Cost of Living

The ticking clock from the back wall got right up in Vadie’s ears, reminding her that time goes on and she was going on with it but she wasn’t going nowhere anytime soon.

“And you don’t know anything about the money?” Sheriff Bertram McCoy’s eyes fixed upon the young woman opposite his desk. They had known each other all their lives of course. Everyone knows everybody else around here. She was wearing a simple black dress with an apron. Her brown hair was put up in a bun with several fly aways already this afternoon. Bertie had heard her complain before, half joking, that her hair won’t stay up.

Vadie shifted and crossed the other leg. Her heart pounded and she considered how far she might get if she just got up and left the room. That wouldn’t do at all. What was this feeling? It was more than just being questioned. Something new. A cold drop of sweat tickled the back of her neck at the sight of Bertie’s pistol on his hip. She loathed the black glistening steel. Strange. Law or not, every man carries a pistol.

“Vadie. You know where that money come from?”

She composed herself. “Why would I? Plenty of Tom’s business I don’t know nothing about, chicken fights and card games. We come into money and we owe money and I know about it when I know and not before.”

“Mrs. Haynes, this ain’t hardly a chicken fight. You don’t win twenty thousand dollars in a card game. Hell, nobody around here that ain’t top company men or them that owns the coal mines even got that kind of money and they ain’t letting that much get away, not even before the slump. No other three families together makes that kind of money. You have to know where it came from, don’t you? You have anything to do with this?”

“I work hard for my money and save every bit I can going from job to job. That’s all I can count on is what I earn. I struggle for what I get and don’t count what ain’t mine. I could have had a lot of money if I had been a man. I love to work. I worked like a man all my life.”

The sheriff shuffled his bulk with a long steam exhaust exhale of annoyance. When her daughters did this, Vadie would say, “Train don’t stop here!” How scared they must be now and light hearted back talk wouldn’t see her arms around her babies any sooner.

“Vadie, let’s just go over this one more time. Tell me again what happened.”

...

We was walking, me and Tom, up Calloway Branch like we done many time before, close to the place where I was raised up that first holler where the creek forks when we saw my sister Mary and her husband Dallas coming the other way. My hand started feeling a little more wrapped in Tom’s fingers than usual. The sun was hot on the back of my neck but his hand was a gravestone damp with early dew.

Mary was a smilin’ and a wavin’ and her smile got right up on my face. About the time we was crossing paths to speak my hand was in a vice grip and I nearly lost my footing as Tom pulled me away from Mary and got right up between us.

Silver flashed and there was a loud banging of smoke and metal. It just don’t seem right somehow, like I’m telling you about a dream. I don’t remember it as it seems I ought to. A darkness closed up around my eyes and all I could see was Dallas falling down limp as a pheasant shot from the sky. I don’t remember hearing anything after Tom’s pistol but upon a time there was screaming. I was or Mary or both. I don’t know. I don’t recall. Tom stormed off up the holler and that’s the last time I saw him. I stayed with Mary and we sobbed into each other’s cheeks while Dallas lay there and his shirt soaked red.

...

“Very much as when we found him with you and your sister still by his side. I’m sorry, ma’am. Why did he do it though? Was it because of the money, you reckon?”

Tick tick tick tick. “I don’t doubt it. They had been quarreling after they played cards the other night up Smith Fork down from where George lived, Dallas was his nephew.”

“I remember George,” said the Sheriff. “As common a feller as anybody but had more book learning than you’d think just talking to him.”

“Yessir. Well a few years ago he was smart enough to make more money than any common man in Pike County even as they was more than ever looking for work but no work to be had. George built him a still up on the top of the mountain up there where nobody goes but everybody already knows that, even you, law though you are. He made enough money to grease enough hands around here so time was for him to quit he could just slip out.

Men are like that, Bertie. Here where you can see them going about their business, but you ain’t supposed to know what that business is. If you are in the way of knowing, you best not let on. Everybody knows George was a bootlegger. That liquor is the devil, they say. We’ve made Pike a dry county but it don’t seem to matter. They even done federal pro-bishun as they say and men will have it anyway and the devil will collect his due.”

“So that’s why Tom killed Dallas? He had some of George’s whiskey money?”

“George’s money weren’t just from bootleg whiskey. He made him a contraption to port down all them whiskey barrels off the hill with a belt line and pulleys. I reckon he patented it thinking a cooperage or some sort of factory might find it useful, but in the end it was the very coal mines around here that bought it up. In a few years they say they’ll bring coal out of the mountain into towers as big as the buildings in Detroit, carried on George’s belts and pulleys. They’ll be fewer jobs here when my girls are courtin’ husbands.

So you see, it ain’t just a bunch of men shirking the law with moonshine whiskey. The coal mine is content to break the backs of common men and pay them worthless script. Common men fight back and unionize so the mines mechanize and all but the rich see hard times. George’s money has had so many hands on it from the bootlegger to the mine owner and now all their hands are so dirty you can’t tell if it’s they are black from mining or shaking hands with the Devil.

The truth is, all I know about that money is that George hoarded it, Dallas knew about it, and Tom plotted with him to get it. Whether it was gambling with the deeds to our houses or with the lives of their families or both, I’ll never know. It don’t much matter anyway.

You can’t count nothing as yours except what you make for yourself. I work hard for my money and my family. My oldest girl, Grace, was my whole world when she was born. Tom ain’t her daddy, you know. I was courting Henry Dotson when I was just a girl myself. I thought I was the luckiest girl in the world to be doted on by such a handsome soldier just come home from France and them far away places over the ocean. His smile made me tickle and shiver so. You know he went and bought me a box wrapped in silk ribbons and full of chocolates all just for me. I never had nothing so fancy. Then that night he got me to go talk with him over in the barn and one thing led to another. At that time, I never felt anything so good. The next thing you know I was with child and that’s how I learned the facts of life, as they say. Nobody ever before spoke to me about the ways of having children.

As you know, Henry comes from one of the better families around here so his mother and father didn’t think he ought to marry me. I wept many nights losing Henry but I understand better now. Really he weren’t never mine at all. A man like Henry goes a courtin’ and a young maid’s mother invites him to talk to her in the parlor and go to church with the family. You don’t go a courtin’ in a barn. When I had Grace though, she was my whole heart and we have each other. That’s what I count as mine, what the Good Lord saw fit to let me make for my own.

Sheriff Bertie, I reckon men and women can’t see things eye to eye right away, not unless they try. How can you try though? All the bootleggers, the card players, the chicken fighters, the miners, the company men, even the law? We walk into the house of God, men on the right, women on the left and maybe that is fine with me too.

I didn’t know anything about twenty thousand dollars in that little black ledger book of his you got there until it was gone. It weren’t never mine anyway. There is blood on every nickel of it and I don’t want it, though Lord knows a body could use a rest from toil that money like that could bring. Ain’t no rest for a working soul. That money was gone before it was had and now my husband is gone to prison and Mary’s is gone to Jesus.

So if you don’t mind, Bertie, that’s all I have to say about money and guns and such. My girls and my sisters and me, we need each other now more than ever. People are going to come visiting to sit up with Dallas and cornbread and beans need hands to make them. With your leave, I’ll be going on home now.”

Sheriff McCoy viewed with wonder the unflappable woman before him and understood that she had already lost more than the money. Her estimation of it as unimportant conjured in him shameful feelings as he rose from his seat and took of his hat.

“Yes ma’am,” he said, “and you’re right. We are all just going home anyway.”