Brady Hammer stole a peach pie from Old Lady White’s kitchen window sill.
He wasn’t harboring any larcenous intentions against the maiden woman when he woke up early for his four-to-midnight shift at the mine that afternoon hungry as a spring-skinny bear and still a little groggy from wasting so much of what was
left of the previous night at a saloon with a few of the boys. In fact, outside of raiding the occasional watermelon patch with the other coal camp kids as a child himself back home in Kentucky, he’d never been what anyone would consider any kind of thief.
But walking down the alley behind the former schoolteacher’s house and catching a whiff of the fresh-baked delight that warm summer afternoon, and knowing like everyone else how the spinster White made a daily habit of taking little nap – passing out – after downing a tot of whisky at lunch (something, it was said, she firmly believed absolutely no one but herself and the Tacoma spirits distillery that discreetly shipped her two bottles of its best every week knew about), Brady just couldn’t stop himself.
Fresh pie!
And besides, he reasoned, she should have figured setting a hot pie out to cool in a window opening directly on a public alley was a bad idea. Especially in a mean-natured place like Butte, Montana! That’s right, he thought, glancing quickly around before taking the tin pie pan in both hands and hastily retracing his steps back to his rented room over a hardware store in the next block down the alley, she should have known better!
Alone, with the door locked tight behind him, Brady leaned in close and inhaled deeply, drawing the endlessly pleasant mingled odors of peaches, sweet spices and lard pastry crust over whatever operating olfactory sensors he still retained after so many years of breathing acrid dynamite smoke and pulverized hardrock dust.
Damn, but he loved pie! Always had.
Apple, cherry, berries of all colors and tastes, shoo-fly, cream, custard, buttermilk, even vinegar when nothing else was available, Brady couldn’t remember a time in his life when he had enough pie at one time to satisfy his taste for what was to him the most sacred of baked desserts. Cake, he could take or leave. But a well-baked slice of p-p-pie was as close to culinary perfection on Earth as he ever expected to get.
Brady gently set the pie on his bed. He gazed at it adoringly for a few seconds before kneeling and reaching down to grope around underneath the bed. He came up with a chipped china dinner plate. The floral-patterned plate came with a breakfast he’d ordered delivered two weeks prior, and he’d been meaning to wash it and return it to the beanery across the street ever since. Now, absently wiping the delicate but food-soiled dinnerware on the dusty linen curtain of the room’s only window, he was glad he’d hung onto it.
Hands trembling slightly, Brady carefully turned the pie pan over onto the plate and smiled happily when he removed it to find that the crust remained intact. Constantly swallowing back anticipation-generated saliva, he noted how nice and evenly browned the underside of the baked dough had turned out, and he hungrily eyed the thick rolled edge where the top was married to the bottom.
“A true wonderment,” he mumbled, reaching for his jackknife and fumbling the big blade open. He cut a slender wedge into the pie, and marveled at the consistency of the juice that oozed out. Not too thick, not too thin.
Still on his knees beside the bed, Brady separated a tiny taste from the point of the wedge and balanced it on his knife blade. Then, teasing himself mercilessly for a moment by holding it out from his body, he slowly moved the morsel first to his nostrils before gingerly placing it beyond his lips.
Even though it was still too warm for anything but adventure eating, Brady’s first bite of Old Lady White’s peach pie had to be a hint of what after-supper sweets must taste like in Gloryland, he reckoned. And the second bite. And the third. Eyes closed tight in flavor-borne ecstasy, Brady savored every last little delicately seasoned chunk of blessed summer’s most blessed of fruits. He chewed slowly and methodically until each luscious mouthful was reduced to a near-liquid consistency before regretfully swallowing.
On the fourth bite though, he chomped down on something in the pie filling hard enough to have broken a tooth if he hadn’t been chewing so fastidiously. Isolating the offending object with his tongue and spitting it out into his palm, he saw that it was a small chunk of peach pit. Probably got left in there accidentally when the peaches were canned, he guessed. Taking care not to chew so hard, he finished the slice within another minute or two.
