American Pop

by Snowden Wright

  Harold took one last look around the lobby, the sight of his brothers making his chin quake, the sight of his sister making his shoulders cave, before sitting back down with tears in his eyes. He could not find a tissue. Harold put his face into his hands as “Auld Lang Syne” echoed through the hotel. He was crying because of his family. Never in his life had he seen them all so happy.

  1.2

  The Original Sweetest Thing—An Indian Named Branchwater—A Bumper Crop of Drinking Straws—The Annabelle Constellation

  The only thing Fiona wanted was for Houghton to be happy. It simply wasn’t right for a fourteen-year-old boy to work so hard. “Why don’t you sit down to eat?” she asked Houghton in the kitchen of the family’s two-bedroom home in Panola County, Mississippi. He forked a fried egg onto a biscuit and added a few cuts of fatback. Fiona said, “Your father wouldn’t mind you being late to the store.”

  “Like hell he wouldn’t.”

  “Watch that mouth.”

  He turned away from the stovetop, grinned at her, and made a show of taking a hefty bite. “Didn’t hear you,” he said, voice garbled, mouth full. “Watch what now?” Pieces of biscuit scattered on the floor.

  He wasn’t in want of humor; that much was for certain. Fiona was nonetheless worried about Houghton. Ever since he was a child, he’d shown an uncommon sense of industry, taking up house duties before he was assigned them. What kind of boy volunteered for chores? She could see him now. In the field, chopping wood, at age eight. In the barn, milking cows, at age five. His work ethic had only increased since he’d reached puberty. During the week, Houghton worked twelve hours a day at the drugstore, and on weekends he tended to his own business enterprise, collecting scrap metal from around the county, tin from barn roofs, iron from anvils, brass from doorknobs, and selling it to a foundry just south of Memphis. Fiona hoped he knew his hours at the store would have to be cut once school started back up in September. She was about to remind him that morning, but he had already clomped out the door. She watched through the casement window as he saddled his horse.

  Although he would never admit it to anyone, especially not his own mother, the reason Houghton worked so much these days was circumstantial. Work was the best means he could come up with to distract from the awkward, unwieldy erections that had begun to plague him most every second of the day. It seemed anything would trigger one. Glancing at the exposed ankle of his schoolteacher held him at his desk until matters had subsided. Catching a whiff of perfume from a churchgoer forced him to use a hymnal for sacrilegious cover. One time the feminine whinny of a dray horse sent him crouching to hide what had been sprung loose.

  After reaching town Houghton relieved himself of such thoughts by readying Forster Rex-for-All for the business day. He ran the tumblers through a mechanized washer. Less than three weeks later those tumblers would tipple with the soda concoction made possible by the secret ingredient he would soon discover. He swept the wide-plank pine floors. Less than two years later those floors would creak with the footfall of over a hundred daily customers who had heard tell of a delicious new drink. In conclusion to his morning routine Houghton wound, dusted, polished, and set the Willard banjo regulator hanging on the wall.

  The time was two minutes till eight. Because his father was away on his house calls—every month he made a trip around the county medicating the ailments of farmers too busy to come to town—Houghton was responsible for opening the store. Today, the simple act of hanging the open sign would have a lasting effect. In front of the door, looking through its wobbly glass pane, Houghton noticed a girl, yellow haired and pale skinned, walking down the street. She rendered all his efforts at distraction for naught. None of his morning routine at work, not the sweeping, not the washing, not the dusting, could stop his reaction, in body and in mind, to what he decided was the sweetest thing he’d ever seen.

  * * *

  Since her mother’s death in 1882 of scarlet fever, Annabelle Teague had doted on her father. The relationship between parent and child was the reverse of typical. She packed his lunch in the morning and asked after his day in the evening. He let her feel his brow for fever and heeded her advice on sensible attire. Owner of a shipping business based on the Mississippi, resident of New Orleans for all his life, and special adviser to the governor of Louisiana, Royal Teague never took another wife because, in addition to simply not having the time for courtship, he already had a woman in his life off whom to sound business ideas and from whom to beg for a second helping of dessert. It was due to such aspects of their relationship that Annabelle told her father, laid up with gout, to stay in his room at the Batesville Inn while she went in search of a druggist.

