Free Uncle Sagamore and His Girls by Charles Williams Page A

you bring out here, you either got to hide it or set on it.”
    The Sheriff took a deep breath. “All right,” he says. “But what does he want with a hawg-pen and a shed?”
    “He didn’t say,” Mr. Jimerson told him. “He jest stopped at the house early this mornin’ and hawr’d me to build ’em. Paid me five dollars.”
    The Sheriff stopped him. “He’s already paid you? You mean Sagamore Noonan—?”
    Mr. Jimerson nodded like he wasn’t quite sure he believed it either. “That’s what he done, Shurf. After he left, I talked it over with Prudy. She says there’s bound to be a trick in it somewheres, but when I takened the money to town and showed it to Clovis Buckhalter at the bank, he said it was a real five-dollar bill. So I put it in the bank, an’ Clovis give me a receipt.” He took the receipt out of his pocket and looked at it like he wanted to be sure it was still there. “You don’t reckon there’s no way he can beat me out of it now, do you, Shurf?” he asked.
    The Sheriff rubbed his chin. “I don’t know of none, Marvin. But if it was me, I’d spend it as soon as I could. But whereabouts are you goin’ to build this shed?”
    Mr. Jimerson pointed out in the open just up the hill from us. “Right out there somewheres. He says to line up the back corner of the house with that spring off to the left up there on the hill, and dig down, and I’d find a pipe just under the ground—”
    “Pipe?” the Sheriff asked.
    “Hey,” Booger says, sort of excited, “that’d be the old water supply for that still he had set up in the back room of the house. Remember?”
    “By God, yes,” the Sheriff says. “What about the pipe, Marvin?”
    “Why, he told me to build the shed right a-straddle of it,” Mr. Jimerson said.
    “Oh,” the Sheriff says. “He wants the water for the hawgs? Is that it?”
    Mr. Jimerson looked at him kind of funny. “Why, Shurf, he ain’t got no hawgs.”
    The Sheriff took off his hat and mopped his forehead real slow and careful. “I mean, he wants the water for the hawg-pen?”
    Mr. Jimerson studied about it. “Why, I reckon not. Why would anybody want water in a hawg-pen without no hawgs in it?”
    The Sheriff seemed to be breathing kind of hard. He opened his mouth, but he didn’t say anything.
    “That’s jest be a foolishness,” Mr. Jimerson went on, like he was having a hard time explaining it to him. “I mean, pipin’ water into a empty hawg-pen.”
    “ Ffffssshhh—! ” the Sheriff says.
    “And, anyway,” Mr. Jimerson says, “the hawg-pen won’t be up there nohow. It goes out there back of the barn, around that chinaberry tree.”
    “Well, look,” Booger says, “he must want that water for something—”
    The Sheriff got tracked at last. “ Goddammit! ” he yelled. “Let’s get out of here before we go completely nuts!” They went back to the car, and it dusted up the hill and out of sight.
    I went on shelling corn. Mr. Jimerson took some post-hole diggers out of the wagon and went out to the chinaberry tree beyond the back end of the barn. He started digging the holes and tamping in the posts. In a little while he had ’em all set, and he unrolled the wove wire and nailed it on. It wasn’t a very big pen, about 20 feet on a side. Then he went off about fifty yards above the barn and dug around until he located the pipe. He set four posts there, longer ones that was about eight feet tall when he tamped ’em in. Then he nailed the two-by-fours around the upper ends and another one across the top for a ridgepole, and covered it with tin roofing that he found in the barn. I went up and looked at it while he was gathering up his tools. It was a kind of rickety-looking shed, but it kept the sun off you, and I reckoned it would stand up if we didn’t have a really hard wind. It was about twelve feet square.
    “What you reckon he wants it for?” I asked Mr. Jimerson.
    He bit off a chew of tobacco and studied about it for awhile.