Chapter 8
Jedediah Hitt was nothing if not a crafty man, and he planned moving his ‘shine with considerable care. He and Woodrow laid down a good few bundles of hay in the Hitts’ spring wagon to shield the quart jars of ‘shine from unexpected jolts, and set the jars out maybe a foot from each other, with more hay between. Then they packed more hay in and around and over the jars, until they lay hidden in the hay as sweet and snug as new-born nurselings.
The two men rode the wagon out towards Macon County well before crack of dawn early one late summer morning, with none in the world wiser as the big bay geldings plodded steadily along a back road. The whole world slept calmly, in the repose of peaceable Christian men and women, and it was too early even for curs to wake and growl, let alone bark.
They took the ‘shine to a remote farm owned by Lewis Jenkins, self-proclaimed king of the Macon County shiners. Jenkins and Sheriff Jerry Dallas of Macon County knew and understood each other well: Jenkins, a small, dark man of Welsh descent, helped Dallas out from time to time with a dollar or two, whilst Dallas turned a blind eye, and a deaf ear, to idle gossip. He was also a frequent visitor around mealtimes, for Mrs. Caryad Jenkins believed in feeding men well, and the county spoke of her biscuits and pound cakes and pies of every description with an admiration not far short of awe.
Jedediah and Woodrow naturally stayed for a bite to eat after delivering their wagonload, and Lewis arranged for a rather inquisitive man named Harrell, who seemed to have little better to do than ask a great number of questions about the availability of ‘shine in the two neighbouring counties, to learn that they planned to drive on into Coates that very same day. Harrell seemed to melt away when he heard this, and Woodrow, Jedediah, Lewis and Jerry Dallas, gathered together at Mrs. Jenkins’ table with some other cronies, smiling at each other. There was a general feeling that a fool had been nicely fed, and Mrs. Jenkins, a big woman with black hair and cheeks as red as russet apples in the fall, brought extra plates of pie by way of celebration.
But all good things have to end some time, and the gathering broke up with a deal of belching and spitting and scratching, whilst some of the less well-fed visitors gave Mrs. Jenkins hopeful looks, though whether they wanted to take spare slices of pie home with them, or hoped to entice Caryad away from her husband, was a moot matter. Caryad merely smiled enigmatically. Lewis had paid for her to travel out from Wales as a young girl, and they always spoke together in Welsh. She was not a woman interested in wandering.
Several willing helpers joined Jedediah and Woodrow in reloading the spring wagon with a consignment of fresh jars. Not many, but enough to create a show, all filled with some of Lewis’ ripest pig manure. One jar broke on its way to the wagon during the loading, when a friend of the Jenkins who had taken a little too much ‘shine with his pie, slipped and fell. He was rushed off to the creek, because the stench was well-nigh overpowering, and it was generally agreed that Joe Wilkes was due for an unpleasant surprise.
With much back slapping and calls of ‘Ya’ll come back’, Jedediah and Woodrow set off, with the big geldings now plodding along the main road back to Coates. The two men sat comfortable on the spring wagon driving seat, because Jedediah now had a few more gold five dollar coins in his pocket, chewing on cuds of tobacco gifted by Lewis, and mulling over how Joe Wilkes might take being fooled, and what to do with the wagon.
‘Them durned deppities bound to climb up.’ Woodrow scratched himself with the slow appreciation of a man who has eaten and drunk perhaps a little too much.
Jedediah spat off to one side. ‘We’ll just shift the straw out on the street.’
‘Ridin’ home with the stink.’
‘I got me a big stout broom.’
Woodrow nodded. He knew he would be the one to have to sweep out the back of the wagon. But there are worse things in life than bad odours. He guessed Jedediah would make a fitting reward.
The two big bay geldings plodded on, and meanwhile Joe Wilkes briefed his men, seated in his office with his feet up on his desk to display the rowels on his cavalry boots, that might have come from out West, or possibly a mail order house. He had already spoken to Edgar Harriman, proprietor of the Coates Weekly Patriot-Examiner, and Edgar had agreed both to watch the ambush from the room above his office - for he was a cautious man, and feared the idea of being caught in possible cross-fire if Sheriff Wilkes and Jedediah Hitt came to violence - and wire a graphic report to major newspapers across the nation. Joe had also sent word of his plans winging down the wires to Nashville, the state capital, and he knew he was staging an event that would rivet the whole nation’s attention.