  She came across Forster Rex-for-All around the corner. It looked to be the only pharmacy in town. Despite such a modest exterior, whitewash hatched in brown, tin roof blotchy with bird droppings, windows fogged by pollen, Annabelle found the store, judging by its interior, comparable to those scattered throughout the Garden District, a testament to modernity. On shelves lining the back wall sat an array of mercury glass, cruets next to ewers, flagons next to vases, each of them placed beneath a nameplate inscribed in Latin. Steam from an alembic wafted toward the ceiling. An elaborate show globe filled with water dyed white hung from a brass chain at the center of the room. Rattan stools leaned against a mahogany counter. Next to a soda fountain, one of the largest Annabelle had ever seen, stood a boy about her age. He seemed to be having a rather difficult time situating an apron around his waist.

  “Welcome to Forster’s, miss. What can I do for you?”

  As he spoke those words Houghton immediately forgot them. The presence of such a beautiful girl was a breath blown against the dandelion of his thoughts. He became a fragile, bare stem in front of her, his capacity for reason scattered to the wind. “Is the druggist in?” the girl said.

  “At your service.”

  The girl crossed her arms in a pantomime of impatience, as though to say, That’s not a satisfactory answer, and I will not repeat the question. Houghton wouldn’t have been surprised if she had started tapping her foot, lips curled, one eyebrow raised above an unwavering stare. This obnoxious brat was, undoubtedly, the most adorable person he’d ever met. He set his bite to hold back a smile.

  “My father is the senior druggist of the store. He’s not in at the moment and is not expected back for another day or so. Rest assured I am a more than competent proxy.”

  “That so?”

  His pace deliberate and his manner steady, Houghton walked out from behind the counter, situated a stool in front of the girl, and motioned for her to take a seat, all while making a point of letting her notice him studying her appearance. “By the scent of your hair I take it you’re from New Orleans. The apothecaries down there commonly derive sodium laureth sulfate from coconut oil to use as a surfactant. Despite a complexion that indicates a primarily indoor life, you have no signs of a deficiency in vitamin D, which tells me you take a daily supplement or have a diet with high levels of it. Either way requires a certain financial means. Your sleep patterns have not been regular of late, but you haven’t treated the problem medicinally. Also, judging by the slight redness of your nostrils, I’d say you recently had a cold. What did you use to get over it? Rose hip tea, I’ll conjecture.” Houghton walked back around the counter. Without taking his gaze from the girl he wiped down its varnished top with a rag.

  “How’d you know about my lack of sleep?”

  “Even a beauty as great as yours can’t distract completely from those bags under your eyes.”

  Although she did not realize it yet, the feature Annabelle admired most in other people, no matter her relationship to them, was guile. This boy had plenty. She could tell by that sly grin he was trying so hard to hide beneath a more somber expression. The faint line curling into the corner of his mouth, in contrast to his tightly wound bow tie and hair parted so cleanly the warp and woof of each strand was distinct, made the boy, however uncultivated and inferi
or his ancestry, seem liable to do anything next, whether beg pardon, snap a playing card from thin air, or remain quiet. Was he being modest in regard to his deductions, or was he pretending to be modest in regard to his deductions? Annabelle couldn’t decide.

  The latter was correct. Yesterday a customer had pointed out to Houghton the caravan of wagons arriving from New Orleans. The customer said only a wealthy man could afford such extravagant means of transport. Houghton combined that knowledge with what, over the years, he had learned working at Forster Rex-for-All. He knew the common ingredients for shampoo. He knew expensive foods such as mushrooms were rich in vitamin D. He knew long trips disrupted sleep patterns. The only genuine deduction he had made about the girl was the one that involved her recent cold. To break the silence, as well as to divert any suspicions, Houghton said, “You still haven’t said how I can be of use to you.”

