Post 4- Three-Quarters Cannon

Three-Quarters Cannon

 

            The old storyteller was sitting on the porch when I walked into the store.

            “I’ve heard about the big guns watermen used to hunt,” I said.  “Does anybody around here have one?”

            “Not now,” the old storyteller said.  “Three-Quarters used to.”

            “Three-Quarters?” I questioned.

            “Yeah, Three-Quarters had one.”

            “Is that somebody’s name?”

            “Yep, that’s his name.  Three-Quarters Curlew.”

            “How did he get a name like that?”

            “If you knew the Curlews, you wouldn’t have to ask that question.  The Curlews, you see, live on the lowest rung of the social ladder in this community.  Rarely will anybody marry a Curlew ‘cept another Curlew.  Three of his four grandparents were Curlews, that’s why he’s called Three-Quarters.”

            “I suppose that makes sense,” I said.

            “There’s a whole colony of ‘em on the other side of the creek.  Well now, when Three-Quarters married, he married another Curlew, of course, and they had a son.   I remember the evenin’ Three-Quarters came here to the store and asked for help.”

            “What kind of help?”

            “He needed help to name the boy.  Well, all the best mathematical minds here at the store tried to figure it out, couldn’t do it, so somebody called a teacher at the school in town and told him the problem.  That teacher gave the boy his name, he’s Seven-Eights.”

            “I know you made that up.”

            “It’s the truth,” the storekeeper said.

            “I was asking about the big gun,” I said.  “What happened to it?”

            “That’s a long story.”

            “By the grin on the storyteller’s face, I could see it was coming, so I sat down to listen.”

            “Those big guns were illegal,” he said.  “Three-Quarters hunted with it at night so he wouldn’t be caught, and that’s illegal too, but worse than that, he fired it every Saturday night and that’s when he got in trouble.”

            “Why did he fire it every Saturday night?”

            “Just for the fun of it.”

            “Just for the fun of it?”

            “Yeah, Saturday was payday.  Watermen catch crabs all week and bring ‘em to the shanty.  The shantyman keeps a tally and pays them Saturday, after the dealer in town pays him.  Most watermen pay their bills with that money, then give the wife most of the rest to keep the house for the week,   Not Three-Quarters.  He’d go straight to town and buy some Sneaky Pete, that’s moonshine the bootlegger in town sells.  Then he’d go home with his Sneaky Pete and wait by the ditch bank near the willow tree in his back yard, drinkin’ his Sneaky Pete until his friends came, and then he’d bring out his pack of cards and they’d gamble ‘till late at night.

            “Well, Three-Quarters always lost, he wasn’t very good at cards after the Sneaky Pete, and then he’d go back to his out buildin’ and drag out his big gun.  Those things were big, really big.  Three-Quarters had the biggest I ever saw.  He called it his cannon.  It was a muzzle-loader, and he poured a pound of powder in it for a shot.  That’s a lot of powder.

“That gun went off with a thunderous roar, and it lit up the sky like a flash of lightnin’.   It’d wake up everybody about midnight, and it would crack plaster and break window glass all the way from the creek to the high ground where the pine trees grow.  It would bounce the lamp chimneys off the top shelf here at the store, the store keeper had to put them in boxes and move them down to the floor.  After Three-Quarters fired his cannon, you could hear him cacklin’ all the way to the other end of the community.  He was havin’ great fun.”

            “That sounds like it was quite a big problem.”

            “It was, so the people in the community went to the shantyman and asked him what to do about it. “

“The shantyman?  Why did they go to him?

“He’s the one everybody on the creek went to when they had a problem.  The shantyman is the one they depend on for their money, and they depend on him for makin’ any decisions regardin’ the community.”

            “What did he tell them?”

            “He said that Three-Quarters would never give up his gun, he insisted it was his constitutional right to keep it, and no man or no law could make him give it up.”

            “So what did they do?”

            “The shantyman thought about it, and he knew that Three-Quarters didn’t fear the law, so he told them that they needed to take him to the church and get him saved, and then tell him it was a sin to get drunk on Saturday night and fire that gun, and that God would punish him if he did it again.  Surely Three-Quarters feared God.

            “So that’s what they decided to do.  When he came into the store that night, the men were ready for him.  They told him that getting drunk on Saturday night and firin’ that big gun was a sin, and that he needed to get saved from his sins.

