“Derned if he didn’t fool me,” Willard told the Sons of the Mountaineers, an informal group who got together every Tuesday at noon for lunch at the Azalea Restaurant behind the courthouse.
“Not only did he say, ‘You’re damn right I’ll be a pallbearer for Bill,’ but he told me to see that Bill was given the semi-deluxe, that’s our medium-grade funeral, and he’d pay fer it. How about that?”
“Remorse, pure and simple remorse,” sneered Ackley Hootley, who, like most of the others, had a low opinion of Sneaky Meany. “It’s his conscience bothering him fer what he did to Bill. That’s what it is.”
“Now that you mention it,” said the young pharmacist at Bailey’s Drugstore — he had only been in town for five or six years — “just what was this so-called feud between Grapeseed and Means all about? What started it all?”
Ackley said that it had begun back in the Depression when Ainsley’s father, who had started the bank around 1900, had cozened Bill’s illiterate father into signing away coal and timber rights to one hundred acres of land for twenty-five cents an acre.
Nope, that wasn’t it, insisted Emmett Pollard, clerk of courts.
“My daddy knew all about it,” said Emmett. “He and Bill’s pa were close. Well, back in the Depression about the only two ways to make a little money was bootleggin’ an’ sanging.”
“Sanging?” inquired the young pharmacist. “That’s a new one on me.”
“Shouldn’t be,” said Emmett, “you being familiar with potions and elixirs. Anyways ‘sang’ is a Southern Appalachian... ah... ah...”
“Designation,” suggested Attorney Elias Scattergood, an oldtimer, held in high esteem by one and all, a kind, honest, decent lawyer.
“Yes, designation, thank you, Elias,” said Emmett. “As us oldtimers well know, the word ‘sang’ is a designation for ginseng, a plant of the wild that is to this day held in very high esteem by the Chinese as an aphrodisiac.”
He was interrupted by a half dozen titters and at least two full-throated guffaws.
“Now, fellows, let’s keep it clean,” he told them, a sheepish grin on his weathered face. “Remember we have a young waitress in our midst. Anyway, to get on with what I was saying, back then, this is around 1932, when Bill was about twenty and eggs were selling for twelve cents a dozen, coffee three pounds for a dollar, bread a dime, prices like that, hard to believe nowadays, anyway, even then sang was selling for two to three dollars a pound, big money. ’Course today it goes for forty, fifty dollars, imagine. Anyway Bill was great for the woods and word got around that he had found a big patch of sang somewhere around Elder’s Knob and he was curing it, they hang it from rafters, in a shack where he was living. He had left home for some reason... up Dismal Hollow... well, this is taking longer than I expected. To make it short, that sneaky kid Ainsley, couldn’t have been more than ten years old, just hated (time proved that, didn’t it) to see anyone else get hold of a little money. He hired some poor old drunken ridge-runner, I forget his name, to steal Bill’s sang... that’s the story I heard.”
“I heard that story, too, Emmett,” said Elias Scattergood. “But I think some of us have another version of what started the feud, don’t we, Oswald?”
“Yes, we do,” agreed Oswald Easterham, retired postmaster. “Like the fellow says, ‘Shar say lee feminne.’ ” No one laughed at Oswald’s pronunciation, not sure it was wrong.
He continued.
“The way I heard it, somewhere around 1942, 1943, about a year after poor old Bill lost his leg when a tree fell on him when he was working at a lumber camp... well, to back up... there were eighteen, nineteen, maybe twenty in the Grapeseeds, that poor woman... none of them what folks would call remarkable looking, just ordinary... except for... for Junie...”
Oswald stopped; an odd hush fell over the dining room. Now what gives, thought the young pharmacist.
“Ahem,” went Oswald, clearing his throat. “Ahem” again, then, “Ah, she was the last of the... she was number nineteen or twenty, doesn’t matter now which... Oh, she was... well, once in a blue moon there comes along, among hollow families, for some unexplainable reason, a real, genuine beauty. Junie was one of those. Slender as an autumn daisy... with hair like corn-silk... shiny... big blue eyes... lovely face... and she always smelled like... like springtime in April... you remember her, don’t you, Elias?”
“If you had me on the witness stand right now, Oswald, I’d have to answer that I... I... well, who could forget Junie?” And it was noted by five or six of the fellows that Elias’s usually strong, firm, resonant voice seemed to quiver just a bit.
“I enlisted that year,” went on Elias, a kind of dreamy expression on his handsome face, “and when I came back home on furlough, I made haste to hurry down to Bailey’s for one of those double-decker chocolate walnut sundaes. Junie was behind the soda fountain that summer... well, go ahead, Oswald, before I say something foolish.”
“Hey, Elias,” said Oswald, “you weren’t the only one. There’s at least eight or ten old bast... oldtimers in this room who were crazy about that... that... oh, she was something... but that was long ago... that brings up Ainsley Means.”
“Boooooooooooo,” came a spontaneous burst. “Booooooo.”
“Exactly,” said Oswald. “Yep, exactly. Anyway old J.P., Ainsley’s father, was head of the county draft board, and he finagled a deferment for Ainsley. Ainsley had the world by the tail. Had a white Chrysler convertible and all the girls in the county, others his age off to the war. Well, Junie suddenly disappeared from Bailey’s, and though old man Bailey, a kind soul, never said a word about why she left, folks soon learned that the dear, sweet, beautiful girl — she weren’t more than seventeen — had been put in a family way and... died in Beckley while a doc was per, forming an abortion...”
Another hush fell. Later several of the chaps remarked that this particular informal gathering had been quite different from the usual jolly get-together.
The hush was broken by the young pharmacist.
“You mean,” he said, “that Means... he... it was he who was responsible?”
“There was never any proof,” answered Oswald, quite subdued, even more than before. “But Junie had been seen in Ainsley’s convertible on the back roads on her days off. Poor old Bill... he was away that summer, trying to enlist in whatever branch of the service would take a wooden-legged man... none would... not even the Merchant Marines. Well, when he got back home, his... little sister... Junie was dead and buried... he went crazy... would have killed Ainsley right then and there had not old J.P. got wind of Bill’s intentions and shipped Ainsley out to California for eight or ten months.”
“It doesn’t really matter now what caused the feud,” said one of the oldtimers. “Poor old Bill spent the rest of his unhappy life, the poor bast... the poor old fellow... trying hard to make Ainsley suffer. I can hear him now, the poor chap, snarling that if it took the rest of his life he was going to make Ainsley pay. Funny, now, thinking back, I can’t recall his ever saying just what he was going to make Ainsley pay for.”
Someone else recalled that Bill had been arrested at least ten times over the years on suspicion of having committed various offenses against Ainsley, including dynamiting Ainsley’s Packard, starting a whispering campaign that the bank was going under, shooting a hole in the front window of the bank when Ainsley was working late, setting fire to Ainsley’s summer cottage on Lake Stonewall Jackson, things like that, and though Bill was never caught redhanded, he was convicted twice and spent a total of nine years in the state pen at Moundsville and each time when he came back to Battle Grove his first words were, “I’ll git him, I’ll git him, if en it’s the last thing I do on this cher earth.”