“Yeah?” I said. “How’s that, baby?”

“Sam Gaddis. The whole town’s talking about him. Why, do you know what he did, Nick?”

“I ain’t got the slightest idea,” I said. “I always thought Sam was a mighty good man.”

“He raped a little two-year-old nigger baby, that’s what!”

“Mmmm? Male or female?” I said.

“Female, I guess. I—‘ha, ha’—Nick, you awful thing, you.” She laughed and gave me a squeeze.“But isn’t it terrible, honey! To think of a grown man screwing a poor innocent little baby! And that’s only one thing he did!”

“Do tell,” I said. “Like which?”

Rose said that Sam had also cheated a poor widow woman out of her life’s savings, and then he’d beat his own father to death with a stick of cordwood to keep him from talking about it.

“And that’s only the beginning. Nick. Everyone’s saying that Sam broke into his grandma’s grave, and stole the gold teeth out of her mouth. Did you ever hear of such a thing? And he killed his wife and fed her corpse to the hogs. And—”

“Now, wait a minute,” I said. “Sam Gaddis has never been married.”

“You mean you just never saw his wife. He was married before he came here, and he fed her to the hogs before anyone could find out about her.”

“Aw, come on, now,” I said. “Just when is Sam supposed to have done all these things?”

Rose hesitated and said, well, she didn’t know when exactly. But, by God, she knew he’d done ‘em.

“People wouldn’t just make up stories like that. They couldn’t!”

“Couldn’t they?”

“Why, of course not, honey! Anyway, most of the stories came right from Mrs. Robert Lee Jefferson, according to Myra. Her own husband told them to her, and you know Robert Lee Jefferson wouldn’t lie.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It don’t seem like he would now, does it?”

And I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing. Or maybe doing the opposite. Because it was really pretty god-danged sad, now, wasn’t it? It was a god-danged sorry state of affairs.

Of course, it was all to the good for me. I’d thrown the bait to Robert Lee Jefferson, and he’d bit on it. He’d done just what I expected him to do—gone around, asking people what the stories about Sam were. Which had started them to asking other people. And before long, there were plenty of answers; the kind of stinking dirty dirt that people can always create for themselves when there ain’t none for real.

And it made me kind of sad, you know? Really downright sad. I couldn’t help wishing that Robert Lee hadn’t taken the bait, and started asking questions. Which, in turn, had started piling up the dirt around a fine man like Sam Gaddis.

Yes, sir, I really sort of wished things hadn’t worked out this way. Even if it did ruin Sam and get me re-elected, which it was just about certain to do.