“Maybe it’s one of his mules,” he says.

The man up on the scaffold was still hammering away and muttering to hisself when we got in the car and drove back up the hill. Pop eased up real careful and stopped the car and trailer under the big tree in front of the house while we got ready to hold our noses. But when we got out it seemed like there was a little breath of air blowing up from the lake behind us, and we didn’t smell anything. Not at first.

It was real quiet. It was so still you could hear your breath going in and out. I liked it fine, because it was so different from all the noise around big cities like Aqueduct. I looked around. The front yard was bare dirt, beat down flat and smooth, and there was a walk marked off with square brown bottles set in the ground. The front door in the middle of the porch was open, but we didn’t see anybody inside. There was still a little smoke coming out of the stovepipe, but not as much as there had been at first.

“Hello!” Pop called out. “Hello, Sagamore!”

Nobody answered.

“Why don’t we just go in?” I asked.

Pop shook his head. “No. We might surprise him.”

“Ain’t it all right to surprise people?”

“Maybe some people,” Pop says. “But not Sagamore.”

“Well,” I says, “I don’t think there’s anybody here.”

Pop looked around, real puzzled. “Well, you’d think Bessie would be, anyway—oh, sweet Jesus!” He grabbed his nose and started fanning the air with his hat.

I began to choke too. “Pop,” I says, “it’s coming from over there. You see all them tubs, over there by the well?”

He waved an arm. “See if you can get close enough to find out what’s in ‘em.”

After you’d had a whiff or two you got a little used to it and you could breathe without choking, so I walked over towards the well. It was off beyond the end of the porch. There was a clothes line strung up between two posts, and the tubs was sitting in the sun just this side of it. There was six of ‘em, washtubs, strung out in a row along the side of the house. When I got up close I had to hold my nose again.

There was something in ‘em, all right. I couldn’t make it out at first. It looked like sort of brownish water with some scum and old thick bubbles floating on top. Then I saw there was something underneath the surface. I got a stick and poked around inside until I could fish part of it up. It was a cowhide. The hair was slipping off it. When I dropped it back, the whole mess bubbled. It was awful.

I looked at the other washtubs and they was all the same.