Tales from Hogwaller Holler: Moonshine, Pt. 2

© 2018 by Walter Reimer


Certain of the settings and characters in this story are supplied by E.O. Costello. Thanks!


2.

Junior Dennison considered the Governor’s job his by right, as he was Old Man Dennison’s eldest son. You had to admit he certainly looked like a governor. The wolf was tall, with finely brushed fur, and a natty three-piece suit ordered all the way from Rich's in Atlanta. He could also make a fine speech in a courthouse square.

He was even better, people noted, at making enemies. Folks started noticing that really early on, when he literally elbowed a few of the more prominent members of the Machine out of the way to make a show of mourning for his father. Even if he was the heir of the dead wolf, some of the furs that had carried out the Old Man's wishes thought he was being a little too fast, and more than a little grabby.

Well, nothing sells newspapers like a good, old-fashioned, knock down and drag out fight of an election. While it was great for the papers, it wasn’t too good for the state’s reputation or all those high-sounding words about ‘one fur, one vote.’ Matter of fact, a few people figured out that there’s another side to that rule.

Namely, one less fur, one less vote.

There wasn’t much of a chance that Junior Dennison and Boss Angus would bury the hatchet any time soon, unless it was in each other’s heads. Junior's enemy-making habits were well-honed, and started with a series of State Police raids in Boss Angus' domain, noisy ones that got either front-page headlines and pictures (in papers that supported Dennison) or scathing, critical editorials (in papers that were owned, literally or otherwise, by Angus and his crew). Scantily-clad femmes will catch the eye, you know what I mean?

So, Election Night wasn’t a pretty picture, as you might expect. It made the first election after the Boys in Blue took over seem like a Sunday picnic. The State Police had to call out all of its reserves to keep track of the ballot boxes. The local sheriffs and chiefs of police had to make do in order to keep people from getting too badly beat up or killed. Sad to say, there were a few furs ended up dead.

There was also a lot of talk flying around about bootleg liquor being used to help sway undecided voters to vote the right way. Just between you and me, now, that’s a fine old tradition, stretching all the way back to when the people bent the knee to the King. Can’t see too much wrong with keeping up traditions, but if it leads to heads getting broke, well, that’s just not fair play.

Most of the seats in the Legislature were uncontested. That’d been the case pretty much since the end of the War, except for a try by some poor, deluded fur who thought that he would be the start of the Other Party's comeback in the State. So early on in the election, something like four-fifths of the 301 seats were spoken for, one way or the other.

But it was that final fifth, about fifty-five seats, that was causing the ruckus. People were accusing other people of tampering with the voting registers, ballot boxes, voting locations, election inspectors and the like. The fur’d been flying back and forth for weeks, and it was evident that the Legislature wasn't going to be able to sort out the matter until it got organized. And it couldn't be organized until all its members were seated.

Old Man Dennison might have been able to sort it out. Back in his day, he had a good tight grip on the wheel of the ship of state, and every fellow who warmed a seat in the Legislature knew his place and kept to it. But with him gone to his Eternal Reward, and the Regulars and the Mavericks now split and feuding like mountain folks, it was every fur for himself.

Hang on a minute, while I get a lemonade, will you? This stuff’s drier than a desert on a summer afternoon. You want one?

Now, where was I? Oh yes. So the fur finally stopped flying and there were a fifth of the seats still being fought over. There was nothing for it but to dump the whole mess into the black-clad laps of the State Supreme Court of Errors. It’s a good name for them; "Nothing like truth in advertising," a reporter for the Journal-Post said, which made a lot more than his editor laugh. Most of the nine furs were old courthouse hacks that had been appointed at one time or another by Old Man Dennison. He expected them to rule the way he wanted them to rule, whether it was for the Railroad, the Power Company, the Union Trust, or the Mill Group, or against pesky furs with interesting interpretations of the State's constitution.

That was a tricky proposition all by itself. That thing’s been amended seventy-eight times since Reconstruction ended. There’s only three furs now who know what it actually says, and of those three one’s dead, another’s in the state mental home, and I was the third one but I forgot.

Poor Junior Dennison had been made to sweat it out, and he was fretting like an expectant father. The ‘official’ election returns had him winning by about 4,500 votes, and that number was firm with no way of getting around it. Whether he was going to be able to govern, though, was another question. The Supreme Court was slowly whittling down the number of open races. Here and there, a result had to be overturned, much to the joy and fury of one side or another.

So as things stood, it was 146 for the Regulars, and 139 for the Mavericks, with most of the open cases being in Dennison County. Yeah, you heard me right; the county was named for the Old Man’s family, and it’s sort of their property. Old Man Dennison learned from his daddy’s knee how to grease a palm or two and make sure ‘his people’ did all right, and Junior learned the same way.

Like it or not, most of the people in the State thought that Junior Dennison and the Regulars would be running the State for the next four years. Matter of fact, most people had already gone back about their business. Court cases can get boring after a while, and there’s always jobs to be done and bills to pay, am I right? You can read about things in the papers after the reporters have finished chewing things over.

Speaking of the reporters, quite a few from the big Eastern papers were still loafing around, trying to pay attention to those last few court cases, while dunning their editors for just another few dollars to get by on. Mind you, getting by usually meant nightly penny-ante poker games in the Correspondent’s Room at the State capitol building. Place still smells like an old ashtray, even though you can open the windows. Most of the reporters were thinking that things would settle down and go back to the way they always had.

Now, I say “most” of the reporters, and that’s a fact. A few of them were watching this one old skunk, reporter from a local paper he was. Dapper gent, always wearing an old-fashioned frock coat with white shirt and string tie, set off with pince-nez. He wasn't much of a poker-player, anyway, and tended to fold fairly quickly. The Sun's reporter was on a very strict allowance from his boss, a boss that was a deacon in his church, and didn't approve of gambling. Didn’t approve of a lot of other things, but that’s another story.

He was being way too quiet, and that made the other reporters a little nervous. What was that old skunk up to? Did he know something? Did he have sources they didn’t? Now, that was possible; he was the oldest fur in the room, after all.

What they didn’t know was that old skunk had put a well-trimmed claw on a fact that no other paper had remembered, and that was that for the first time since time out of mind, there was not one independent in the Legislature, but two. Furs that owed no allegiance to either the Regulars or the Mavericks.

And that leads me to Billy Rackham, and Calder Hall.



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