“—son would take off his shoes in public,” Fairchild continued unperturbed. Mrs. Wiseman returned and she stood with her hands on her hips, regarding Fairchild’s unkempt head with disgust. Mrs. Maurier gazed helplessly at him.
“Everyone’s finished,” Mrs. Wiseman said. “Come on, let’s go on deck.”
“No,” Mrs. Maurier protested. She said firmly, “Mr. Fairchild.”
“Go on,” the niece urged him. “What about Al Jackson?”
“Shut up, Pat,” Mrs. Wiseman commanded. “Come on, you all. Let ’em stay here and drivel to each other. Let’s lock ’em in here: what do you say?”
Mrs. Maurier asserted herself. She rose. “Mr. Fairchild, I simply will not have — if you continue in this behavior, I shall leave the room. Don’t you see how trying — how difficult — how difficult”—beneath the beseeching helplessness of her eyes her various chins began to quiver a little—“how difficult—”
Mrs. Wiseman touched her arm. “Come: it’s useless to argue with them now. Come, dear.” She drew Mrs. Maurier’s chair aside and the old woman took a step and stopped abruptly, clutching the other’s arm.
“I’ve stepped on something,” she said, peering blindly.
Pete rose with a mad inarticulate cry.
* * *
“Old man Jackson”—Fairchild continued—“claims to be a lineal descendant of Old Hickory. A fine old Southern family with all a fine old Southern family’s pride. Al has a lot of that pride, himself:’ that’s why he won’t take off his shoes in company. I’ll tell you the reason later.
“Well, old man Jackson was a bookkeeper or something, drawing a small salary with a big family to support, and he wanted to better himself with the minimum of labor, like a descendant of any fine old Southern family naturally would, and so he thought up the idea of taking up some of this Louisiana swamp land and raising sheep on it. He’d noticed how much ranker vegetation grows on trees in swampy land, so he figured that wool ought to grow the same rank way on a sheep raised in a swamp. So he threw up his bookkeeping job and took up a few hundred acres of Tchufuncta river swamp and stocked it with sheep, using the money his wife’s uncle, a member of an old aristocratic Tennessee moonshining family, had left ’em.
“But his sheep started right in to get themselves drowned, so he made lifebelts for ’em out of some small wooden kegs that had been part of the heritage from that Tennessee uncle, so that when the sheep strayed off into deep water they would float until the current washed ’em back to land again. This worked all right, but still his sheep kept on disappearing-the ewes and lambs did, that is. Then he found that the alligators were—”
“Yes,” murmured Major Ayers, “Old Hickory.”
“—getting them. So he made some imitation rams’ horns out of wood and fastened a pair to each ewe and to every lamb when it was born. And that reduced his losses by alligators to a minimum scarcely worth notice. The rams’ flesh seemed to be too rank even for alligators.
“After a time the lifebelts wore out, but the sheep had learned to swim pretty well by then, so old man Jackson decided it wasn’t worth while to put any more lifebelts on ’em. The fact is, the sheep had got to like the water: the first crop of lambs would only come out of the water at feeding time; and when the first shearing time came around, he and his boys had to round up the sheep with boats.
“By the next shearing time, those sheep wouldn’t even come out of the water to be fed. So he and his boys would go out in boats and set floating tubs of feed around in the bayous for them. This crop of lambs could dive, too. They never saw one of them on land at alclass="underline" they’d only see their heads swimming across the bogues and sloughs.
“Finally another shearing time came around. Old man Jackson tried to catch one of them, but the sheep could swim faster than he and his boys could row, and the young ones dived under water and got away. So they finally had to borrow a motorboat. And when they finally tired one of those sheep down and caught it and took it out of the water, they found that only the top of its back had any wool on it. The rest of its body was scaled like a fish. And when they finally caught one of the spring lambs on an alligator hook, they found that its tail had broadened out and flattened like a beaver’s, and that it had no legs at all. They didn’t hardly know what it was, at first.”
“I say,” murmured Major Ayers.
“Yes, sir, completely atrophied away. Time passed, and they never saw the next crop of lambs at all. The food they set out the birds ate, and when the next shearing time came, they couldn’t even catch one with the motorboat. They hadn’t even seen one in three weeks. They knew they were still there, though, because they would occasionally hear ’em baa-ing at night way back in the swamp. They caught one occasionally on a trotline of shark hooks baited with ears of corn. But not many.
“Well, sir, the more old man Jackson thought about that swampful of sheep, the madder he got. He’d stamp around the house and swear he’d catch ’em if he had to buy a motorboat that would run fifty miles an hour, and a diving suit for himself and every one of his boys. He had one boy named Claude — Al’s brother, you know. Claude was kind of wild: hell after women, a gambler and a drunkard — a kind of handsome humorless fellow with lots of dash. And finally Claude made a trade with his father to have half of every sheep he could catch, and he got to work right away. He never bothered with boats or trotlines: he just took off his clothes and went right in the water and grappled for ’em.”
“Grappled for ’em?” Major Ayers repeated.
“Sure: run one down and hem him up under the bank and drag him out with his bare hands. That was Claude, all over. And then they found that this year’s lambs didn’t have any wool on ’em at all, and that its flesh was the best fish eating in Louisiana; being partly corn fed that way giving it a good flavor, you see. So that’s where old man Jackson quit the sheep business and went to fish ranching on a large scale. He knew he had a snap as long as Claude could catch ’em, so he made arrangements with the New Orleans markets right away, and they began to get rich.”
“By Jove,” Major Ayers said tensely, his mind taking fire.
“Claude liked the work. It was an adventurous kind of life that just suited him, so he quit everything and gave all his time to it. He quit drinking and gambling and running around at night, and there was a marked decrease in vice in that neighborhood, and the young girls pined for him at the local dances and sat on their front porches of a Sunday evening in vain.
“Pretty soon he could outswim the old sheep, and having to dive so much after the young ones, he got to where he could stay under water longer and longer at a time. Sometimes he’d stay under for a half an hour or more. And pretty soon he got to where he’d stay in the water all day, only coming out to eat and sleep; and then they noticed that Claude’s skin was beginning to look funny and that he walked kind of peculiar, like his knees were stiff or something. Soon after that he quit coming out of the water at all, even to eat, so they’d bring his dinner down to the water and leave it, and after a while he’d swim up and get it. Sometimes they wouldn’t see Claude for days. But he was still catching those sheep, herding ’em into a pen old man Jackson had built in a shallow bayou and fenced off with hog wire, and his half of the money was growing in the bank. Occasionally half eaten pieces of sheep would float ashore, and old man Jackson decided alligators were getting ’em again. But he couldn’t put horns on ’em now because no one but Claude could catch ’em, and he hadn’t seen Claude in some time.
“It had been a couple of weeks since anybody had seen Claude, when one day there was a big commotion in the sheep pen. Old man Jackson and a couple of his other boys ran down there, and when they got there they could see the sheep jumping out of the water every which way, trying to get on land again; and after a while a big alligator rushed out from among ’em, and old man Jackson knew what had scared the sheep.