            “Well now, Three-Quarters saw it differently.  He told ‘em he didn’t want to get saved from his sins.  He said that if it wasn’t for his sins, he wouldn’t have no fun at all.

            “So that plan didn’t work.  The next day they went back to the shantyman and told him what happened.  He thought about it a bit, and he said they’d have to convince him that God would punish him for his sins when he died, but first, they’d have to convince him that he was goin’ to die.  Three-Quarters, you see, never thought very far ahead, he had never considered that someday he would die.

            “So they came up with a new plan.  One of the men had an uncle who might be able to help.  The next evening after dark, after all the men were gathered at the store to play dominos, and Three-Quarters was there with them since it wasn’t a Saturday, this long, black hearse pulled up in front of the door and stopped.  The men all watched as a tall man wearing a black suit unwound his long legs and stepped out, and he put this tall, black, stovepipe hat on his head and walked up the steps into the store.  He went straight to Three-Quarters, and he looked directly into his eyes, and he said, ‘Are you Mister Three-Quarters Curlew?”

            “That I am.  What’cha want?”

            “I need for you to lie down on this bench,” the stranger said, and the other men on the bench moved to make room.  Three-Quarters laid down on the bench, and the stranger stretched out his legs and folded his arms across his chest, and then he got out a measuring tape, and he asked one of the men to hold it at the top of Three-Quarters’ head.  He stretched the tape to the bottoms of his shoes, and he took a little black notebook from his pocket, and he wrote something in it.

            “He thanked Three-Quarters and he said that was all he needed, and he walked out the door and got into the black hearse and drove off.

            “Three-Quarters sat up.  ‘What was that all about?’ he said.

            “That’s the undertaker, he’s measuring you for your coffin.”

            “Why would he do that?”

            “Because you’re goin’ to die.”

            “I ain’t goin’ to die.”

            “Sure you are. Everybody dies, sooner or later, and he knows you’re goin’ to be sooner.”

            “How does he know that?”

            “That’s his job.  He’s an undertaker, you know.  He has to plan for things like that.  He’s got to make your coffin, and that takes time.  He has to get ready, and you need to get ready, too.”

            “Three-Quarters thought about it for a few minutes.”

            “Are you sure he knows?”

“That’s his job.”

“Three-Quarters got up and left the store.”

            “The next evening, soon as he came into the store he asked, ‘How do I get ready to die?’”

            “You go to church, that’s what you do, and the preacher will tell you how.  Every Sunday night, there’s a fire-and-brimstone preacher at the Pentecostal Church, he knows all about that, and he’ll tell you.  You need to go there this Sunday night.”

            “So Three-Quarters did.  He saw a couple of the other watermen sitting about half way down to the front, and he joined ‘em.  They slid toward the middle, and he sat on the end.  The preacher started tellin’ about the time when Jesus would come.  He said there’d be a loud noise like thunder, louder than a thousand shouts, and then the stars would fall from the heavens like fire, and then Jesus would come, and everybody had better get ready for that.  Then he got into all the punishments God had in mind for sinners, and everybody needed to get saved or they would spend eternity, and that’s a long time, sitting smack dab in the middle of a lake of fire.

            “Well now, that scared Three-Quarters so much, he dived right under the pew in front of him.  The men dragged him out, with him screaming that he didn’t want to be sent to that lake of fire, so the men told him that he needed to get saved or it was sure to happen, and they led him to the front of the church, where the preacher was waiting.

            “That’s the night Three-Quarters got saved, and then he didn’t know what to do.  See, he hadn’t never been saved before, but he was wantin’ to be ready when Jesus comes, and not be sent to that lake of fire.

            “The next night, when he came to the store, he asked the men what he should do now that he was saved, so they began to tell him.

            “The men belonged to different churches. The Baptist said that he needed to quit lying, and quit selling undersized crabs, and he needed to get dunked under the water, and he also needed to quit drinking the Sneaky Pete he bought in town every time he got a little money in his pocket.  He also needed to take that money home every Saturday after he got paid for his crabs, and he needed to give it to his wife so she could buy food for the house and shoes for his kids.  The Methodist agreed with most of that, except he said that Three-Quarters didn’t need to get dunked under the water, a sprinkling was good enough.  The Episcopalian didn’t agree with much of it, not much at all.  He said that Three-Quarters didn’t need to stop drinking his Sneaky Pete altogether, moderation was good enough.  Moderation in all things, that’s the key.

