Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 114, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 697 & 698, September/October 1999

Hidden Talent by Helen Tucker

©1999 by Helen Tucker

A former reporter for newspapers and radio, Helen Tucker now concentrates her efforts on fiction writing. From her home in Raleigh, North Carolina she turns out small tales of ordinary people — stories with the traditional flavor of the Golden Age. Ms. Tucker is one of the few authors for EQMM. who still uses a typewriter, not a computer: perhaps this helps her to maintain her classical style.

If Caley Potter had lived today, what he had would have been called a disease which could and should be treated. But back in the ’thirties, Caley’s heyday, it was called a bad habit, a vice, and even, by some, a sin. However, most people in Laurelton smiled when Caley’s name was mentioned, because what he had wasn’t contagious, there wasn’t a speck of harm in him, and he was a pleasant fellow.

Caley Potter was the town drunk. He was fifty years old and looked sixty-five with his sparse gray hair, mottled complexion, and slightly stooped shoulders.

The one person in town who simply couldn’t abide Caley was the mayor, Thomas Baxter. Baxter was a staunch Methodist who thought drinking was the devil’s way of capturing souls for hell. He himself had signed The Pledge at an early age.

Hardly anyone in the town of three thousand had ever seen Caley completely sober. He started nipping in the morning, sipping at noon, and by night had settled down to serious drinking.

He hadn’t held a job in years. After ten years of a shaky marriage, his wife Polly, a seamstress, divorced him. No one knew how he subsisted, but the consensus was that Polly (who apparently still loved him but couldn’t live with him) gave him some of her hard-earned money from time to time, and once in a while, Rafe Hollcut let Caley sweep out his feed store for a dollar or two.

Once, thinking he was doing Caley a favor, Rafe went through Caley’s pockets, found a pint bottle of rye, and flushed the contents down the toilet. Watching him from a distance, Caley, without a word, finished sweeping the store, then, taking a knife, cut open a fifty-pound bag of oats and covered his newly swept floor. He was making his exit by the loading platform in the back of the store when Rafe screamed at him, “Caley, where the hell you think you’re going? Clean up this mess right now!”

“I’ll clean it up when you replace my tonic,” Caley said.

“Tonic, my rear end! You...”

“Rafe, you in here?” came from the front of the store.

“I’ll be right back,” Rafe said. “Don’t you move.” He rushed to the front room. In those lean days every customer was important. But when he got there the potential customer had already gone, and when he returned to the loading platform, the loaded Caley had gone also.

Rafe, shaking his head sadly, later told someone, “I guess Caley thought I was destroying his lifeline and he was just getting his revenge by spilling my oats.” It was impossible for him to get really mad at Caley for something he himself had instigated.

Caley lived in one room over the Esso filling station, an accommodation that cost him nothing in return for keeping away burglars. All the local people knew that by eight o’clock on any given night, Caley would be in his nocturnal stupor, but burglars from out of town might be deterred by seeing a light in the living quarters above the station. At least, that’s what Norris Payton, the station manager, counted on. Actually, Norris just plain liked Caley, and even more, liked to listen to Caley whistle.

Caley had one powerful talent that caused everyone in Laurelton to look at him with awe. If angels could whistle, they would sound like Caley. He could triple-tongue and trill and do all sorts of things that no one could put a name to but that everybody went ape over. And the most amazing thing was that he whistled mostly classical music: Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, and Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, and Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Mans Desiring, and the Mozart Alleluia. Nobody had the faintest idea where he’d ever heard the music, much less heard it often enough to know every note.

Yet it was this very talent that got Caley in the worst trouble of his life, the trouble that caused the people of Laurelton to look at him with disdain instead of kindly tolerance.

Some of the students at the high school got the notion that if, with a little practice, they could whistle like Caley, they could start a whistling band. Something that had never been heard of before. Then they could be on The Amateur Hour on national radio and win a lot of money.

