Greg was not put out of countenance. He used the seventeen dollars to place an ad in the Oklahoma City Herald. The ad pointed out that about the same sort of thing had happened to a certain rat-catcher in the town of Hamlin. Being a Christian, the ad went on, Greg Stillson was not in the way of taking children, and he surely knew he had no legal recourse against a group as large and powerful as the Oklahoma Ranchers’ and Cattlemen’s Association. But fair was fair, wasn’t it? He had his elderly mother to support, and she was in failing health. The ad suggested that he had prayed his ass off for a bunch of rich, ungrateful snobs, the same sort of men that had tractored poor folks like the Joads off their land in the thirties. The ad suggested that he had saved tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of livestock and had got seventeen dollars in return. Because he was a good Christian, this sort of ingratitude didn’t bother him, but maybe it ought to
give the good citizens of the county some pause. Right-thinking people could send contributions to Box 471. care of the Herald.
Johnny wondered how much Greg Stillson had actually received as a result of that ad.
Reports varied. But that fall, Greg had been tooling around town in a brand-new Mercury. Three years’ worth of back taxes were paid on the small house left to them by Mary Loil’s mother. Mary Lou herself (who was not particularly sickly and no older than forty-five), blossomed out in a new raccoon coat. Stillson had apparently discovered one of the great hidden muscles of principle which move the earth: if those who receive will not pay. those who have not often will, for no good reason at all. It may be the same principle that assures the politicians there will always be enough young men to feed the war machine.
The ranchers discovered they had stuck their collection hand into a hornets’ nest. When members came in town, crowds often gathered and jeered at them. They were denounced from pulpits all across the county. They found it suddenly difficult to sell the beef the rain had saved without shipping it a considerable distance.
In November of that memorable year, two young men with brass knucks on their hands and nickel-plated .32’s. in their pockets had turned up on Greg Stillson’s doorstep, apparently hired by the Ranchers’ and Cattlemen’s Association to suggest – as strenuously as necessary – that Greg would find the climate more congenial elsewhere Both of them ended up in the hospital. One of them had a concussion. The other had lost four of his teeth was suffering a rupture. Both had been found on corner of Greg Stillson’s block, sans pants. Their brass knucks bad been inserted in an anatomical location most commonly associated with sitting down, and in case of one of these two young men, minor surgery was necessary to remove the foreign objects.
The Association cried off. At a meeting in early December, an appropriation of $700 was made from its fund, and a check in that amount was forwarded to Stillson.
He got what he wanted.
In 1953 he and his mother moved to Nebraska. The rainmaking business had gone bad, and there were some who said the pool-hall hustling had also gone bad. Whatever the reason for moving, they turned up in Omaha where Greg opened a house-painting business that bust two years later. He did better as a salesman for TruthWay Bible Company of America. He crisscrossed the cornbelt, taking dinner with hundreds of hard working, God-fearing farm families, telling the story his conversion and selling Bibles, plaques, luminous Jesuses, hymn books, records; tracts, and a rabidly right-wing paperback called America the TruthWay:
Communist-Jewish Conspiracy Against Our United States
In 1957 the aging Mercury was replaced with a brand-new Ford ranch wagon.
In 1958 Mary Lou Stillson died of cancer, and late that year Greg Stillson got out of the born-again Bible business and drifted east. He spent a year in New York City before moving upstate to Albany. His year in New York been devoted to an effort at cracking the acting business. It was one of the few jobs (along with house painting) that he hadn’t been able to turn a buck at. But probably not from lack of talent, Johnny thought cynically.