Jackhammered

by Ed Bethune

  Rationing, imposed at the outset of the war, limited our food choices, but lack of money was a bigger problem. Occasionally Mother would splurge. We could not afford to go to a sit-down restaurant, but she would buy delicious hot tamales from a pushcart-salesman who came down our street every Wednesday night hollering “hot tamales” in a singsong way at the top of his voice. The Hot Tamale Man was selling homemade tamales, wrapped in real cornhusks. They were delicious and they were only ten cents apiece, or three for a quarter. Our little family developed a Pavlovian reaction to his melodious call. We were regular customers, once a week, for a couple of years but our feasting ended when we learned the police had jailed the Hot Tamale Man for using cat meat to make his tamales.

  By this time in my life, Mother had boiled the Vermilye creed down to a few basics. The goal was to be as independent as possible so “they cannot take what you have.” This notion was the product of her life with the Vermilyes, the loss of Little Gerle, growing up during the First World War, and the Great Depression. From my days in the crib, she taught me to follow the creed, mainly because it was “us versus them.” “Them, or they,” depending upon usage, meant anyone or anybody who had power of any sort and who was in a position to “take what little you might have.” The idea, according to Mother was to fight your way up to a place in life where “they had to give you a good lettin’ alone.”

  My mother had a multitude of sayings. Some were just cute and bore no relationship to anything: If you dropped something she would say, “You dropped the set out of your ring.” We woke up to her saying, “Good morning, Glory.” If we were to hum or sing, you could count on her to say, “Sing before breakfast and you will cry before dinner.” She had a saying for every occasion but most of them expressed the fundamental beliefs of the Vermilye family. For instance, there was the polestar, the lynchpin of the creed: “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

  The one common trait that Mother and Daddy shared was humor. Oddly enough, it seemed to work well with either the Vermilye or Bethune lifestyles. It was the glue linking the two philosophies, making coexistence possible. Mother’s humor began with her sayings, whereas Daddy’s humor was dry wit and his flair for self-deprecation.

  Every summer we took a month-long sojourn to Pocahontas. Mother would put one of the renters in charge to collect rent and take care of the house. Daddy never joined us on our trips to Pocahontas, another clue I missed that trouble was brewing between Mother and Daddy.

  The Great Depression forced the entire Lewallen family, Mama, Papa, and Mother’s two younger brothers George and Lloyd, to move out of the family home and into a few rooms in the back of the café. They sold the home place to pick up a few extra dollars. When visiting Pocahontas, we bedded down in a tiny alcove near the rooms where Mama and Papa Lewallen stayed. We were like sardines at night, but we dismantled our cramped quarters early each morning. The café opened at 5:00 a.m. and there was plenty to do to get ready for the onrush of breakfast customers.

  I was never bored with life at the Lewallen Café because it was a magnet for an unusual cast of characters. There was Uncle John Shively, who ran a store a few doors down from Lewallen Café. He came for lunch most every day and would eat standing up at the bar. Mama would serve him and he usually washed his sandwich down with a mug of cold Griesedieck Brothers beer. Griesedieck was the beer of choice at Lewallen Café because the brewery, located in St. Louis, sponsored the broadcast of Cardinal baseball. Uncle John had white hair and a white beard and took a fondness to me, so I made it a point to lurk around the bar at noon. When he came in, I would climb up on a bar stool next to him and Mama would fill a small, glass coffee creamer with beer for me to sip as I visited with my friend. Everyone thought it was cute and I was the talk of the café, especially when having my beer.

  Another favorite of mine was the iceman. He came each morning hauling fifty-pound blocks of ice into the café from his truck. He wore a big thick leather pad on his back and carried the big blocks of ice over his shoulder using a huge set of tongs. It was fascinating to me to watch him hoist the heavy blocks into the ice compartments on a huge bank of frontloading iceboxes that covered an entire wall in the kitchen. He was not a big man, but he was strong, and he had a dancelike technique that helped him leverage the ice into position. As he was swinging the blocks upward, he would grin at me saying, “Upsy-daisy.” It was a funny routine, and when he finished I would follow him out of the café, mopping up the trail of water left by the melting ice. He always thanked me for helping and it made me feel very grownup.

