Emmett walked in and stood at the end of her bed and, not saying a word, he opened his mouth and sang to her "Sweeter as the Days Go By" in the most beautiful bass voice she had ever heard. After he finished he said, "Minnie, if you can hear me, I've come to tell you that I'm available to sing with you if you want me."
Minnie sat up a little more in the bed. Emmett Crimpler was considered, along with J. D. Sumner and James (Big Chief) Wetherington, as one of the great basses in gospel music. He told Minnie he had had a dream where Ferris had come to him and told him to leave the group he was with and to go over and take his place.
After an hour she said to Bervin, "Run down to the drive-in and get me an order of fries and a ham-and-cheese sandwich."
Emmett did not mention that he had wanted to leave the Harmony Boys for over a year but it did not matter. His arrival had been a miracle, said Reverend Nails. Minnie had lost over thirty-five pound sand the Oatmans were on the road once more!
Hamm Sparks was not, as noted, particularly good-looking, not very tall, only about five foot nine, and of average build. He had brown hair, dark brown eyes, but he had something more. He had charm and was naturally seductive and he did not even know it. There is a certain kind of appeal about people who know exactly what they want and let you know up front what you can do to help them get it and what you can expect in return.
But the most seductive thing about Hamm, which made his overt, raw ambition oddly charming, was that, unlike most ambitious men, he meant what he said. There was not a covert or phony bone in his body. He believed that everyone was his friend and that he was his or her friend. He believed that he was the person to speak for them, to fight for the average person, and for those who were being pushed around. And he was a man looking for a fight. Dukes up, ready to take on the world. He was nice but tough and single-minded and came from a long line of proud people.
When the Tennessee Valley Authority had wanted to take over the family's land and build a dam to supply electricity for the entire region, his father had fought them as hard and as long as he could. But to no avail. In the end the TVA flooded the entire area and nothing of theirs was left. They even dug up his ancestors who had fought and died in the Civil War and moved them to another place. Unlike most of the others in Norris, Tennessee, who had made the best of a bad situation and had gone to work for them, his father had refused to accept a government job or to live in the company town they had created. He had moved his family around and had spent his remaining years painting the roofs of barns all over the South with SEE ROCK CITY. It was a rough job and paid little money and eventually killed him at age forty-one but by God he had not caved in to the federal government. And as far as his son was concerned, he died a hero.
His father had told him over and over, "Son, if the federal government can steal one man's land and get away with it, democracy is in danger of failing. Once they sacrifice one for the so-called good of many, you've got socialism. Now, if they had asked me for my land, I might have given it up. I'm not dumb enough not to realize that electricity was a good thing but when they just come in and don't give me a choice that what wars are fought over. That's why I fought, to be able to be free from government. To own my own land. That's all we had. And the bastards took it away from us and don't ever forget it." This one event had changed his father and his family's life forever. It had forged Hamm into a fierce defender of individual rights. His own and everybody else's. In this one respect he was like a horse with blinders and could see neither left nor right. Now that the Depression and the war were over, he thought that Roosevelt's handout programs should be stopped. He had no sympathy for anyone who would not work if they could. He knew firsthand what a toll a handout exacts from the spirit and dignity of a man. The only time he had ever taken anything from the federal government was one terrible day after his father had died. His mother was sick and he had walked all the way to Knoxville to get help. Although they had not signed up for it, the woman at the welfare office had begrudgingly handed him a sack with navy beans, a piece of a side of beef, a few potatoes, flour, and sugar in it. He had taken it and cried all the way home, thinking about how his father would have felt. But they were just about starving to death so they ate it. Afterward he had gone outside and vomited it back up. Sick with shame. That day he'd vowed never to take another thing from the government as long as he lived.
He went to work the next day at age thirteen and saved enough money to buy a used twenty-two rifle and every day before and after school he hunted and brought home meat for the table. In summer he fished and planted vegetables, swapped catfish and turnips for eggs, sugar, and cornmeal. Swapped rabbits, deer, and squirrels for money to buy shoes and clothes for his sisters. It was understandable why Hamm was to grow up hard-pressed to understand why any man that could would not work. To have little patience with men who would not fight and die for what they believed. Just like his father and grandfather before him, within a few hours after Pearl Harbor he had joined the army as a foot soldier. Hamm's total belief that he was put here on this earth for a purpose and would certainly not die made him the perfect soldier and leader of ground troops. His expert ability with a gun and his lack of fear caused him to do things that another man would not have. In war, if you want to live, these feats are rewarded with medals and offers of advancement.
But even then, between battles, some in the deepest jungles of the Pacific, he considered his future. When the army tapped him for officers training, he declined. He knew that after the war, just by sheer numbers, a lot more enlisted men would be voting than officers.
He made a lot of good and loyal friends while he was in the army. When he returned home he worked part-time and almost finished college, but after he and Betty Raye married he dropped out and went to work full-time, trying to save a little more money for a house. But in 1952 the urge to go into politics was too great, so he quit his job at the Allis-Chalmers tractor company and ran for Pettis County commissioner of agriculture.
Even though it was just a county election, their rented house was in constant upheaval. Phones ringing, people in and out, and after he won, Betty Raye made him promise not to do that to her again. He held that office for a year and did a good job. But he was anxious to move on. What Hamm wanted next was to run for the office of state commissioner of agriculture. All Betty Raye wanted was for them to buy a small home of their own and have some security. At the moment they did not have anything but a two-year-old baby and the use of a car the county had provided and now they were about to lose that. The county job had paid very little and they'd had to move from one rental to another. But Hamm was not thinking about a house or security. He was thinking about his future. He knew that if he could just win this one election it would get his foot in the door of statewide politics. All those years of selling tractors and shaking hands had to add up to something. But he would be running against a strong incumbent. He needed campaign money and a car. He tried to get a bank loan but the bank turned him down. He knew only one person who might be able to lend him the money. He hated to do it but he called his old army buddy Rodney Tillman. Rodney had been a top Pontiac showroom salesman before the war and now owned a few used-car lots outside of Sedalia.
