to drive the 1930 Plymouth over the rutted roads and through the wagon track that led through the woods to their house. It was around 8:30 when I pulled up in front of the gate and honked the horn. That isn’t polite, I know, but too many of the country folks keep a dog that’ll eat your leg off while you’re trying to introduce yourself. No dog showed itself or barked, and nobody came to the door, so I got out and went into the yard.
“Miz Pindar? This is Cal Hampton!” I yelled, not knowing just what sort of firearms she might have in the house. “Mister Pindar? You all right?”
There was a long silence. Then feet tap-tapped toward the door, which opened a crack.
“We’re fine. Go away!” that unforgettable voice snapped.
“Folks kind of got worried about you when you quit comin’ to prayer meeting,” I said as soothingly as I could.
“Tell them we’re just fine. We need nothing at all, now or ever. Now go away.”
I did, because that woman had more authority in her little finger than General Rommel did in his entire body. And there things stood for several months, because my work got more complicated when they assigned me to help out with Precinct Three, whose constable had been drafted.
Uneeda Ralston got old enough for the draft, and they took him off for basic training. I’d been using him from time to time when I needed somebody to give me a hand, so I made sure to see him when he came back for his final leave before being sent overseas. Turned out I didn’t have to go looking for him, because he came to see me on his last day at home.
He looked mighty trim and clean and military, which was good, but he also looked pretty upset.
“Come sit down, Uneeda,” I said, leading him to the bench on the porch. “You bothered about somethin’?”
“Mistah Cal, I think I done seen a ghost.” His voice shook, and I could see he figured I wouldn’t believe him, but I knew that boy well, and I knew he wouldn’t lie to me.
I put my arm around his shoulder and felt him shaking. “Tell me about it,” I said.
He straightened up and took off his cap. “You know my mama lives nearest of anybody to Mister Dennis Pindar’s place. We kin see their backyard from our cow lot. I went out to milk old Daisy for one last time, just after daylight. I got settled and was milkin’ away when I realized I was lookin’ at somethin’ tall and skinny that I could see clean through. Not only that, but after a little it begun to moan, like as if it was hurtin’. Sounded plumb pitiful.”
Uneeda looked into my eyes and spoke carefully. “My mama says she ain’t seen Mr. Pindar for months, though she used to wave at him sometimes when he was workin’ in their garden or fixin’ fence. Mama thinks …” He seemed to be gathering his nerve, but then he went on, “Mama thinks Miz Pindar has kilt him and put him down that there septic tank she’s so proud of.”
I must have jerked, because he nodded slowly. “She thinks so, Mistah Cal, and you know my mama ain’t one to holler before she’s hit. Kin you do somethin’ to check up on it and see? Mama is pretty upset over this thing. She’s goin’ to do enough worryin’ about me, once I get over to Yurrup and the war. She don’t need no extra to worry her.”
All the while we said our good-byes and I called the kids to shake his hand, I was thinking about the problem he’d brought to me. I’d been constable, by now, for eight years, and I’d never had a murder to handle. Killings, yes, over fences or stray cattle or wives caught with the wrong man. Many hunting accidents, of course. But no deliberate murder—I shivered at the thought.
As I waved to Uneeda, and his uncle Ned’s car carried him away toward Templeton, I was still thinking about the Pindars. How in hell was I going to find out what, besides crap, was down in that tank?
Then, of course, things got busy for me. Old Man Ellison went deer hunting to get his family some winter meat and found a body in the woods. It wouldn’t have been such a big deal, but that body turned out to belong to a federal agent who had been on some assignment for the government—they wouldn’t give even a hint as to what that might be, and that got the sheriff and the Texas Rangers (one of them, anyway) and even some men from Washington down here getting in my hair and making a lot of unnecessary trouble. Except for the ranger, a little guy about shoulder high to me, none of them had any idea how to get around in the woods without getting snakebit or stuck in briar patches.
Even worse, the fellow had been dead for a couple of months, so the chance of finding who killed him was pretty slim. If he’d been local, it would’ve been different, but this man was from Wisconsin, of all places, and nobody here had ever seen or heard of him. I believed that too. What in tunket could be a reason for one of our folks to shoot somebody from Wisconsin, anyway? Most likely he got killed by whatever outfit he was investigating, and that was finally what everybody decided after wasting most of the winter with useless messing around in the woods.
By the time that was over, I’d just about forgot about Uneeda’s ma and her ghost. That boy surprised the tar out of me, though. He wrote me a letter! To find a colored kid who could write wasn’t all that common, because the school for Negroes was pretty sorry back then. He’d managed it, though, and once I figured out his spelling, I realized that the boy was really concerned about his ma, who’d evidently written him letters of her own since he left.
