(For everyone who asked:)

I real quick want to tell you about what happened when two old-time Eastern Shore characters named Sturgill Emory and Olney Herbertson kidnapped Everett and Donald Barren.

It’s important for you to know a few things first, like how this particular crime took place right before Christmas many years ago, back when folks around here all lived off two things – the land and the Chesapeake Bay. Most everybody was poor in those days. We just hadn’t yet been informed of it. Somebody had to come along later and fill us in on that little tidbit of news.

You should know too that the two friends in this story were very different in almost every way. Sturgill Emory was charming, dapper, and well-off; his daddy was a big-fish-little-pond kinda fella, while Olney Herbertson was a hardscrabble tough guy full of Rye whiskey and orneriness. The two of them were lifelong running buddies and mutual bad influences ever since the first grade when they set fire to the outdoor privy at Miss Myrtle DeCourcey’s one room schoolhouse.

And also, Everett and Donald Barren were jackasses. Not jackasses like politicians and showbiz folk, but real jackasses. Mules. Donkeys. Ears. Tails. Buckteeth. You get the picture.

As things happened more often than not back in those days, Sturgill and Emory were holding down a couple of barstools at the Towed Inn when it all started.

“How about another round?” asked Earl, the owner-bartender.

“I believe,” Sturgill Emory said to nobody really but himself, “Gunther Barren is shorting me and my daddy on his Christmas clippings.”

The season had started mild, weather-wise, but around the holidays back then, no matter what, there always used to be a big business for folks to cut holly and mistletoe by the boatload and ship it up the Bay to sell in Baltimore City where it was transported by rail the same way we sent our oysters, tomatoes, and peaches out into the great beyond.

“I don’t know of a way I could possibly care less,” Olney told Sturgill.

Sturgill never let other people not caring about what he was saying stop him, so he went on. “We’ve been letting Gunther go into those woods down off Knuckle Cove to take all the cuttings he wants, plus we lent him daddy’s scow to take them up to Baltimore to sell. All he had to do was cough up fifteen percent of the gross. He said he made three full trips, but daddy had our tenant down there keeping an eye out, and Clayton said he saw Gunther’s oldest boy Leo alone make at least five trips.”

“Clayton never could count too good,” Olney pointed out.

“He can count to five!”

“I can too. So how about we go ahead and have one more? That’ll make us an even five. And it’s your turn to buy a round.”

Sturgill squinted his eyes and squinched his nose and said, “What?”

“What?” Olney parried.

“There’s nothing right about what you just said, except about how we should have another round. Earl, set me and the mathematician up again. On me. Just like the last eight hundred rounds.”

“You got it, Sturgill,” said Earl. “Want me close your tab out?”

“Better not do that,” advised Olney. “We still might have a couple more after this next one.”

“You got it, Olney,” said Earl.

Sturgill finished his original thought: “I know Gunther is cheating us, but I don’t know what to do about it. If I ask him again, he’s just going to lie again, and it’s too late in the season to worry about throwing him off the property. A part of something is always better than all of nothing, I guess, but I wish there was a way to get what he owes us. Two whole shipments of greenery ain’t nothing to sneeze at, you know. Not these days.”

Offering a solution, Olney said, “We could rob him.”

“Nah,” reasoned Sturgill “he’d call the law on us before I’d even get the chance to blame it all on you.”

“We could kidnap one of his kids. Ask a ransom.”

“Ain’t nobody want none of them misbehaving little simpletons.”

Olney thought a moment. “We could kidnap Everett and Donald,” he said before taking a healthy slug from his freshly uncapped bottle of beer. Then he burped. Loudly. Then he burped again.

Now, I’ve got to pause here and tell you that Everett and Donald Barren were not just any ol’ burros. They were Gunther Barren’s two best friends. He loved Everett and Donald like they were family. In fact, he loved them even more than that.

Gunther Barren had a way with animals. He was the closest thing we had to a veterinarian around here back then. He made more of a living breaking horses and training oxen than he did working his small tenant farm. Gunther never liked people much, but he cared for his livestock and pets with a gentle compassion, and Everett and Donald were his pride and joy.

The mules were brothers. They’d been beaten by their original owner, so Gunther paid the man almost twice their market value to save them from the cruelty. When he got them back to his place, he quickly found them to be bright, personable, and loyal creatures. They were smarter than most of Gunther’s children and more affectionate than his wife.

Everett and Donald ambled around the Barren farm as they pleased, and at night they slept in comfortable stables next to a milking parlor where Gunther housed a few dairy cattle. When it got cold out, Gunther would put the two mules on the enclosed porch attached to the side of his house and light a fire for them in the coal stove he kept out there for just that purpose. 

But like I said, it was a mild evening, so when Sturgill and Olney set out to kidnap Everett and Donald, the mules were asleep in their stable. The jackasses what stole them put them in the back of Sturgill’s pickup truck.

“What the hell are we supposed to do with these damned mules now?” Sturgill finally figured he’d ask.

“I,” Olney reported in after a slug off their shared flask, “was not in charge of that part of the plan, Sturgill.”  

“Exactly what part of the plan were you in charge of, Olney?”

