Wampus Cat

Wampus Cat By Timothy C. Phillips Byron House lay awake while his wife tickled his neck and smiled ever hopefully at his side. As he did every night, Byron House steadfastly ignored her feeble advances and stared stonily at the spotless white paint of the... More

Wampus Cat By Timothy C. Phillips Byron House lay awake while his wife tickled his neck and smiled ever hopefully at his side. As he did every night, Byron House steadfastly ignored her feeble advances and stared stonily at the spotless white paint of the bedroom ceiling. He was a man with a lot of things on his mind. Fourteen sharecroppers worked House’s land. A disagreement with one of the sharecroppers currently knitted his brow. The Trumbles raised corn on House’s lower east forty. They had moved to Benton County the previous year from Georgia. They were a typical sharecropper family; there was Old Man Trumble, his wife, and a gaggle of children, ranging from tow-headed brats to a couple of almost-grown teenagers. The Trumble’s first corn crop on his land had been decidedly poor. That would not have been too bad; but there were other complexities. Foremost among these complexities was a somewhat threadbare tradition suggested that a sharecropper in such a predicament mig Less