After Mass at St. Charles, the church Buddy discovered, where he had been baptized as a baby…Pap would always linger for a smoke with the other farmers, where they would discuss the prices of crops and cattle. They would discuss the weather, pest and the best method for castrating young bulls. It was difficult to get Pap free from these discussions…if he rolled another cigarette from his nickel bag of Bull Durham, we couldn’t be certain that we would get home before dark.
But Ma always had the final say, when she reminded him that Lee, Dorothy and Polly would be at the farm waiting to have dinner and play a few hands of High Nine. And if he continued to linger…she would make other threats which all the adults seemed to understand but it was lost on Buddy and the other kids…except for Aileen who knew all there was to know about comments between adults.
Certain to form, by the time the old car turned off the Miller Pike into the long lane to the house, we could see that the rest of the family had gathered and had made a big pitcher of sweet tea, and begun the process of killing a few young chickens to be fried. Now Buddy and Little Uncle Larry loved this part of Sunday. It was their job to catch the chickens and then Uncle Lee would wring their necks with a certain amount of dexterity. After the chickens hopped around the barnyard, they would be commandeered and plunged into a large black kettle, beneath which, a fire had been made from wood, creating a heat source to bring the water in the kettle to a boil.
The nasty part of the job was next, the young chickens (usually five chickens could feed the family, leaving left overs for supper.) would be taken from the boiling water and the feathers would be stripped from their backs, so that all that was left was the white skin and a nasty looking butt.
Lee was a real pro at killing and defeathering the chickens…he was an avid hunter as well and loved to kill rabbits, squirrels, coons and deer…in season. He loved to fish as well and often went to the Licking River to try his hand at catching a few trout or he would go to the lake on the back of the farm, which was off-limits to the kids without an adult, where he would catch a mess of croppies.
The farm was self-sufficient for the most part. But each and every Saturday, the clan would pile into the old car and go to town. Ma would do her shopping at Sapp’s Grocery where Pap had an open account, which he settled each year after his tobacco crop was sold at auction… down at the big tobacco warehouse, which was operated by Oscar Marshall who was Nettie Marshall's uncle.
Nothing infuriated Pap more than these shopping forays into Sapp’s Grocery because Ma and the girls always found things they just couldn’t do without and Pap knew that Sapp was robbing him. But Ma insisted on going to Sapp’s instead of the Piggly-Wiggly…she said the Sapp’s baloney was fresher…and the ham tastier. Buddy thought she was right…and he also loved the fresh, crisp snap of the potato chips…and the great taste of the Fig Newton’s with a bottle of pop. That constituted the ritual Saturday lunch upon the return to the farm.
It might be difficult for those of you readers born after 1950's, to discover that there were no fast food chains like McDonalds, Burger King and Queen, Dairy Queen, Long John Silvers, Papa John’s Pizza or Kentucky Fried Chicken (sic. KFC) or Wendy’s. There were these wonderful little country grocery stores, like Sapp’s… where the butcher would personally make a huge baloney, tomato, lettuce, pickle, onion and Mayo sandwich for a quarter…and some of these little charming groceries also made two types of homemade soup (bean with ham or vegetable with beef and a handful of crackers.)
There was one other item which kept Ma coming to the Sapp’s Grocery, Sapp’s was the only grocer in the county that carried Pap’s sugar cured country hams and they sold quite a few hams each year. These Hams were cured with Pap’s very own secret process which he had learned from his father, Buddy’s great grandpa who had learned the secret from his father who would have been Buddy’s great, great, grandpa (who served in the Union Army during the Civil War.) and the secret went even further back through the Simpson clan into Ireland.
Buddy was proud to see his grandfather’s work hanging on a peg in the middle of the butcher shop. It seemed that each week Buddy had to help carry the big hams into the store. They always sold a couple of hams per week, which netted Pap several hundred dollars off his weekly grocery bill at the end of the year.
So, net, net…it was a pretty tidy life living on the farm…a lot of very hard work for his Pap during the summer months and the milking never stopped, twice a day every day, three hundred sixty-five days per year…the cows took no vacations and they never complained.
Uncle Lee finally got around to catching the pony and putting the gear on him. Buddy was warned that the pony would be a little rank because she had not been ridden in quite a long time. She was rank indeed, farting and kicking her way out of the barnyard…with little Buddy holding on for dear life and then, once they had cleared the gate into the big pasture, he just gave her… her head and held on as the little pony ran to the other end of the field.
It was great fun feeling the breeze in his face and the freedom that felt that he was flying…soon Buddy had the pony under his control to the point that he was able to ride with no hands…it was all just so much fun, Buddy didn’t ever want it to stop. But stop it did…August gave way to September and on the first week-end of the fall, on Labor day…Buddy’s mother and Ham came to the farm to pick Buddy up to take him back to St. Joseph.
It was a very sad time…but Buddy knew that he would be back next summer and he even wondered if he might not be able to spend the whole summer at the farm. He had come a long way from feelings about going to the farm, which he had demonstrated prior to leaving the city. Sure he had some wonderful friends in the city…but they were not like his own kinfolk…where the old saying, “blood is thicker than water.” could not have been more true.
