(Today marks the return of an old friend to this blog. Rusty Pails, the bard of Sprung Hinge, is back after an absence of several years with another of his tales of life in the slow lane. Rusty has been a part of my life for almost forty years, ever since he made his first appearance in the premier issue of "The Elk River Current," a weekly newspaper out of Southwest City, Missouri, which I helped to establish in the late 1980's. All of Rusty's past adventures appear in earlier postings in this blog, even the ones that initially ran in The Current and a few other local newspapers. It was good running into Rusty again, and I suspect more of his stories will appear in Pa Rock's Ramble in the coming months!)
I found the big pine box at an auction last fall and even though I had absolutely no idea what I would do with it, I knew that I had to have it. But leave it to Esther Pearl to try and bust my happy bubble. As I stood admiring the handcrafted thing of beauty, she stepped up behind me and said, “You do know that’s a coffin, don’t you.”
“Of course I know it’s a danged coffin! Do you think I’m as dumb as one of Gladys Clench’s chickens?”
Right on cue, Glady’s sashayed by and threw her two-cents worth into what was otherwise intelligent discourse – for Sprung Hinge. “At least my girls earn their keep by laying eggs. That’s more than can be said for some of the men in this town.” Gladys talks high and mighty, but she would grab any man she could catch. She even settled for Shadetree Mike once, ‘til he managed to escape!
When Gladys had strolled on out of earshot, Esther turned real serious and said, “Rusty is everything alright?”
“What?” I snapped. Then, when she nodded at the coffin, I added, “It’s a well-made wooden box, and I can think of several good aboveground uses for it.”
“Uh huh.”
“Right now I’m thinkin’ toolbox.”
“And right now I’m thinkin’ foolbox,” Esther said over her shoulder as she headed to catch up with Gladys for lunch at the Weenie Wagon.
Fortunately coffins weren’t much in demand that day, and I managed to buy it worth the money. Heck Frye and Judge Rufus T. Redbone helped me to load it in the bed of my old pickup, the "Rust Bucket," while Shadetree Mike supervised. Somehow we managed to the big pine box home to my cabin where my crew and I set it upright on the porch next to the front door - and I managed to forget about it until Halloween.
I usually don’t get many little goblins coming around for tricks or treats on Halloween, but this year the boys and I decided to be ready with both. We had a domino party that night with plenty of "Rustwiches" (baloney and onion sandwiches on grilled rye bread with horseradish mustard) and cold root beer, but before our fun started inside, we dressed Truman Treetopper up like a zombie in clothes that were a little more ragged than the ones he had worn to the party, and smeared lard mixed with green food coloring on his hands and face. Then we gave our friend a bucket of horehound candies and told him to open the lid to the coffin and throw a few whenever her heard kids on the porch. Truman was eating his second Rustwich and drinking a cold root beer as we shut him in.
Truman’s act ended when one of the mothers, who either didn’t like the gag or didn’t like the candy, put a big rock in front of the coffin and blocked it closed. After awhile Truman, who doesn’t speak, gave up trying to get out and went to sleep standing up – and I guess the rest of us forgot about him
But I remembered Truman the next morning when I woke up to my mail lady, Raquel Rainwater, screaming on the front porch like the cabin was on fire. She had stepped onto the porch to deliver a package when she heard a commotion in the coffin and realized that someone or something was trapped inside, When Raquel pushed the rock aside, the lid to the coffin flew open and my silent buddy, Truman Treetopper, fell out onto the porch covered in green lard and baloney, onion, horseradish, and horehound vomit.
The smell was so bad that the EPA sent a feller around a day or two later to see if I qualified for a superfund cleanup – but the smell drove him away before he could write a check!
I’m not sure why Raquel was so danged upset, but for the next week I had to go.to the post office to pick up my mail. Finally, I got a letter from the postmaster telling me that they would resume delivery, but that if I ever attacked another carrier with a vomit-covered zombie, I would have to start delivering my own danged letters.
The postmaster's letter arrived postage due!
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