Out of Their Minds

7

Linda Bailey spotted me as soon as I walked through the school house door and came bustling over to me like a self-important hen. She was one of the few people there that I remembered and there was no way one could fail to remember her. She and her husband and her brood of grubby children had lived on the farm next door to ours and there had been few days during the entire time that we were there that Linda Bailey had not come traipsing up the road or across the fields to borrow a cup of sugar or a dab of butter or any one of a dozen other items of which she continually found herself short and which, incidentally, she never seemed to get around to paying back. She was a large, raw-boned, horsey woman and she had aged, it seemed to me, but little.

"Horace Smith!" she trumpeted. "Little Horace Smith. I'd knowed you anywhere."

She flung her arms about me and she pounded me on the back with resounding thumps while, embarrassed, I struggled to remember just what bond of affection there had been between my family and the Bailey family to justify this kind of greeting.

"So you came back again," she yelped. "You couldn't stay away. Once Pilot Knob gets into your blood, there can't no one stay away. And after being to all those places, too. To all them heathen countries. You were in Rome, weren't you?"

"I spent some time in Rome," I told her. "It's not a heathen country."

"The purple iris that I have down against the pigpen," she declared, "is from the Pope's own garden. It's not so much to look at. I've seen lots better iris—a whole lot prettier. Any other kind of iris no better than that I'd dug up and throwed out long ago. But I kept it because of the place it come from. It ain't everybody, I can tell you, that has iris from the Pope's own garden. Not that I hold with the Pope and all that foolishness, but it does make the iris sort of distinctive, don't you think it does?" "Very much," I said.

She grabbed me by the arm. "For goodness* sake," she said, "let's go over and sit down. We have so much to talk about."

She dragged me to a row of chairs and we sat down together.

"You said Rome wasn't no heathen country," she said, "but you been in heathen countries. What about them Russians? You spent a lot of time in Russia."

"I don't know," I said. "Some of the Russian people still believe in God. It's the government…"

"Land sakes alive," she said, "you sound as if you liked them Russians."

"Some of them," I said.

"I heard," she said, "that you were up Lonesome Hollow and came driving down the road past the Williams place this morning. What in the world would you be doing there?"

Was there anything, I wondered, that she didn't know about, that all Pilot Knob didn't know about? Better than tribal drums, more efficient than radio, the news went thrumming through the community—every bit of gossip, every supposition.

"I turned up the road on impulse," I told her, lying very feebly. "When I was a boy, I went squirrel hunting up there sometimes in the fall."

She looked at me suspiciously, but she didn't follow up the reason for my being there. "Maybe it's all right in daylight," she declared, "but I wouldn't, for all the money in the world, go up there after dark." She leaned closer to me and her braying voice sank to a scratchy whisper. "The place is haunted," she said, "by a pack of dogs, if you want to call them dogs. They come baying down across the hills, snarling and yapping, and when they go past there is a cold wind going with them. It's enough to freeze your soul…"

"You've heard these dogs?" I asked.

"Reared them? On many a night I've beared them, howling down the hills, but I've never been that dose to them that I've felt the wind. Nettie Campbell told me. You remember Nettie Campbell?"

I shook my head.

"Oh, of course you wouldn't. She was Nettie Graham before she married Andy Campbell. They lived at the end of the road up Lonesome Hollow. The house is deserted now. Just walked away and left. Them dogs drove them off. Maybe you saw it—saw the house, I mean."

I nodded, not too positively, for I'd not seen the house. I'd only heard of it from Lowizie Smith the night before.

"There are strange things hi these hills," said Linda Bailey. "Things a body, in his right mind, would not believe. It comes, I suppose, from being such wild country. A lot of other places are all settled down, with not a tree left standing and all the land in fields. But this is still wild country. I guess it will always be."

The schoolroom was beginning to fill up now and I saw George Duncan making his way through the crowd toward me. I stood up to greet him and held out my hand.

"I hear you got settled in all right," he said. "I knew you'd like the place. I phoned Streeter and told him to look after you. He said you were out fishing. Catch anything worthwhile?"

"A couple of bass," I told him. "I'll do better once I get to know the river."

