An Incident at the Hoe-Cake Cafe, Chapter III

Anne Boleyn Jones had grown into a big woman. Now in her late twenties, she stood at six feet one inch and weighed a well-proportioned one hundred fifty pounds. When she was a little girl, she'd been fiercely competitive in all endeavors -- a tomboy. Her teachers in school had nicknamed her Up-And-At-'Em Annie. Her father, Nick Jones, lived in a falling-down farmhouse just outside Alfalfa Junction, where State Highway 452 met the River Road. Old man Jones smoked, got drunk, collected firearms and ate canned corned beef hash because it reminded him of the tinned bully beef for which he'd cultivated a taste during his Army days. He collected a modest veteran's pension for undistinguished service during the Spanish-American War and supplemented his income by selling night crawlers and bloodworms to the fishermen who fished the Susquehannica and its tributaries. "Reason God made guns is so white men can shoot niggers," old Jonesy said one night at Sam Pardee's speakeasy in Alfalfa Junction. Sarah Jones, Annie's mother, shielded her daughter for as long as she could, deflecting and often absorbing the impact of Nick Jones's alcoholic rages. But one night, after the old man had chased her a quarter-mile down the River Road, waving his Army-issue revolver and threatening to blow her goddamn head off, Sarah Anne Jones took cover in a patch of woods and waited until the old man had stumbled back to the house and passed out. Then she crept back, collected her five-year-old daughter and one carpet bag containing her important possessions, blew out the pilot light, opened all the valves on the gas stove and set fire to a pile of oily rags in the basement. Explosions and fire lit the night sky behind them as Sarah and Annie walked up the road to Alfalfa Junction. Sarah's older sister, Emma James, proprietress and owner of the Grand Continental Hotel., took them in as long-term guests. The Grand Continental was neither grand nor continental, and was a hotel only in the sense that it provided living quarters for a dozen or so unmarried young women and temporary recreational lodgings for traveling salesmen with cash in their pockets. Sarah and Annie settled in and Sarah earned room and board by cooking, cleaning and tending to the endless female problems of the working girls.

Orders from Windstorm Creative

Dear Readers... A number of you have told me you're not receiving books you ordered from my publisher, Windstorm Creative. I need to get to the bottom of this quickly. If you are one of the above, please e-mail me at clemson.page@verizon.net with the following information: 1. When you placed your order. 2. How you placed your order: phone? e-mail? Other? 3. Where did you send your order? 4. Did you receive confirmation? 5. Did you make payment by credit card or otherwise? I am considerably embarrassed at hearing these reports, and I'd really appreciate your help in my investigation. Thanks. Clem.

Why "Son of a Curmudgeon"? (Reprise)

Over the years, people have called me a son of many things, most of them based on my supposed relationship to female dogs. But why a Son of a Curmudgeon? It started one winter day, just before Christmas, in the early 1960s. Our family was gathered in the living room. My brothers and I were taking bets on whether or not the Christmas tree would remain standing under the onslaught of Mom’s relentless tinkering with the ornaments and placement of the lights. Everyone was in a festive poisonous humor. The language was quite inappropriate for the season. We decided to take a break for family photos. What a great idea! I can’t remember which moron came up with it, but at least it promised to sidetrack momentarily the strife over the tree. We started with Dad. We sat him in a straight-backed chair, handed him a walking stick, and told him to look as crusty and disagreeable as he could -- not a difficult assignment under the circumstances -- while one of us took the picture. I wish I could show you the result, but it's lost to posterity, more's the pity. Pop looked like one of those sourpussed elderly gentlemen you sometimes see in old studio photographs, their necks clamped in steel and celluloid to prevent the slightest appearance of comfort or relaxation. From the day it came back from the photo shop to the day it vanished into the ether, that portrait was titled “Curmudgeon.” Dad decided he enjoyed the role and refined it considerably during the remainder of his life. Happily, he could toggle it on and off at will, and never lost his capacity to enjoy or share a good joke or a conversation. As the years go by, I find myself wondering if curmudgeonliness might not be an inherited trait. When I see current photographs of myself (see above), I seem to want to growl at someone.