  “Use?”

  “Assistance.”

  “Oh. Assistance. Yes, of course,” she said. “It’s my father. He is prone to gout and has recently come down with a particularly severe case. Back home his doctor gives him—”

  “Colchicine, extract of the meadow saffron.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s a fine place to start. Most pharmacists shy away from going any further in their curative.” Houghton retrieved three bottles from a shelf and arranged them on top of a workbench nearby. “But I am not the type to abide the majority.” He mixed liquid from one bottle with powder from the other two. “I’ve found that colchicine is most effective when accompanied by lime extract. With just a touch of turmeric.”

  Because the boy’s back was to her, Annabelle could not see the details of his operations until, with a mildly theatrical air, he turned around, shaking a small bottle of brown liquid. He placed the bottle on the counter. Without fully admitting it to herself Annabelle was disappointed at such efficiency. She had wanted to hear more from this boy who, despite most likely having grown up bathing in a barrel half, acted as though he were of a station equal to hers. Such the shame. His wit had to have been a studied ploy. His game had to have been a sales tactic. Just as Annabelle concluded the boy was nothing but a parlor trickster Houghton spoke up.

  “That takes care of your father. Now let’s take care of you.”

  Annabelle managed to ask, “Excuse me?” more confounded than upset. Take care of her how?

  “Rest assured, miss, you have done nothing offensive enough as to warrant excusing of any kind, especially from myself.” Out of a trough behind the counter Houghton pulled bottles stoppered with spouts. “We’ll remedy the dregs of that cold of yours. Just need the right medicinal syrups. And, of course, some help from the Mockingbird.”

  “The what?”

  Three years earlier, Houghton’s father, Tewksbury, had decided it was high time to replace the store’s soda fountain, a basic gooseneck model. He hoped a more luxurious one would help cater to the carriage trade. Rather than purchase the fountain from one of the country’s four largest manufacturers—Charles Lippincott & Company, James W. Tufts, A.D. Puffer & Sons, and the John Matthews Apparatus Company, all of which, in 1891, would combine to form the American Soda Fountain Company—Houghton convinced his father to let him build it himself. His side business in scrap metal came to be useful. Overall the project took two months to complete. A cottage design with Victorian gingerbread on the roof and bas-relief scenes in each tile of its Brocatelle marble, the fountain was a paradigm of aesthetic beauty as well as pneumatic chemistry, featuring innovative pump pistons, stopcocks, and block-tin coils. Houghton had bought the gold-plated figurine that provided its nickname from a retired sutler in Olive Branch. Once a decorative feature on a Pullman car owned by a textile magnate, the small metallic bird was actually a bald eagle, but after the man who stole it from a Nashville depot clipped its wings to pay a gambling debt, the piece more closely resembled the state bird of Mississippi.

  The figurine from which the Mockingbird got its name has for years been one of the most sought-after pieces of memorabilia among PanCola enthusiasts throughout the country. It was officially declared missing when the company entered receivership on March 4, 1978. In Mythic Trinkets, a detailed compendium of Americana that are now considered lost, Timothy Hamish writes, “Those bullies of life—time and chance—conspired, by way of family neglect, corporate theft, or sheer public disregard, to hide the Mockingbird somewhere in the world: that yard sale down the street, a corner of your friend’s basement, the landfill across town, or maybe your very own garage.” Those words proved fateful in more ways than one. In addition to predicting the circumstances for how the Mockingbird figurine would eventually be found, they also mirrored, unbeknownst to their author, a moment of philosophical revelry in Houghton Forster’s mind as he told Annabelle Teague the story of how he’d built the soda fountain, concluding with the namesake ornament that Hamish would later describe as the victim of two bullies. Houghton stared at the beautiful girl before him, decided it was love at first sight, and, wondering about the thousands of seemingly inconsequential events that must have led to this introduction, formed a theory: fate is nothing but chance plus time.

