Part One
William B. Regan was born in 1855 in a log cabin, one of Robinson Regan and Elizabeth Brown's many grandchildren. From his parents he inherited fifty acres of land and an almost unbearably stubborn nature, and from this inheritance little Bill Regan built an empire.
First he gained even more acres of family territory by marrying his cousin, Julia Regan. They had nine children, all slim and small and stubborn, marked by a double dose of Regan genes - and then Julia died. So since his cousin had worked out the first time, Bill went ahead and married his dead wife's younger sister, but soon she died, too. Those days women's work was hard, and childbirth was harder, and women often died young. So Bill married a third wife, a 17-year-old girl - unrelated - who bore him five more children. While his wives were birthing and raising that small army of Regans, Bill was very, very busy.
Over eighty years, Bill Regan turned those first fifty acres into well over two thousand acres of Georgia farmland and forest. Like his grandfather, he knew how to handle a herd, and he had sheep and cattle grazing all across the county. Every year when the local farmers got together to round up those free-roaming animals, read their markings, and divide them up, he'd sell mountains of sheep's wool and fine beef, awakening envy in his neighbors. He cut down some of the forest on his land and turned it into farmland, where he grew corn, cotton, and sugarcane. Other acres he kept as valuable virgin timber, and in these woods he hid a still and turned out gallons of whiskey. He had barns full of meat, cane syrup, moonshine, and hay, and pretty soon he had a serious fortune saved up in the bank in town.
Little Bill Regan truly was a little man, short and slight, even by Regan standards. But he was a proud man, and when he rode on his horse with his back ramrod-straight, he looked as tall as he seemed to feel. He was a smart man, for all he'd had no education, and a determined and hard-working man. But Bill Regan had a problem. Some men have a drinking problem, some men have a womanizing problem, some men have a gambling problem, but Bill Regan didn't have any of these - he had a money problem. See, he loved money too damn much. He loved money more than he loved his wives, more than he loved his children. He may have loved money even more than he loved his prize horse. He almost loved money more than he loved his life.
In 1929, Bill Regan had $35,000 saved up in the banks, and when the banks started to crash, he pulled that money out and stored it all in a giant safe in the corner of his house. By then he was an old man, living alone with his grown son, Tony. And at that time, during the Depression, when folks were desperate for money and there were no jobs to be had, land - good farmland, good timberland - could sell for fifty cents an acre. If Bill Regan had only spent his money, his children would have grown up to live like kings. They could have lived like the old plantation owners, like the men who ran the sawmills; they could have entered the legislature.
But Bill Regan wouldn't spend his money for anything. He wouldn't spend it on his house, wouldn't spend it on his clothes, wouldn't spend it on a car, and certainly not on helping anybody else. By the time he was an old man, he wouldn't even spend money on land anymore. He was so tight with his money that when the winter grew hard and one of his sons came asking for a little bit of syrup, for his hungry children - William's grandchildren - William said no. He had hundreds of gallons of cane syrup stored away, but he would not unlock that barn. He was a tight man, a stingy man. And everybody knew it. Everybody knew that William Regan's money rotted away in his safes, that it grew stale and never circulated, that he never shared it when others were in need.
One day in 1930 some strangers came in to town, and started talking to some of Bill Regan's neighbors, and pretty soon they heard that the old man had land and cattle and sheep and was tight-fisted with the money he earned off them. And his neighbors whispered that the money was "dead money," that "Uncle Bill" never used it for a damn thing, and it was a damn shame he kept it stuck up in that safe, and these strangers pricked their ears up at that.
"What safe?"
And one neighbor, whom Bill had always counted as a friend, narrowed his eyes. He thought of all of William's wealth, his beautiful horse, his endless acres; thought how if he'd had that wealth, he'd have treated a neighbor with generosity. And his eyes turned an ill shade of green. He looked at these strangers, who were all but licking their lips, and he said, "That safe he keeps in his house. That house, right up the road."
And the men decided to pay old Uncle Bill a visit...
Part Two
No comments:
Post a Comment