So twenty students from the junior and senior classes began to hunt Caley out every afternoon after school and sit at his feet like disciples in back of the Esso station while he did his best to teach them.

After a week or so, Caley was ready to give up. “I don’t think this is working out,” he said. “Whistling is a gift from God, and if you ain’t got the gift, you might as well fergit it.”

But they didn’t want to “fergit it.” By then they were all enthralled with Caley, his benign, half-crooked smile, his don’t-give-a-damn attitude toward every issue about which their parents nagged them, and his acceptance of them as his equals, not children. So when Caley decided to stop the lessons, the students followed him around town, begging him to continue.

That’s when Mayor Thomas Baxter blew his cork, because two of his children, Betty Sue, a senior, and Nelson, a junior, were among Caley’s most steadfast admirers.

“A Pied Piper, that’s what he is,” Mayor Baxter told his wife. “An instrument of the devil! He’s leading our children to perdition. He’s got to be stopped.”

He talked to his children and they listened silently, nodded as though in agreement, then went right back to Caley.

When the mayor found out that neither talk nor threats of punishment would accomplish the desired results, he decided to have a talk with Caley himself.

Every day at noon, Caley went to the kitchen door of Mrs. Beasley’s Dining Room on Main Street. If Mrs. Beasley happened to be in the kitchen, Caley paid a quarter for whatever was called the “Sandwich of the Day.” If Mrs. Beasley was serving in the dining room, her chief cook and dishwasher slipped Caley a sandwich gratis. Caley then would take his lunch down to the Tar River and eat it sitting on the bank.

It was there that the mayor found him. “Caley, I want a few words with you.”

“Make it very few,” Caley muttered, sotto voce. Getting into any verbal sparring with this silver-tongued politician might spoil his lunch.

The mayor wouldn’t lower himself to sit on the bank beside Caley, so he stood over him, while Caley calmly munched on his egg-salad sandwich. “Caley, you are setting a bad example, a really rotten example for the youth of this town.”

“How so?”

“For starters, you drink like a fish...”

“How you know fish drink? You ever seen one drink?”

“... and you stagger around town trying to influence all the young people, and...”

“I ain’t trying to influence nobody.”

“Nevertheless, you are doing it, and I and all the other parents in this town want it stopped.”

“How can I stop something I never started?”

Mayor Baxter cleared his throat. “You stay away from the children of this town or, I’m warning you, the consequences will be dire. You’re nothing but a drunken old fool, a tool of the devil...” The mayor broke off suddenly and looked toward a giant oak tree a few feet away. “Who’s back of that tree eavesdropping?” he called. “Come out and show yourself.”

Caley stared at him. “How you know somebody’s back there?”

“He spoke. Didn’t you hear him? He said, ‘Judge not...’ Uh, and then he added something else.”

Caley shrugged. “I didn’t hear nothing. Maybe your conscience is talking to you.”

In a much softer tone, the mayor said, “Look Caley, I’m not enjoying this conversation, and I really regret that I felt it necessary. But it’s my duty to protect our young. And what would people think of me if I didn’t do my duty?” With that, he started back up the bank toward his car.

“You wouldn’t worry about what people think of you if you realized how seldom they do,” Caley called.

The mayor went back to his office, knowing that nothing would be changed, yet loath to give up his campaign in spite of the voice that had told him to judge not lest he be judged. He spent hours, days, trying to think of some way to end this monstrous hero-worship of the town drunk.

The idea came to him one afternoon as he was driving home and saw Caley staggering toward the Esso station, the inevitable pint bottle in his sagging pocket. Early the next morning he was in the office of the chief of police.

“Robby, this afternoon around five-thirty, I want you to arrest Caley Potter for public drunkenness and put him in jail.”

The chief blinked and looked at the mayor as though the man had suddenly spilled his marbles all over the floor.

“You hear me?” the mayor asked sternly. “Do it without fail.”