‘Zack, you ride on out of town and watch for them, then come back and report.’ He spoke crisply, an experienced military man marshaling his troops.
Zachary Benton, the deputy who had lost a tooth to Uriah, nodded. He was still smarting from the humiliation of the encounter, not to say a continuing soreness in his gum, and welcomed this opportunity to be first to exact revenge.
‘The rest of you gather round the wagon, soon as it comes up to the front of The Commerce Hotel. We’ll holler Hitt to stop, and then haul him down.’ Wilkes launched a stream of tobacco juice at his brass spittoon. He had several bones to pick with Bob Thornton, the hotel’s proprietor, most of them centred on suspicions that Thornton was selling illegal liquor. Smashing his supply under his nose would teach the man a lesson.
The four other deputies nodded. They were pretty much no account men, when they were not sworn in: a couple of clerks, one of Edgar Harriman’s type setters from the Coates Weekly Patriot-Examiner, and a farm boy from just out of town. Nothing much ever happened in Coates, bar the occasional drunk picking a fight, and they were looking forward to this chance to figure in a big show. The town would surely gossip about their ambush for months, even years to come, and their names would be enshrined.
Meanwhile Becky Wilkes was finalising some plans of her own. She had spoken to Bella Thornton, Bob Thornton’s wife, and Bella had agreed to set a table laden with light refreshments in the best front room on the hotel’s first floor. She would make a little speech, perhaps, as the first lady of Coates, briefing them on her husband’s brave purpose, and add a few words of warning about possible ricochets, for she had read of Union ladies riding out to watch the assault on Richmond in the opening days of the Civil War, only to fall to stray bullets. Bella had promised to barricade the window with a pair of mattresses, and had assured her they would all be perfectly safe. But Rebecca was a cautious woman, and liked to take no chances.
She also mused about what she should wear. She thought her best black silk dress might be in order, because there might well be fatalities. She wondered whether she should also wear a veil, pulled back from her face, just in case something dreadful might happen. She was sure Judge Pelligrin would ride over to console her if the dreadful Hitt man did for poor brave Joe, and the Judge liked her in black, she knew it for a fact. He had smiled on her benevolently during her last visit to his courtroom, when Joe had run in some criminal or other, and he was a widower, with more than a thousand acres of prime tobacco land to his name. She would advise Patricia and Viola, her two fat tow-headed teenage daughters, to wear gray, so as not to be conspicuous. Gray might not be a very striking colour, but it would make her black silk look all the more becoming.
Patricia and Viola were also day-dreaming. The way Paw had described it, there was going to be a regular battle, and they wondered whether the state might send in a force of troopers to support him. They would select their very best bonnets, and bite on their lips to enhance them. Maybe there would be a celebratory presentation after the event down in Nashville, with a cotillion hosted by the Governor, and all the best beaux in the city dancing attendance. The thought made them insist on Jemma, the housemaid, lacing them into their dresses as tightly as possible, though Patricia, who was rather plumper than Viola, declared that she was sure she would not last the day for not being able to breathe, whilst Viola thought to herself that tightlacing offered poor concealment for girls with very full figures.
The battle of Coates fought itself out late that afternoon. Joe Wilkes and his brave men concealed themselves strategically behind The Commerce Hotel, until they saw Zack Benton come riding hell bent towards them, and then they split into two groups - Sheriff Wilkes and two deputies in the middle of Park Street, blocking Jedediah’s way, two more deputies cutting off the wagon from behind.
Wilkes rode up beside the wagon looking stern. He had a big Colt .45 in a holster buckled to his hip, and he pulled the gun free, trying to twirl it on his finger as he had seen Bill Cody twirl his .45 when a travelling show had passed through.
‘Jedediah Hitt, I hev reason to believe you are carrying illegal liquor under thet there straw of your’n.’
Jedediah spat in the dirt. He was not a man much given to mirth, but Sheriff Wilkes had a strange feeling that he was smiling.
Wilkes swung himself from his horse, and gestured to two deputies to mount the spring wagon. They probed around in the straw, and then one triumphantly lifted a quart Ball jar.
‘We found it.’
Wilkes glowered at Jedediah. ‘You got any reason to hev thet stuff?’