Then, in an orgy of self-gratification, he cut away a slice wider across than his open palm, and gook it gently in his faintly trembling hands. Only when every last morsel of crust was gone, every last bit of peach flavor licked from his fingers did he feel sated enough, temporarily, to let his thoughts turn to other of life’s necessities.
But damn, he thought, wishing for something to drink, that was good. He gazed lovingly at what was left of the pie, and slowly came to his feet.
“Save ‘er for later on,” he decided out loud. “Make ‘er last.”
The only place to store the pie until later on, other than the bed or the floor, was to put it on the only other piece of furniture in the room; a straight-backed chair next to the bed. He used it strictly as a handy place to throw his clothes when turning in, but it would do nicely for the pie. He shoved a pile of dirty clothing off the chair and onto the floor, then brushed bits of loose rock and dirt from where his grimy work clothes would ordinarily have lain until the kid from the Chinese laundry down the block came by to pick them up every Wednesday.
He carefully placed the pie in its new place of honor on the woven reed chair seat, and turned to notice the now empty pie pan. Have to get that back where it came from, he reckoned. But best wait until after work. Slip it back onto Mrs. White’s sill in the wee hours, and maybe leave a dollar or two in it to show his appreciation.
And don’t let anyone see him do it. Not anyone!
Having a plan in place Brady drew a deep, contented breath, and suddenly fetched a heroic belch up from somewhere deep in his deepest innards. The taste immediately coated his tongue – a rancid combination of last night’s supper, leftover whisky and canned peaches, with the harsh metallic taste of the can nearly as strong as that of the peach slices – and almost caused him to bring up the various sources of that taste. But, swallowing furiously, he gradually eased the contents of his stomach down his throat and back into their normal homeplace behind his belt buckle.
“Damn,” he muttered, working his mouth furiously to squeeze a trickle more saliva from the already overworked spigots under his tongue, “I need a drink.”
Still a little queasy, Brady locked the door behind him a few minutes later. He shuffled carefully down the rickety steps and started up the alley toward his favorite hootch house around the corner – a place christened merely with the name “Bar.” Though he never pondered on the coincidence of how the small booze shop was not only his favorite but also happened to be the closest one to where he lived, he did wonder why three Chinamen digging a toilet pit in a yard across the alley stopped working to watch him pass.
He casually glanced back toward his second-floor room, and its single window. Had these Chinee seen him take the pie up there and eat it, he wondered?
Naw, he decided. He knew exactly what lay beyond his window curtain, and even he couldn’t make out any details from here. No one saw what he did up there. No one knew he stole that pie!
Feeling more secure of himself, he squared his shoulders and met the silent stares of the men with a slight sideways grin. “Afternoon, Gents,” he said lightly, touching the brim of his wool cap in a polite almost-doff. “They keeping y’all busy?”
As one, the three sons of China wordlessly went back to their labors. Brady walked on, chuckling at himself for worrying about this sudden skittishness over taking the pie and enjoying it so much.
The saloon was more of a long, slender, roofed-over and indifferently-floored space between two buildings than an actual business establishment. With the canvas tarpaulins that served as front and back walls rolled all the way up on such a warm day, customers stood packed at the bar instead of sitting at tables there was no room for anyway. Entering from the alley, Brady walked through the place and elbowed enough room for himself near the open street end, and caught the eye of the bartender – a tough-looking, muscular-built man he’d never seen working the bar at this time of day.
Just as the rough-faced barkeep arrived to take his order, Brady uncorked another deep-gut belch that moved the men crowded in on either side of him away by better than a foot.
“There’s a privy out back, friend,” the bartender growled, glaring at Brady and wrinkling his nose in disgust. “Cobs are a nickel a handful.”
Feeling the hostile eyes of the nearby customers on him, Brady cleared his throat and swallowed frantically for a long moment.
“Uh, no,” he finally said. “No thanks. Just pour me a beer and I’ll drink it over by the sidewalk.”
“Suit yourself, but don’t do that in here again.”
“I won’t.”
Halfway through the beer, something in Brady’s belly moved like it suddenly grew its own mind and wanted out, now. He knew he was in some serious personal trouble. Brady eased cautiously to the bar and set the glass down. Pulling out another nickel, he motioned discreetly at the bartender.