“But Thomas, why? Caley never hurt one living soul.”

“Because I said so. And you’re to leave him in jail for twenty-four hours.”

Next, the mayor went to the high-school principal’s office.

“Walter, I want to take your junior and senior classes on a little field trip tomorrow at two o’clock. Give them a lesson in civics, a lesson that will make better citizens of them.”

The following afternoon, an unseasonably hot, for April, ninety-two degrees, Mayor Baxter, with sixty-four students in tow, went to the little brick jailhouse where Caley was the only “resident.” Outside, the mayor described the dreadful results of drinking, calling it the worst sin man could commit, because it made man cast off his own nature and take on the devil’s. Then he went into detail about the horrors of being in prison, what it did to one’s reputation for the rest of one’s life.

Next, he took them inside, through the office and the big door that led to the three stiflingly hot cells. And there sat Caley in one of the cells, on a bare cot that was attached to a cinder-block wall. Caley, his face dark with stubble, had on boxer shorts and a sweat-soaked undershirt, nothing else. His trousers and shirt were beside the cot on the floor. On seeing the audience crowding around the cell, Caley’s mouth dropped open as though he were about to speak, but no words came out.

“Here is the perfect example of what I was telling you about,” the mayor said. “This man has been a firm friend of Demon Rum all his life. He is a good-for-nothing who can’t hold a job, can’t support a family, can’t even qualify as a human being.”

The students’ mouths were agape, and their expressions changed quickly to disgust. As one, they turned around and left the cell room and the jail.

“Jesus wept!” Caley cried, finding his voice. His surprise was even greater than that of his observers. “I’ll get you for this, Thomas Baxter,” he screeched. “You see if I don’t. Revenge will be sweet!”

But for Caley, the era of tolerance had ended. He could tell by the looks he got from everyone in town. The looks told him he might as well have been something bad they stepped on in a cow pasture for all the respect he got. The word of his downfall had spread quickly. Students no longer sought him out, indeed, they crossed the street if they happened to see him. He had to pay for all his sandwiches at Mrs. Beasley’s. And, worst of all, nobody asked him to whistle anymore.

With great difficulty, he even cut down considerably on his drinking, but that didn’t bring back a smidgen of what he’d lost — or rather, what had been stolen from him by the mayor. The life he had known was gone forever.

Days, weeks, and months passed, and although the town waited for Caley to carry out his threat against the mayor, nothing happened. There was no act of revenge. Caley made no effort to get back at the man he despised for ruining him.

Four years later, Thomas Baxter died, and his funeral at the Methodist Church was the largest, grandest ever held in Laurelton. So many people attended that the Sunday-school rooms behind the main auditorium had to be opened to accommodate the crowd. Surprisingly, even Caley Potter attended.

The organist outdid herself, and a quartet singing “Abide With Me” brought tears to many eyes. Then there was Scripture read, followed by enough eulogies to run the service almost two hours.

It was after the final prayer, when all was quiet, that a low moan seemed to come from the casket. And then another, louder.

In the stunned, unnatural silence, people looked at each other, some turning pale. A child’s voice, heard all over the church, piped, “Mama, he ain’t dead.”

Phillip Hassel, the undertaker, motioned for the pallbearers to come forth, but nobody moved. Then a voice came from the casket saying, “Oh, please have mercy! Let me out of here. The Lord won’t let me in heaven and the devil said I’m too mean for hell. So they sent me back. Christ Almighty! Let me out of here!”

Some of the people screamed, others looked on the verge of fainting, and all of them made a frantic, panic-stricken rush for the door, even Phillip Hassel.

Caley Potter, who had been sitting on the right side of the church near the front, was the last one out. At the door, he turned and gave the casket a mock salute. There was a little smile on his face as he murmured, “Gotcha!”

“You sure did, Caley,” came from the casket. “You had the last word.”

Caley was so accomplished that his lips hardly moved at all when he threw his voice.