Buddy loved all these people and they had loved him in return. He could not have asked for anyone to be more kind and understanding than Ma…nor could he have been any closer to her if she had been his own grandmother. And all the kids had become one big gang…even Aileen, the very private teen-ager, who was secretly in love with yet another boy at High School, was a party to the gang by the end of the summer. And she was welcomed into the gang’s tree house although she was a bit large and frightened to climb the rickety steps up the tree. But most of all because Buddy had threatened to goose her if she didn’t move along while climbing the ladder, and she was certain that he would… and more concerned that he might miss the spot…or hit the appropriate one depending on your point of view.
Buddy couldn’t be trusted when it came to girls. He loved to tease them, wrestle with them in the big front yard and feel them up naturally…even if the girls were his step-aunts. They often protested, but they always came back for more horsing around, and buddy was there to chase them down, tackle them and begin to tickle and tease.
Aileen wasn’t as easy to catch…she most often only played hide and seek, or catching the fireflies after dark…but occasionally she enjoyed rough housing with Buddy as the others watched her pin Buddy to the ground and then sit on his arms which necessitated her sitting in a rather awkward position… you get the picture.
Yes, the summer was over, the kids would go back to school leaving Little Uncle Larry to watch over the farm.
Historical Review
In the southwest of Europe, between the Adriatic Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, live the peoples commonly called Latins, stereotyped often as hot-blooded, romantic and artistic. In fact they are related more by the common Latin root of their languages than by anything else, and the first countries they inhabit are as ethnically complex as anywhere else in the continent. Greeks, Phoenicians, Celts, Arabs have all settled in these parts at one time or another, adding their own elements to the common stock and by now a Sicilian, a Portuguese, a Milanese, and Andalusian and a Parisian would hardly recognize each other as fellow-Latins at all.
Geographically too, the region is many faced. Its southern shores are, of course
, pure Mediterranean. These are the lands of the olive, orange, the perfumed shrubs and the scraggy goats, ringed by memories of classic Greece. The sea is not always as clear as it used to be, the beaches are often hideously developed, but still over much of these coasts there hangs an almost palpable suggestion of myth. Corsica, the greatest island of the region, is clad with aromatic marquis, the tangle of thyme, oleander, lavender, mint and myrtle that gave its name to the French resistance movement of the Second World War.
Inland from the coast, however, the numen hardens. Only 40 miles (65 kilometers) from the pleasure beaches of Spain rise the Sierra Nevada highlands, whose topmost villages are the highest in Europe, and beyond that again stands the bitter and terrific plateau of Castile, full of castles and formidable towns. The coast of Italy may be benign, but the spine of the country is the sever range of the Apennines, interspersed by a thousand rugged valleys, patched with dark forest, but still inhabited here and there, by wolves. Portugal does not have a Mediterranean coast at all and faces only the stern Atlantic. As for France, which Winston Churchill once called the fairest portion of the earth’s surface, it stretches away from the warm provincial hills above the sea to fetch up on the chill sand-dunes of the English Channel, about as far from the Mediterranean ethos as one could get.
Yet history has made, if not a family of these states, at least an association. In particular, it was here, in the swath of territories that lay in the lee of the Alps which Christianity, the chief coalescing force of Europe, developed its power and it’s aesthetic. From the village churches of Malta to the immense and marvelous cathedrals of Spain, from lonely mountain shrines to the Vatican itself at the center of it all, the old consequence of this faith proclaims itself here as nowhere else.
Here too exploded the Renaissance, that surge of all the arts and sciences which was at once to challenge and glorify the Christian creed, and which now makes all Europe a treasure-house of its artifacts. Much of the artistic genius of Europe has come from this corner of it, much of the philosophical and scientific genius as well. The navigators of Portugal and Spain opened the rest of the world to European exploration, creating the first of the great maritime powers of history; later the French flag too would fly over colonies across the world; and almost until the last gasp of the imperial age, Italy was still collecting territories overseas.
From minute Malta, then, to majestic France, a congeries of peoples astonishingly inventive and adventurous. Today France, Spain and Italy are three of the chief industrial States of Europe, while Portugal remains agricultural, and the Republic of Malta, whose 385,000 people s Strange a language derived partly from Italian, partly from Arabic, stands as a reminder that wherever we are on Europe’s southern shores, we are never far from Africa. Here two worlds are linked-the warm cherishing south, the hard and thrusting north-and their mingled meanings contribute powerfully to the personality of Europe.
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Famously wet and windy between the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, the British Isles are perhaps the most fateful of the all the world’s islands, and they stand in a unique relationship to the rest of Europe. Four nations occupy these relatively uninviting islands-the English, the Irish, the Welsh and the Scots- and they are grouped into two States. 58 million people live in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, three and a half million live in the Republic of Ireland, and the mutual attitudes of the two are notoriously equivocal. The islands have not been occupied by an outside power since 1066 AD, and for several centuries they have been governed, in one degree or another, by systems of parliamentary democracy.
