Chaneysville Incident Read Online Free PDF

actually crazy, certainly changed. He did not go back to his work, which, for as long as most people could remember, had been supplying the half of the County that drank with corn liquor. He gave that up, and he gave up drinking whiskey himself. He gave up cards. And he more or less gave up hunting—he still went out, but he went without a gun; no one, as usual, knew why, and no one was fool enough to ask.
    Those changes, fundamental as they seemed, still might have been explained adequately by a simpler theory than insanity, but the rest could not. Moses Washington was seen to enter the church occasionally, although never during an official service; he was fond of attending choir practice, and he took over the job of keeping the sanctuary clean. He was seen to spend time in conversation with whatever minister the Central Jurisdiction of the Methodist Episcopal Church saw fit to send—it was suggested that he was the main reason that none of them lasted more than two years. Not that he was sectarian; rumor had it that, especially during the winter months, he would prowl the countryside for miles around, and in the dead of night, appear at a parsonage and roust the preacher out of bed for far-reaching theological discussions.
    But all that came after the biggest event; in 1946 he shocked everyone by asking for the hand of Miss Yvette Franklin Stanton, whose father had been a professor at Howard University before retiring to a neat house at the far side of town—away from the “other ones,” as the Professor put it—in order to drink the local mineral water, which, the Professor maintained, had not lost any of its curative powers since the days when President James Buchanan had partaken of it. Miss Stanton was a spinster at thirty-one not because she was ugly, but because she had somewhat haughtily refused to become involved with any of the young men from the Hill, although, unlike the Professor, she was active in the Hill’s affairs. The people called it uppitiness, the rejected suitors something else, but they all nearly fainted when Miss Stanton accepted not only a ruffian, but the Ruffian of Ruffians, even if he did appear to have settled down some.
    Moses Washington and Miss Stanton were married in 1946, but the marriage was not consummated for a solid year, while Moses Washington enlisted the help of Josh White, and Old Jack Crawley, and built the house. The three of them lived in it while they built it, raising the walls around them, constructing the roof over them, and, if rumor has it correctly, adding numerous four-letter words to the English language while doing it. When it was finished, Jack Crawley and Josh White went back to their battered cabins on the far side and Moses Washington moved his wife in. Mrs. Washington did not approve of drinking in any form, or of cussing, or of Old Jack and Uncle Josh, for that matter, and so Uncle Josh never again set foot in the house he had helped to build; even during Moses Washington’s funeral he, along with Old Jack Crawley, stood outside on the porch. And Old Jack had only entered it once more, on the afternoon of that day, when he had come looking for Moses Washington’s elder son.
    It was hotter than hell on the day they buried Moses Washington. All the men said so, muttering it softly, after making sure that neither their wives nor the preacher was in earshot. It was just barely hyperbole; it was the dry part of August and air that had been baked on the Great Plains hung unmoving over the mountains, heavy with tan dust that made a haze like smoke on the mountaintops and the trees gray like powdered wigs. There were nearly a hundred people at the funeral; everyone on the Hill who was both old enough to respect death and young enough to walk to meet it, and more than a few people who had left the Hill, and even one man who was white. They stood out behind Moses Washington’s house—among his effects had been found a letter giving strict instructions about his