An Incident at the Hoe-Cake Cafe, Chapter II

Everything was calm at the Hoe-Cake Café until the day young Up-And-At-'Em Annie showed up. It was a Sunday in October 1933, just after the repeal of Prohibition. She rolled onto the cindered side lot astride a red Indian motorcycle with half a dozen other girls from Ma James's ... well, establishment ... in Alfalfa Junction, all of them on red Indian motorcycles, too. One with a taste for Wagnerian music and Teutonic legend might have called it a latter-day Ride of the Valkyries. Caldonius came out to meet them, wiping his hands on one of little Lizzie's diapers -- a clean one. They came in handy as rags in his workshop, and Lizzie didn't hardly need them no more. The water wheel was turning and the Café was thump-thumping its heartbeat over the thrum of the motorcycle engines. "Hey, nigger. Shine mah shoes." Annie swung off the Indian and shoved an engineer-booted foot at Caldonius. He regarded it for a moment without comment, then raised his eyes and met Annie's stare. The other girls stood in a loose circle around the two. Several of them struck wooden matches on the seats of their dungaree britches and lit Lucky Strikes which they then pasted to their lower lips with spit so they hung insolently from the corners of their mouths. "Well, now, ma'am, I ain't what you'd call a proper bootblack, so I can't oblige you with a shoeshine." Caldonius stuffed the diaper in his back pocket and fingered the handle of the wooden mallet in his apron pouch. During the Depression years, the rural portions of the Susquehannica valley, along the River Road from Alfalfa Junction to Dixon's Ferry, were a string of somnolent hamlets in a neutral zone between the virulent racial hatreds of the South and the more subtle prejudices of the North. People had called Caldonius a nigger all his life, so the word had lost – never really had – any power to shock or offend him. On the other hand, he'd carried a rifle in the mud of France and fought alongside troops of all the Allied nations and had come to believe it should not be any black man's lot in life to look at his feet and mumble "Yassuh" whenever a white man chose to call him a nigger. He'd fought alongside the best and the worst of them. The bullets and the gas and the shrapnel and the enemy bayonets had not discriminated in winnowing the ranks. It didn't matter whether he'd fought well or was just lucky – most likely, it was a bit of both – Caldonius Chisholm from Ashepoo, South Carolina, had lived to participate in the triumph of the forces which had fought to end all wars. By the time he was mustered out of the 341st Infantry Battalion at Camp Dix in 1921, he was no longer willing to think of himself as a nigger, nig, nigra, coon, shine, darky, spade, jig, jigaboo or any of the myriad other names some people seemed to have bestowed upon others because of differences in skin pigmentation. Caldonius smiled at Annie. "No, ma'am. I can't shine your shoes. But my wife's cookin' up some mighty fine flapjacks inside. You and your friends be most welcome to join the folks eatin' 'em." MORE TO COME

A Good Day at the Chateau

I’m pleased to report that we sold 44 copies of my book today at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Sinking Spring, PA. The proceeds have gone to the parish building fund. Just a small way of thanking the Creator for the gift of words and storytelling. I’m even more pleased to report that my first granddaughter, Nora Jeanne Molyneaux. was born today in Boston to my daughter Lindsay and her husband Brad. It’s been a good day and I’m grateful.

