← Columns

Darby’s Throne

The Source

Darby’s left foot would catch on each of the wooden steps as he made his nightly crawl up to his throne. That’s what Dad called it, Darby’s Throne. Darby Sitton lived just east of us on the west edge of town. His rambling two-story frame house was a jumble of repairs, patches, and just plain poor fixing. Everything in Darby’s life was done on the cheap. If a door fell off, he nailed it shut and used another. His broken windows all said, “SEARS” as packing crates were duct-taped across the cracks. Darby Sitton was the richest man in town and he had earned his money one cheap fix after another. Even Darby’s Throne was a study in time saving. The town had waited until the early 1970’s to purchase its own sewer system so the more affluent household were flush with septic tanks while the older folks still relied on the outdoor privy. But privy digging takes work and Darby couldn’t be bothered. Instead of digging a pit then constructing an outdoor john, Darby built a platform some twelve feet in the air, cut a hole in the caning of an abandoned kitchen chair, and placed it over a similar hole on the platform. Each night, while there was still light enough for him and the entire world to see, Darby would climb the dozen steps to his throne and sit there like the king of Homerville, surveying his realm as the shit dropped below. This was always Mom’s cue to serve supper. It’s not that she favored eating while Darby was performing his nightly absolutions, but she knew that if we were sitting down at the kitchen table we wouldn’t be able to see our neighbor lighten the load of his day. To my mother’s relief, Darby was regular…at least in his schedule. Mom could time four hamburgers to come off the broiler just as Darby was coming out onto his back porch. By the time he hit the first step the cheese would be melting and just as we’d bow our heads to say, “Lord we thank you for this food, pardon us many sinners in Christ’s name. Amen,” Darby would be lowering his drawers. We weren’t the only family who prayed when Darby dumped. What started out as an amusing enough small town eccentricity soon became the shame of the village. The town board even hired a lawyer to draw up an ordinance against Darby’s nightly ceremony but each time the young man brought back the new language the boys on the board would either veto it because of is fuzzy wording, or laugh it off the agenda when the wording was too plain. Darby might have stood maybe five foot four if he’d ever have straightened up, but to my memory, he didn’t. He would tamp his pipe down with a charge of Prince Albert, light it up, then go charging…head-down as if fighting a strong wind, for the four blocks to his store. He wore the same grey shirt with the sleeves of his long johns showing under the bottom of each sleeve, stained gray pants, and old gray cap that was sweat stained a good seven years after Darby quit sweating. He’d unlock the gray padlock on his gray door and that’s the last you’d see of him all day unless you had some reason to shop at Darby’s. I never did. I never knew anyone who did. Dad said that the shelves were filled with food in crumbling boxes and mice ran freely over the smiling Quaker’s head on the oatmeal containers. I had no idea how Darby spent his day but my young imagination conjured up visions of the old man mixing potions and boiling cats. Some said he read old newspapers, slept, and counted his money. Darby Sitton had lots of money. This was more than a rumor… we knew it to be a fact because most of his money was once in the pocketbooks of the rest of the town. As my grandpa explained it to me, when the Great Depression hit, Darby was the only man in town who had money and he commenced to buying up everything that the local farmers and business wanted to sell. At one time Darby owned five teams of horses. This was unheard of during the Depression. Nobody owned five teams, but Darby did. All of the horses slowly starved to death, but they did it under Darby’s watch. Darby once owned a dozen cars, all parked in the junk pile that was his back yard. He was the town’s pawnshop. When your credit got so bad you could no longer feed your family, you sold Darby your car…or your washing machine or your house. And when you got a bit more flush, Darby wouldn’t sell it back. Men would load up in a wagon and to Valley Draw to get drunk, and while at the Riverview Bar they’d vow to kill Darby for his greediness and waste, but by the time they’d made