“I believe I’ll have that handful of cobs after all,” he said softly, knowing his face must be as red as the new bricks making up the walls of the skinny bar.
“Cobs it is,” the big barman said loudly, grinning and reaching into a wooden box near the beer barrel. “And for you, friend, they’re on the house this time.”
Ignoring the bartender’s smirk, and the outright laughter of the afternoon saloon loafers, Brady reached for the denuded corncobs and walked stiff-legged back toward the alley. He dropped one cob on the way, to the roaring approval of every man there, but he didn’t dare bend over to pick it up.
In the toilet, located about twenty unsteady steps from what would have been the back wall of the bar if it had a wall instead of just a rolled-up canvas drape, Brady got his suspenders loose and his britches and balbriggans down just in time.
He tried to keep his business private, but he soon realized that there was no way his nether regions were going to stay quiet during the painful, uncontrollable and thoroughly humiliating internal spasms that racked his body over and over, and curled him into a fetal position on the double-service bench. Even during the most violent eruptions, Brady could hear laughter in the distance. Guessing someone was stationed nearby and passing reports to those inside the slender saloon, he found he no longer cared. His only concern was whether or not he had enough corncobs.
Finally, he drew a deep breath and was able to sit up. He wiped sweat from his brow and reached for a cob. But before he could put it to its intended secondary career another stab of pain shot through his middle, and the infernal body racket started up again.
Almost a quarter-hour later, exhausted and beyond the ability to be embarrassed any further at the moment, he hitched up his clothing and slunk from the privy.
“It’s not as pleasant coming out as it was going in,” the bartender shouted from inside the saloon, “was it, friend?”
Brady ignored the barman’s dig, and its accompanying laughter, and reassured himself that the big bastard couldn’t possibly know about the peach pie. The damn peach pie. Instead of returning to the saloon, he turned toward the mine where he worked as a driller. He was going to be late now.
For some reason, someone sat eating pie in the front window of every eatery he passed, and the odor of baking pies seemed to have chased away the normal Butte smell of burning coal from the smelters and bodily wastes from the hundreds of horses usually stinking up the town. Turning one corner, he saw a man wearing a tall chefs’ hat and pushing a flatbed wheelbarrow toward him. The man stopped as Brady approached.
“Pie?”
“Uh, what?”
“I’m selling pies,” the man said. “It’s a new business for me. Like to buy one? It’d make a dandy after-supper snack. They’re fresh-baked and still warm.”
Trying desperately to sound as casual as possible so as not to arouse suspicion among the constant stream of strollers passing by – and vaguely wondering why anyone should be suspicious of him for anything since he was fairly positive he hadn’t been seen stealing Old Lady White’s supper dessert – Brady shrugged.
“What kind have you got?” he croaked.
“Oh, all kinds.” The man smiled, sensing a sale. “Apple and cherry, mostly,” he said. “A few blueberry. But I do have an apricot and a couple of peach—where are you going?”
Brady couldn’t help it. At the mention of peaches, his legs began pumping completely without his conscious permission, and he found himself shoving past other pedestrians along the walkway.
“Make you a hell of a deal,” the pie salesman shouted.
Near panic, Brady practically ran headlong into a uniformed beat copper. The policeman grabbed Brady’s shoulders and held on firmly.
“Did you steal that pie?” he barked, the age-old flavor of Ireland hanging heavy in his thick accent. “Speak up, now!”
Brady almost went limp in the lawman’s grasp.
“Um…”
“Well, did you?”
“Wh-What?”
“I said did you see that guy,” the copper snapped, jerking his forehead at the pie vendor. “He was trying to talk to you about something when you just took off running like he asked you for a loan. Clean out your ears, Bucko!”
Brady realized what was likely going on. The pie vendor probably supplied free pies to the beat cops hereabouts for the privilege of operating on the street. But before he could answer, Brady belched again. The policeman held on for a moment longer, and then he cussed and released Brady to move backwards a few unsteady steps. Brady fell all the way to the plank sidewalk.
“Jaysus!” the cop roared. “What a stink! Just what in the name of all that is dear to the holy mother have you been eating, boyo?”
“I’m late for work is all,” Brady said, levering himself slowly to his feet. “And I don’t feel all that good this afternoon, no.”