“I came up with the idea. I held the door while you led them out of the stable. I walked Everett out the lane. I put the tailgate down, and then put it back up. Christ, Sturge, what part of this operation wasn’t I in charge of?”

“Okay then, General Pershing,” said Sturgill, “what’s next?”

“Well, obviously,” said Olney, “we hide the donkeys somewhere. Tomorrow, you go tell Gunther that you know he’s been cheating you and you want your money. He’ll be all out of whack over Everett and Donald getting snatched. You tell him that if he pays you what he owes you, you’ll see he gets them back without having to pay that steep ransom.”

“Well, said Sturgill, “That ain’t too bad, old buddy, but mightn’t he suspect I had something to do with their disappearance? I mean I can BS with the best of them, but I’ve never been much of liar. Or, you know, as criminally minded as some present company might be.”

“Oh,” said Olney. “He’s gonna know you did it. No doubt about that. And I’m not crazy about what you’re insinuatin’. It’s accurate, but hurtful.”

Sturgill said, “I’m starting to get the feeling this wasn’t such a great idea” and took a prolonged pull from the flask.

“Look,” Olney told Sturgill, “let’s take this one step at a time. First, I’m beat. Let’s put these mules somewhere and call it a night. We can figure out what to do next tomorrow.” 

“We sure as hell can’t take them to any of my daddy’s properties,” Sturgill guaranteed his partner in crime. “If this goes kablooey, Pap is not going to want to have had no part in any of it.”

Olney thought for a drawn-out minute and then made a proposal. “How about this,” he offered. “First step: We load ol’ Everett and Donald onto your daddy’s scow and run the two of ‘em out to Little Dick Island for safe keeping overnight. Nobody’ll ever see them out there. Once Gunther pays up, we’ll go get them and bring them straight back.

“What’s the second step?” Sturgill asked.

“I already told you. We call it a night. Jeez, Sturgill, try to keep up.”

“Gunther’s going to lose his mind, Olney. If he figures out who kidnapped his mules, charges will be pressed. Triggers probably too.” He gave it all some serious pondering. “Maybe he’ll just pay the ransom,” he said. “Leave the money in a sack down by the river like we told him in the note. Maybe he’ll just want Everett and Donald back, no questions asked.”

Olney had his moment of clarity. He pulled a crinkled piece of paper from the chest pocket of his overalls and said, “Maybe we should have remembered to leave the ransom note.”

A light came on in the house and they took off.

 Well, the next afternoon, at the tail end of the biggest surprise winter storm we’d seen in decades, Sturgill and Olney showed up at the Towed Inn and told us all the rest of the story of what happened after they rode out of Crab Alley Crick and deposited Everett and Donald on Little Dick Island.

With little variations, they’d tell that story the rest of their lives.

“We left them mules standing there on the marsh,” Olney laughed. “Looking at us like we was the morons,”. 

“That’s when I kinda noticed the temperature had dropped a bit,” Sturgill said, “but I didn’t pay it much mind. I’d had a long day, too.”

So they get Everett and Donald out to Little Dick Island, come back to shore and have a nightcap or two. Sturgill drops Olney off, goes home, climbs into bed with his wife, and shuts out the light. Well, wouldn’t you know it, the temperature drops about 40, almost 50 degrees overnight. That nor’easter wind comes up, it’s blowing a gale, and by dawn the snow’s coming down by the wagon load. When Sturgill wakes up its real, real cold.  

“Cold as a coma,” Sturgill told the guys at the Towed.

“Cold as Admiral Byrd’s ball-sack,” confirmed Olney.

“What woke me,” said Sturgill, “was my snores. It was so cold they were freezing in the air right over my face. You’d have thought Nanook had moved in next door. It felt like it was 20 below and that was inside the house. Anyway, when I realized how cold it was, I panicked thinking about them damned donkeys, and I jumped up out of bed and drove down to the shore lickety-split. Didn’t even stop to pick up Olney. Got down there, and just like that, the crick had froze all the way over.”

“So,” Olney told the crowd, “Everett and Donald just walked right home across the ice.”

Sturgill chuckled, shaking his head. “When I drove over to Gunther’s place the two of them were right there under a lean-to in the front pasture in the middle of this snowstorm, eating hay like nothing had ever happened.”

“Gunther never even knew they’d been gone,” Olney said. “But I bet he’s still pondering over how they got out of that stable overnight.”

In the years that followed, Sturgill would always add that he ended up just writing those two cargoes of greenery off as a loss. “Never mentioned them to Gunther Barren again,” he would say.

“Turns out,” Olney only half-drunkenly announced that afternoon in the Towed, “all in all it was a very happy, Christmas-y type ending.” He put an empty beer bottle up on the bar and said, “So Earl, in honor of the spirit of the season and all’s well what ends well, why don’t you bring us all another round. On Sturgill’s tab, of course.”

Photo by Martin Alargent

Please purchase, read and review my books: REMEMBERING KENT ISLAND: STORIES FROM THE CHESAPEAKE, A HISTORY OF THE KENT ISLAND VOLUNTEER FIRE DEPARTMENT, BLOODY POINT 1976 and STARBUSH BY THE BUSHEL: HOLLYWOOD ON THE CHESAPEAKE BAY’S EASTERN SHORE!