Most of the land is good agricultural country, well-watered and easy. But is the west and in the north-in Wales, in much of Scotland, along the Atlantic shore of Ireland-rough highlands predominate, and this accentuates the chief ethnic division of the population, between the Anglo-Saxon, deriving from Teutonic invaders who arrived in the Christian era, and the Celtic, descended from far earlier waves of Mediterranean immigration. It was here that the Roman Empire reached its final frontier. The legions never controlled northern Scotland, and they never crossed the Irish Sea. The Archipelago was an extremity of the Roman world then, and it remains an extremity of Europe still, never quite assimilated into the European consciousness.
Several of Europe’s great historical trends, nevertheless, are epitomized in the British Isles. The continents ancient dynastic fervors survive here in a rich and ostentatious monarchy. The feudalism that once dominated Europe finds its mementoes still in the obtrusive class system of England and in the kilts, tartans and the rituals of the Scottish clans. The religious struggles of the continent, mostly ended elsewhere, survive here in a violent, apparently insoluble and almost stylized conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. Europe’s instincts for aggression and expansion has found some of its most vigorous exponents among these islanders-from the sixteenth century to the twentieth, the British were engaged in a career of overseas acquisition which made them briefly the most powerful people on earth, ruling territories in every continent and brazenly commanding all the oceans.
Above all, it was here that Europe first mechanized itself, when the power of steam, was harnessed by British scientist and engineers, at the end of the eighteenth century. The mastery of technique not only made the British wealthy, but it made them primarily an urban nation-the first in Europe. Today England in particular is one of the most crowded of all countries, and the vast city of London, sprawled in the southeast corner of the islands in a welter of suburbs and problems, is like an allegory of urban life.
The British attitude to Europe remains ambivalent. No other European Power is an island State, and none has looked so instinctively to the sea for its fortunes. For centuries the British tried to stay clear of continental involvements, intervening only when it seemed that one European Power or another was becoming dangerously dominate. Now their Empire has gone, and their industrial capacity has long been overtaken, but their overseas investments are still enormous, and many older citizens still feel that they have more in common with the other English-speaking peoples, scattered across the world, than with their continental neighbors.
In 1990 the British Isles were for the first time linked by a tunnel to France-a portent, most Europeans thought, of their inevitable absorption into a Pan-European system. Old-school Britons, though, remembered with nostalgia a much-loved, frequently quoted but actually apocryphal headline from The Times of London:
Violent Storms in the English Channel
Continent Isolated
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Now, if but only for a brief time, please let me return to the conditions in Dublin. In 1770, Henry Grattan, A Dublin lawyer and parliamentarian, won growing support for independence by his brilliant oratory. “Nations,” he declaimed, “are governed not by interest only, but by passion also, and the passion of Ireland is freedom.” In 1782, inspired by the example of the American Declaration of Independence, Grattan persuaded the Dublin parliament to pass an Irish declaration of legislative independence. The following year the British government in London, anxious not to have an Irish as well as an American revolution, passed an Act of Renunciation in parliament at Westminster that affirmed the exclusive right of the Dublin parliament to legislate for the Irish people. For the first time in history, Dublin was a capital in the full sense of the word. But the spirit of optimism that followed the Act of Renunciation was to be short-lived…for we know what a devious lot preside in the hallowed halls along the banks of the Thames.
In theory there was now two independent kingdoms, one British and one Irish, under a common crown. In practice, though, the British government still controlled Ireland, because it continued to nominate the viceroy and chief secretary at Dublin Castle, who were the executive arm of the Irish government. What sounded like independence was a sham (are we still surprised?).
Even the nominal independence of what Grattan called the “Protestant
nation” of Ireland was seen by conservative forces in England as an excessive concession, the beginning of a surrender that might end in the creation of a Catholic state closely bound by spiritual ties to England’s main continental enemy, France. Their fears intensified in 1789 when the storming of the Bastille signaled the greatest political upheaval of the 18thand 19thCenturies: the French Revolution. Nor where they alone in their concern. The revolutionary ideas of liberty and equality posed as much of a threat to Anglo-Irish minority as it did to other elites, and Protestants, who, ten years before, had campaigned for autonomy from England now began to look once again for the reassurances of the English connection.
VI
DEATH STALKS THE ASYLUM
When Buddy got back to the orphanage it looked as though a war had broken out of the east side of the building. The bulldozers, engineers and surveyors were out in force and there was serious work taking place near the Chapel.
Buddy was able to quickly discover through his friends what was going on. Father Hermann was building a new wing and it was going to house the girls from St. Mary Orphanage in the city.
He could hardly contain himself bouncing from one friend to the next, picking up tid-bits of construction news from each he discovered that the girls would be moving over to the new wing for the next school year which would place Buddy in the fourth grade.
The girls side of the orphanage would have a mirror image of that which currently existed for the boys. Five apartments would be constructed for nearly 200 girls ranging in age from two to fourteen. Best of all Father was having some of the dirt from the basement being dug for the girl's brought to the boy’s side playground. The large mound of dirt could be used for tunneling or other adventures in the afternoon.
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