“Don’t feel all that good, he says!” The policeman shook his head. “Hell, feller-me-lad, your guts must be rotting right out your backside! Surely you noticed.”
The policeman moved away another few feet. Brady knew it was in case he belched again, but he still felt faintly insulted. And, speaking of his backside, another ominous twinge there told him he needed to get to the mine toilet as soon as possible.
“Officer,” he said, rubbing meaningfully at his lower abdomen, “with all due respect, I really should get on to work.”
“Well off with ‘ye then,” the cop barked. “And get yourself a good dose of salts. Whatever ails your insides is a pure sin!”
Thinking that the policeman was closer to the truth than he realized, Brady promised to down a strong percogoric as soon as possible; having no intentions of keeping that promise because salts were the absolute last thing he needed.
Stopping twice along the way to clamp his buttocks tight against incessant waves of pressure, Brady finally staggered to the mine and entered the office. The foreman looked up and frowned.
“You’re late, Hammer,” he said tightly. Then he looked closer at Brady’s ashen, sweaty face. “Say, do you feel all right?”
“No.”
The other man jerked a wrinkled handkerchief from his back pocket and used it to cover his mouth and nose. “It’s nothing catching, is it?” he asked suspiciously.
“Probably not.” Brady hoped the foreman didn’t notice how stiff-legged he must have looked standing there. “But I don’t think I can hold out for a whole shift this evening.”
The foreman blinked and, narrowing his eyes, studied Brady more intently.
“The trots?” he finally asked.
Humiliated all over again, Brady only nodded.
“Hell, Brady,” the foreman said, putting his handkerchief away and leaning back in his chair, “I can’t let men take off an entire shift every time they catch a case of the skivers.”
“But—”
“That’s your problem,” the foreman said, smiling at his own little joke. “And if that’s your only ailment, there’s plenty of abandoned drifts down yonder where you can take care of it.”
Brady’s shoulders slumped in defeat. He regretted it instantly when the action accidentally allowed a tiny sample of the steadily expanding gas blowing his intestines up like a balloon to escape into the small room.
“Now I don’t mean to be unkind about it,” the foreman went on, “but you have to understand my position here. I can’t just let—what the HELL is that stench?”
“Sorry,” Brady murmured.
“Damn!” The foreman yanked the handkerchief out and clapped it over his nose again. “You don’t need to take a shift off, Brady, you need a week in a hospital somewhere.” He moved the cloth and sniffed experimentally, then slapped it over his nose again. “Hell, maybe a sanitarium! What did you eat, boy? Whatever it was is taking a powerful revenge on you.”
Before Brady could respond, another violent belly spasm ripped through his already twisted insides, and the panicked look on his face said more than mere words could. He turned and grabbed for the doorknob, his eye on the toilet beside the nearby hoist shack.
“Take off as long as you need, Brady,” the foreman yelled through the door. “Just don’t bring that stink with you when you come back!”
Sitting miserable inside the privy, Brady thought about how the foreman was right. And so was the policeman. What ailed his insides was a sin, and it was wreaking revenge on him. A terrible revenge.
During the half-hour he sat there, unable even to straighten himself upright on the roomy three-hole bench for most of the time, he heard at least two people approach the outhouse. Faint chuckling noises from beyond the door made Brady suspect that several more had crept up after the first two, as if they were checking up on whether or not the others had told the truth about the odors and noises coming from the privy. But he didn’t care. All he wanted was to eliminate the odiferous demon torturing his guts.
Later, walking slowly toward the downtown area, Brady had to stop in his tracks and stand perfectly still several times. He no longer even pretended to study the awesome mountain views off in the distance while giving his innards time to settle down.
Shuffling aimlessly around the streets, and always keeping a toilet in sight, he noticed a revival tent set up in a vacant lot a half block back from Main. The sun was still up, but people were already beginning to gather at the site because it would get too cold for preaching after sundown.
Thinking over what the policeman said about sin, and what the foreman had said about revenge, Brady shrugged and headed that way. He found a seat on a rough plank bench near the back of the lamp-lit tent, and hoped no one would sit near him. But as the tent continued to fill with the faithful and soon-to-be righteous, he found himself trapped in place; desperately hoping his last outhouse visit at the mine would be the last he’d need before the revival meeting broke up.
