Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction Read online

  The judges of the Hobby Show were Newell Cady, Upton Beaton, and Chief Stanley Atkins, and they moved slowly along the great assemblage of tables on which the entries were displayed. Atkins, who had lost weight and grown listless since informed public opinion had turned against the new fire truck, carried a shoe box in which lay neat stacks of blue prize ribbons.

  “Surely we won’t need all these ribbons,” said Cady.

  “Wouldn’t do to run out,” said Atkins. “We did one year, and there was hell to pay.”

  “There are a lot of classes of entries,” explained Beaton, “with first prizes in each.” He held out his hand to Atkins. “One with a pin, please, Chief.” He pinned a ribbon to a dirty gray ball four feet in diameter.

  “See here,” said Cady. “I mean, aren’t we going to talk this over? I mean, we shouldn’t all merrily go our own ways, should we, sticking ribbons wherever we happen to take a notion to? Heavens, here you’re giving first prize to this frightful blob, and I don’t even know what it is.”

  “String,” said Atkins. “It’s Ted Batsford’s string. Can you believe it—the very first bit he ever started saving, right in the center of this ball, he picked up during the second Cleveland administration.”

  “Um,” said Cady. “And he decided to enter it in the show this year.”

  “Every show since I can remember,” said Beaton. “I knew this thing when it was no bigger than a bowling ball.”

  “So for brute persistence, I suppose we should at last award him a first prize, eh?” Cady said wearily.

  “At last?” said Beaton. “He’s always gotten first prize in the string-saving class.”

  Cady was about to say something caustic about this, when his attention was diverted. “Good Lord in heaven!” he said. “What is that mess of garbage you’re giving first prize to now?”

  Atkins looked bewildered. “Why, it’s Mrs. Dickie’s flower arrangement, of course.”

  “That jumble is a flower arrangement?” said Cady. “I could do better with a rusty bucket and a handful of toadstools. And you’re giving it first prize. Where’s the competition?”

  “Nobody enters anybody else’s class,” said Beaton, laying a ribbon across the poop deck of a half-finished ship model.

  Cady snatched the ribbon away from the model. “Hold on! Everybody gets a prize—am I right?”

  “Why, yes, in his or her own class,” said Beaton.

  “So what’s the point of the show?” demanded Cady.

  “Point?” said Beaton. “It’s a show, is all. Does it have to have a point?”

  “Damn it all,” said Cady. “I mean that it should have some sort of mission—to foster an interest in the arts and crafts, or something like that. Or to improve skills and refine tastes.” He gestured at the displays. “Junk, every bit of it junk—and for years these misguided people have been getting top honors, as though they didn’t have a single thing more to learn, or as though all it takes to gain acclaim in this world is the patience to have saved string since the second Cleveland administration.”

  Atkins looked shocked and hurt.

  “Well,” said Beaton, “you’re head judge. Let’s do it your way.”

  “Listen, Mr. Cady, sir,” Atkins said hollowly, “we just can’t not give—”

  “You’re standing in the way of progress,” said Beaton.

  “Now then, as I see it,” said Cady, “there’s only one thing in this whole room that shows the slightest glimmer of real creativity and ambition.”

  There were few lights in Spruce Falls that went off before midnight on the night of the Hobby Show opening, though the town was usually dark by ten. Those few nonparticipants who dropped in at the church to see the exhibits, and who hadn’t heard about the judging, were amazed to find one lonely object, a petit-point copy of the cover of a woman’s magazine, on view. Pinned to it was the single blue ribbon awarded that day. The other exhibitors had angrily hauled home their rejected offerings, and the sole prizewinner appeared late in the evening, embarrassed and furtive, to take her entry home, leaving the blue ribbon behind.

  Only Newell Cady and Upton Beaton slept peacefully that night, with feelings of solid, worthwhile work behind them. But when Monday came again, there was a dogged cheerfulness in the town, for on Sunday, as though to offset the holocaust of the Hobby Show, the real estate man had been around. He had been writing to Federal Apparatus Corporation executives in New York, telling them of the mansions in Spruce Falls that could virtually be stolen from the simple-hearted natives and that were but a stone’s throw from the prospective home of their esteemed colleague Mr. Newell Cady. What the real estate man had to show on Sunday were letters from executives who believed him.

