Swamp Sister

5

Joel Sutt was a sit-around man. Walk into his store any time and you'd likely catch him sitting around anywhere. Just where didn't much matter to Sutt because he was rump-sprung and the saggy flesh of his rear seemed to adjust itself to the contours of anything that had an edge to it. Folks like to remember the time Jort Camp came into the store and found Sutt sitting in a corner on a stack of M. Ward catalogues, just sitting there staring at his dead pipe. "Like a mechanical man with a stripped gear," is what Jort had said.

But he wasn't lazy. No. The truth was he was rather obese, and obesity is enough to steer any man away from activity. And if he was sometimes prone to a certain statue look (especially about the eyes), it was because he was a thinking man.

He'd lived his entire life on the fringe of the swamp, made his living off its green edge; and he'd been satisfied. "Let the fools rush in," was a maxim of his. And the natural conclusion to this aphorism (in his mind) was that he was a wise man who kept his feet where they belonged. Oh, long ago, when he was a boy he'd wondered as other swamp boys had-well now, just what is in that blame old place? But he'd never gone to look. It took a certain amount of courage (addleheadedness, Sutt called it) to track the swamp, and he was a man who needed those wise feet of his on security. So he'd grown up on the fringe and had inherited the store from old Rice Sutt, who had inherited it from old Hunk Sutt-the Confederate veteran who had built the little money-maker in the first place. So he grew up with his feet (and the sprung rump) on the security of cracker boxes, flour barrels, enamel ware, bolts of cretonne, and shotgun shells, and never once had to call a Fire Sale or any kind of sale, and made money-not a lot, but enough to afford Jort Camp's observant comment about the mechanical man with the stripped gear.

And so he married a placid-faced girl from down-river and never had to worry about relatives mooching off him because her mother had run off with a punchboard drummer and her father had been killed in a fight with the revenue agents. And he called the blank look she held for him in her eyes Love, because he wasn't the man to admit (even to himself) that he'd married a stupid girl. And he called the quiet attention she offered whenever he spoke Adoring Respect, because he never did realize that every word he spoke entered one ear, wandered willy-nilly through the empty chamber without finding any sort of barricade, and meandered out the other, leaving less markings than a snail leaves on uneven sand. And so they'd bred (an act that didn't require intelligence, or even focal attention) two boys, and one had died early and the other was now hanging about the Landing, growing fat on the thought that he would someday inherit all the wonderful boxes and barrels and benches to break down his own rump on.

Then Mr. Ferris had come out of the north and had told about the Money Plane. Like most of the men in that region Sutt had done his share of night-tossing in his damp bed, thinking of the payroll money. But that was all he did about it. The rest could at least go out and look, but Sutt could only dream.

"I cain't go tom-fooling off into the swamp," he'd sometimes say into the long restless night, apropos of nothing. "Got me my store to tend."

And the placid-faced woman that lay at his side would know then that he was coming to a climax of frustration, and would understand instinctively that he was going to do the next best thing to assuage that frustration. She was like a test dog, in that respect, in which a certain reaction pattern had been instilled. Minutes later the placid-faced woman would stare up past the hump of his shoulder at the dark rafters and think of the pie she would bake the following morning. You take a cinnamon stick and you-.

But Mr. Ferris, the man with the penetrating eyes, had looked at Sutt and had listened to him, and finally had said, "Someday, someone around here is going to find that plane. When they do they're going to find that they've discovered more than just money. They're going to find themselves in a soul-shattering battle with their conscience. And, Mr. Sutt, eighty thousand dollars is a mean opponent for anyone's conscience. I have a feeling that the man who finds that money will not be overly garrulous about it-" (Excuse me, Mr. Ferris. I didn't quite catch that word of yourn). "I say the man who finds the money will want to keep it to himself. He won't talk about it. But-Mr. Sutt: but you are in an ideal position to discover that hypothetical man's secret-if and when he does find it." (How's that, Mr. Ferris?) "Men come to you to trade and buy. Someday one of them will be coming with a ten-dollar bill, and it will be bearing one of these numbers-"

Sutt couldn't wait for the last of his nightly regulars to clear out. And towards the end he was nearly rude to old Dad Plume. He couldn't help it. Shad's ten-dollar bill was burning a hole in his pocket.

Finally, after Dad Plume had quit the store in a huff, Sutt locked up, pulled his blinds, put out the light, and made a beeline to the rear room he called his home. There in his old worm-eaten rolltop he rooted and cursed through an aged litter of receipts, invoices, and lading bills until he found what he was looking for: thirty-two type-numbered pages, bearing the serial numbers of eight thousand ten-dollar bills.

The numbers were numerical, so the job was really quite simple. He placed Shad's bill alongside one of the sheets and started down the list.

L54427135B. That was the number on Shad's bill, and that was also one of the eight thousand numbers Mr. Ferris had given him. Sutt sat back in his chair and reached for his pipe, his eyes bright with speculation and the thought of remuneration. "By juckies," he mumbled. "I be bitched!"

After a while Sutt went out into the front of the store and dialed the long-distance operator on his phone.