Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  Mr Hunter refolded the ribbon and returned it to his wallet. Then he put the hoe back on his shoulder, and we entered the cemetery. A little road went halfway into the cemetery, and a number of paths branched off from it, and both the road and the paths were hip-deep in broom sedge. Here and there in the sedge were patches of Queen Anne’s lace and a weed that I didn’t recognize. I pointed it out to Mr Hunter.

  ‘What is that weed in among the broom sedge and the Queen Anne’s lace?’ I asked.

  ‘We call it red root around here,’ he said, ‘and what you call broom sedge we call beard grass, and what you call Queen Anne’s lace we call wild carrot.’

  We started up the road, but Mr Hunter almost immediately turned in to one of the paths and stopped in front of a tall marble gravestone, around which several kinds of vines and climbing plants were intertwined. I counted them, and there were exactly ten kinds – cat brier, trumpet creeper, wild hop, blackberry, morning glory, climbing false buckwheat, partridgeberry, fox grape, poison ivy, and one that I couldn’t identify, nor could Mr Hunter. ‘This is Uncle Daws Landin’s grave,’ Mr Hunter said. ‘I’m going to chop down some of this mess, so we can read the dates on his stone.’ He lifted the hoe high in the air and brought it down with great vigor, and I got out of his way. I went back into the road, and looked around me. The older graves were covered with trees and shrubs. Sassafras and honey locust and wild black cherry were the tallest, and they were predominant, and beneath them were chokeberry, bayberry, sumac, Hercules’ club, spice bush, sheep laurel, hawthorn, and witch hazel. A scattering of the newer graves were fairly clean, but most of them were thickly covered with weeds and wild flowers and ferns. There were scores of kinds. The majority were the common kinds that grow in waste places and in dumps and in vacant lots and in old fields and beside roads and ditches and railroad tracks, and I could recognize them at a glance. Among these were milkweed, knotweed, ragweed, Jimson weed, pavement weed, catchfly, Jerusalem oak, bedstraw, goldenrod, cocklebur, butter-and-eggs, dandelion, bouncing Bet, mullein, partridge pea, beggar’s-lice, sandspur, wild garlic, wild mustard, wild geranium, rabbit tobacco, old-field cinquefoil, bracken, New York fern, cinnamon fern, and lady fern. A good many of the others were unfamiliar to me, and I broke off the heads and upper branches of a number of these and stowed them in the pockets of my jacket, to look at later under a magnifying glass. Some of the graves had rusty iron-pipe fences around them. Many were unmarked, but were outlined with sea shells or bricks or round stones painted white or flowerpots turned upside down. Several had fieldstones at the head and foot. Several had wooden stakes at the head and foot. Several had Spanish bayonets growing on them. The Spanish bayonets were in full bloom, and little flocks of white moths were fluttering around their white, waxy, fleshy, bell-shaped, pendulous blossoms.

  ‘Hey, there!’ Mr Hunter called out. ‘I’ve got it so we can see to read it now.’ I went back up the path, and we stood among the wrecked vines and looked at the inscription on the stone. It read:

  DAWSON LANDIN

  DEC. 18, 1828

  FEB. 21, 1899

  ASLEEP IN JESUS

  ‘I remember him well,’ said Mr Hunter. ‘He was a smart old man and a good old man – big and stout, very religious, passed the plate in church, chewed tobacco, took the New York Herald, wore a captain’s cap, wore suspenders and a belt, had a peach orchard. I even remember the kind of peach he had in his orchard. It was a freestone peach, a late bearer, and the name of it was Stump the World.’

  We walked a few steps up the path, and came to a smaller gravestone. The inscription on it read:

  SUSAN A. WALKER

  MAR. 10, 1855

  MAR. 25, 1912

  A FAITHFUL FRIEND

  ‘Born in March, died in March,’ said Mr Hunter. ‘Fifty-seven years and fifteen days, as well as I can figure it out in my head. “A Faithful Friend.” That hardly seems the proper thing to pick out and mention on a gravestone. Susan Walker was one of Uncle Daws Landin’s daughters, and she was a good Christian woman. She did more for the church than any other woman in the history of Sandy Ground. Now, that’s strange. I don’t remember a thing about Uncle Daws Landin’s funeral, and he must’ve had a big one, but I remember Susan Walker’s funeral very well. There used to be a white man named Charlie Bogardus who ran a store at the corner of Woodrow Road and Bloomingdale Road, a general store, and he also had an icehouse, and he was also an undertaker. He was the undertaker for most of the country people around here, and he got some of the Rossville business and some of the Pleasant Plains business. He had a handsome old horse-drawn hearse. It had windows on both sides, so you could see the coffin, and it had silver fittings. Bogardus handled Susan Walker’s funeral. I can still remember his two big black hearse-horses drawing the hearse up Bloomingdale Road, stepping just as slow, the way they were trained to do, and turning in to Crabtree Avenue, and proceeding on down to the cemetery. The horses had black plumes on their harnesses. Funerals were much sadder when they had horse-drawn hearses. Charlie Bogardus had a son named Charlie Junior, and Charlie Junior had a son named Willie, and when automobile hearses started coming in, Willie mounted the old hearse on an automobile chassis. It didn’t look fish, fowl, or fox, but the Bogarduses kept on using it until they finally gave up the store and the icehouse and the undertaking business and moved away.’