  By late afternoon on Monday, the last bitter word about the Hobby Show had been spoken, and talk centered now on the computation of capital gains taxes, the ruthless destruction of profit motives by the state and federal governments, the outrageous cost of building small houses—

  “But I tell you,” said Chief Atkins, “under this new law, you don’t have to pay any tax on the profit you make off of selling your house. All that profit is just a paper profit, just plain, ordinary inflation, and they don’t tax you on that, because it wouldn’t be fair.” He and Upton Beaton and Ed Newcomb were talking in the post office, while Mrs. Dickie sorted the late-afternoon mail.

  “Sorry,” said Beaton, “but you have to buy another house for at least as much as you got for your old one, in order to come under that law.”

  “What would I want with a fifty-thousand-dollar house?” said Newcomb, awed.

  “You can have mine for that, Ed,” said Atkins. “That way, you wouldn’t have to pay any tax at all.” He lived in three rooms of an eighteen-room white elephant his own father had bought for peanuts.

  “And have twice as many termites and four times as much rot as I’ve got to fight now,” said Newcomb.

  Atkins didn’t smile. Instead, he kicked shut the post office door, which was ajar. “You big fool! You can’t tell who might of been walking past and heard that, what you said about my house.”

  Beaton stepped between them. “Calm down! Nobody out there but old Dave Mansfield, and he hasn’t heard anything since his boiler blew up. Lord, if the little progress we’ve had so far is making everybody that jumpy, what’s it going to be like when we’ve got a Cady in every big house?”

  “He’s a fine gentleman,” said Atkins.

  Mrs. Dickie was puffing and swearing quietly in her cage. “I’ve bobbed up and down for that bottom tier of boxes for twenty-five years, and I can’t make myself stop it, now that they’re not there anymore. Whoops!” The mail in her hands fell to the floor. “See what happens when I put my thumb the way he told me to?”

  “Makes no difference,” said Beaton. “Put it where he told you to, because here he comes.”

  Cady’s black Mercedes came to a stop before the post office.

  “Nice day, Mr. Cady, sir,” said Atkins.

  “Hmmm? Oh yes, I suppose it is. I was thinking about something else.” Cady went to Mrs. Dickie’s cage for his mail, but continued to talk to the group over his shoulder, not looking at Mrs. Dickie at all. “I just figured out that I go eight-tenths of a mile out of my way every day to pick up my mail.”

  “Good excuse to get out and pass the time of day with people,” said Newcomb.

  “And that’s two hundred forty-nine point six miles per year, roughly,” Cady went on earnestly, “which at eight cents a mile comes out to nineteen dollars and ninety-seven cents a year.”

  “I’m glad to hear you can still buy something worthwhile for nineteen dollars and ninety-seven cents,” said Beaton.

  Cady was in a transport of creativeness, oblivious of the tension mounting in the small room. “And there must be at least a hundred others who drive to get their mail, which means an annual expenditure for the hundred of one thousand, nine hundred and ninety-seven dollars, not to mention man-hours. Think of it!”

  �
��Huh,” said Beaton, while Atkins and Newcomb shuffled their feet, eager to leave. “I’d hate to think what we spend on shaving cream.” He took Cady’s arm. “Come on over to my house a minute, would you? I’ve something I think you’d—”

  Cady stayed put before Mrs. Dickie’s cage. “It’s not the same thing as shaving cream at all,” he said. “Men have to shave, and shaving cream’s the best thing there is to take whiskers off. And we have to get our mail, certainly, but I’ve found out something apparently nobody around here knows.”

  “Come on over to my house,” said Beaton, “and we’ll talk about it.”

