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