I decided that I ought to do some quiet investigating of my own, since nobody in this part of the county would want to run afoul of Gladys Pindar. I talked it over with Mattie and even asked my ma what she thought. Ma is a mighty clearheaded lady, and she said, straight out, “I’ve knowed Minty Ralston since she was little, and I never knowed her to tell a lie. If she says she’s seein’ somethin’ over there, she sure enough thinks she’s seein’ it. But be careful, Cal. I figure you might hide out someplace close enough to see good but hid enough so Gladys won’t know you’re there. I s’pose the deputy out of Templeton wouldn’t give any help?”
I shook my head. It would take a lot more than a letter from a black boy, soldier or not, and the word of his ma to get official help, particularly now that the law was so shorthanded and wore out from thrashing through the woods for weeks. I knew I’d have to do this by myself, with maybe some help from Minty Ralston.
It’s funny how different it feels to sit in the early dawn chill waiting for a deer or a flight of ducks and doing the same thing waiting to see if there is a ghost dancing around on the top of a septic tank. By now I was familiar with the things…. Since moving into Hackberry my family had used one, and even my folks had put one in and were surprised at how nice it was not to have to trudge out to the privy in the dark and cold on a winter night. I knew the old man who had dug the pit for the Pindars, and I looked him up and got a clear notion of where the thing was and what kind of lid it had on it. He promised not to mention my visit to anybody, and I trusted him.
So there I was, crouched behind a clump of yaupon bushes, trying to see through the dimness. After a little I heard Minty going out to her cow lot to milk Daisy, and I took a deep breath and came to attention. Now was the time, if it was going to happen today.
But it didn’t. Nor the day after either. Not until the fourth morning did I hear, over the squirt of milk into Minty’s bucket, the sad wail coming from the Pindar place. I stood up to look over the yaupons, and there was a drifty sort of shape out in the backyard of the Pindar house, directly over the spot where the old fellow had told me he’d dug that pit.
I slipped off toward the cow shed and hissed at Minty, “Is Ned able to come out and be a witness for me? It’s there, and I need another person to testify to it.”
“He’s not feelin’ too swift, but he’ll go with you. I’ll get him.” She took her bucket of milk into the house, and soon old Ned came limping out, walking stick in hand, and waited for orders.
I took up the bag holding my shovel and pick, and together we went quietly toward the Pindars’ back gate, slipped inside the yard, and stopped. The figure was still drifting above the septic tank, moaning very softly. It didn’t seem to care that we were watching it, and I asked, “Dennis Pindar? You in there?” I nodded toward the dirt-covered lid of the tank.
He went out like a bubble popping, and I knew he had to be there. “You sit down, Ned, while I dig. I know your heart won’t stand hard work, but you can swear to whatever I find in there … if I find anything, of course.”
It was easy to get to the tank lid, though it should have had thirty years of washed-in dirt on top of it. The lid had been a sheet of corrugated iron, and it was rusted almost into brown lace. The smell was unbelievable when the shovel blade punched through it and let the accumulated stink out. That had strong hints of privy in it, but overriding even that was the overripe smell of dead flesh. That’s something you never could mistake for anything else.
I sent Ned home to alert Minty, while I took down a washline pole and dredged the tank with it. With a bloop of released gases, the body came up to the surface, and it was nothing you’d ever want to see. Made that body old Ellison found in the woods look almost good, by contrast. And the smell was beyond anything I’d ever known before.
About that time, the back door of the house flapped open and Gladys came boiling out like a whole nest of wasps. “What do you think you’re doing in my yard, digging up my—” Her voice stopped abruptly when she saw what I was doing.
“Miz Pindar, you’re under arrest. One of Minta Ralston’s children is on his way to town right now to telephone to Templeton for the sheriff. I just found your husband’s body in your septic tank, and nobody could ever convince anyone that a man would open the thing up, jump in—and then close it after him.”
She didn’t say a word. Even when the sheriff showed up, sweating thumbtacks over bothering the Pindars, she kept her thin lips shut like a trap. But nobody could deny what was in that hole, and there was no one else on earth who had anything against Dennis Pindar. I was able to write Uneeda Ralston that his mama’s problem was solved, because even the jury couldn’t find any way to figure Gladys Pindar was anything but guilty as sin.
Now I’ve retired from being constable, the war is long over, and Uneeda has come home to take care of his mama and his uncle Ned. I can go to prayer meeting on Wednesday nights without worrying about poor old Dennis getting beaten like a rug by that skinny little wife of his. When they passed out mean, that woman went through the line twice. Maybe three times. I often wonder how she fares in prison, but not enough to inquire about her.
But I’ll never forget the stink rising from that hole in the ground or the wispy shape of poor Dennis hovering over his dead body. We put him away real nice, once we got things sorted out, and he lies in the cemetery beside his daddy. If I have anything to do with it, Gladys can be buried in the Huntsville prison graveyard with the rest of the unclaimed murderers. I just wish I could stick her in her own septic tank!