A sad-faced accordion player accompanied the crowd on a couple of ancient hymns to open the service before an enthusiastic preacher jumped spryly onto a small stage made from nailed-together soapboxes. He removed his topcoat and, spreading his arms wide, laid his head reverently over at a slight angle and closed his eyes.
“Beloved,” he intoned, “confess your transgressions and be redeemed!”
There was a moment of complete silence in the tent, and then a large, heavily bearded miner stood up near the middle of the crowd and faced the preacher.
“I have lain with women of the street,” he yelled loud enough so that everyone could hear, “and one of them gave me the clap! I want to be free of this demon!”
The preacher’s eyes popped open and he pointed toward the crude plank alter at his feet.
“Then come down, brother,” he said firmly. “Come down and ask to be delivered of that vile clap!”
“Amen!” the miner shouted, shoving people out of his way and practically running toward the front. “Amen!”
“Anyone else?” the preacher bellowed. “Any other wretched reprobates here in need of redemption?”
“I’ve coveted my neighbor’s sewing machine,” a woman shrieked, coming to her feet and turning toward the congregation. “It’s a Singer.”
“Well come on down here, sister, and be free of that … covetessness.”
While the lady made her way to the alter, others began standing and shouting out wrongdoings. All kinds of heinous moral offenses. One well-dressed man claimed to have helped rob a blind bootblack over in Anaconda. Two women said they regularly engaged in intimate relations with each other’s husbands. A matronly old lady tearfully alleged she regularly engaged in intimate relations with herself. A bartender said he often secretly sipped at the glasses of customers before passing them over, and spit in the glasses of the customers he didn’t like. The preacher’s response was always the same: No matter the degree of moral failing, redemption could be had merely for the confessing.
Unable to stop himself when his misery-wracked colon suddenly jumped halfway to his breastbone and threatened to eat its way out his navel, Brady shot to his feet during a slight lull in the proceedings.
“Yes, brother,” the preacher cried, pointing at Brady. “You have a personal burden to confess?”
Every eye in the tent, wet and dry, turned in Brady’s direction, and a hushed stillness fell over the assemblage.
What difference does it make if they know now, he wondered?
“I stole a pie,” Brady wailed, “and it’s about to kill me!”
“Then come on down,” the preacher entreated, “and shed your soul of that wicked offense!”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because…because I dare not move!”
“But you must!” The preacher clasped his hands together in pleading supplication and held them out toward Brady “All are welcomed here, brother! Welcome to cleanse their troubles from their disgraceful bodies!”
“I admit as how I sure could use some of that cleansing,” Brady said, suppressing a shudder. “But just not now.”
The preacher hopped off the podium and made his way toward where Brady stood. “In that case, I’ll come to you,” he shouted, shaking his hands wildly with every step. “As we all come together, so shall we come to you!”
“No,” Brady shouted, clutching at his middle, his face a tense mask of agony. “Don’t do it!”
“But Brother, I must come to you as you come to me!”
“No,” Brady yelled again, standing up straighter and throwing his head back in the faint hope that he could stop what he suddenly knew he couldn’t. “Stay back you bastard!”
The preacher stopped, stunned. As one, everybody in the tent gasped at Brady’s foulmouthed outburst.
A hushed paralysis seemed to freeze everyone silently in place for a long, thunderstruck moment.
Then, with a prodigious and unmistakable growling noise that built from his bowels much like the bass rumbling of a shallow underground dynamite blast, and was clearly heard all over the suddenly silent tent, Brady filled his pants.
“Damn,” he muttered.
All around him, the faithful broke free of their temporary immobility and immediately backed away, pushing and falling over each other. Brady’s foul-natured aroma expanded relentlessly inside the tent and many of the pilgrims crowding toward the door flap as a manic mob threw decidedly uncharitable glares his way. Some were even abandoning belongings, and the lady with the accordion dropped it where she stood and scuttled under the bottom of the tent wall.
Still standing near Brady, the preacher frowned and blinked. The sides of the preacher’s nose went up involuntarily, and he squinted intently at Brady through the pungent reek.
