She and Reverend Schultz found the clerk. He had been in Jefferson about six months. He had letters to the church, but nobody except Reverend Schultz and Mrs. Merridew knew anything about him. That is, they made him the clerk in Uncle Willy’s store; nobody else knew anything about him at all.
But Uncle Willy’s old customers wouldn’t trade with him. And we didn’t either. Not that we had much trade to give him and we certainly didn’t expect him to give us any ice cream and I don’t reckon we would have taken it if he had offered it to us.
Because it was not Uncle Willy, and pretty soon it wasn’t even the same ice cream because the first thing the clerk did after he washed the windows was to fire old Job, only old Job refused to quit.
He stayed around the store anyhow, mumbling to himself and the clerk would run him out the front door and old Job would go around to the back and come in and the clerk would find him again and cuss him, whispering, cussing old Job good even if he did have letters to the church; he went and swore out a warrant and the marshal told old Job he would have to stay out of the store. Then old Job moved across the street.
He would sit on the curb all day where he could watch the door and every time the clerk came in sight old Job would holler, “I ghy tell um! I ghy do hit!” So we even quit passing the store.
We would cut across the corner not to pass it, with the windows clean now and the new town trade the clerk had built up — he had a lot of trade now — going in and out, just stopping long enough to ask old Job about Uncle Willy, even though we had already got what news came from Memphis about him every day and we knew that old Job would not know, would not be able to get it straight even if someone told him, since he never did believe that Uncle Willy was sick, he just believed that Mrs. Merridew had taken him away somewhere by main force and was holding him in another bed somewhere so he couldn’t get up and come back home; and old Job sitting on the curb and blinking up at us with his little watery red eyes like Uncle Willy would and saying, “I ghy tell um! Holting him up dar whilst whipper-snappin’ trash makin’ free wid Marse Hoke Christian’s sto. I ghy tell um!”
IV
Uncle Willy didn’t die. One day he came home with his skin the color of tallow and weighing about ninety pounds now and with his eyes like broken eggs still but dead eggs, eggs that had been broken so long now that they didn’t even smell dead any more — until you looked at them and saw that they were anything in the world except dead. That was after he got to know us again. I don’t mean that he had forgotten about us exactly.
It was like he still liked us as boys, only he had never seen us before and so he would have to learn our names and which faces the names belonged to. His sister had gone back to Texas now, because Mrs. Merridew was going to look after him until he was completely recovered, completely cured. Yes. Cured.
I remember that first afternoon when he came to town and we walked into the store and Uncle Willy looked at the clean windows that you could see through now and at the town customers that never had traded with him, and at the clerk and said, “You’re my clerk, hey?” and the clerk begun to talk about Mrs. Merridew and Reverend Schultz and Uncle Willy said, “All right, all right,” and now he ate some ice cream too, standing at the counter with us like he was a customer too and still looking around the store while he ate the ice cream, with those eyes that were not dead at all and he said, “Looks like you been getting more work out of my damned old nigger than I could,” and the clerk began to say something else about Mrs. Merridew and Uncle Willy said, “All right, all right.
Just get a holt of Job right away and tell him I am going to expect him to be here every day and that I want him to keep this store looking like this from now on.” Then we went on behind the prescription case, with Uncle Willy looking around here too, at how the clerk had it neated up, with a big new lock on the cabinet where the drugs and such were kept, with those eyes that wouldn’t anybody call dead, I don’t care who he was, and said, “Step up there and tell that fellow I want my keys.”
But it wasn’t the stove and the needle. Mrs. Merridew had busted both of them that day. But it wasn’t that anyway, because the clerk came back and begun to talk about Mrs. Merridew and Reverend Schultz, and Uncle Willy listening and saying, “All right, all right,” and we never had seen him laugh before and his face didn’t change now but we knew that he was laughing behind it.
Then we went out. He turned sharp off the square, down Nigger Row to Sonny Barger’s store and I took the money and bought the Jamaica ginger from Sonny and caught up with them and we went home with Uncle Willy and we sat in the pasture while he drank the Jamaica ginger and practiced our names some more.
And that night we met him where he said. He had the wheelbarrow and the crowbar and we broke open the back door and then the cabinet with the new lock on it and got the can of alcohol and carried it to Uncle Willy’s and buried it in the barn.
It had almost three gallons in it and he didn’t come to town at all for four weeks and he was sick again, and Mrs. Merridew storming into the house, jerking out drawers and flinging things out of closets and Uncle Willy lying in the bed and watching her with those eyes that were a long way from being dead.
But she couldn’t find anything because it was all gone now, and besides she didn’t know what it was she was looking for because she was looking for a needle. And the night Uncle Willy was up again we took the crowbar and went back to the store and when we went to the cabinet we found that it was already open and Uncle Willy’s stool sitting in the door and a quart bottle of alcohol on the stool in plain sight, and that was all. And then I knew that the clerk knew who got the alcohol before but I didn’t know why he hadn’t told Mrs. Merridew until two years later.
I didn’t know that for two years, and Uncle Willy a year now going to Memphis every Saturday in the car his sister had given him. I wrote the letter with Uncle Willy looking over my shoulder and dictating, about how his health was improving but not as fast as the doctor seemed to want and that the doctor said he ought not to walk back and forth to the store and so a car, not an expensive car, just a small car that he could drive himself or maybe find a negro boy to drive for him if his sister thought he ought not to: and she sent the money and he got a burr-headed nigger boy about my size named Secretary to drive it for him.
That is, Secretary said he could drive a car; certainly he and Uncle Willy both learned on the night trips they would make back into the hill country to buy corn whisky and Secretary learned to drive in Memphis pretty quick, too, because they went every Saturday, returning Monday morning with Uncle Willy insensible on the back seat, with his clothes smelling of that smell whose source I was not to discover at first hand for some years yet, and two or three half-empty bottles and a little notebook full of telephone numbers and names like Lorine and Billie and Jack.
I didn’t know it for two years, not until that Monday morning when the sheriff came and padlocked and sealed what was left of Uncle Willy’s stock and when they tried to find the clerk they couldn’t even find out what train he had left town on; a hot morning in July and Uncle Willy sprawled out on the back seat, and on the front seat with Secretary a woman twice as big as Uncle Willy, in a red hat and a pink dress and a dirty white fur coat over the back of the seat and two straw suitcases on the fenders, with hair the color of a brand new brass hydrant bib and her cheeks streaked with mascara and caked powder where she had sweated.
It was worse than if he had started dope again. You would have thought he had brought smallpox to town. I remember how when Mrs. Merridew telephoned Mamma that afternoon you could hear her from away out at her house, over the wire, clean out to the back door and the kitchen: “Married! Married! Whore! Whore! Whore!” like the clerk used to cuss old Job, and so maybe the church can go