An Incident at the Hoe-Cake Cafe, Chapter I

When the food wheel turned at the Hoe-Cake Café on River Road in the Susquehannica River valley, music played and the food came up from the griddles, steaming and delicious. A Little Black Sambo doll sashayed and cakewalked and hallelujahed while a pair of ceramic tigers chased each other around a real miniature coconut palm tree on the highboy in the middle of the dining room. Nobody could remember what the food wheel was supposed to signify, if anything. It was a miniature ship's wheel of the type used aboard the flat-bottomed stern-wheelers that had plied the Susquehannica in fleets and squadrons around the turn of the century. It came with the place when Caldonius and Sassie-Marie Chisholm bought it in 1921 and renamed it the Hoe-Cake Café . Now, when the food wheel turned, powered by a water wheel and a system of shafts, cogs and gears, it made a rhythmic double thump that sounded for all the world like a human heartbeat. Rigging the system had been a sort of therapy for Caldonius Chisholm. The Meuse-Argonne offensive in 1918 had left him a hollow-eyed wreck, and he'd seemed to derive great comfort from harnessing the Susquehannica for his playful and not-so-playful purposes at the Hoe-Cake Café on the River Road between Alfalfa Junction and Port Coghlan. When the food wheel turned, the Hoe-Cake Café was alive. Its heartbeat reverberated from the high cliffs on both sides of the river. The Café perched, about half a bubble off plumb, on the east shore. A system of wooden sluices, gates and valves which Caldonius had made with hand tools brought water from the Susquehannica to the six-foot red-painted overshot water wheel that put life and mettle into the heels of Little Black Sambo and ran the ceramic tigers around the palm tree until they were a blur of yellow. The butter, however, came from the Upland Farms Dairy, and Sassie-Marie kept it in the kitchen icebox. At the top of the cliff on the western shore of the river, the terrain was flat and grassy. It fell away in a sheer drop of five hundred feet to the twin tracks of the Susquehannica-Havre de Grace Rail Road, which brought grain and produce from the heartland farms to the barges on the Chesapeake that carried it all to market. From the top of the cliff, the Hoe-Cake Café, with its fretwork of watercourses and its big red turning water wheel, looked like a one-of-a-kind toy some doting old Gepetto might build out of scrap lumber to enchant his grandchildren on Christmas morning. When he was busy with the never-ceasing care and adjustment of the water wheel (which also milled the buckwheat flour for Sassie-Marie's incomparable flapjacks), Caldonius Chisholm wore a striped denim engineer's cap and carried a long-spouted oil can. He oiled the bearings of the water wheel twice a day. The wheel turned quiet as a bat wing across the face of the moon. In his apron he carried a wooden mallet and pieces of oakum. Whenever he found a water leak in one of the wooden sluices, he pounded strips of oakum into the cracks, and the water stayed more or less within its appointed boundaries. And so the heartbeat of the Hoe-Cake Café double-thumped through the valley. And Little Black Sambo danced, the tigers chased each other around the palm tree on the highboy, and Sassie-Marie served heaping plates of buckwheat flapjacks to the customers who filled the gingham-covered tables from dawn to noon every day of the week. MORE TO COME

Shipping Misinformation from Amazon.com

Dear Readers... If you happen to want to purchase a copy of Up Home: Stedman 1903-1909, and you visit Amazon.com to make the purchase, you may see their ridiculous notation that the book "usually ships in 1 to 3 months" if you order it from Amazon. If you see that stupid notation, please don't laugh until cappuccino spurts from your nose. Just contact me, via this blog, and I'll see that you get a copy in a fraction of Amazon's ridiculous time frame. Those morons must think the book is being written in longhand, one copy at a time, by monks cloistered somewhere in the Hindu Kush, and shipped via slow boat from China. As you may have gathered, Amazon.com presently holds a high ranking position on my personal fecal roster. NOT THAT THEY BLOODY WELL CARE. They'll just blunder on like a nearsighted elephant, damning their authors to literary perdition by stupid listings of the type I'm bitching about here. Do you suppose the bitching will help? Please cast your votes.

A New Year's Greeting

THE CURMUDGEON’S SON SITS IN THE SUNSHINE ON NEW YEAR'S DAY AND GRIPES ABOUT THE HUMAN CONDITION

ON THIS DAY of resolutions and good intentions to reinvent our lives, it’s interesting to ponder why this impulse tends to strike only once a year. It’s like opening the windows on the first balmy, breezy day in the spring and letting in something to lighten the stale air we've been breathing all winter. The Solstice is past. The days begin to lengthen, however imperceptibly. The urge to shake off the shackles of the past peeks out like the sun from behind a dark cloud. Freedom! Why are we so afraid of it? Why do others get so anxious and disapproving when we talk about it – or, God forbid, actually practice it? In every social environment I’ve ever occupied, it’s been the same: whether they’ll admit it or not, people don’t want other people to start acting too free. I think it’s why New Year’s Day is a day off for so many of us. It’s how society lets us get this “I’m free” nonsense out of our systems for a day, before we slip back into the warm bath of mediocrity and self-imposed bondage in which we’ll soak for the next 364 days – unless death or insanity grabs us first. That’s more than just a little gloomy, isn’t it? You’ll have to decide for yourself whether you find a kernel of truth in it. This New Year’s Day of 2008, my take on it is that freedom is for the very young, the very old and the very crazy. So have a crazy new year! I certainly intend give it my best shot. Or so I say today, and here highly resolve. But I suspect the warm bath will be waiting tomorrow. Clem.