Thomas Stribling - A Daylight Adventure

Everybody was gratified. They came pouring around Poggioli to congratulate him on his speech. A fat man elbowed up, seized Poggioli by the arm, motioned at me, too, and shouted at us to come to dinner in his hotel. Poggioli said we had just eaten at the Monarch cafe.

“Then you-all are bound to be hungry. Come on, my wife sent me over here to bring ye. She feeds all the revivalists and their singers who come to preach in the square.”

The criminologist repeated that we were not hungry, but the fat man came close to him and said in what was meant for an undertone:

“Don’t make no diff’runce whether you are hungry or not — my wife wants you to come inside while you and your buddy are alive!”

“Alive!” said my friend.

“Shore, alive. Do you think Deacon Sam Hawley will let any man stand up in the public square and accuse him of waylayin’ Jim Cancy, and then not kill the man who does the accusin’?”

My friend was shocked. “Why, I never heard of Deacon Sam Hawley!”

“He’s the man you et by, and he knows you. Come on, both of you!”

“But I was simply describing a type—”

“Brother, when you go to a city you find men in types — all dentists look alike, all bankers look alike, all lawyers look alike, and so on; but out here in these Tennessee hills we ain’t got but one man to a type. And when you describe a man’s type, you’ve described the man. Come on in to my hotel before you git shot. We’re trying to make Lanesburg a summer resort and we don’t want it to git a bad name for murderin’ tourists.”

We could see how a hotel owner would feel that way and we too were anxious to help preserve Lanesburg’s reputation for peace and friendliness. We followed our host rather nervously to his hotel across the square and sat down to another lunch.

There was a big crowd in the hotel and they were all talking about the strange way the Lord had brought about the conviction of Deacon Sam Hawley, and rescued a comparatively innocent woman from an unjust sentence. Poggioli pointed out once or twice that the woman was not out of danger yet, but all the diners around us were quite sure that she soon would be.

The whole incident seemed about to end on a kind of unresolved anticlimax. The diners finally finished their meal and started out of the hotel. We asked some of the men if they thought it would be safe for us to go to our car. They said they didn’t know, we would have to try it and see. Poggioli and I waited until quite a number of men and women were going out of the hotel and joined them. We were just well out on the sidewalk when a brisk gunfire broke out from behind the office of the Lane County Weekly Herald, which was just across the street from the hotel. It was not entirely unexpected. Besides, that sort of thing seemed to happen often enough in Lanesburg to create a pattern for public action. Everybody jumped behind everybody else, and holding that formation made for the nearest doors and alleys. At this point Sheriff Matheny began his counterattack. It was from a butcher’s shop close to the hotel. How he knew what point to pick out, I don’t know; whether or not he was using us for bait, I still don’t know.

At any rate, the sheriff’s fourth or fifth shot ended the battle. Our assailant, quite naturally, turned out to be Deacon Sam Hawley. He was dead when the crowd identified him. In the skirmish the sheriff was shot in the arm, and everybody agreed that now he would not be able to take Mrs. Cancy to the penitentiary for a good three months to come. She was reprieved at least for that long.

As we got into our car and drove out of Lanesburg, the crowd was circulating a petition to the Governor to pardon Mrs. Cordelia Cancy of the minor crime of forgery. The petition set forth Mrs. Cancy’s charity, her purity of heart, her generosity in using the proceeds of her crime for the church, and a number of her other neighborly virtues. The village lawyer put in a note that a wife cannot forge her husband’s signature. He argued that if she cannot steal from him, then she cannot forge his name, which is a form of theft. She simply signs his name for him, she does not forge it.

The petition was signed by two hundred and forty-three registered Democratic voters. The Governor of Tennessee is a Democrat.

At this point we drove out of Lanesburg…

1950