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.