“Don’t feel bad.” Idgie patted Grady on the back. “Sipsey told me the reason you boys cain’t catch him is because he can turn himself into a fox or rabbit whenever he wants to. What do you think? Do you reckon that’s true, Grady?”
Wilbur wanted to know how much the reward was up to.
Grady answered, “As of this morning, it was two hundred fifty dollars. Probably go up to five hundred before this thing is over.”
Wilbur shook his head. “Damn, that’s a lot of money.… What’s he supposed to look like?”
“Well, according to our people that saw him, they say he was just a plain old nigger boy in a stocking cap.”
“One smart nigger boy, I’d say,” Smokey added.
“Yeah, maybe so. But I’ll tell you one thing, when I do catch that black son of a bitch, he’s gonna be one sorry nigger. Hell, I ain’t been home to sleep in my own bed in weeks.”
Wilbur said, “Well hell, Grady, from what I hear, that ain’t nothing new.”
Everybody laughed.
Then, when Jack Butts, who was also a member of the Dill Pickle Club, said, “Yeah, it must be pretty bad … I hear Eva Bates’s been complaining, too,” the whole place exploded with laughter.
“Why, Jack, you ought to be ashamed of yourself,” Charlie said. “You ought not to insult poor Eva that way.”
Grady got up and looked around the room. “You know, every one of you boys in this cafe is as ignorant as hell. Just plain ignorant!”
He went to the hat rack and got his hat, and then turned around. “They ought to call this place the Ignorant Cafe. I think I’ll just take my business elsewhere.”
Everybody, including Grady, laughed at that one, because there wasn’t anyplace else. He went out the door and headed for Birmingham.
NOVEMBER 27, 1986
Stump Threadgoode, still a good-looking man at fifty-seven, was at his daughter Norma’s house for Thanksgiving dinner. He had just finished watching the Alabama-Tennessee football game and was sitting at the table with Norma’s husband, Macky, their daughter, Linda, and her skinny boyfriend with the glasses, who was studying to be a chiropractor. They were having their coffee and pecan pie.
Stump turned to the boyfriend. “I had an uncle, Cleo, that was a chiropractor. Course, he never made a dime at it … treated everybody in town free. But that was during the Depression, and nobody had any money, anyhow.
“My momma and Aunt Idgie ran a cafe. It wasn’t nothing more than a little pine-knot affair, but I’ll tell you one thing: We always ate and so did everybody else who ever came around there asking for food … and that was black and white. I never saw Aunt Idgie turn down a soul, and she was known to give a man a little drink if he needed it …
“She kept a bottle in her apron, and Momma would say, ‘Idgie, you’re just encouraging people into bad habits.’ But Aunt Idgie, who liked a drink herself, would say, ‘Ruth, man does not live by bread alone.’
“There must have been ten or fifteen hoboes a day that showed up. But these boys weren’t afraid to do a little work for their grub. Not like the ones they’ve got today. They’d rake the yard or sweep the sidewalk. Aunt Idgie always let them do a little something, so as not to hurt their pride. Sometimes she’d let them come sit in the back room and baby-sit with me, just so they’d think they were working. They were mostly good guys, just fellows down on their luck. Aunt Idgie’s best friend was this old hobo named Smokey Lonesome. God, you could trust him with your life. Never took a thing that didn’t belong to him.
“Those hoboes had an honor system. Smokey told me he heard they caught one that had stolen some silverware out of a house, and they killed him on the spot and took the silverware back to the people he had stolen it from … back then, we didn’t even have to turn a key. These new ones on the road and riding what’s left of the rails are a different breed. Just bums and dope addicts that will steal you blind.
“But Aunt Idgie never had one thing taken.” He laughed. “Of course, that may have been because of that shotgun she kept by the bed … she was as tough as pig iron, wasn’t she, Peggy?”
Peggy called back from the kitchen, “Tougher.”
“Of course, most of that was just an act, but she could be a hellion if she didn’t like you. She had this running feud with this old preacher at the Baptist church, where Momma taught Sunday School, and she would give him fits. He was a teetotaler, and one Sunday he preached against her friend Eva Bates, and it made her so mad she never did forgive him. Every time a stranger came to town looking to buy some whiskey, she’d take him outside the cafe and point to old Reverend Scroggins’s house and she’d say, ‘See that green house, down there? Just go over and knock on the door. That man’s got the best liquor in the state.’ She’d point out his house when some of those old boys was looking for something else, too.”
Peggy came out of the kitchen and sat down. “Stump, don’t be telling them that.”
He laughed. “Well, she did. Always doing something mean to that man. But, like I say, she just liked for people to think she was mean … inside, she was as soft as a marshmallow. Just like that time the preacher’s son, Bobby Lee, got arrested … she was the one he called to come get him.
“He’d gone over to Birmingham with two or three boys and gotten himself all liquored up and was running down the halls in his underwear, throwing water balloons out of the seventh-floor window; only Bobby Lee had them filled with ink and had dropped one on some big city councilman’s wife when they were going into the hotel for some shindig.
“It cost Aunt Idgie two hundred dollars to get him out of jail and another two hundred dollars to take Bobby’s name off the books, so he wouldn’t have a police record and his daddy wouldn’t find out … I went over there with her to get him, and coming home, she told him that if he ever let anybody know she had done it, she would shoot his you-know-whats off. She couldn’t stand anybody knowing she had done a good deed, especially for the preacher’s son.
“All that bunch in the Dill Pickle Club were like that. They did a lot of good works that nobody knew about. But the best part of the story is that old Bobby Lee went on to become a big-time lawyer, and wound up as an attorney general for Governor Folsom.”
His daughter, Norma, came in to get the rest of the dishes. “Daddy, tell him about Railroad Bill.”
Linda shot her mother an exasperated look.
Stump said, “Railroad Bill? Oh Lord, you don’t really want to hear about Bill, do you?”
The boyfriend, who really wanted to take Linda out parking somewhere, said, “Yes sir, I’d love to hear about it.”
Macky smiled at his wife. They had heard this story a hundred times and knew Stump loved to tell it.
“Well, it was during the Depression and, somehow, this person called Railroad Bill would sneak on the government supply trains and throw stuff off for the colored people. Then he’d jump off before they could catch him. This went on for years, and pretty soon the colored started telling stories about him. They claimed that someone saw him turn into a fox and run twenty miles on top of a barbed-wire fence. People that did see him said he wore a long black coat, with a black stocking cap on his head. They even made up a song about him.… Sipsey said, every Sunday in church, they’d pray for Railroad Bill, to keep him safe.
“The railroad put a huge reward up, but there wasn’t a person in Whistle Stop that would have ever turned him in, even if they had known who he was. Everybody wondered and made guesses.
“I got in my head that Railroad Bill was Artis Peavy, our cook’s son. He was about the right size and as fast as lightning. I followed him around night and day, but I could never catch him. I must have been around nine or ten at the time, and I would have given anything to have seen him in action, so I would have known for sure.