‘It’s for the ‘maters.’
Wilkes hesitated. ‘’Maters?’
‘They grow better.’
Now the sheriff knew that Hitt was trying to mock him. He raised his arm, pointing at the deputy with the jar. ‘Smash thet thing down, and every other one you find in there.’
The deputy dropped the jar triumphantly over the side of the wagon, and
then a second. His companion joined him enthusiastically. Then they both
hesitated, because the smell was most unpleasant.
Wilkes, standing a little way in front of the two geldings, so that Jedediah could not attempt to ride off, took their hesitation as a pause. ‘Get them off, get them off!’
The deputies did not move, and he walked back towards them. Then he stopped, and sniffed the air, and backed away hurriedly.
Jedediah Hitt looked down on him with scorn. ‘Tol’ yo’ it were fer the ‘maters.’
Sheriff Wilkes did not say a word as he remounted.
The battle was the talk of the town within half an hour, had winged its way around the state of Tennessee within the hour, featured large in The Nashville Banner next day, and brought many a chuckle to the nation’s breakfast tables throughout the following week. Edgar Harriman excelled himself. He was not particularly fond of Sheriff Wilkes, and he lampooned the law officer unmercifully, writing in purple prose of brave lawmen battling jars of manure tea in the ‘Park Street shambush’. Some editors spiked the story, regarding it as a rather tasteless subject for their morning editions. But many viewed it as a magnificent confrontation between independence of spirit and overbearing authority, with independence taking all the laurels, and a ‘Joe shambush’ became a portmanteau term for all unsuccessful official arrogance, whilst the New Yorker actually deigned to note the event with a cartoon of a pig wearing a sheriff’s star contemplating a heap of broken glass over the caption: ‘dang me, if I ain’t chosen the wrong jars’.
Becky Wilkes, who had to pay Bella Thornton for the use of her front bedroom, not to mention a cold collation that had turned to ashes in her mouth, refused to speak to her husband for a whole week, making him sleep on a couch hastily erected in their bedroom. Patricia and Viola had to contend with much mocking laughter. But Wilkes himself vowed vengeance, and spent much of the next couple of weeks devising plots and stratagems for knocking down the Hitts.
‘I’m gonna cut thet man and his boy down to size, see if I don’t,’ he told all and sundry, and Jedediah and Uriah both grew particularly careful in their ways. Jedediah took to carrying his hunting rifle over his shoulder every time he ventured more than a few yards from his cabin, and then invested part of the money he had taken from selling out of ‘shine on a Navy Colt, and a gunbelt to go with it. Few passed the Hitt cabin close by, but those that did, and possessed sharp eyes, might have seen him from time to time standing sentry-guard. He also put up some rough targets on trees, to hone his aim.
Uriah enjoyed the protection of the Chesapeake and Nashville, but he still had to ride into town to heave coal at the depot, and both David Kingman and Turner Evered, the C&NR agent in Coates, thought one ambush might follow another.
‘We’ve got to do something for the man.’ Kingman and Evered were seated comfortably in two big leather armchairs in the drawingroom of David Kingman’s new home a few days after the Kingman’s arrival. The Kingmans had settled in rapidly, for the house was very spacious and comfortable, furnished in the very latest manner and lit brightly by big oil lamps that shed a warm glow on the big, solid mahogany tables and chairs and bookcases, filled with a range of inspiring and uplifting works, the imported carpets with luxuriously thick piles, and the oil paintings both of Filben Brent and Brents of previous generations that conferred an almost aristocratic air. The house was not quite as large as the mansions that Andrew Jackson and other members of the plantation aristocracy had built themselves on the edge of Nashville, but the good people of Coates reckoned it gave even the best Nashville homes a pretty good run.
Turner nodded. ‘What d’you have in mind?’
‘A fireman?’
The C&NR agent thought for a moment. ‘He’d be away a good deal.’
‘Just what I had in mind.’
Frances Kingman put down the round sampler she had been stitching whilst she had been talking softly to Alice Evered a little away from the two men. The Kingmans had been entertaining the Evereds to dinner, and her mother had gone up with Doris to put the three little Kingman girls to bed.
‘Wouldn’t that be a little cruel, David, my dear?’
Kingman smiled at his wife. It was plain that he doted on her, and that she only had to wish for something for him to strive his hardest to make her wish come true. ‘You mean because of her condition?’
