I can just imagine the "good ol' boys" ( and you're right, it is derogatory, short for " prejudiced,insensitive, unintelligent,loud and conformist",I think) of Childress would, if Jack was drinking, disappearing regularly,going off to Randall's boss's cabin with him on "fishing" trips, picking up the vibes - LD himself implies he thinks there's something effeminate about Jack when he says at Thanksgiving, "You want your son to grow up to be a man, don't you, daughter?"and may have given away, knowingly or not, his uneasiness; then there are the men watching Jack demonstrate the new combine who comment about his inability to ride bulls successfully ( and having that sort of mind I took "riding bulls" to be an analogue for heterosexual sex) - in total a lot of suspicion floating around and maybe it just reached critical mass and a group decided to do something about it. The burst tire story is the acceptable public version, but I like the way in Lureen's version Jack drowns in his own blood, symbolic to me of the way his passions/desires eventually kill him, and how, in the ss, Ennis thinks Jack might have lived had there been anyone there to turn him over, as he did that night on BBM when it all started ( and ended, too, in the " In my end is my beginning" way).