  The café had one big dining room and the tables of four had red-and-white gingham tablecloths. There were several ceiling fans to circulate the air, and it was easy to see the reach of each fan because strategically placed strips of sticky flypaper hung from the ceiling. Those closest to the fans were in constant motion while the more remote strips were motionless. Oddly enough, the ones in motion seemed to catch more flies than those that were still.

  It was at one of the tables near the front of the café that Uncle Leaf Hawkins would encamp. Uncle Leaf—a gnomish man in a soup-stained suit that was too big for him—was the glasses man. He came at least once a week to sell spectacles from a big black leather satchel filled with the latest in optics. People would line up to see Uncle Leaf and I would stand by his table for hours watching and listening to him as he made fittings using a gadget that let him switch from one lens to another. He was a happy little man who kept everyone laughing while he worked. I wondered aloud what it would be like to have bad eyes and Uncle Leaf, sensing my interest, put a pair of glasses on me. The lenses were so thick that it made me dizzy. I pulled them off and everyone around the table had a big laugh on me. Mama let Uncle Leaf use the café as his office so long as he did not interfere with the lunch crowd. She figured he brought people into the café and that was good for business.

  Papa Lewallen provided the fireworks, without fail, nearly every day of the summer. He was a hopeless drunk. The day-law, Estle Bramlett and the night-law, Butch Stolt ranked him at the top of their list of “town drunks.” His falling-down-drunk excursions around the square landed him in the county jail at least once a week. Mama, a teetotaler, would plead with the lawmen to bring Papa back to the café when they found him wandering around town and sometimes they would. Nine times out of ten they just locked him up until someone in the family came to get him with a promise to take him straight to the café.

  The family tried hiding Papa’s shoes to keep him from going out but that did not stop him. He just walked around town in his stockings. It was a sad situation, but no matter how drunk he got, the next morning Papa would be sitting at his favorite table in the café as if nothing had happened, eating a serving of eggs on top of pancakes with sausage. It was at that moment, when he was sober, that I could get his attention. Though my time with him each day was short, I remember him as a sad, but loving grandfather.

  Soon after the lunch crowd left the café, Papa would start the cycle all over again. The drinking—which near the end of his life included shoe polish, vanilla extract and anything that contained alcohol—killed him in 1944. He died of stomach rot—that is what all the grownups called it—and they displayed him in his casket in a room above the café. A man with a deep voice sang “Asa’s Death,” a funeral dirge that fit perfectly with the somber mood of all those who came up the stairs and circled through the room where his body lay. I learned later that people liked Papa a lot, which was something of a surprise. I liked Papa, but I never heard much good about him at home.

  The Lewallen Café was about 300 yards uphill from the Black River and the place where the River Rats lived on a gaggle of ramshackle, homemade houseboats. The river had once been the center of activity in Pocahontas but the steamboats left when the railroad came. Only a few boats were left to work the river and most of them belonged to the River Rats.

  The river was off limits for Delta Lew and me. Its fast, swirling current had claimed many victims bu
t Mother and Mama seemed most concerned with keeping us away from the River Rats—poor people who lived hand-to-mouth on the tarpapered houseboats, eking out a living on the river. They fished and sold their catch to the townspeople, and when the weather was good, the River Rats would dig mussels from the muddy bottom of the Black River. They sold the mussel shells to a button factory situated downstream, not far from the town square. Big piles of mussel shells, each shell pierced with several button-size holes, surrounded the factory. Buttons stamped from mussel shells had a pearly look so they were much in demand before the invention of plastic.

  The River Rats did not make much from mussel digging and fishing but it was how they got by. Mama and Mother said they were filthy and uncouth and that I should stay away from such “trash.”

  I could not restrain myself. I slipped away from the café and headed down to the river as often as I could.