  “It’s so perfectly simple, there’s no need to talk about it,” said Cady. “I found out that Spruce Falls can get rural free delivery, just by telling the Ilium post office and sticking out mailboxes in front of our houses the way every other village around here does. And that’s been true for years!” He smiled, and glanced absently at Mrs. Dickie’s hands. “Ah, ah, ah!” he chided. “Slipping back to your old ways, aren’t you, Mrs. Dickie?”

  Atkins and Newcomb were holding open the door, like a pair of guards at the entrance to an execution chamber, while Upton Beaton hustled Cady out.

  “It’s a great advantage, coming into situations from the outside, the way I do,” said Cady. “People inside of situations are so blinded by custom. Here you people were, supporting a post office, when you could get much better service for just a fraction of the cost and trouble.” He chuckled modestly, as Atkins shut the post office door behind him. “One-eyed man in the land of the blind, you might say.”

  “A one-eyed man might as well be blind,” declared Upton Beaton, “if he doesn’t watch people’s faces and doesn’t give the blind credit for the senses they do have.”

  “What on earth are you talking about?” said Cady.

  “If you’d looked at Mrs. Dickie’s face instead of how she was doing her work, you would have seen she was crying,” said Beaton. “Her husband died in a fire, saving some of these people around the village you call blind. You talk a lot about wasting time, Mr. Cady—for a really big waste of time, walk around the village someday and try to find somebody who doesn’t know he can have his mail brought to his door anytime he wants to.“

  The second extraordinary meeting of the volunteer firemen within a month finished its business, and the full membership, save one fireman who had not been invited, seemed relaxed and contented for the first time in weeks. The business of the meeting had gone swiftly, with Upton Beaton, the patriarch of Spruce Falls, making motions, and the membership seconding in chorus. Now they waited for the one absent member, Newell Cady, to arrive at the post office on the other side of the thin wall to pick up his Saturday-afternoon mail.

  “Here he is,” whispered Ed Newcomb, who had been standing watch by the window.

  A moment later, the rich voice came through the wall. “Good heavens, you’ve got all those plants in there with you again!”

  “Just got lonesome,” said Mrs. Dickie.

  “But my dear Mrs. Dickie,” said Cady, “think of—”

  “The motion’s been carried, then,” said Chief Atkins in a loud voice. “Mr. Beaton is to be a committee of one to inform Mr. Cady that his fire department membership, unfortunately, is in violation of the by-laws, which call for three years’ residence in the village prior to election.”

  “I will make it clear to him,” said Beaton, also speaking loudly, “that this is in no way a personal affront, that it’s simply a matter of conforming to our by-laws, which have been in effect for years.”

  “Make sure he understands that we all like him,” said Ed Newcomb, “and tell him we’re proud an important man like him would want to live here.”

  “I will,” said Beaton. “He’s a brilliant man, and I’m sure he’ll see the wisdom in the residence requirement. A village isn’t like a factory, where you can walk in and see what’s being made at a glance, and then look at the books and see if it’s a good or bad operation. We’re not manufacturing or selling anything. We’re trying to live together. Every man’s got to be his own expert at that, and it takes years.”

  The meeting was adjourned.

  The Ilium real estate man was upset, because everyone he wanted to see in Spruce Falls was out. He stood in Hal Brayton’s grocery store, looking at the deserted street and fiddling with his fountain pen.

  “They’re all with the fire engine salesman?” he said.

  “They’re all going to be paying for the truck for the next twenty years,” said Upton Beaton. He was tending Brayton’s store while Brayton went for a ride on the fire engine.

  “Red-hot prospects are going to start coming through here in a week, and everybody goes out joy-riding,” said the real estate man bitterly. He opened the soft drink cooler and let the lid fall shut again. “What’s the matter—this thing broken? Everything’s warm.”

  “No, Brayton just hasn’t gotten around to plugging it in since he moved things back the way they used to be.”

  “You said he’s the one who doesn’t want to sell his place?”

  “One of the ones,” said Beaton.

  “Who else?”

  “Everybody else.”

  “Go on!”