‘Yes, m’dear. It would be a hard thing for her to be on her own at the birth of her first child. Women need their husbands around them at such times.’
She coughed gently, putting her lace edged handkerchief to her mouth, and David Kingman got to his feet to walk over to her chair and take her hand.
‘I think the sheriff means him harm.’
‘But we have the cottage, dear. Could they not live there?’
Frances Kingman spoke from a sense of need. Doris, the Kingman’s nanny, was a Baltimore girl, born and bred, and had already made it pretty clear to her mistress that wooden houses and dirt street held no appeal for her at all. She had sized up Joe Wilkes’ deputies in a trice, and thought them a pretty sorry collection of lawmen: no match at all for the solid, dependable Irish constables who patrolled Baltimore’s streets at night, and often had a kind word or two for nannies escorting small children to the park. She had grown to fancy the idea of a good man in blue, but now she was rooted up and transported several hundred miles, and she was growing homesick. Uriah and Iris in the cottage, with Uriah away a good deal of time, would free up a good deal of Iris’ time, once she had come to term, and Franny judged Iris a good solid, dependable country girl, a girl who could well be counted on as a good friend and companion to the three little Kingmans.
Kingman glanced at Evered, and the C&N agent nodded thoughtfully. Evered was tall and thin, but his waistline had begun to run a little astray, and he had dressed formally in an evening suit for the occasion, though the suit looked as though it had seen very little wear, for Coates was not generally a town where folks dressed for dinner, nor dined much, for that matter either. Local custom called for breakfasting around five, a big meal at midday, and supper at maybe four or five. Evelyn Iverson had cooked a beef roast for the occasion, because the Kingmans were still waiting to engage a good cook, and David Kingman had put a bottle of French wine on the table. The Turners had tasted their glasses, and Evered had been mightily impressed, and now felt full of good humor. However Alice had only taken a few small sips of her wine, and had not looked approving. She was a good, green-eyed Tennessee girl, built almost as broad as her husband in her best ruched dark green silk, and not wholly sure she held with East Coast ways.
‘I guess Mrs. Kingman is right, sir. He could. The old man has the spring wagon he brought into town. They could bring all their necessaries down on that.’
‘You see, dear?’ Franny smiled up at her husband, and David thought to himself that he had never seen such a brave and courageous woman.
He patted her hand. ‘I shall ask Hitt how the idea strikes him, dearest. I imagine Iris might also be able to help out with the children.’
Franny put down her sampler, and got up. She had to pause for a moment to straighten herself, for she was not feeling too well. But good old Doctor Parminter had told her country air might be good for her condition, and she believed optimism might often overcome mountains.
‘I shall go and say good night to the children, dearest. Perhaps Mr. Evered will allow you a few moments out of his company to say their prayers with them.’
Both men got to their feet, with Evered plainly musing on Frances’ words. He had grown more and more alarmed at the rate at which she appeared to be sickening, for she seemed to have grown more and more doll-like, even in the few days since her arrival, with her skin taking on a translucent, almost transparent sheen. He very much approved of her suggestion, for he also judged Iris Hitt a good, practical, dependable girl, and equally suspected that Doris, the nanny, might not stay long. The girl seemed distant and introverted, as though thinking secret thoughts, perhaps of a beau back in Baltimore.
‘A good man should always pray with his children, ma’am.’ He pulled his big gold repeater from his fob pocket. ‘I think Alice and I must be thinking of walking home.’
Frances raised her hand. ‘But perhaps you will let Alice come up with us for a moment first?’
David Kingman beamed, and walked to the door. ‘Why don’t we all go up and pray together? I am sure the Almighty would like that.’
Alice nodded. She held the same opinion of Frances’ health as her husband, and had promised to find the Kingmans a good cook, for she had a feeling that Frances’ mother might not settle too comfortably in Coates, and the girl Doris was plainly moping. ‘I’ll say amen to that.’
So the Kingmans and their three daughters, along with the Evereds and Frances’ mother and Doris, prayed together in a scene of comforting domesticity. But Frances Kingman coughed a little as they completed the Lord’s Prayer, and David, and Frances’ mother and the Evereds were all mindful of her health, with their thoughts very much taken up with their fears and anxieties, whilst Doris wondered how she might best make her escape.