the 17-mile trip back to Homerville, they’d either be sober or passed out. Rupert Dodds once made a deal with Darby to buy his wife’s sewing machine for just a day. The few banks that survived the Depression weren’t loaning any money, and Rupert needed 12 dollars fast to make a house payment. Darby took the old sewing machine, gave Rupert the 12 dollars, and then watched him hurry off to the bank to save the house. Times being what they were, Rupert wasn’t able to pay off Darby until four days later. When he walked into the store, cash in hand, Darby refused to sell him the machine back. He said that Rupert had reneged on the deal. Rupert Dodds was a big German farmer. Honest, strong, and Lutheran to the bone. But, according to my Dad, on that hot August afternoon Rupert cried like a baby as he left Darby’s store. Melba Dodd’s sewing was all that was keeping the family alive and there was no way in the world Rupert could afford to buy her a new sewing machine. I suppose that today we would have found a way to have Darby committed to an asylum, but in those days his malady was labeled just plain meanness. Melba’s sewing machine rusted away in the front window of Darby’s store. The old man had no tooth in his head as far as we could tell, his face and chin were perpetually covered with tobacco-stained gray stubble, and no one had ever seen his eternally squinted right eye. He was Popeye on the day Bluto had won. Some said he never washed, but our family knew this to be a lie. …at least in the summertime. Darby kept his washtub on his back porch and his summer baths were as immodest as his nightly defecations. He’d enter the washtub from the west, giving us the rearward view. The old man had no butt. None. It just wasn’t there. I’d seen a butt like it in social studies class when Mr. Heck brought out some old photos of concentration camp survivors and can remember the collective gasp that went up from our eighth-grade class as we envisioned drifting off into old age without benefit of buttocks. My brother Kelly was the first in our family to notice Darby’s butt-less-ness. Kelly was fighting Indian wars with peach branches on our cellar door when he gazed toward Black Hawk’s territory and saw Darby standing stark naked on his back porch. Tossing down his rifle and commanding his troops to stand at ease, Kelly went running inside to Mom. “Mom, Darby’s naked on the back porch.” Mother peered out the kitchen window. “Oh dear Lord.” “He lost his butt, Mom.” “Just stay inside ‘til he’s done.” “What happened to it?” “What happened to what?” “His butt. He was born with one wasn’t he? Don’t everbody got a butt?” “How about some cookies?” “Can I take some to Darby?” “Not now. Wait ‘til he dries off…and..uh…covers himself.” The winter nights would come quick and I’d peer out the window at Darby’s lightless house and ask Dad what Darby was doing. “Sleeping, I imagine. He goes to bed at sunset.” “But I mean…all alone like that? Don’t you reckon he gets lonesome?” “Some folks can do without company. I guess Darby’s one of ‘em. He starves horses. I don’t care to know anything else about him, son.” One night my brother and I were in the yard trying to see how many fireflies it’d take to light up a Mason jar when we heard the most eerie sound coming from the upstairs of Darby’s house. “What you reckon that was?” my brother asked me. “Don’t know. Was it a giggle?” “Darby? Darby’s gigglin’? At what?” “Don’t know. I guess he’s countin’ other folks money.” I remember that night because it was the evening before Darby was killed. We had just sat down to supper when Dad looked out and saw a car pulling slowly down the incline in front of Darby’s house. The car wound down to a stop and we heard what sounded like a snap of a branch in a high wind. Then the car moved on. The shot caught Darby in the stomach and at first he thought it was his ulcer. The damned thing had plagued him for years but he wasn’t about to pay a doctor to tell him what he already knew. Darby had served in the war and seen men die, and it never occurred to him that a gunshot could cause such little pain. Then he saw the blood dripping down between his legs and he grabbed at his stomach. He still didn’t quite realize what had happened until he stuck his finger right in the bullet hole and figured this was to be more serious than he’d first imagined. It was a quiet musing he had with himself in those last moments. “I’ll be damned,” he muttered, and he stuck the finger in again. He had indeed been shot