Small Town Notes

Showing How the Eighteenth Amendment Has Added Colour to Rural Life in America

SHERWOOD ANDERSON

PETE, who is deputy sheriff, came into the newspaper office and whispered to the editor. They both laughed about the tale he told. That had been the twentieth time Billy Vetch had put it over on him. Pete said it was all because of Billy's wife. Of course it was. He swore he would have caught Billy a hundred times if it hadn't been for her.

So he said he got a search warrant for Billy's house because Billy was up to it again. Cars parked before the house every night at all hours, men coming away from there singing. There was a fight out in the road one night.

And Billy's house only a mile out of town. "You can't stand for the rough stuff," Pete said to the editor.

So he got Cal Brown and George Wiley, two other deputy Sheriffs, and a search warrant and they went out there. Billy has been searched so often that he always knows what is coming off.

He lives in a nice house. It is a little white house beside the road, with climbing roses growing on its sides and over the porch. Billy's wife is a good housekeeper too. They have done fairly well at it. They drive a pretty nice car.

The editor almost thought Pete was jealous about Billy Vetch, having such a wife. Perhaps he was.

Pete said, "You know what that woman was?" The editor did know, of course. Such a little hell-raiser she used to be about that town before Billy got her. "You might as well talk to the moon now. She has got as quiet as a little mouse."

A little black-haired, trim-looking thing too.

SO the three men went out there and drove up as suddenly as they could, of course. Billy came out to the front porch. For just a second he popped inside the door and then right out again. He met them smiling.

He made them show the search warrant though. "You got to show me boys," he said. Then he looked it over carefully. "Go ahead boys," he said, "it looks all regular to me."

"But I am innocent," he said smiling. He burst right out laughing. You never saw such an innocent man. "My soul is a lily," he said. "It is a water lily."

"Ah, look here," Pete told the editor he said, "now don't you kid us none. What do you do for a living anyway?" he asked Billy. That was just to be saying something.

"I pick blackberries," Billy Vetch said. "My wife cans them. She makes jell of them. If you ever see me walking in the woods you boys will know what I am doing. When there are no blackberries ripe I go to look at the bushes. I love bushes."

"You go to hell," Cal Brown said to Billy Vetch, thinking of the hours they had all spent tramping the hills and looking for Billy's still, so they began to search the house. They had searched it lots of times before. They knew just where to look.

"But where's your wife?" Cal Brown asked Billy. "She is around somewhere," Billy said.

She was, too. The three men went into a bedroom and there she was, lying on the bed. She had her head done up in a wet cloth. Her name is Kate. "Hello Kate," Pete said. He asked her what was the matter and she said she had a fearful headache. Cal Brown said sometimes he had them too. Kate said hers came and went.

They searched of course. There was another bed in the room. They took all the covers off that. "Gee you have nice things, you and Billy," George Wiley said. He was speaking of a nice bed coverlet they had on that extra bed. They searched and searched.

Then they went out into the other room. Billy Vetch was standing there. "My wife is my wife," he said.

That put it into Pete's head strong. He said he wasn't going to be bluffed out. He went back into that room followed by the other two. Billy Vetch went in with them. This was upstairs. "I am going to search your bed, that one you are on, Kate," Pete said.

"Search away," Kate said. She said, "but don't let your hands come near my body."

"Not your defiling hands," Billy Vetch said. Billy used to teach school. He can throw words. He is the funniest kind of a man to be in the business you ever saw.

He said smilingly that he would kill any man who touched his wife. "It's her purity," he said, "and then, besides, she's sick."

"I have a headache," Kate said again, "with me they come and go."

They searched that bed too, just as close to Kate as they dared. Of course they didn't find a thing. Then they went out on the porch. They thought they would search the yard. Billy only has a small yard. A car passed. Pete heard a little noise. There was a kind of thump. He said afterwards that he looked over into a nearby field—it was a clover field and belonged to a man who was a hot prohibitionist himself—and he saw something shining there.

The three men got over into the field and looked and there were three bottles there. They were all full, and they warm still warm. Pete said there never was anything cold about Kate. When they looked up, the window of that room where Kate was lying was closed.

She wasn't lying there any more. As they got over the fence with the stuff she came out to the front porch. "Well now, wasn't that tricky of them?" Billy Vetch said. He swore he had seen some men, in the car that had just passed, throw something into the field. "I'd have told you but I don't hold with none of this prohibition stuff myself— you know that boys," he said.

They said they did know it. Billy said it showed how good they were. "People just see you fellows standing on a porch and they begin throwing stuff out of cars," he said. "Gee," he said, "I'd be afraid of you fellows if I was handling any stuff," he said. "But I ain't," he said, "I'm in the blackberry line."

He said, "my wife cans them and she makes jell."

"Your wife gets well quick enough from headaches too, don't she Billy?" Pete said. He said he had to laugh. Kate said it was all true. She said that her headaches just came and went: "Ain't it funny? That one just came when I saw you coming; and now that you are going, it is going too."