  He brushed aside the thought to focus on mixing a drink for the girl. With his back to the fountain, its marble splotched in red, brown, yellow, white, and three shades of blue, Houghton combined a similarly varied range of ingredients: tincture ginger and Seidlitz powders, bromo-caffeine and bromo-seltzer, ester gum, bicarbonate of soda, and pepsin. Into the mix he poured a dose of apple syrup for taste. Houghton said over his shoulder, “This should be plenty invigorating enough to treat your cold,” while filling the glass with soda water. Foam bulbed the rim as he set the drink before her.

  “What do you call it?” Annabelle asked.

  Houghton answered, “Apple of My Eye.”

  Of all his facial expressions, the boy knew from a smirk. Nonetheless Annabelle wanted to see how easily it could be wiped clean of this Mississippi ragamuffin. She drew on her knowledge of the soda trade to say, “Apple of My Eye. Hmm. I’ve always preferred a virgin.”

  That surely did put him in a pet. His face lost its color and his shoulders caved in and his smirk became a frown. “I’m sorry, miss.” The boy gulped onomatopoetically. “But did you say—”

  “That I prefer virgins? Yes. Isn’t that what soda jerks call it when they add cherry flavor to a drink? Make it a virgin?”

  “Around here we say, ‘Make it virtuous.’”

  Despite the brief moment of crisis, his thoughts forming an inventory of how the girl could have known, Houghton quickly revitalized, grabbing the bottle of cherry syrup and adding a pony’s worth to the drink. Something told him she had simply been toying with his composure as a means to justify her own snobbery, to restore the natural order as she understood it, and to see, perhaps, if he would stand for such treatment. Houghton was trying to think of a sufficiently playful way to call her on the move when a voice came hollering from the back of the store.

  “The ice man’s in the alley, Houghton. How many blocks we need today?”

  Into the front of the store walked an Indian larger than any Annabelle had ever had occasion to glimpse when passing through the French Quarter on the way to her weekly piano lesson. Still, in spite of his size, shoulders as wide as a wagon axle and each hand as big as a lettuce, he appeared to be of the civilized sort, black hair held down by an elegant trilby, tab-collar shirt laundered to a crisp white. The Indian paused on noticing Annabelle. “My sincerest apologies for the interruption,” he said, surprising her with his elocution. “Did not realize we had a customer on the premises.” Have mercy, but he even bowed like a gentleman.

  “Branchwater, I’d like you to meet”—the boy turned to her—“what was your name again, miss?”

  “Annabelle. I mean, Miss Teague.”

  The situation, Annabelle thought while being greeted, again with impressive manners, by this fellow named Branchwater, was strange. Why was she being spoken to so fra
nkly? Why was she still there in the store? And most perplexing of all, why did she feel so at ease? These people were beneath her. She was a Teague!

  “Such a peculiar name, Mr. Branchwater. Might I ask its etymology?”

  “He’s genuine Cherokee nation,” said the boy behind the counter. “Isn’t that so, Branchwater?”

  Mr. Branchwater squared his stance, raised the palm of his hand, and solemnly said, “How.” Annabelle was not sure if he was joking until she heard a snicker from Houghton.

  “I love it when he does that.”

  Despite Thomas Jefferson Branchwater’s tribal heritage, his friends liked to say he’d gotten his last name because, whenever any of them were drinking bourbon, he made for good company. His people skills were just as deft when put to other use. “Send Branchwater to have a talk with them,” Houghton, throughout the years ahead, would often say in regard to troublesome distributors, merchants, or contractors, who, after the meeting, would explain the ring of black around their eye or the new sedan in their driveway, the wad of hundreds in their pocket or the cast around their forearm, by saying, “The Indian came to see me.”

  The heat in the store, increasing each minute, was starting to get to Annabelle. “How much do I owe you?” she asked, the taffeta at her neckline damp with sweat, the glass on the counter jeweled from the humidity. Appearances, she reminded herself. The world was always watching.