"I think the program is about to start," he said. "Ill see you later on. There are a lot of people here you should say hello to."

The program got underway. The teacher, Kathy Adams, played the old dilapidated organ and different groups of kids came up and sang some songs and others spoke their pieces and a bunch of eighth grade pupils put on a little play that Kathy Adams proudly announced they had worked out themselves.

It all, in its stumbling way, was entirely delightful and I sat there remembering when I had gone to school in this very building and had taken part in exactly such a program. I tried to remember the names of some of the teachers I had had and it was only toward the end of the program that I remembered one of them had been named

Miss Stein, a strange, angular, flighty person with an abundance of red hair and most easily upset by some of the pranks we were always thinking up. I wondered where Miss Stein might be this very evening and how life had treated her. Better, I hoped, than some of us kids had treated her when we had gone to school.

Linda Bailey tugged at my jacket sleeve and spoke in a grating whisper. "Them kids are good, ain't they?"

I nodded that they were.

"This Miss Adams is a right good teacher," Linda Bailey whispered. "I'm afraid that she won't stay here long. This little school of ours can't expect to keep someone as good as her."

Then the program was over and George Duncan came pushing through the crowd and took me in tow and began to introduce me to some other people. Some of them I remembered and some of them I didn't, but they seemed to remember me, so I pretended that I did.

But right in the middle of it Miss Adams was standing up on the little platform at the front of the room and calling to George Duncan, "You forgot," she told him, "or are you pretending to, in hopes you'll get out of it? But you promised to be our auctioneer tonight."

George protested, but I could see that he was pleased. One could see with only half an eye that George Duncan was an important person in Pilot Knob. He owned the general store and was the postmaster and a member of the school board and he could turn his hand to many other little civic chores, like auctioneering the baskets at a basket social. He was the man that Pilot Knob always turned to when they needed something done.

So he went up to the platform and turned to the table that was stacked with decorated baskets and boxes and picked one of them up for the crowd to look at. But before he started in on his auctioneering, he made a little speech.

"All of you know," he said, "what this is all about. The proceeds from this basket social will be used to buy new books for the school library, so you will have the satisfaction of knowing that whatever you spend here will be used to a good purpose. You aren't just buying the basket and the privilege of eating with the lady whose name you find inside it; you also are contributing to a very praiseworthy public cause. So I'll ask you fellows out there to loosen up a bit and spend some of that money that is sagging down your pockets."

He hoisted the basket that he held. "Now here," he said, "is the kind of basket that I like to offer. I tell you, fellows, this one has a hefty feel to it. There's a lot of good eating packed into it and the way it's decorated and all, I'd say the lady who put it up probably paid as much attention to what went into it as how it looks outside. And it might interest you to know that I seem to catch a whiff of good fried chicken."

"Now," he asked, "what am I bid?"

"A dollar," said someone, and someone else immediately made it two and then from the back of the room came a bid of two and a half.

"Two dollars and a half," said George Duncan in aggrieved surprise. "Are you boys going to stop at two and a half? Why, if you were to buy this basket by the pound, that would be dirt cheap. Now do I hear…"

Someone bid three dollars and George worked it up from there, fifty cents and a quarter at a time, to four seventy-five and finally knocked it down for that.

I looked about the crowd. They were a group of friendly folks and they were having a good time. They were spending an evening with their neighbors and were comfortable with them. Right now they were intent upon the selling of the baskets, but later on there would be time for talk and there would be little weighty talk, I knew. They'd talk about the crops, the fishing, the new road that had been talked about for twenty years or more but had never come about and now was being talked about again, of the latest scandal (for there always was a scandal of some sort, although often of the very mildest kind), of the sermon the minister had preached last Sunday, of the old gentleman very newly dead and beloved by all of them. They'd talk of many things and then they'd go home through the softness of the late spring evening and they'd have their little worries and their neighborhood concerns, but there would be none of them weighed down by huge official worries. And it was good, I told myself, to be in a place where there were no overpowering and dark official worries.

I felt someone tugging at my sleeve and looked in the direction of the tugging and there was Linda Bailey.