  We left Susan Walker’s grave and returned to the road and entered another path and stopped before one of the newer graves. The inscription on its stone read:

  FREDERICK ROACH

  1891–1955

  REST IN PEACE

  ‘Freddie Roach was a taxi-driver,’ Mr Hunter said. ‘He drove a taxi in Pleasant Plains for many years. He was Mrs Addie Roach’s son, and she made her home with him. After he died, she moved in with one of her daughters. Mrs Addie Roach is the oldest woman in Sandy Ground. She’s the widow of Reverend Lewis Roach, who was an oysterman and a part-time preacher, and she’s ninety-two years old. When I first came to Sandy Ground, she was still in her teens, and she was a nice, bright, pretty girl. I’ve known her all these years, and I think the world of her. Every now and then, I make her a lemon-meringue pie and take it to her, and sit with her awhile. There’s a white man in Prince’s Bay who’s a year or so older than Mrs Roach. He’s ninety-three, and he’ll soon be ninety-four. His name is Mr George E. Sprague, and he comes from a prominent old South Shore family, and I believe he’s the last of the old Prince’s Bay oyster captains. I hadn’t seen him for several years until just the other day I was over in Prince’s Bay, and I was going past his house on Amboy Road, and I saw him sitting on the porch. I went up and spoke to him, and we talked awhile, and when I was leaving he said, “Is Mrs Addie Roach still alive over in Sandy Ground?” “She is,” I said. “That is,” I said, “she’s alive as you or I.” “Well,” he said, “Mrs Roach and I go way back. When she was a young woman, her mother used to wash for my mother, and she used to come along sometimes and help, and she was such a cheerful, pretty person my mother always said it made the day nicer when she came, and that was over seventy years ago.” “That wasn’t her mother that washed for your mother and she came along to help,” I said. “That was her husband’s mother. That was old Mrs Matilda Roach.” “Is that so?” said Mr Sprague. “I always thought it was her mother. Well,” he said, “when you see her, tell her I asked for her.”’

  We stepped back into the road, and walked slowly up it.

  ‘Several men from Sandy Ground fought in the Civil War,’ Mr Hunter said, ‘and one of them was Samuel Fish. That’s his grave over there with the ant hill on it. He got a little pension. Down at the end of this row are some Bishop graves, Bishops and Mangins, and there’s Purnells in the next row, and there’s Henmans in those big plots over there. This is James McCoy’s grave. He came from Norfolk, Virginia. He had six fingers on his right hand. Those graves over there all grown up in cockleburs are Jackson graves, Jacksons and Henrys and Landins. Most of the people lying in here were re
lated to each other, some by blood, some by marriage, some close, some distant. If you started in at the gate and ran an imaginary line all the way through, showing who was related to who, the line would zigzag all over the cemetery. Do you see that row of big expensive stones standing up over there? They’re all Cooleys. The Cooleys were free-Negro oystermen from Gloucester County, Virginia, and they came to Staten Island around the same time as the people from Snow Hill. They lived in Tottenville, but they belonged to the church in Sandy Ground. They were quite well-to-do. One of them, Joel Cooley, owned a forty-foot sloop. When the oyster beds were condemned, he retired on his savings and raised dahlias. He was a member of the Staten Island Horticultural Society, and his dahlias won medals at flower shows in Madison Square Garden. I’ve heard it said he was the first man on Staten Island to raise figs, and now there’s fig bushes in back yards from one end of the island to the other. Joel Cooley had a brother named Obed Cooley who was very smart in school, and the Cooleys got together and sent him to college. They sent him to the University of Michigan, and he became a doctor. He practiced in Lexington, Kentucky, and he died in 1937, and he left a hundred thousand dollars. There used to be a lot of those old-fashioned names around here, Bible names. There was a Joel and an Obed and an Eben in the Cooley family, and there was an Ishmael and an Isaac and an Israel in the Purnell family. Speaking of names, come over here and look at this stone.’

