What You Don’t Know Won’t Hurt You—Maybe!

A Report from our Down East Correspondent Shadrach Spencer.

Mildred and Wally Hotchkiss lived a long way off the main road, and Mildred was a penurious old woman, meanin’ she was a tight as tick when it came to spendin’ money; that, and it was a long way to town in their 1963 Ford pickup; which is why she was a’ churnin’ her own butter, an’ it was cheaper that way, besides that, it saved on gas, and that old Ford really sucked gas. (Now the editor tells me that’s long sentence, but I been readin’ St. Paul, and he carries on more’n that, an’ I reckon’ he knows what he’s doin’.)

As I was sayin’ she was busy a’ churnin butter. After a while she went into the house get herself a cup of tea, and after a bit she came back and went on a’ churnin’. When she was finished she had a wonderful junk of butter, and that’s not all; she also discovered a dead mouse in the left-over buttermilk. Just about then Wally came into the milk shed, took one look at the butter, an’ another look at the mouse, and kind o’ turned green. There wasn’t a way on God’s good earth he was a’ goin to eat that butter.

Mildred had no choice. She took that junk of butter and tossed it in the styrofoam cooler that Wally used for bait, climbed in the old pickup an’ headed for Millsap’s General Store over in town. She took Will Millsap aside and explained her perdicament, “There’s not a thing in the world wrong with the butter, but Wally found out and he won’t touch it. It’s a shame to waste that much good butter.”  She flushed a little, an’ braced herself, and then said, “You don’t think I could trade it in for another piece of butter, and maybe you could sell mine to somebody else?” Then she added slyly, “After all, what they don’t know won’t hurt them.”

Now Will Millsap had lot’s o’ dealin’s with Mildred and Wally over the years and he knew that co-operation was a lot easier than arguin’ so he took Mildred’s butter out back where she couldn’t see him and whacked it into a different shape with a meat cleaver then squared of the ends, and brought it back out to Mildred.

“Well you’re in luck,” said Will, “I just happened to have another piece just about the same size. I’ll sell yours to someone else, and you can have this one. No charge! An even trade. How about that? Like you said, ‘What they don’t know won’t hurt them.’”