When Hamm got him on the phone, Rodney listened a few minutes without comment, then said, "How much do you need, Hambo? If I haven't got it, I'll get it."
Hamm said, "I think I can do it with five hundred."
"I'll get you six."
Hamm said, "I'll pay you back."
"I know you will."
"I'll never forget this, buddy," said Hamm.
"Don't worry about it. You just go out and win the damn thing."
Once again they moved and again Betty Raye's home life was turned upside down. As soon as he announced, the house was filled with men coming and going, day and night. When she went to bed there were men in her living room. She slept, got up, got dressed, got the baby changed, and by breakfast there were already four or five men sitting at the kitchen table, filling up the place with cigar smoke. She hardly ever saw Hamm alone. If he was not traveling, he was always with his pack of cronies. The house was in a constant mess and she spent most of her time cleaning up after them. There was only one bathroom, so all day long men were traipsing through her bedroom. And if she went into the bathroom she could never be sure that some man would not walk in on her. She tried her best but when she woke up with a strange man she had never seen before walking through her bedroom, that was the last straw. Hamm never understood why she was so upset.
It did not bother him at all to have people around him twenty-four hours a day. In fact, he thrived on it. It seemed to energize him. This constant and relentless lack of privacy, however, was making a nervous wreck out of Betty Raye. She could not even find a place to sit down and cry by herself Six long months later, it was all over: between the radio ads, the posters, and Hamm stumping all over the farm areas, he'd won. He was now state commissioner of agriculture.
Betty Raye was so glad when it was final. At last she could have her husband all to herself and they could get back to a normal life again.
The phone rang in the office of the Tillman and Reid used-car lot and Rodney Tillman picked it up. "Hello?"
A man's voice said, "Hey, sport, what are you doing?"
It was his friend Hamm Sparks. Rodney said, "Right now I'm sitting here trying to figure out if I should kill my ex-brother-in-law or not."
Hamm laughed. "What's he done now?"
"We got the best looking little forty-nine Chevy in here and he went out and started fooling around with the odometer after I told him not to and the damned idiot just put an extra two hundred miles on the thing."
"Why don't you just run it back the other way like you always do?"
"I would if I could, Hambo," he said, glaring at his ex-brother-in-law, who'd just passed by, "but the damned thing's stuck. What are you doing?"
"I'm gonna be working in your area today. Why don't you come take a ride with me this afternoon, keep me company."
Rodney looked through the glass window at the lot, full of dusty cars and empty of customers. "Might as well."
As they rode out to the farms Hamm was checking on that day, Rodney pulled his pint out of his back pocket and took a swig.
"I tell you, son, some days I wish I had just stayed and married that little Japanese gal; this alimony is about to kill me. You sure lucked out with Betty Raye. Now, that's a sweet woman."
"Yes, she is," said Hamtn.
While he stopped at the farms on his list, Rodney sat in the car scrunched up in the front seat and watched Hamm trudging out in the fields, walking around in barnyards and pigsties, talking to each farmer, patting them on the back, saying whatever agriculture people say to each other, and swigged from his pint. After about the fifth farm Rodney asked, "How many more places do you have to go to today?"
"Just six more."
"Well, can we stop somewhere? I need to eat something."
"Oh sure, there's a place right up the road."
Right up the road turned out to be twenty-three miles. As they came out of the small roadside filling station and country store with sausage biscuits, cheese crackers, and Cokes, Hamm headed back to the car.
"Can we eat outside?" Rodney said. "I hate to say it, buddy, but you're beginning to smell like a barnyard. God knows what you've been stepping in, and those hog-snout marks on your pants ain't all that appetizing, either."
Hamm looked down at his pants and laughed. "Yeah, I see what you mean. Sorry, it's just part of the job."
They walked over to a wooden bench set up beside a creek behind the store and sat down. Rodney handed Hamm his Coke. "Drink some of this for me, will you." Hamm took a swig and handed it back and Rodney filled it back up to the top with whiskey, took a drink, and said, "Now, that's a Coke. So, Hambo, is this what you do every day? Stomp around in barnyards?"
"Just about."
Rodney examined the sausage biscuit in his hand with skepticism but bit into it anyway. "Why you ever wanted this job in the first place is a mystery to me. I know you aren't making any money."
Hamm agreed, "No, it's sure not the money. But somebody has to give these folks a hand, trying to scratch out a living with nothing but these little pie crust roads between them and the market. Most of them are just hanging on by a thread as it is." Hamm bit into a cheese cracker with peanut butter in the middle and said, "When it rains, they can't get out and the government won't fix the roads. They throw money at the big cities and build fancy buildings and all those overpasses and underpasses and in the meantime the small farmer is getting ignored. I'll tell you… it makes me mad to see good, hardworking, tax-paying people being kicked around like that. I watched my daddy get kicked around like that, so I know how it feels… But I can't do much. Just give them a little encouragement."
"Well, that's life, Hambo. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer, bless their pea-pickin' little hearts. The only difference between you and me and the rich is they've got money and we don't."
Hamm said, "Naw, Rodney, I don't think it's just the money they are different from us. I was around a few of those rich people once and found that out myself."
"When was this?"
"After the war, when I was in school, I met a few of those rich college boys while I was waiting tables. I used to joke around with them every once in a while. I wasn't friends with them or nothing like that, but this one kid from Minneapolis must have thought I was unique or something and invited me to go home with him one weekend."