  We stopped before a stone whose inscription read:

  THOMAS WILLIAMS

  AL MAJOR

  1862–1928

  ‘There used to be a rich old family down here named the Butlers,’ Mr Hunter said. ‘They were old, old Staten Islanders, and they had a big estate over on the outside shore, between Prince’s Bay and Tottenville, that they called Butler Manor. They even had a private race track. The last of the Butlers was Mr Elmer T. Butler. Now, this fellow Thomas Williams was a Sandy Ground man who quit the oyster business and went to work for Mr Elmer T. Butler. He worked for him many years, worked on the grounds, and Mr Butler thought a lot of him. For some reason I never understood, Mr Butler called him Al Major, a kind of nickname. And pretty soon everybody called him Al Major. In fact, as time went on and he got older, young people coming up took it for granted Al Major was his real name and called him Mr Major. When he died, Mr Butler buried him. And when he ordered the gravestone, he told the monument company to put both names on it, so there wouldn’t be any confusion. Of course, in a few years he’ll pass out of people’s memory under both names – Thomas Williams, Al Major, it’ll all be the same. To tell you the truth, I’m no great believer in gravestones. To a large extent, I think they come under the heading of what the old preacher called vanity – “vanity of vanities, all is vanity” – and by the old preacher I mean Ecclesiastes. There’s stones in here that’ve only been up forty or fifty years, and you can’t read a thing it says on them, and what difference does it make? God keeps His eye on those that are dead and buried the same as He does on those that are alive and walking. When the time comes the dead are raised, He won’t need any directions where they’re lying. Their bones may be turned to dust, and weeds may be growing out of their dust, but they aren’t lost. He knows where they are; He knows the exact whereabouts of every speck of dust of every one of them. Stones rot the same as bones rot, and nothing endures but the spirit.’

  Mr Hunter turned and looked back over the rows of graves.

  ‘It’s a small cemetery,’ he said, ‘and we’ve been burying in it a long time, and it’s getting crowded, and there’s generations to come, and it worries me. Since I’m the chairman of the board of trustees, I’m in charge of selling graves in here, graves and plots, and I always try to encourage families to bury two to a grave. That’s perfectly legal, and a good many cemeteries are doing it nowadays. All the law says, it specifies that the top of the box containing the coffin shall be at least three feet below the level of the ground. To speak plainly, you dig the grave eight feet down, instead of six feet down, and that leaves room to lay a second coffin on top of the first. Let’s go to the end of this path, and I’ll show you my plot.’

  Mr Hunter’s plot was in the last row, next to the woods. There were only a few weeds on it. It was the cleanest plot in the cemetery.

  ‘My mother’s buried in the first grave,’ he said. ‘I never put up a stone for her. My first wife’s father, Jacob Finney, is buried in this one, and I didn’t put up a stone for him, either. He didn’t own a grave, so we buried him in our plot. My son Billy is buried in this grave. And this is my first wife’s grave. I put up a stone for her.’

  The stone was small and plain, and the inscription on it read:

  HUNTER

  1877 CELIA 1928

  ‘I should’ve had her full name put on it – Celia Ann,’ Mr Hunter said. ‘She was a little woman, and she had a low voice. She had the prettiest little hands; she wore size five-and-a-half gloves. She was little, but you’d be surprised at the work she done. Now, my second wife is buried over here, and I put up a stone for her, too. And I had my name carved on it, along with hers.’

  This stone was the same size and shape as the other, and the inscription on it read:

  HUNTER

  1877 EDITH 1938

  1869 GEORGE

  ‘It was my plan to be buried in the same grave with my second wife,’ Mr Hunter said. ‘When she died, I was sick in bed, and the doctor wouldn’t let me get up, even to go to the funeral, and I couldn’t attend to things the way I wanted to. At that time, we had a gravedigger here named John Henman. He was an old man, an old oysterman. He’s dead now himself. I called John Henman to my bedside, and I specifically told him to dig the grave eight feet down. I told him I wanted to be buried in the same grave. “Go eight feet down,” I said to him, “and that’ll leave room for me, when the time comes.” And he promised to do so. And when I got well, and was up and about again, I ordered this stone and had it put up. Below my wife’s name and dates I had them put my name and my birth year. When it came time, all they’d have to put on it would be my death year, and everything would be in order. Well, one day about a year later I was talking to John Henman, and something told me he hadn’t done what he had promised to do, so I had another man come over here and sound the grave with a metal rod, and just as I had suspected, John Henman had crossed me up; he had only gone six feet down. He was a contrary old man, and set in his ways, and he had done the way he wanted, not the way I wanted. He had always dug graves six feet down, and he couldn’t change. That didn’t please me at all. It outraged me. So, I’ve got my name on the stone on this grave, and it’ll look like I’m buried in this grave.’