in the stomach and there was no one more amazed at this than Darby Sitton. But the pain was still tolerable and he thought that if he could just stand up and pull up his pants, he could probably make it to his house….or better yet, our house. The bullet had evidently hit something valuable because the flow of blood now pulsed with the same regularity as Darby’s racing heart. But here was the problem, he found…. he could not stand. The hot tip of lead had severed a portion of Darby’s spine and he simply could not get his legs to pay any attention to was his brain was trying to tell them. “Darby on his throne tonight, Dad?” I asked. “I s’pect he is. It’s suppertime.” “Can I look?” “No you may not,” said Mother. “Eat your goulash. You’re the one who always wants goulash when it snows.” “Snow?” My brother spent his entire young life and never knew of such things as weather forecasts. “It’s snowin’?” “Been snowin’ for ten minutes,” said Dad. Kelly made a move for the door. “Not ‘til you eat supper!” said Mom. “The snow will last, Kelly. It’ll hit the ground then it’ll stay there.” We all laughed. Every family must have a youngest child to say the stupid things that we’ve all said but in his case, will be best remembered. Kelly’s nose was out of joint. We’d gone over the kidding limit. He stuck out his lower lip and crossed his arms. Mom relented, “Okay kiddo, take a peek out the window. Just a peek, then get back to that goulash.” In a heartbeat, Kelly had dragged his chair to the window over the sink and was leaning dangerously toward the lemon lush dessert. “Wow! It really is snow!” But the advent of the season’s first snow deafened his ears to my kidding. “It’s …I mean, it’s just all over the place! It’s…” and he stopped. “Dad, what’s a matter with Darby?” Mother rose, “That’s enough, young man. I told you to look the snow, not that old man…” But she stopped. Her tone changed. “Get down from there. Lawrence, come here.” Dad knew that tone. He got up quickly and peered out the window. A silence, then “Oh hell.” Once…only once before had I ever heard Dad cuss. It was late one July night when he had answered the phone then slowly sank into his chair, holding his head in his hands. He quietly whispered, “Oh my God.” His good friend Dean had been found on the levee of his pond, a Ford 8N tractor on top of him. When Kelly heard Dad say, “Oh hell,” he started to cry. Kelly had no idea what was going on, but it had nothing to do with softly falling snow. “Everybody stay inside,” and Dad was out the back door. Mom watched from the kitchen, gently patting the top of Kelly’s sobbing head. “What is it, Mom?” I asked. “I don’t know. Your dad will tell us when he gets back.” Dad hurtled what was left of Darby’s woven-wire chicken fence in a single leap and carefully rushed up the wooden steps. Darby had fallen forward onto the few remaining inches of platform and his body was dangerously close to falling into his dung pit. Dad looked for a clean or at least a clothed spot of Darby to grab onto and finally took hold of the back of Darby’s shirt. He flopped the lifeless, half-naked body of Darby over onto its back and saw that Darby’s left forefinger was stuck up to the knuckle into his own stomach. Death by gunshot was not anybody’s first guess in Homerville and it wasn’t Dad’s that night. In fact, it wasn’t anybody’s. Autopsies were expensive and we all just assumed that the crazy old man had gone to empty his bowels, then for some reason stuck his finger into the thin skin on his stomach and died. By the time Jimmy Dodds confessed to the killing some forty years later in a letter to his niece in St. Louis, it was too late to be digging up Darby again and confirming anything. Jimmy Dodds moved away from Homerville in 1939 after his family was forced to sell their farm. Jimmy had done well as a machinist in Decatur, raised a family, and was two weeks short of being dead with lung cancer. In the letter he said, “The old man killed my father or might as well have. He wouldn’t give back Mom’s sewing machine and that was our only hope of making a living. I’m sorry I did it. I confess my sin to you since I don’t for sure know how to tell the story to my own kids. I just had to tell somebody. If there was ever a reason for killing somebody, it was this one.” “Darby Sitton, killed by a sewing machine, December 12th, 1953.” Or least that’s the way Dad puts it. Greed was more the cause, I suppose. And meanness. No matter what they tell you, meanness kills.

PAGE

PAGE 7