  Two of the River Rat families had children my age and I made friends with them. My favorite was Toni who lived on a houseboat with her father and a younger brother. She was a pretty girl my age with long black hair that turned to ringlets when it reached her shoulders. Her eyes were captivating, different from any I had ever seen, steel grey and hard not to look at.

  We often sat on the side of her houseboat, dangling our feet in the swift current of the Black River and rubbing our heels against the mossy scum that collected on the side of the boat. It was a perfect setting for swapping stories about the way we lived. Toni and the other River Rat kids were enthralled as I told them about life in Little Rock, about streetcars, traffic lights and other things they had never seen. They, in turn, told me all about their life on the river. I did not want to change places with them, but the simplicity of their lifestyle—working the river and living hand-to-mouth—appealed to me in a Huck Finn sort of way.

  When Toni told me about digging for mussels, she said they were always on the lookout for pearls when they opened the shells. Toni liked to explain things and she was good at it. She showed me the fish traps and told me what they had to do to keep the fish alive until they could sell them, but her sharp eyes came afire when she explained to me that Black River pearls had a good reputation and there was a ready market for good ones, especially white ones. She said there were many stories about Black River pearls—black ones, pink ones, and white ones—that were as big as peas and sold for hundreds of dollars to the pearl-buyers who came out of Memphis.

  Toni said her family had found a few little pearls, but never a “big-un.” It was her dream that one day they would find a big, well-shaped pearl. A windfall like that would change their life forever. She said one of their fellow River Rats had found such a pearl and it sold for $500. As she told the story she got excited, talking faster and louder, especially when she told how the man used the money to buy a piece of land. She said, “That-un got him and his’n off the river.” I could see that finding a big pearl—hitting the jackpot—was Toni’s dream.

  When I asked her what was the best they ever got for a pearl her excitement drained away. She thought a minute and said, “Well, we once got thirty-five for a middlin’ black-un, but that’s the best we ever done.” I felt sorry for her because I suddenly realized how hard it would be for her to find a big, perfect pearl. I think she saw how I felt because she said, “We’re not ‘bout to quit lookin’, or give up.” “Besides,” she said, “we get a little somethin’ for slugs.” The slugs were imperfect pearls that buyers shipped to India to be ground-up and burned in incense. Toni said, “They need ‘em on account of some religious thing.” Looking back, I realize that finding a big, perfect pearl was the only hope she and her family had for a better life.

  One day when her father was away, Toni and her little brother took me inside their houseboat so I could see how they lived. There was no electric light of course, but I could see that there were two beds and a cook-stove and table that took up one end of the small cabin. She was not ashamed but she felt a need to say, “It’s purty little, but it works OK for us.” I figured Toni to be the housekeeper because the place was not messy even though it was full of the stuff that you need on a boat.

  I could not imagine myself as a River Rat. Nevertheless, I told her how we squeezed our entire family of four into one room in our Little Rock rent house and that we were living in an alcove in the back of the Lewallen Café that was no bigger than the one room where she and her family lived. It was not much to say but it was a little bit that we had in common.

  I was fascinated with the River Rats and I never missed a chance to go down to the river to see Toni, but the grownups in Pocahontas were saying that they and their way of life would soon be gone. The townspeople did not want them, there were problems with school authorities, and the button factories were going out of business.

  One day, a few years after I first met Toni, I ran down the trail to the river and her boat was gone. I went back several times, but I knew in my heart that her boat would not be there and that I would never see her again. That was the way of the River Rats, always on the move. I feel fortunate to have learned what I did from such a hardy lot.