  “Really,” said Beaton. “We’ve decided to wait and see how Mr. Cady adapts himself, before we put anything else on the market. He’s having a tough time, but he’s got a good heart, I think, and we’re all rooting for him.”

  Souvenir

  Joe Bane was a pawnbroker, a fat, lazy, bald man, whose features seemed pulled to the left by his lifetime of looking at the world through a jeweler’s glass. He was a lonely, untalented man and would not have wanted to go on living had he been prevented from playing every day save Sunday the one game he played brilliantly—the acquiring of objects for very little, and the selling of them for a great deal more. He was obsessed by the game, the one opportunity life offered him to best his fellow men. The game was the thing, the money he made a secondary matter, a way of keeping score.

  When Joe Bane opened his shop Monday morning, a black ceiling of rainclouds had settled below the valley’s rim, holding the city in a dark pocket of dead, dank air. Autumn thunder grumbled along the misty hillsides. No sooner had Bane hung up his coat and hat and umbrella, taken off his rubbers, turned on the lights, and settled his great bulk on a stool behind a counter than a lean young man in overalls, shy and dark as an Indian, plainly poor and awed by the city, walked in to offer him a fantastic pocketwatch for five hundred dollars.

  “No, sir,” said the young farmer politely. “I don’t want to borrow money on it. I want to sell it, if I can get enough for it.” He seemed reluctant to hand it to Bane, and cupped it tenderly in his rough hands for a moment before setting it down on a square of black velvet. “I kind of hoped to hang on to it, and pass it on to my oldest boy, but we need the money a whole lot worse right now.”

  “Five hundred dollars is a lot of money,” said Bane, like a man who had been victimized too often by his own kindness. He examined the jewels studding the watch without betraying anything of his inner amazement. He turned the watch this way and that, catching the glare of the ceiling light in four diamonds marking the hours three, six, nine, and twelve, and the ruby crowning the winder. The jewels alone, Bane reflected, were worth at least four times what the farmer was asking.

  “I don’t get much call for a watch like this,” said Bane. “If I tied up five hundred dollars in it, I might be stuck with it for years before the right man came along.” He watched the farmer’s sunburned face and thought he read there that the watch could be had for a good bit less.

  “There ain’t another one like it in the whole county,” said the farmer, in a clumsy attempt at salesmanship.

  “That’s my point,” said Bane. “Who wants a watch like this?” Bane, for one, wanted it, and was already regarding it as his own. He pressed a button on the side of the case and listened to the whirring of tiny machinery striking the nearest hour on sweet, clear c
himes.

  “You want it or not?” said the farmer.

  “Now, now,” said Bane, “this isn’t the kind of deal you just dive headfirst into. I’d have to know more about this watch before I bought it.” He pried open the back and found inside an engraved inscription in a foreign language. “What does this say? Any idea?”

  “Showed it to a schoolteacher back home,” said the young man, “and all she could say was it looked a whole lot like German.”

  Bane laid a sheet of tissue paper over the inscription, and rubbed a pencil back and forth across it until he’d picked up a legible copy. He gave the copy and a dime to a shoeshine boy loitering by the door and sent him down the block to ask a German restaurant proprietor for a translation.

  The first drops of rain were spattering clean streaks on the sooty glass when Bane said casually to the farmer, “The cops keep pretty close check on what comes in here.”

  The farmer reddened. “That watch is mine, all right. I got it in the war,” he said.

  “Uh-huh. And you paid duty on it?”

  “Duty?”

  “Certainly. You can’t bring jewelry into this country without paying taxes on it. That’s smuggling.”

  “Just tucked it in my barracks bag and brought her on home, the way everybody done,” said the farmer. He was as worried as Bane had hoped.

  “Contraband,” said Bane. “Just about the same as stolen goods.” He held up his hands placatingly. “I don’t mean I can’t buy it, I just want to point out to you that it’d be a tricky thing to handle. If you were willing to let it go for, oh, say a hundred dollars, maybe I’d take a chance on it to help you out. I try to give veterans a break here whenever I can.”