Pete said that after that he and Cal and George just felt that they might as well go and they did.

IT doesn't seem to me that any sheriff should enjoy the memory of any sort of ardent spirits as much as Sheriff Joe over in West Virginia, near here, enjoyed thinking about that peach brandy. It's against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth. Will, the lawyer, and Tom, the jailer, say the same thing.

Sheriff Joe says he doesn't think yet it was new-made stuff. "No Sir-ee," he says.

He says someone gave him a tip where to find the stuff. It was a lady, he says.

"She is a good woman and strict and full of sobriety," he says.

"You come over here," she wrote to Sheriff Joe.

So Joe went over there. She was in a neat little house, at the opening of a gully, at the foot of a mountain. She was a maiden lady, the Sheriff said.

"I've been in a little bit of a hurry," she said to Joe when he got there. He had taken two deputies along.

"Well," Joe said. He is always saying, "Well," when he is stumped.

So Joe said—"What's up?"

She said there was a little house up the gully, half way up the mountain.

She didn't think they were ready to make the run yet. "You'll have to stay here until they get going. I'll board you free," she said. She said the two deputies would have to go on home.

It might be a day and it might be a week. One of Joe's deputies was named "Mike."

Mike laughed.

The Sheriff said he couldn't do it. "I'm a married man," he said.

"Well . . ."

"Where is the house you're talking about?" Joe asked. So he and the deputies went up the gully, creeping up.

He said it was a kind of a Robinson Crusoe kind of a place.

Lilies in the yard, he said and a goat tied to a post. Climbing roses on a little half tumble-down mountain house.

They saw a man turning something up there. It was a small cider mill.

"He was a regular dude," the Sheriff said. He said that was a swell looking guy.

Then Mike had to stumble and make a noise.

The man hopped over a fence and started to run up the hill.

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'Stop,' the Sheriff said, "stop or I'll shoot."

So the fellow stopped and came hack laughing.

" I hat dame down there told you, eh? lie said. "A man ought never start anything when there is a dame like that living anywhere near."

"What you doing up here?" Joe said.

The young fellow told him to go in the house and see—knowing he would anyway—and he did.

There was a small copper still, a dandy. The best outfit the Sheriff ever saw. He could hardly contain his admiration, speaking of it.

He kept saying it over and over. "A swell outfit. Ah, a swell outfit."

So they ripped up the floor of this place and there was a keg with twenty-five gallons in it. It was this peach brandy.

"Good stuff, eh! A man of my experience."

"All the liquor I have seen made."

It took the three men to carry it down to the Sheriff's car. The Sheriff made that young dude help and he himself marched behind keeping him covered with a gun.

They kept stopping. The young dude would say, "let's stop. Let's straighten up," he would say.

"He was sure a cheerful young man," the Sheriff said. Stopping that way and maybe just standing around the keg cheered them all up.

So they got the keg into town and put it and the young dude both into jail. The young dude was hailed right out. A thousand dollars was his bond. A smart lawyer put it up. He went away whistling.

The Sheriff tried to keep that liquor but he said he couldn't. He locked it up everywhere, in cells, in the jail, in the big safe in the court room, in the cellar under the jail and even in the Judge's chambers.

There was less and less of that peach brandy in the keg all the time. "Ah," the Sheriff said, "it was marvelous stuff."

"One drink and then—but," he said, "what's the use talking."

So the day came for that young dude's trial and he wasn't there. A lot of others were though, walking nervously about. They were the best citizens of all that part of West Virginia, too.

"That old Judge is dead now. He was an old crust," Joe the Sheriff said.

He said half the prominent people in his West Virginia county were so nervous they couldn't sit down.

By that time, the Sheriff said, the keg was quite empty. He said it wasn't his fault. He said it was a keg you couldn't keep nothin' in. He filled it up with water.

And so into the Court comes that smart lawyer and he says to the Judge. "My man isn't here," he says. "I guess he's lit out."

"What was his name?" the Judge asked.

"Tom Williams," said the smart lawyer.

"He told me 'Teb Smith,' Joe," the Sheriff said.

So the Judge said, "we'll call Mr. Teb-Tom Smith-Williams, eh?"

"You have to put up the thousand dollars," the Judge said to the smart lawyer.

"Oh, let me out with five hundred, won't you?" the smart lawyer said.

"No," the Judge said. "The law is the law. I'll just give you thirty minutes to put it up," he said.

So the smart lawyer did it. He brought the cash over to the Courthouse.

So the Sheriff took the water that was in the keg and poured it into the street.

"That was that," he said. He said he was talking to the Judge later. "You were stern with that lawyer," he said.

"Yes," said the Judge, "I was, and with myself too. I might have let myself off with less than I did."

"I had to put up four hundred of that thousand myself," he said to the Sheriff.