And it had been damn near worth my life, I reminded myself, to stay with Snuffy Smith, sitting at the kitchen table and drinking moonshine liquor with him.
It was incredible, of course, that I should give credence to the fact that there had been a Snuffy Smith. There wasn't any such person; there simply couldn't be. He and his pinheaded wife were zany characters that paraded through a comic strip. But hard as I tried to tell this to myself, I couldn't make it stick.
Except for the dogs and the man who stood out hi the yard yelling at them, the place was the same, however, as Snuffy's place had been. And that, I told myself, was beyond all reason.
Then I saw something that was different and I felt a great deal better about the entire crazy mess, although it was a small thing to feel very good about. There was a car standing by the woodpile, but its rear end wasn't jacked up. It was standing on four wheels, although I saw that a couple of sawhorses and a plank were leaning against the woodpile, as if the car only recently had been jacked up for repair, but that now it had been fixed and taken off the blocks.
I was almost past the place by now and once again the car headed for the ditch and I caught it just in time. When I craned my neck around for a final look, I saw the mailbox that stood on the post beside the gate.
Lettered on it in crude printing, made with a dripping paintbrush, was the name:
T. WILLIAMS
3
George Duncan had grown older, but I recognized him the minute I stepped into the store. He was gray and shaky and he had an old man's gauntness, but he was the same man who had often given me a sack of peppermint candy, free, when my father bought a box of groceries and, perhaps, a sack of bran, which George Duncan lugged in from the back room where he kept his livestock feed.
The storekeeper was behind the counter and talking to a woman who had her back to me. His gravelly voice came clear across the room.
"These Williams kids," he said, "have always been a pack of troublemakers. Ever since the day he came sneaking in here, this community has never had a thing but grief from Tom Williams and his tribe. I tell you, Miss Adams, they're a hopeless lot and if I was you, I wouldn't worry none about them. I'd just go ahead and teach them the best way that I could and I'd crack down on them when they stepped out of line and that would be the end of it."
"But, Mr. Duncan," said the woman, "they aren't all that bad. They have no decent family background, naturally, and sometimes their manners are appalling, but they really aren't vicious. They're under all sorts of pressures—you can't imagine what social pressures they are under…"
He grinned at her, a snaggle-toothed grin that had grimness rather than good humor in it. "I know," he said. "I know. You've told me this before, when they were in other scrapes. They're rejected. I think that's what you said."
"That is right," she told him. "Rejected by the other children and rejected by the town. They are left no dignity. When they come in here, I bet you keep an eye on them."
"You are right; I do. They would steal me blind."
"How do you know they would?"
"I've caught them doing it."
"It's resentment," she said. "They are striking back."
"Not at me, they ain't. I never done a thing to them."
"Perhaps not you alone," she said. "Not you personally. But you and everyone. They feel that every hand is raised against them. They know they aren't wanted. They have no place in this community, not because of anything they've done, but because this community decided, long ago, that the family was no good. I think that's the way you say it—the family is no good."
The store, I saw, had changed but little. There were new items on the shelves and there were items that were missing, but the shelves remained the same. The old round glass container that at one time had held a wheel of cheese was gone, but the old tobacco cutter that had been used to slice off squares of chewing tobacco still was bolted to the ledge back of the counter. In one far corner of the store stood a refrigerator case used for dairy goods (which explained, perhaps, the absence of the cheese box on the counter), but that was the only thing that had been really changed in the entire store. The potbellied stove still stood in its pan of sand at the center of the store and the same scarred chairs were ranged about it, polished from long sitting. Up toward the front was the same old pigeonholed compartment of mailboxes with the stamp window in the center of it and from the open door that led into the back came the redolent odor of livestock feed, stacked up in piles of burlap and paper bags.
It was, I thought, as if I'd seen the place only yesterday and had come in this morning to be faintly surprised at the few changes which had been effected overnight.
I turned around and stared out the dirt-streaked, fly-specked window at the street outside and here there were some changes. On the corner opposite the bank a lot, that I remembered as a vacant lot, now was occupied by a car repair shop thrown up of cement blocks and in front of it a single gas pump with the paint peeled off it. Next door to it was the barber shop, a tiny building that was in no way changed at all except that it seemed somewhat more dingy and hi need of paint than I remembered it. And next to it the hardware store, so far as I could see, had not changed at all.
Behind me the conversation apparently had reached its end and I turned around. The woman who had been talking with Duncan was walking toward the door. She was younger than I'd thought when I had seen her talking at the counter. She wore a gray jacket and skirt and her coal-black hair was pulled back tight against her head and knotted in the back. She wore glasses rimmed by some pale plastic and her face had upon it a look of worry and of anger, mixed. She walked with a smart, almost military, gait, and she had the look of a private secretary to a big executive—businesslike and curt and not about to brook any foolishness on the part of anyone.
At the door she turned and asked Duncan, "You're coming to the program tonight, aren't you?"
Duncan grinned with his snaggled teeth. "Haven't missed one yet. Not for many years. Don't reckon I'll start now."
She opened the door then — and was swiftly gone. Out of the corner of my eye I watched her marching purposefully down the street.
Duncan came out from behind the counter and shambled toward me.
"Can I do anything for you?" he asked.
"My name is Horton Smith," I said. "I made arrangements..»
"Now, just a minute there," said Duncan quickly, peering closely at me. "When your mail started coming in, I recognized the name, but I told myself there must be some mistake. I thought maybe…"
"There is no mistake," I said, holding out my hand. "How are you, Mr. Duncan?"
He grasped my hand in a powerful grip and held onto it. "Little Horton Smith," he said. "You used to come in with your pa…"
"And you used to give me a sack of candy."
His eyes twinkled beneath the heavy brows and he gave my hand an extra hearty shake, then dropped it.
It was going to be all right, I told myself. The old Pilot
Knob still existed and I was no stranger. I was coming home.
"And you're the same one," he said, "as is on the radio and sometimes on television."
I admitted that I was.
"Pilot Knob," he told me, "is plumb proud of you. It took some getting used to at first to listen to a home-town boy on the radio or sit face to face with him on the television screen. But we got used to it at last and most of us listened to you and talked about it afterwards. We'd go around saying to one another that Horton has said this or that and we took what you had to say for gospel. But," he asked, "what are you doing back? Not that we aren't glad to have you."