Part One Part Two
In the dead of winter, when the Georgia air was biting cold and the ground was dusted with snow, a car drove up to Bill Regan's place. They arrived soon after nightfall, when the little house was surrounded by darkness and empty woods. Uncle Bill sent his son Tony to answer the door, and Tony - about thirty years old by then - pulled it open to face three men he'd never seen before. These men smiled at the two Regans. b "We're looking to buy some cattle," said one. "At a real generous price," added another. Old Man Regan saw dollar bills dancing as soon as he heard those words, and he invited them into his house to talk business.
They sat by the fireplace, built up real high for some warmth on that cold night, and the men sat for a while chatting about cattle. They started to barter, real friendly-like. And the three strangers tried not to stare at the safe, sitting plain as could be in the corner of that big square room. They talked and talked until Bill Regan looked right at ease, and then one of the men said, "Could I fetch a cup of water, do you think?" Bill Regan pointed at the door, towards the pump outside, nothing but profit on his mind. He didn't watch as the man walked past the pump and straight to the trunk of his car. When that stranger came back in, he carried a gun in his hand.
The friendly smiles on the three men's faces had flown away, replaced by hard stares and cruel grins. The men pinned down Tony, hog-tied him, and threw him on a bed, then turned to Bill, elderly and weak, and told him, "Old man, you're going to open that safe."
But William loved his money too much to hand it over, even with a gun in his face. "I can't remember the combination," he lied. Tony lay on the bed, tied up and helpless. "I just can't remember it."
The men looked at each other, as calm as could be. Then they looked at the iron beside the fire, waiting to help press some shirts, because Bill Regan was a neat and well-dressed man. They placed that iron right on the coals of that big, hot fire.
"Well," the men told Bill. "We'll just have to make you remember." And they pulled off his shoes, and waited until that iron got hot. Old Bill saw the iron glowing bright red, saw the looks on these men's faces, and by firelight he could just make out the terror in the eyes of his son Tony, but he didn't give in. "I don't remember," he said, while Tony tried to shout around the rope in his mouth. "I just don't." So the men shrugged, and they sat on William's small frame to pin him down. They waited another long second, to see if the old man would come to his senses, and then they pressed that iron firm against the soles of William's feet. The crackling of the fire was drowned out by Bill Regan's screams, but outside the house, the empty woods and cold winter night swallowed up the sounds. Soon the pain grew stronger than Bill's love of money. "I remember," Bill Regan gasped. "I remember, for the love of mercy, I'll open it!" Was the agony in his voice from the pain in his feet, or from the thought of saying goodbye to those beautiful stacks of bills?
On his hands and knees, sobbing, pathetic, old Bill crawled to his safe and slowly dialed in the combination. But despite his pain and his fear, Bill was still thinking of his money. When he opened the door, h grabbed one bag of cash and tried to hide it underneath the safe. But the men saw, and they grabbed a stick and beat old Bill for trying to cheat them like that. Then they hog-tied Bill Regan and threw him on the bed next to Tony, and carried all the bags of money out into their car. Laughing, they drove away to the north.
It took hours before Tony wriggled out of the ropes tying him down, and then he ran as fast as he could to the closest farm, banging on the door and hollering for help. They went to town and roused the sheriff, and the very next day the sheriff started asking around about the strangers. It was more than two years before they found them, scattered across the country from Chicago to New York, and they never did find a penny of the money. They brought the men back to Early County to prosecute them, and they stood before an even older Bill, whose feet had healed but whose pride never had. "I'm sure you had a real good time with all my money," Bill snarled.
"Nah," said the men, cruelly. "It wasn't that much."
When they went to prosecute those men, the court didn't give them hardly any time in jail, because people said the money they stole hardly counted as money - "Dead money," they called it, like they always had. "Dead money. The old man wasn't using it anyway - it was barely a crime."
After the robbery, William Brown Regan wasted away until he died. He never was the same again - he didn't care about a thing. Folks said he died of grief over losing that money, which he'd loved so much more than he should have. And while Bill Regan may have had fourteen children, it didn't do him much good when he was dying. See, he'd had more children than he had love and kindness for them; he was as stingy with his heart as he was with his money. And when William lost his fortune and grew old, and weak, and needed to be cared for like a baby, his children remembered what a tight-fisted and unloving father he had been. All that land, and he wouldn't pass it down properly to his grown children - he made them work it for halves, like sharecroppers. No, they didn't look at him with kindness - not even Tony. Only one of all his fourteen children would agree to take him in - and that was his son John Howard, the same son Bill had turned away when John Howard came begging for a little syrup for his starving children.
John Howard was a generous as Bill was stingy, and he shared his food with anybody, family or stranger, who was hungry, and he opened his home to the old and infirm when nobody else would take them in. In the final years of his life, Bill Regan, the proud man who wouldn't give a penny to anybody, found himself flat broke, depending on another man's generosity to keep him alive. And that's what we call irony.
No comments:
Post a Comment