“We want you to buy the Mercedes too...”
“We don’t drive, you know...”
“Max always took us...”
Once in a while, just for fun, I would sneak a glance at the odometer of Max’s Mercedes. He was averaging less than a thousand miles per year. Unlike the house, the car was in mint condition.
The house had six bedrooms, four floors and a basement, four or five bathrooms, living and dining rooms, library, kitchen, wide sweeping porches that were falling in, and an attic that I felt certain was crammed with family treasures buried there centuries ago. It would take months just to clean it before the remodelers moved in. A hundred thousand dollars was a low price for such a mansion, but there were not enough newspapers sold in the entire state to renovate the place.
And what about all those animals? Cats, birds, rabbits, squirrels, goldfish, the place was a regular zoo.
I had been looking at real estate, but, frankly, I’d been so spoiled by paying them $50 a month that I found it hard to leave. I was twenty-four years old, very single, and I was having a grand time watching the money accumulate in the bank. Why would I risk financial ruin by buying that money pit?
I bought it two days after the funeral.
On a cold, wet Thursday in February, I pulled to a stop in front of the Ruffin residence in Lowtown. Esau was waiting on the porch. “You trade cars?” he asked, looking at the street.
“No, I still have the little one,” I said. “That was Mr. Hocutt’s.”
“Thought it was black.” There were very few Mercedes in Ford County and it was not difficult keeping track of them.
“It needed painting,” I said. It was now a dark maroon. I had to cover the knives Mr. Hocutt had painted on both front doors, and so while it was in the shop I decided to go with a different color altogether.
Word was out that I had somehow swindled the Hocutts out of their Mercedes. In fact, I had paid blue-book value for it — $9,500. The purchase was approved by Judge Reuben V. Atlee, the longtime chancellor in Ford County. He also approved my purchase of the house for $100,000, an apparently low figure that looked much better after two court-appointed appraisers gave their estimates at $75,000 and $85,000. One reported that any renovation of the Hocutt House would “... involve extensive and unforeseen expenditures.”
Harry Rex, my lawyer, made sure I saw this language.
Esau was subdued, and things did not improve inside. The house, as always, simmered in the sauce of some delicious beast she was roasting in the oven. Today it would be rabbit.
I hugged Miss Callie and knew something was terribly wrong. Esau picked up an envelope and said, “This is a draft notice. For Sam.” He tossed it on the table for me to see, then left the kitchen.
Talk was slow over lunch. They were subdued, preoccupied, and very confused. Esau at times felt the proper thing to do was for Sam to honor whatever commitment his country required. Miss Callie felt like she had already lost Sam once. The thought of losing him again was unbearable.
That night I called Sam and gave him the bad news. He was in Toledo spending a few days with Max. We talked for over an hour, and I was relentless in my conviction that he had no business going to Vietnam. Fortunately, Max felt the same way.
Over the course of the next week, I spent hours on the phone with Sam, Bobby, Al, Leon, Max, and Mario, as we shared our views about what Sam should do. Neither he nor any of his brothers believed the war was just, but Mario and Al felt strongly that it was wrong to break the law. I was by far the biggest dove in the bunch, with Bobby and Leon somewhere in the middle. Sam seemed to twist in the wind and change daily. It was a gut-wrenching decision, but as the days dragged on he appeared to spend more time talking to me. The fact that he had been on the run for two years helped immensely.
After two weeks of soul-searching, Sam slipped into the underground and surfaced in Ontario. He called collect one night and asked me to tell his parents he was okay. Early the next morning, I drove to Lowtown and delivered the news to Esau and Miss Callie that their youngest son had just made the smartest decision of his life.
To them, Canada seemed like a million miles away. Not nearly as far as Vietnam, I told them.
Chapter 30
The second contractor I hired to transform the Hocutt House was Mr. Lester Klump from out in Shady Grove. He had been highly recommended by Baggy, who, of course, knew exactly how to restore a mansion. Stan Atcavage at the bank also recommended Mr. Klump, and since Stan held the mortgage for $100,000 I listened to him.
The first contractor had failed to show, and when I called after waiting for three days his phone had been disconnected. An ominous sign.
Mr. Klump and his son, Lester Junior, spent days going over the house. They were terrified of the project, and knew it would be a regular nightmare if anybody got in a hurry, especially me. They were slow and methodical, even talked slower than most folks in Ford County, and I soon realized that everything they did was in second gear. I probably didn’t help matters by explaining that I was already living in very comfortable quarters on the premises; thus I wasn’t going to be homeless if they didn’t hurry up.
Their reputation was that they were sober and generally finished on time. This put them at the top of the heap in the world of remodeling.
After a few days of scratching our heads and kicking at the gravel, we agreed on a plan whereby they would bill me weekly for their labor and supplies, and I would add 10 percent for their “overhead,” which I hoped meant profit. It took a week of cursing to get Harry Rex to draft a contract reflecting this. At first he refused and called me all sorts of colorful names.
The Klumps would begin with the cleanup and demolition, then do the roof and porches. When that was over, we’d sit down and plan the next phase. In April 1972 the project began.
At least one of the Klumps appeared every day with a crew. They spent the first month scattering all the varmints and wildlife that had made the property home for decades.
A carload of high school seniors was stopped by a state trooper a few hours after their graduation. The car was full of beer, and the trooper, a rookie fresh from school where they had alerted them to such things, smelled something odd. Drugs had finally made it to Ford County.
There was marijuana in the car. All six students were charged with felony possession and every other crime the cops could possibly throw at them. The town was shocked — how could our innocent little community get infiltrated with drugs? How could we stop it? I low-keyed the story in the paper; no sense beating up on six good kids who’d made a mistake. Sheriff Meredith was quoted as saying that his office would act decisively to “remove this scourge” from our community. “This ain’t California,” he said.
Typically, everybody in Clanton was suddenly on the lookout for drug dealers, though no one was quite sure what they looked like.
Because the cops were on high alert, and would love nothing more than another drug bust, poker the next Thursday was moved to a different location, one deep in the country. Bubba Crockett and Darrell Radke lived in a dilapidated old cabin with a nonpoker-playing veteran named Ollie Hinds. They called their place the Foxhole. It was hidden in a heavily wooded ravine at the end of a dirt road that you couldn’t find in broad daylight.
Ollie Hinds was suffering from every manner of postwar trauma and probably several prewar ones as well. He was from Minnesota and had served with Bubba and survived their horrible nightmares. He had been shot, burned, captured briefly, escaped, and finally sent home when an Army shrink said he was in need of serious help. Apparently he never got it. When I met him he was shirtless, revealing scars and tattoos, and glassy-eyed, which, I would soon learn, was his usual condition.