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cheaper prices than in town), provides all manner of canned goods and fresh vegetables, long underwear, firearms, spinning tops, bed linen, certain tractor attachments, scratch feed, calico, domestic hardware, and fishing bait. And there is even a slaughterhouse in the back.
    In the countryside surrounding it, and in Pine Cone itself, morality is rampant. When a boy playfully filched a pencil from his best friend, it was universally predicted that he would end up in the state penitentiary, if he recovered from the whipping that his father administered. And among adults, adultery is an unmentionable thing, which only occurs in the Bible and in Mobile. But this morality is that of the hard face: it is scandalous to mow your lawn on Sunday, for that shows disrespect for God, who likes long grass on the seventh day. On the other hand, it is perfectly natural -- because it is legal by the laws of the United States - for the president of the bank to foreclose on a piece of property adjoining his own, so that he could purchase it for the price of a dead dog, tear down an old woman's house, and build a swimming pool for himself. The old woman died in a nursing home in Andalusia before the pool could be filled with unchlorinated water.
    But it could be said also that there is a great vitality in the mean-spiritedness of the town's inhabitants. Sometimes they are creatively cruel to one another, and there were seasons in which Pine Cone was an exciting place to live- if you were a spectator, and not a victim.
    The Pine Cone Munitions Factory is made up of half a dozen large, single-storey, clapboard buildings set on piles of concrete blocks. These unsightly structures were built during World War II for the emergency production of exploding shells. Pine Cone was selected for the location of this facility precisely because it was small, insignificant, and remote - though not so very far from the important base at Fort Rucca, then technically only a camp - and because a congressional representative from Alabama on the Armed Services Committee had a nephew who owned a tract of land in Pine Cone which, because it was good for nothing at all, screamed out to be purchased at a fabulous sum by the wartime government.
    The plant during the war employed a great number of people, and these lucky ones, many of whom had not known employ-m ent since the beg inning of the Depression, actu ally dreaded the end of the great conflict in Europe and the Pacific, because that would also mean the cessation of their weekly pay envelopes which, if not generous, were at least regular. They were right, for directly after Japan surrendered, the railway stopped bringing into Pine Cone the carloads of parts that had been so easily assembled into the bullet-shaped instruments of destruction. The people who worked at the factory were let go, and they wandered disconsolately about the town, making trouble late in the night, consuming great amounts of bootleg whiskey (an industry that was not affected by the end of World War II), and wondering what they were going to do next.
    Unknown to them, however, the buildings had been sold privately, without bidding, and at a scandalously low sum, to the first cousin of the Alabama congressional representative who had got the plant located there in the first place. When questioned regarding the propriety of this, the Alabama congressman replied that the family had a sentimental attachment to the acres in Pine Cone, and wished to retain them in the family. He wasn't sure, but he thought that his great-grandmother might be buried in the vicinity.
    The machinery that had put together exploding shells was quickly converted for the assembly of a kind of rifle then much in favour with the army. Modifications, suggested by a Pentagon general who was rabid on the subject of repeating rifles, were incorporated and before long a large government contract had been awarded to the Pine Cone Munitions Factory, though as yet it had only its