CHAPTER 31

At the heart of things, the Hoolahan men were a break-off from a clan of swindlers and thieves in Hoboken, Alabama.  As it came out around the fire, Ezeriah and Horace were wanted for questioning  concerning several major and minor crimes, and had decided to transfer their talents to the new frontier.  

Jubilation Crawlback, as he lay rolled in his blankets, understood what he was hearing.  But with the joy of youth, he was sure he could scam the scammers and get away with it.  However, by 1916, just when Jube thought they had forgotten, the Hoolahans ran a campaign for Horace for City Council.  

The  Hoolahans had conquered the burden of developing Jube’s extra land by stringing it with        

barbed-wire.  Through methods known only to them, they had tripled their herds and hired a large gang of gun-wielding cowboys ready to obey every command.  

So, even though there were voices at the beginning who claimed that the Hoolahans were ineligible to hold office  because they didn’t live within City Limits, they were, none-the-less, the richest and most powerful force in the area; and those who spoke against them either soon suffered some form of  harassment, or suddenly bought new drapes for the living room.

 In January of 1917 the new era began.  First order of business was to claim Public Domain and rid the town of the bathhouse and its accruing stigma of shame.  

Horace repeatedly told of how his poor innocent wife, Anna Mae Potts Hoolahan, had been corrupted by the promise of illicit gains, and changed her name to Trudence LaForge, to be lost to her husband and son forever.  In a strange twist of fate, the women of the Jerkwater Community Bible Church backed Horace’s proposal, even before he declared the land should be donated to the JCBC.  Furthermore, they all  decided there could be no liquor establishment built within four-hundred-fifty feet of the church in any direction.  Jube had gone bankrupt and he knew that had always been a part of the the plan.        

For his first three years of pauperism, Jube had been a social outcast.  It was only after the Hoolahan’s secret deal with the railroad - to move the upcoming tracks so that they were convenient to their own personal loading area but cut the church off from most of its congregation - that public opinion wavered.  And it was another fifteen years until Jube’s half brother, Larry, twenty-five years Jube’s junior and newly-made widower, came from Minneapolis with his son, Rudolph, to build a bar.   

Rude finished this story on his third date with Isobel.  Two tables over, Lloyd and Charm Lupinski     celebrated their twenty-seventh anniversary with champagne and Ethyl Esther’s pasta primavera.  Charm was beaming all evening.