            “One thing they did agree on, though, they all agreed that he needed to stop firin’ his cannon every Saturday night.

            “So Three-Quarters went home, and he poured out his gunpowder and pitched out the big ball of cotton he used to make the wad for his cannon, because without them he couldn’t fire it.   As he understood it, firing the cannon was the problem, that was his big sin.  All that week, he made out pretty well with the things they told him he was supposed to do, and not do.  He was ready for Jesus to come.

“That is, he made out pretty well until Saturday, that’s when he got paid for his crabs.  He put his money in his pocket, and he started walking along the ditch bank toward his house.  Well now, that ditch bank is high above the marsh, from it you can see forever.  You can see to the horizon in every direction, nothing in the way of sight.

Three-Quarters stopped about half way home, and he looked to the North and to the East, and he didn’t see Jesus comin’.  He looked to the South and to the West, and he still didn’t see Jesus comin’, and he said to himself, ‘Jesus ain’t comin’ on a Saturday.  Nobody starts nothing on a Saturday, and he turned around and walked to town and bought his bottle of Sneaky Pete.  He sat on the ditch bank behind the house with his old buddies, way down there near the big willow tree, and they drank their Sneaky Pete and played poker by the light of a lantern until way after dark.

“Well now, Seven-Eights knew that his father had poured out the powder, and he missed the thought of firing the big gun that night, so he had gone to the hardware store in town and bought a pound of gunpowder.  He dragged the big gun out from under the tool shed while the men were playin’ poker, and he propped it up against a tree, and he poured his powder down the barrel.  He rammed it down with a rod, like he had seen his father do, and then he went to look for the cotton to make the wad to hold the powder down.  The cotton was gone, so he went to the trash barrel behind the store to see if he could find something that would do as a wad, and he dug out a piece of paper with fat meat scraps wrapped up in it.  The storekeeper had been trimming a ham that day, and he had thrown the fat trimmings in the trash.  The boy took that paper with the fat meat and he rammed it down the barrel for a wad.

“He propped the gun up against a tree limb, so it was pointed out with a clear view of the sky, and he picked up the old paddle his father used to fire it, and he slammed to paddle down on the long, metal trigger.  The gun fired with a tremendous roar, and flames erupted from the barrel like from a volcano, and the wad shot out.  The flames ignited the paper wad, and the ball of glowing fat meat arched high up over the roof of the store and into the dark sky above the willow tree.

“Well now, Three-quarters was laying against the ditch bank half drunk and half asleep, and he heard the roar like thunder, as loud as a thousand shouts, and he looked up.  The glowin’ ball rose up in the sky straight above him, and it exploded, and it filled the heavens with flyin’, flamin’ fat meat.  It looked for sure like the stars were falling.

“My God,” he shouted, “Jesus is comin’ on a Saturday night.”

“Well now, he had already figured out that his big sin was firing his cannon.  He ran to the shantyman’s house, and he banged on the door, and he asked the shantyman to keep the gun for him so God would not find him with it and would not know he was the one who had fired it.

“When he brought in his crabs the next Monday, the shantyman made Three-Quarters an offer.  He offered to let Three-Quarters have the old outboard motor had wanted, he would take the cannon in trade for it.  Three-Quarters wouldn’t agree to givin’ up the cannon for good, so he offered to buy the old outboard for fifty dollars, and the shantyman could keep the cannon for security until he saved the money.  The shantyman knew that Three-Quarters would never save up fifty dollars at one time, so he agreed, and that’s what happened to the last big gun on this creek.”

 

Author’s note:

            The scrap of truth behind this story is that my father owned one of those big guns.  When he wasn’t using it, he kept it standing in the stairwell, it was too long to stand against any other wall in the house.  He was an outlaw hunter at night, as well as an oyster pirate.  I can remember my mother begging him to not go out on his boat after dark, she didn’t want him to work illegally.  He went out anyway, and later that night, we would hear his big gun go off, miles away down near the Virginia line.  The geese my father killed, he sold to the wealthy sportsmen who came to the hunting club on Watts Island, in Virginia.  They would buy the geese and pose with them for photos, and take them home to the big city to prove they were good hunters.

 

            Glenn Lawson

Storyteller