his friends realized what he was doing, they mockingly started to call him Easy. The name stuck.
Ed Garvey calculated the weight of the wheat, opened the dark green accounts book, and made an entry for Easy Tucker. His right hand followed a strip of leather from his belt to his pocket, where it dislodged a key that opened the wooden cash drawer beneath the table. Ed counted out the cash into Easy’s right hand and said, “Thanks for your business, Mr. Tucker.”
Jay Langston, leaning against the iron stove in the middle of the room, watched and waited for the transaction to take place. Business was business. Then he piped up, “Easy, you gonna buy a car with that money?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “No matter. That money will be gone by Christmas anyway.”
“No, it won’t,” Easy said. “No, it won’t.” But Easy knew it might. He was usually broke and begging for a loan by Easter. Most families, like the Reverend Aaron and Ivy, sold a little of their wheat in August for cash to buy school clothes or a new roof for the house, but kept the lion’s share in a granary to be traded for flour during the winter. Every month Aaron would take a load of wheat to the mill and trade it for two 48-pound bags of flour. Ivy would bake all of her breads, pies, cakes, pancakes, and biscuits for the month out of these two bags. Most farmers husbanded their resources this way so that no matter what else happened, the family always had food. Not Easy. He said he wanted his money to grow, at 1percent in the bank. Unfortunately, he seldom left it there long enough to benefit from his financial strategy.
“I bet you take that money right down to the dance hall, take a fling around the floor when Mrs. Tucker isn’t looking, and lose the whole pile,” Jay shouted so all could hear. The other farmers chuckled, until they noticed that Easy wasn’t smiling.
Easy had a quick temper, or at least that was his reputation; few of the men at Garvey’s had actually seen him angry. Easy was built like a block of cedar, with a square face and large forehead and one peculiar feature: he had no nose, at least not that you could see. His nose looked like a bite of pancake from the front. It was so flat against his face that sometimes people would work their way around to his profile just so they could see if he really had a nose. The story went that one year at the county fair, Easy was stopped near the sheep pens by a complete stranger who asked if he really had a nose. Startled, Easy stepped back from the stranger as if stung by a bee. Then he realized that several folks had heard the question and had stopped to look. Easy felt the blood rushing up through his shoulders and past his collar. Then he turned slightly away from the stranger, lifted his right fist, and sent it with slingshot velocity right onto the man’s nose. The nose flattened with a crunch, sending blood flying in all directions. People ran, screaming and shouting that Easy Tucker had gone mad. Satisfied that now there were at least two people in the world with a pancake nose, Easy found Mrs. Tucker over by the baked goods exhibits and took her home without saying a word. The joke around the community was: If you make fun of Easy Tucker, you soon look like Easy Tucker. So the men at Garvey’s Mill let the matter of money drop.
Hank Simpson, who ran a bakery on Nickerly’s Main Street, had dropped by to join the boys for a bottle of pop. Usually, a small group of farmers gathered at his shop in the afternoon, especially on rainy days when they couldn’t work in the fields. Rainy days were set aside for stocking up at the hardware and dry goods stores. On nice days, when business was slow, Hank left the store to Mrs. Simpson and wandered on down to the mill.
“Easy,” Hank said, “you better keep that boy plowing noon and night ’cause it’s almost time for school. Another two weeks and you lost him to that Chambers girl.”
“Not if my wife has her way,” Easy said. “She says the new teacher has been showing more than ankle to that oldest Swenson boy.”
Club Wilson spoke up from the end of the bench, “I think that Chambers girl is a bird. You touch her and she’ll fly away so fast.”
Club Wilson’s family owned more land in Nickerly County than anyone, thousands of acres by some accounts, with teams of draft horses that could plow twenty acres a day, and barbed wire fences running along stone posts for uninterrupted miles. They also owned the quarry that produced the limestone for all the buildings in town and the fence posts around the farms. Hundreds of men were employed by the Wilson Quarry. They set the dynamite charges and drilled the holes for spacers that would crack the stone open like peanut brittle, not always perfectly straight but close enough for construction purposes. The Wilsons probably had more money than the Garveys, but it hardly showed, mostly because the Wilsons kept to themselves. Club broke his leg in high school, playing football in a pick-up game one evening after class, and hobbled around in a leg cast for nearly six weeks. After the cast was removed, his friends started calling him Club because he tended to drag one foot. The name stuck long after all evidence of the broken leg had disappeared. In fact, most folks no longer remembered how Club got his name in the first place.
“I don’t think she’s so much,” Club said rather sheepishly. “Too tall for me.”
“Not too tall for Talmage Grimes,” Jay broke in. “I hear she slips over to Mt. Pleasant ever so often for a little lesson sharing.”
Joe Tanner hadn’t said anything because the conversation seemed so meaningless. But he could feel the group stirring with uneasiness as the subject turned to women. He had been involved with a girl once, nearly ten years ago when he was nineteen, and she had told him she loved him, just before she ran off with one of the boys from the quarry.
“I’m leaving,” Joe said, standing up. “I got no use for women of any kind. Trust in the Lord, I say, ’cause He’s the only one that won’t leave you when you need Him.” Joe walked through the group and out the door. His departure quieted them for only a moment.
“This is a serious matter,” Easy said. “It’s our kids going to that school. No telling what that Chambers girl is teaching them. She don’t go to church. Her folks don’t go to church. And you can ask Johnny Hargrove what her mother is like.”
A general silence fell over the room as the men considered this new accusation. If this was a call to action, it was slow to be recognized. But Easy had put a question before the group that required a response, and Club was the first to offer a rational solution: “If you boys want to get rid of her, why not just have the school board fire her?” he said. “You guys run the school.”
“No, we don’t,” Ed Garvey interrupted. “My mother does and she loves that Chambers girl. I’m not sure she’s so bad anyway. I don’t believe half that stuff they say about her.”
“Maybe you don’t believe it ’cause you don’t want to,” Joe said.
“That’s crazy,” Ed said. “I don’t like it any better than you if she’s corrupting the morals of our kids.”
“Hell,” Club added, “she’s been to college. You know she’s trying to talk those kids into leaving Nickerly County. First thing you know, we won’t have anybody to work the fields or the quarry. We won’t be good enough for our own kids.”
“Boys, I’ve known her family all my life,” Piney Woods offered. “The Chambers live just up the road. They may not be God-fearing people, but they aren’t evil. We can’t get her fired.”
“Piney,” Club said, “I heard your wife just the other day tell you to stay away from that Chambers girl. Just as you went into the hardware store.”
Piney was embarrassed. He was as tall as a pine tree, with a long face and coal-black hair that lay across his head like wet seaweed. Because he didn’t seem to have any hips, his pants were hitched high, and cinched tight. He wore wire-rim glasses that his grandfather had left
