Chaneysville Incident Read Online Free PDF Page A

answered—my own early theory, that Moses Washington had wanted triangular rocks (the why of that being still another question) and it had been quicker and easier to find them than to cut them, proved erroneous—for the simple reason that the mason had been Moses Washington himself, and no one had ever been able to figure out why Moses Washington did anything; no one even knew where and when he had learned masonry. And given the ugliness of the house, one could say he never had.
    Certainly he had laid his own ideas on top of any formal knowledge he might have possessed. The mortar, for example, was cooked limestone, the sort of cementing agent that Henri Christophe of Haiti had used to build the famed Citadel. But where Christophe was rumored to have thickened his mortar with the blood of goats, Moses Washington had used portland cement—although it was rumored, too, that the bones of more than one of Moses Washington’s enemies might be discovered beneath the foundation.
    The dressed stone had come from the foundation of the house itself. The rest of it had been dug out of the foundations of houses that lurked in the underbrush on the far side of the Hill, hauled over by Moses Washington and Jack Crawley and Uncle Josh “Snakebelly” White during one of the most murderous Augusts the County had ever seen. It would have been sensible to wait for cooler weather, but Moses Washington had a schedule, and the schedule said move the stone in August, so he had. That was how Moses Washington was. The only times he had backed off from anything was in order to get up speed. Laws local, state, federal, military, and possibly international had not stopped him, threats of incarceration and/or bodily harm had not stopped him; the weather was not about to. Jack Crawley and Josh White had helped him because they had always helped him. The three of them had run together for forty years, hunting and fishing and drinking and generally scandalizing the County. They had run together through—or perhaps “over” is a better word—Prohibition, and neither the Volstead Act nor the relative fortune that Moses Washington had made because of it changed anything. They had run together through the Depression, and that just made them worse; some of the market for Moses Washington’s home brew dried up, and the three of them were forced to consume large quantities in order to keep the prices from falling due to oversupply. They had done a heroic job. When World War II had begun they had tried to enlist together, even though Josh White, the youngest of them, was fifty. They still tell the story on the Hill about how the three of them had stormed the old Espy House, drunk as lords, demanding to be signed up, threatening to take the place apart if they weren’t. Uncle Josh and Old Jack actually did tear the place up, scattering files and file clerks, until they passed out. Moses Washington, seeming suddenly sober, had waited until the dust had settled, and then had taken the director of enlistment aside and spoken to him for a while, and nobody knows exactly what was said, but the next time anyone heard of Moses Washington he was a noncommissioned officer in the Army of the United States, and the next time they heard of him he was in Italy, and then they heard no more until he came back from the war with medals and ribbons bearing witness to his valor and discharge papers certifying his total insanity. This, it was rumored, was because he had tried to shoot one of the white Southern officers that were invariably placed in charge of black combat units. It was a rumor that nobody believed, since the last time Moses Washington missed something he was aiming at was a matter not of record but of legend, and it was widely suspected that the charge of attempted murder was really the result of the workings of Moses Washington’s bizarre sense of humor. But as the days following his return from the war passed, it became evident that he was, if not