"You'd ought to bid on that one," she whispered at me. "That one belongs to the preacher's daughter. She's a pretty thing. You'd enjoy meeting her."

"How do you know," I asked, "that it's the preacher's daughter's basket?"

"I just know," she said. "Go ahead and bid."

It was up to three dollars and I said three dollars and a half and immediately, from across the room, came a bid for four. I looked where the bid had come from and there, standing, ranged with their backs against the wall, were three young men, in their early twenties. When I looked at them I found that all three were looking at me and it seemed to me that they were sneering at me in a very heavy-handed way.

The tug came at my sleeve again. "Go ahead and bid," urged Linda Bailey. "It's them Ballard boys and the other one's a Williams. They are terrible louts. Nancy will just die if any of the three of them should bid in her basket."

"Four fifty," I said, unthinking, and up on the platform George Duncan said, "I have four fifty. Who will make it five?" He turned toward the three ranged along the wall and one of them said five. "Now I have five," sang George. "Will someone make it six?" He was looking straight at me and I shook my head, so he sold it for the five.

"Why did you do that?" Linda Bailey raged at me in her neighing whisper. "You could have kept on bidding."

"Not on your life," I told her. "I'm not going to come into this town and the first night I am here make it tough for some young sprout to buy the basket that he wants. His girl might be involved. She might have told him beforehand how to identify her basket."

"But Nancy's not his girl," said Linda Bailey, much disgusted at me. "Nancy hasn't got a fellow. She'll be mortified."

"You said that they were Ballards. Aren't they the people who live on our old home farm?"

"That they are," she said. "And the old folks are nice enough. But them two boys of theirs! They are holy terrors. All the girls are scared of them. They go to dances all the time and they are filthy-mouthed and do a lot of drinking."

I looked across the room and the three still were watching me, with triumphant leers pasted on their faces. I was a stranger to the town and they had bluffed me out, they had overbid me. It was silly on the face of it, of course, but in a little place like this small triumphs and small insults, because of the lack of any other kind, are often magnified.

Christ, I thought, why did I have to run into this Bailey woman? She'd always been bad news and she hadn't changed. She was a meddler and a busybody and there was no good in her.

The baskets were going rapidly and only a few of them were left. George was getting tired and the bidding had slowed down. I told myself that perhaps I should buy a basket, to demonstrate, if nothing else, that I was no stranger, but was a man, instead, who had come back to Pilot Knob and meant to stay awhile.

I looked around and there was no sign of Linda Bailey. More than likely she was sore at me and had stalked away. Thinking of her, I felt a little flare of anger. What right had she to demand that I protect the minister's daughter, Nancy, against the more than likely innocent designs—or at least ineffectual, if not innocent designs—of some loutish farm boy.

There were only three baskets left now and George picked up one of them. It was only half the size some of the others had been and it was not over decorated. Holding it up, he began his auction singsong.

There were two or three bids and they got it up to three fifty and I made it four.

Someone over against the wall said five and I glanced in that direction and the three were grinning at me—grinning, it seemed to me, with all the clownish malice in the world.

"Make it six," I said.

"Seven," said the middle one of the trio.

"I have seven," said George, somewhat aghast, for this was the highest any bid had run that night. "Do I hear seven and a half or does someone want to make it eight?"

I hesitated for a moment. I was certain that the first few bids had not come from any of the three against the wall. They had only entered the bidding after I had made my bid. They were, I was certain, deliberately baiting me and I was sure, as well, that everyone in the room knew what they were up to.

"Eight?" asked George, still looking at me. "Do I hear an eight?"

"Not eight," I told him. "Let us make it ten."

George gulped. "Ten!" he cried. "Do I hear eleven?"

He switched his eyes to the three against the wall. They glared back at him.

"Eleven," he said. "It takes eleven. No raise smaller than a dollar. Do I hear eleven?"

He didn't hear eleven.

When I went to the front of the room to pay the auction clerk and to get the basket, I glanced at the wall. The three were no longer there.

Standing to one side, I opened the basket and the name on the slip of paper placed atop the lunch was that of Kathy Adams.