  Not all my adventures turned out well. Like many boys my age, I had a Daisy Air Rifle. I took my BB gun along on my visits to see the River Rats, and that made me a big hit because they had no money for such things. Then, one day when I was returning from the river, I encountered the Shively girls, tomboys who also had BB guns. A discussion ensued wherein I contended that boys are better shots than tomboys are. Coming to no resolution, the argument led to a challenge for a BB gun fight to settle the matter. The Shively girls positioned themselves about thirty yards away and started firing shots in my direction. I returned fire and, reeking hubris, advanced on the Shively position. I would show these girls a thing or two. I was laughing loud enough for them to hear and running as I had seen the U.S. Marines do in the movies. Everything was working according to plan until a BB hit me in the mouth. More specifically, it hit my big front tooth, the one on my left side. I immediately reached up, just in time to catch a handful of tooth chips. The BB gun war was over. I lost. I ran crying to the café, tooth pieces in hand, and Mother met me at the front door.

  Closer inspection revealed that I lost about two thirds of my front tooth. Once I calmed down, I was surprised to find that it did not hurt. There was no pain at all, just wounded pride. I asked Mother if I could get it fixed and she quickly let me know that we had no money to spend for such things. Besides, I did not need the entire tooth and she was mad as Hell at me for getting it knocked out. That was that, there would be no trip to the dentist. I was embarrassed to have a snaggletooth look, so I taught myself how to talk without moving my upper lip. It took hours and hours of practice before a mirror but I succeeded. The broken tooth stayed with me all through my school years and until I was twenty-one years old. Just before my discharge from the Marine Corps a kindhearted Navy dentist, ignoring regulations, put on a porcelain cap that lasted twenty years. My motionless upper lip technique stayed with me long after I got the tooth fixed, but I did learn to show my teeth when laughing. I loved doing that after years of turning my head or covering my mouth when I laughed.

  I had a secret place in Pocahontas that was my thinking spot. Mama had converted the floor above the café into a small hotel. There were only twelve rooms available but it turned out to be a reliable source of income, particularly after Papa died and Mama closed the café. My secret place was a cubbyhole just off a small open area that served as a lobby. There were two items in the cubbyhole that never failed to stoke my imagination. One was a stuffed bobcat allegedly killed in the northwest corner of Randolph County when it attacked a hunter. He was big, had a nick out of his ear, and his eyes seemed to always be locked on mine. Next to the bobcat was a two-and-a-half by three-foot lithograph, provided courtesy of Anheuser-Busch Brewery, depicting the last minutes of Custer’s last stand at the Battle of Little Big Horn. I spent hours in my secret place. I would lie on the floor between the bobcat and the lithogra
ph. I would stare at the battle scene imagining myself as General George Armstrong Custer. I preferred to be General Custer because he was still alive. The Indians killed him, but in the picture, he was still alive and heroically fighting for his life. I did not like the idea of being one of the men in Custer’s command, the famous Seventh Calvary, because they were mostly dead, and the hostile-looking Indians were cutting off their scalps.

  My secret place was also the place where I would study the pages of my 1942 Johnson Smith & Co. Catalog. Never in recorded history has there been a collection of interesting stuff such as that offered in the Johnson Smith & Co. Catalog. Whoopee cushions, magic tricks, a complete Negro makeup kit, an exploding deck of cards—the choices reached to infinity. There were books on Jiu-Jitsu, mysticism, mind reading, fortune telling, and if needed you could order a talking Ouija board for $1.50, or a fortune telling ball for twenty-five cents.

  My favorite page offered, for twenty-five cents, a pamphlet entitled “How to Build One & Two Passenger Flying Planes.” The write-up promised detailed plans for building a single engine airplane using junk parts and a second-hand motor for power. I fixed on that page for hours, reading the fine print repeatedly looking for a catch and finally concluded it was something I could really do. Besides, the twenty-five-cent price included a free ten-lesson course entitled “How to Fly.” Perfect!

  My favorite page in the 1942 Johnson Smith & Co. Catalog.

  My second favorite page, just in case the airplane did not work out, was an ad for detailed plans for building a midget auto racecar. The promise was that I could use a washing machine motor or an outboard engine to power my racecar, but if I used a motorcycle engine, I could reach speeds up to fifty miles per hour. All this could be mine for twenty-five cents and the price included a pamphlet giving hints on dirt track racing. What a bargain!