The Choiring Of The Trees Read Online Free PDF Page A

whether or not a road ought to be fixed up or a new roof put on the jail. But he’s the most powerful politician. Dorinda’s brothers scoured the county on Sull’s behalf, and some folks said that they used coercion and bribery and ballot-stuffing. Most of Stay More voted for Sull’s opponent, and Sull didn’t like us for it, and he never let us forget it after he was elected.
    That election made him into “Judge” Sull Jerram at the same time it offered him a way to get rich. It was the same general election when most of the counties of Arkansas voted dry, six years in advance of national Prohibition. Newton County had always been dry, and always would be, so there was always a good local market for Chism’s Dew, and always had been, and there still is. When the first Chism came from Tennessee in 1839, he didn’t intend to break any laws or make a lot of money, he just wanted to do what he knew how to do: make good sour mash drinking-whiskey. There was a time when Seth Chism had some trouble in the 1870s with the government for the manufacture, possession, and sale, but apart from that the Chisms had been moonshining through four generations with impunity, free hands, and honesty. No sheriff of Newton County would come near the Chism place, as long as the product was sold on the premises, which it always had been, or at least not any farther from the premises than “downtown” Stay More, where, in the autumn, a man could buy a pumpkin from little Luther Chism on Saturday afternoon and find a refilled jar or jug inside of it.
    Chism’s Dew had a reputation beyond the boundaries of Newton County, and there were even Little Rock politicians, lawyers, and bankers who obtained quantities of it for their personal use and to entertain guests, but the Chisms had never made any effort to market their commodity outside of Stay More…until the 1913 state “drought” created a demand, and the politicians up at Jasper saw a way to get rich from it. At the same time Sull Jerram became county judge, a friend of his got elected the new sheriff, a fellow from somewhere over in eastern Newton County named Duster Snow, who had worked his way up from assessor and surveyor, with a couple of years as a deputy revenue marshal, so he knew the liquor trade inside out. We got a new county clerk and a new county treasurer, and Judge Sull Jerram found himself presiding over a gang of courthouse liars and ruffians and mischief-makers who lost no time in cooking up a surefire scheme for getting rich: marketing Chism’s Dew to the outside world.
    Judge Jerram was still Seth Chism’s son-in-law, which didn’t entitle him to a better price than anyone else—he paid the same two dollars per gallon—but he began to buy up every last drop that Seth and his boys could make, as fast as they could make it, and Sull had it hauled off to Jasper, where it was loaded onto a big newfangled vehicle called a motortruck and taken off to Harrison. The Chisms ran out of containers; every jug and gallon demijohn in Stay More had been rinsed and refilled and sold to Sull Jerram, and all the jugs and demijohns that he could bring in from Jasper, Parthenon, Spunkwater, Swain, Nail, Deer—whatever community might have a few—he rounded them up and the Chisms filled them and they found their way to Harrison. When all the jugs and demijohns in Newton County had disappeared, they began to use bean pots, cream pitchers, stone jars, wash pitchers, chicken fountains, soup tureens, punchbowls, compotes, gravy boats, even slop jars or thundermugs.
    The Chisms ran out of corn. Or, rather, the Ingledews’ gristmill could not furnish any more cornmeal, having ground up everything the Chisms had raised. My father even made a little pin money selling the hard-dent corn out of his corncrib, and so did everyone else, until all of that was gone, and there were a lot of hungry hogs and chickens that winter. Sull Jerram arranged with whoever was buying the finished product