Mr. Poppins Basement Improvement: Cowchip Alabama, #4

By Norman E. Morrison

Good old fashioned Southern Crime Fiction by Norman E. Morrison. See also the other Cowchip/AL related works.

"Clang! A most satisfying, if short ringing sound, unlike a bell, but every bit as rousing. The nerves of the hand and wrist perceived the minute vibrations of the instrument even as the music quickly melted. It was the sound of cast iron whacking a melon, only it was a large frying pan and it wasn't a melon at all."

Mr. Poppin's Basement Improvement is a murder mystery set near Cowchip/AL in the rural Poppin Hill community. It's the culmination of a long line of events that began shortly after the Civil War and ended just yesterday with a frying pan being deposited inside a man's head.
It's fairly obvious from the outset who the culprit is. The question, is... will he be caught, and how?

Rated PG. No naughty stuff. Just good clean murder by pan. Volume #8. Print Length: 50 pages.

This is a fun tale in the Cowchip/AL series of uniquely written books, always a quarter turn out from what you expect.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Norman E. Morrison
• Release date: Oct 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9798224863075

Book preview

Clang! A most satisfying, if short ringing sound, unlike a bell, but every bit as rousing. The nerves of the hand and wrist perceived the minute vibrations of the instrument even as the music quickly melted. It was the sound of cast iron whacking a melon, only it was a large frying pan and it wasn't a melon at all.

mrpoppin.jpg

The Beginning

Old man Poppin relived the sound and feeling every day of his life, particularly the first thing in the morning. It gave him at once a thrill and fear, even though many years had passed since that fateful day. In his strikingly dull life, the big clang as he liked to think of it was his one major accomplishment.

Sitting in the easy chair in the living room, Clang, he said aloud, chuckling a little.

Ding went the door chime...

Standing outside, Theophilus Bump, a perpetually cheerful man, was old, even older than old man Poppin.

A short, scrawny, slightly bent black man, he had been born on a farm nearby, the son of sharecroppers. Early in his life he had gone north to make his fortune. From a hobo in the back of the boxcar, to a porter on a northern railroad, he had saved his tips and retired on a pension many years before. Coming back home on a train, this time around the porters waited on him.

His savings and pension were put to use in buying land, including the Poppin property. The forest clear cut that surrounded the house on Poppin Hill was the second go around. The first cutting had made him well off, and the second, had made him rich in this land tax generous state.

The bulk of his holdings were in farm and forest land far out in the country.

The sparsely settled Poppin Hill settlement was an oasis in the jungles of Alabama’s famed Cheaha corridor, the nearest town being that of Cowchip/AL, which was 15 miles away down back country roads. The residents of this time warped cross roads community eked out a living by mingling welfare with food stamps and, by doing odd jobs for the well to do gentry living off old money and old land.

Of course, a handful had broken out of the system. A handful of truck drivers, loggers, and the odd one here and there who did useful work in Cowchip, but mostly it was still Antebellum, the happy but hapless residents exchanging the rich local masters for the rich far off masters in Montgomery and Washington.

For black man and white man alike, things hadn't changed much in the last century. The future was only slowly catching up with the past in Poppin Hill.

Black and white still didn’t socialize in Poppin Hill, but they worked well together. Always had. When everyone is poor, there isn’t as much time for class snobbery, robbery, and racism. Poverty, it seems, is the great equalizer. Besides, most of the time, southern folks get along with one another. It’s hard to look down your nose at a shotgun shack when you’re living in a 1965 mobile home with Sunday lunch pecking around in the yard for bugs.

Theophilus Bump was such a man who fled the past, and successfully. He had worked very hard all of his life to feed, clothe and educate his large brood of children and they had all done well by him.

When the time came, those children begat more children, and yet still more. Yes, he had done well for them. Not too shabby for a pea picking lad from nowhere, Alabama.

Looking back the way he came up