“I’m afraid there’s no redemption for you here, friend,” he gasped. The smell almost overwhelming him, the young preacher shook his head and rushed for his coat, and shoved his way in among the others jamming the exit. “Have you tried a sanitarium?” he called out, just before escaping to the fresher air outside.
With the revival meeting irreparably broken up, Brady stood alone in the empty tent for a long time until it was completely quiet outside. His despair and humiliation were complete now and, noticing there was no one hanging around outside the dense canvas walls, he walked slowly back home.
He sat at the foot of the stairs leading up to his room until full darkness had fallen, then peeled out of his soiled clothes and left them to lie on the ground. Vowing to never, ever steal anything again, no matter how small and insignificant it might seem at the time, Brady cleaned himself as best he could with his shirt. Naked and past caring who saw it, he left his clothing for whoever wanted to steal such rags and climbed the steps to his door; drained physically, emotionally and, he hoped, intestinally.
The stairs, along with so much abuse on his body for so many hours, left him light-headed and wobbly on his feet. But, even though he found it hard to concentrate, he knew he didn’t want to sit on his bed in his current unsanitary state. Instead, he reached for the chair and dropped heavily onto it.
Only then did he recall where he left what had remained of the peach pie.
Two days later, he found the street vendor and bought two fresh apple pies. He intended to take one to his boss later, but the other was meant for Old Lady White in atonement for stealing the peach demon.
At her house, he knocked on the back door and stood patiently with the pie in one hand and his cap in the other, a familiar tension beginning to grow in his middle.
When she answered the door, he lost his nerve.
“Uh, I h-heard you…um, I understand a pie went missing day before yesterday,” he stammered. “I had this extra one, and I thought you might like it.”
She stared hard at him, then at the offering. Then she smiled, and it seemed as if at least a decade melted off her face.
“Why thank you,” she said. “But that really isn’t necessary. I meant to throw that pie out anyway. I guess I did, and must’ve just forgotten about it.”
Brady hoped his stunned curiosity didn’t show on his face.
“You threw it out?”
“Yes.” She reached for the apple pie offering. “At least, I was going to. I set it on the sill to cool enough that I could get my pan, and the next thing I knew it was gone. Can’t imagine how I threw away the pan, though.”
Brady made a mental note to return her pie pan as soon as possible.
“Why were you going to throw it out?”
“Because it wasn’t good,” she said, shrugging philosophically. “You see, I had some extra peaches and pastry after I made the pie, so I made popovers, too. But there was something wrong with the peaches. I ate one of the popovers, and it made me so deathly ill that I spent most of that day in the water closet, if you’ll excuse my saying so out loud. How did you hear about the pie?”
Brady glanced down the alley and saw the same three Chinese workers watching him from the next block.
“I…Miss White, I have to be honest with you,” he said, unable to meet her eye. “I took that pie. I stole it, and it don’t matter none that you was going to throw it out anyway. It was theft. I’m right regretsome about that, and I hope you’ll find it in your heart to forgive an old fool.”
The woman studied his face for a long, silent moment. Suddenly, he didn’t understand why he thought she was as old as everyone seemed to believe. Why, she wasn’t more than a few years older than him; probably not even as many as five. Maybe less.
“I see,” she finally said. “Well, Mister…-”
“Hammer, ma-am” he said. “Brady Hammer.”
“Well, Mr. Hammer, from your peaked complexion and hollow eyes, it looks like the pie itself has already chastised you more than anything I can say or do will. You don’t need my forgiveness.”
“I don’t?” An infant grin played at the corners of Brady’s mouth, and the knot that had been growing in his insides since he knocked at her door untied itself and allowed his gut to settle quietly back into place. “I ‘preciate that.”
The Chinamen went back to work.
“My pleasure,” she said, nodding at the pie in her hand. “Now, would you like to join me in a little snack? You look like you could use something solid in your belly, and Lord knows I could use the company.”
Brady glanced at the pie, and he felt his face go white.
“I’ll be happy to set and talk awhile, ma-am,” he said, rubbing absently at his still-tender abdomen. “But…well, I never cared much for pies, myself.”
