The Choiring Of The Trees Read Online Free PDF

in Harrison to start supplying the raw product, and the motortruck that was transporting the load of containers into Harrison would return with a load of corn or cornmeal.
    What the Chisms didn’t know then was that Sull Jerram and his courthouse gang were buying the Chisms’ whiskey for two dollars a gallon and sending it to Harrison, where they were getting four, five, and then six dollars a gallon for it.
    But one night in the spring of 1914, the Boone County sheriff and his deputies stopped that motortruck at the Boone County line and confiscated a whole load of whiskey, arrested and jailed the driver, and kept the motortruck. Sull Jerram’s entire bootlegging operation came to a halt. Our new sheriff Duster Snow talked to the Boone County sheriff, but the latter was incorruptible. Judge Jerram tried to work out a deal with the Boone County judge, but the latter was, while not incorruptible, unswayed by Sull’s terms.
    Seth Chism, visiting his daughter Irene and her husband the judge at their new Jasper house, had been impressed with their improved standard of living. He himself had built a new barn, put a new roof on his still, replaced his thirty-five-gallon pot still with a hundred-gallon copper still, and replaced the old bedrock furnace with a snail shell furnace, all with the profits from his increased production. And his wife Nancy took to wearing Sears, Roebuck dresses to church. Seth appreciated these improvements, and he was sympathetic when he heard about the confiscation of the motortruck, and he said he’d talk to his boy Nail when Judge Jerram suggested that Nail might be willing to transport a load of whiskey inside his wagon of sheep’s wool, which was going to Harrison anyway.
    Nail said he didn’t have any room, that his fleece wagon was loaded down with fleece and the axles would break if he took on a cargo of concealed whiskey. He was just telling the truth. He didn’t really object to his brother-in-law’s bootlegging, although he had resented the extra time he’d had to spend working the still, time spent away from his sheep, who needed him, especially now that shearing time had come. Nail liked making whiskey, and he liked drinking it, and he liked selling it, or he liked seeing his father sell so much of it that the farmplace was getting some improvements. But he just couldn’t see his way to risking a broken axle or two by carrying a load of whiskey inside the load of fleece.
    “You’re jist afraid of gittin caught,” Sull Jerram taunted him.
    “No, I aint afraid of that,” Nail protested. “Who’d stop me anyhow?”
    “What’s wrong with makin two trips?” Sull wanted to know. “Or twenty, if you have to?”
    “Yeah,” Seth said to his son, “you don’t have to take it all at once, and you could bring us back a load of corn.”
    So Nail agreed to take a load to Harrison inside his load of fleece, although he’d be delivering only half as much fleece as the wool agent was expecting, and he’d have to explain that to the wool agent, and he’d have to deliver and unload the whiskey beforehand. He took his kid brother Luther for company and whatever help he might need, the two of them riding side by side on the buckboard the long trip, Nail telling the boy tales or entertaining them both with his harmonica, playing “Red Wing,” “Turkey in the Straw,” and “Paddy on the Turnpike.”
    They didn’t have any problems on the trip into Harrison; but coming home, with the wagon piled high with sacks of cornmeal, a wheel broke and came off, and while they were trying to repair it, a sheriff’s deputy rode up and offered some help and then observed, “Thet shore is a mighty heavy load of corn you’uns is haulin. Whar ye headin with all such as thet?”
    Luther, who was fifteen, answered politely, “Stay More,” before his brother could nudge him into silence.
    The deputy laughed and said, “I hear tell Newton County is plumb out of corn. The eatin kind, that is.”