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where I’m from you’ll occasionally see an old raggedy pulp wood
truck headed toward the mill, or see several mountain-men-looking people
in town in the same truck buying provisions or hauling large clay
demijohns of water. I’d never met one of them but I was told that they
never spoke, don’t have credit anywhere (they pay cash for
everything), don’t have electricity or running water, and didn’t
bother anybody except when someone was fool enough to provoke them.
The first
time I saw a Stovall was on a stormy day in early September. It was a
week before school’s fall semester started and my last week as a
summer employee for the highway department. We hauled gravel, mowed the
sides of the roads, patched potholes or leaned on our shovels during
good weather. But when it rained, we played dominos back at the
headquarters’ breakroom. At about 10 o’clock that nasty morning, our
game was interrupted by a great big hairy fellow wandered through the
mechanic’s bay roll-up door, soaked to the bone. He had to be pushing
seven feet tall and nearly as big around in the chest as an oil drum. He
looked like someone had put a bowl on his head and cut his hair, a
handful at a time, with a butcher knife. His matted, jet-black beard
hung down nearly to the bib of his coveralls that had been cut off just
above the knees.
"Angus
Stovall," he announced to our road foreman, not extending a hand of
greeting, not smiling…just the monotone pronouncement of his name and
a piercing stare. He pointed out a window to the frontage road, and in
as few words as possible, conveyed to my boss that his pulp wood truck
had broken down. He and my boss went out in the downpour to get him on
his way.
I had
noticed several dozen white dots about the width of pencil erasures all
over the back of the man’s calves. A co-worker in his late sixties
told me what he knew of Angus Stovall.
The
Stovall clan didn’t take to outsiders and largely kept to themselves.
My buddy told me that the family had come over way before the Civil War
from Scotland, before statehood and before our native populations had
been moved west. They had married aboriginal women and had been in those
primeval woods ever since, taking what they needed from the land (and
need be, from neighbors).
Being
mistaken for a coyote in the distance one day past dusk, Angus had been
shot in the back of the legs while stealing a man’s watermelons. The
man with the shotgun was a widower and had moved there to retire,
acquiring forty acres after a foreclosure. He didn’t bother to learn
who the people were who owned and resided in the several thousand acres
of swamps and occasional rises that flanked him to the north and south
and bordered the rear of his property to the west.
The poor
man came in from night church a few days later to find all his
watermelons gone, vines and all; all his corn and corn stalks gone; all
his tomato plants gone; all his chickens along with metal laying boxes
gone; his sow and pigs gone; his beagle gone; his tractor’s fuel tank
sugared and his well salted.
He went
into town to the diner the next day where he knew he’d find the
sheriff. When the man tried to air a complaint it fell on deaf ears. The
lawman knew who was responsible and wanted no part of it. "Those
people will skin you alive if you mess with them! My advice to you is to
stay clear of them until this blows over," insisted the sheriff.
But, it never did blow over. After six or eight months of not being able
to go into town without having his house’s doors nailed shut, windows
broken out, chimneys mortared shut and dead possums or live water
moccasins stuck in his mail box, the man moved.
Angus and
his family didn’t worry with hunting seasons either. When they needed
meat, they killed something. If they found it easier to kill whatever
they were after at night, so be it. They sometimes
"accidentally" strayed off of their land. The sheriff had
answered a complaint about the Stovalls soon after he’d moved into
town and was leery of them from then on.
A Stovall
hunting party had killed several deer on a soybean farmer’s land a
mile off Stovall property and the new county lawman had been called to
look at the remains. The sheriff hesitantly followed the hoof prints of
at least a half dozen mules the perpetrators had ridden in on. At the
outer bank of a creek that flowed down one side of the Stovall woods
they found where a mule had been shot between the eyes and field
dressed. Fearing for his life, the interloper hurriedly got back to his
truck. About two o’clock the next morning he heard a loud slamming
noise on his front porch. He grabbed his pistol and investigated only to
find a crude note written on a piece of what looked like brown butcher’s
paper wrapped and tied with jute twine around a horse apple (Osage
orange). He took the scribbling inside and read (translated from broken
colloquial text):
Sirrah,
Do realize that I loved my mule. But also realize that a mule that won’t
cross a creek will eat just fine on a Stovall’s dinner table.
Don’t
come back.’
Last I heard, no one has. |