  He took two long steps, and stood on the next grave in the plot.

  ‘Instead of which,’ he said, ‘I’ll be buried over here in this grave.’

  He stooped down, and pulled up a weed. Then he stood up, and shook the dirt off the roots of the weed, and tossed it aside.

  ‘Ah, well,’ he said, ‘it won’t make any difference.’

  (1956)

  Dragger Captain

  THE BIGGEST FISHING fleet in the vicinity of New York City is a fleet of thirty wooden draggers that works out of Stonington, Connecticut. Stonington is four local stops beyond New London on the New York, New Haven & Hartford. In the winter, when the trees are bare, a corner of its harbor can be glimpsed from a train. It covers a rocky jut in the mouth of Fishers Island Sound, it is close to fertile flounder grounds, it has two fish docks, and its harbor, protected by three riprap breakwaters, is an unusually safe one. Its population is approximately two thousand. There are elms on its sidewalks. On four of its narrow streets – Water, Main, Church, and Elm – are eight clapboard houses that were built in the eighteenth century. The gardens in back yards are fenced with discarded fish nets; some gardeners put seaweed under their tomatoes and skates and sculpin and other trash fishes under their rosebushes. It is an old port, once rich and busy, that has declined; from the Colonial period until the Civil War, it had shipya
rds, sail lofts, a ropewalk, a forge that made harpoons, a ship-biscuit bakery, and a whaling fleet, and it had a sealing fleet from around 1790 until around 1895. In the eighteen-seventies, this fleet brought in a hundred thousand sealskins a year for coats and lap robes. Nathaniel Brown Palmer, who discovered the Antarctic Continent, according to one school of geographers, and for whom Palmer Land in the Antarctic was named, and Edmund Fanning, who discovered the Fanning Islands in the Pacific, were Stonington sealing captains; they were looking for new seal rocks. Many of the draggermen are descendants of whalers and sealers. One Stonington sealer, Mr Ben Chesebrough, is still around. There is a drafty shack adjacent to Johnny Bindloss’s fish dock, at the foot of a lane off Water Street, in which the draggermen kill time when it is too rough or foggy to go out on the grounds. They sit on upended lobster traps and read the Atlantic Fisherman and drink coffee and play poker and sharpen knives and grumble. On such days, Mr Ben sometimes drops in and talks about his experiences as a seal skinner long ago in the Antarctic. In the early summer, herds of seals would come up on the beaches of islands in the Antarctic to breed and while they were breeding the skinners would creep out from behind rocks and brain them by the dozens as cleanly as possible with clubs made of polished Connecticut oak; bullets would have marred the skins.

  Stonington and Fulton Fish Market are closely linked. Several of the oldest commission firms in the market were founded by fishermen who came down from Stonington to handle shipments from relatives and friends and then branched out. Sam and Amos Chesebro (originally Chesebrough; they dropped the last three letters to save ink and time), who founded Chesebro Brothers, Robbins & Graham, were Stonington men. This firm occupies Stall 1 and is the biggest firm down there. Sam and Amos had long lives. Sam was approaching ninety when he died. Amos died a few years after him, in December, 1946, lacking a month of reaching ninety-three. He spent his last fifteen years reading and meditating and dozing in a sunny apartment on an upper floor of a house in Brooklyn Heights, directly across the East River from the market; on clear mornings he sat at a living-room window with a glass of whiskey and water at his elbow and, as if looking back through time at his youth, peacefully watched through binoculars the turmoil on the market piers. Others from Stonington or close by who came down and founded firms, or became partners in ones already founded, were Hiram Burnett, Frank Noyes, A. E. Potter, George Moon, the Haley brothers, Caleb and Seabury, the Gates brothers, Stanton and Gurdon, and the Keeney brothers, Frank, Gideon, and George. The Stonington draggers catch twenty million pounds a year for Fulton Market. They go out primarily for flounders and they bring in five species – flukes, blackbacks, yellowtails, witches, and windowpanes – all of which differ in looks and flavor and all of which dishonestly appear on menus under the catchall culinary term ‘fillet of sole’; none of them belong to the sole family. Another species, the Baptist flounder, is caught in abundance but thrown back; it goes bad shortly after it comes out of the water, whence its name.