Bagombo Snuff Box (11 page)

The fire department joined its newest member by the fire
truck and congratulated him on his election.

“Thanks,” said Cady, tinkering with the apparatus strapped
to the side of the big red truck. “By George, but there’s a lot of chrome on
one of these things,” he said.

“Wait till you see the new one!” said Ed Newcomb.

“They make the damn things as ornamental as a
merry-go-round,” said Cady. “You’d think they were playthings. Lord! What all
this plating and gimcrackery must add to the cost! New one, you say?”

“Sure,” said Newcomb. “It hasn’t been voted on yet, but it’s
sure to pass.” The joy of the prospect showed on every face.

“Fifteen hundred gallons a minute!” said a fireman.

“Two floodlights!” said another.

“Closed cab!”

“Eighteen-foot ladders!”

“Carbon dioxide tank!”

“And a swivel-mounted nozzle in the turret smack-spang in
the middle!” cried Atkins above them all.

After the silence that followed the passionate hymn to the
new truck, Cady spoke. “Preposterous,” he said. “This is a perfectly sound,
adequate truck here.”

“Mr. Cady is absolutely right,” said Upton Beaton. “It’s a
sensible, sturdy truck, with many years of dependable service ahead of it. We
were foolish to think of putting the fire district into debt for the next
twenty years, just for an expensive plaything for the fire department. Mr. Cady
has cut right to the heart of the matter.” “It’s the same sort of thing I’ve
been fighting in industry for half my life,” said Cady. “Men falling in love
with show instead of the job to be done. The sole purpose of a fire department
should be to put out fires and to do it as economically as possible.”

Beaton clapped Chief Atkins on the arm. “Learn something
every day, don’t we, Chief?”

Atkins smiled sweetly, as though he’d just been shot in the
stomach.

The Spruce Falls annual Hobby Show took place in the church
basement three weeks after Newell Cady’s election to the fire department.
During the intervening twenty-one days, Hal Brayton, the grocer, had stopped
adding bills on paper sacks and bought an adding machine, and had moved his
counters around so as to transform his customer space from a jammed box canyon
into a racetrack. Mrs. Dickie, the postmistress, had moved her leafy children
and their table out of her cage and had had the lowest tier of mailboxes raised
to eye level. The fire department had voted down scarlet and blue capes for the
band as unnecessary for firefighting. And startling figures had been produced
in a school meeting proving beyond any doubt that it would cost seven dollars,
twenty-nine cents, and six mills more per student per year to maintain the
Spruce Falls Grade School than it would to ship the children to the big,
efficient, centralized school in Ilium.

The whole populace looked as though it had received a powerful
stimulant. People walked and drove faster, concluded business more quickly,
and every eye seemed wider and brighter—even frenzied. And moving proudly
through this brave new world were the two men who were shaping it, constant
companions after working hours now. Newell Cady and Upton Beaton. Beaton’s
function was to provide Cady with the facts and figures behind village activities
and then to endorse outrageously Cady’s realistic suggestions for reforms,
which followed facts and figures as the night the day.

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
New-comb, 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.