American Pop

by Snowden Wright

  “Dollar for the medicine,” Houghton said. “Soda’s on the house.”

  “That won’t be necessary. Send the bill in its entirety to the hotel. It’ll be paid promptly.”

  Behind the counter, watching this Annabelle Teague walk away, Houghton knew without looking that she had not touched, let alone sipped, the virtuous drink. He wanted to see her again. He needed to see her again. Houghton called out to Annabelle and, attempting in vain to keep his tone casual, asked about her plans for the rest of the day.

  “That’s hardly the affair of some tiller boy.”

  The door screeched shut as she departed. In the silence that followed, Houghton tried to convince himself that he had misheard Annabelle, because of the rusty hinges. He might have been successful in doing so, if only Branchwater had not, at that moment, broken down into a raucous fit of laughter.

  * * *

  On his third attempt Houghton persuaded Annabelle to go on a date. She had been in town a week because her father’s gout, despite a variety of treatments, still hadn’t shown a single sign of being on the mend. “Man must eat a beefsteak at each meal,” the doctor said, “such for his foot to get swoled that big.” Every time Annabelle came by the store to pick up more medicine she turned down whatever social activity Houghton proposed. She did not want to watch the sunset. She had no interest in going for a stroll. What finally caused her to acquiesce was an invitation to help with the monthly harvest of drinking straws.

  Houghton handled the wagon reins while he sat beside Annabelle. Above her head she held a parasol even though the tree canopy provided adequate shade. The image tickled Houghton. A parasol in Panola County! Just the same, he did appreciate the collateral breeze made by her other accessory, a silk folding fan. The morning had grown into a scorcher. He now considered it a mistake to have tried to pretty up for Annabelle by wearing wool trousers instead of the overalls typical of him. He found it difficult to fathom the notion that all of society’s upper crust went about their lives sopped in sweat. No wonder they cherished their fancy sunshades.

  Throughout the four-mile trip on county roads, Mississippi’s flora and fauna varied between its pastures and woodland, the honey locust, sycamore, and mountain laurel as frequent as the papaw, wisteria, and buckeye, pink Cherokee roses growing next to green Virginia creepers, an occasional hooded warbler flitting above a cow pond. Houghton pointed out the most distinctive scenes as they passed by them. A dog of indeterminate breed climbing a ladder perched against the gable of a barn. A yard full of Plymouth Rocks clucking away. A bullfrog hopping from red to black on an abandoned game of bottle-top checkers. Houghton held a hand over each smile brought about by each of those he saw on Annabelle.

  “Would it bother you if I asked a frank question?” he said, already braced for a pert response.

  “I’ll assume you’re being rhetorical.”

  Hoping that was the extent of it, he asked, “Why did you finally say yes to letting me see you outside the store?”

  Annabelle side-eyed Houghton. She knew what he was really asking and she knew the genuine answer to it. There certainly was plenty to like about him. His tongue was of equal speed to his wit. His fettle appeared to be in fine condition. Yet, more than those two obvious attributes, a body fit for the proscenium and an ability to handle a quip, Annabelle liked that Houghton, who probably did not know a dance card from the stag line, would even consider her a possibility.

  “The tiller boy would like to know why I agreed to this little excursion,” she said to the horse team, and then looked at Houghton. “I suppose it had to do with just how pathetic you seemed asking.”

  In a trice Houghton flicked the reins, bringing the wagon to an abrupt stop. Dust unfurled around it from back to front. Annabelle said, “Oh, come now. It was only a joke. Don’t be upset.”

  “I’m not upset.”

  “Then why’d you stop?”

  “We’re here.”

  The meadow in front of them, Annabelle noticed on hearing those words, was covered with wild rye. Gusts of wind sent ripples through the field, as though invisible sailboats were cruising by, parting the yellow stalks of grain like water.

  “It’s beautiful,” Annabelle said, “so Edenic.” At the time, while being helped down from the wagon by a boy who would one day be her husband, she did not know the meadow sat on the southeastern perimeter of land that years later would become their home, nor did she know the estate would be called “Eden.” The first of their four children, Montgomery, was responsible for the name. Prior to the Forsters, those twelve hundred acres outside Batesville, Mississippi, had been owned by the bankrupt descendants of a second-son Welsh aristocrat who, in homage to the public school where he’d first dreamed of making a fortune all his own, had named the property Eton. That word turned biblical when spoken by a child only five years old. Due to the same reason, the family’s first dog, a yellow Labrador named after an Anglo-Saxon epic poem, became known as “Bear-Wolf.”

  From the back of the wagon Houghton grabbed two empty feed sacks and handed one to Annabelle as they walked toward the field. “Usually farmers plant rye to feed their livestock,” he said, “but this here is just growing natural on its own.” Once they were within those wild plants, he pulled a small pair of shears from his pocket and knelt down next to the stalks adrift in the wind, motioning for her to do the same. “You’ve got to cut them down here where they’re still green. See? I like to cut them at an angle. Let’s our customers know the drinking straws are handmade. Not cut by some machine.” Houghton gave another pair of shears to Annabelle. “Let’s see you give it a try.” He took each of her hands in his own, guiding the empty one to clutch at a stalk and guiding the one holding shears to snip its base, and then dropped the rye into her feed sack. “Back at the store I’ll set them out in the sun. When they’re dry, I’ll peel off the outer covering and bundle them by diameter and length. And that’s it. Homemade sippers ready for service.” On her own Annabelle began to harvest the natural drinking straws, so intent on the process that she didn’t notice Houghton watching her.

  He couldn’t help it. Something about this girl compelled him to ogle. Houghton didn’t know why exactly. She was such a sight. Freckles on her elbow, ankle, earlobe, and wrist constellated her figure against the trees, air, grass, and clouds of the summer afternoon. Annabelle became a sort of astronavigation that distracted rather than guided Houghton. Only a little did he notice the bumblebees bumbling, and hardly at all did he notice the roly-polies rolling. Was this how love felt, he wondered, like being lost with a map?

  They’d filled their sacks by three o’clock. After putting them in the wagon Houghton retrieved the picnic supplies and walked just ahead of Annabelle to a walnut tree across the meadow. He set down the basket in a spot of shade, spread out a throw, and picked up a halved nutshell from the ground. While he organized the food, uncovering a plate of cold fried chicken and polishing two apples with a checkered rag, Houghton asked Annabelle, “What animals prefer walnuts on their banana split?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Monkeys,” he said, holding up the walnut, the cross section of its kernel shaped like a simian visage.

  “Soda-jerk humor?”

  “Something like it.”

  Whatever kind of humor it was, Annabelle thought, it was fairly close to adorable. She would give him that much. One thing she most certainly would not give him, however, was the sight of her gnawing on a greasy drumstick. It was impossible to keep up a ladylike appearance in this heat. Why on earth did she wear a whalebone corset in high summer? Annabelle made do with an apple.

  “A nice touch,” she said, glad for the breeze drying the sweat from her brow. “The apples.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You brought them in reference to the first drink you made me. The Apple of My Eye. Didn’t you?”

  “Actually, I hadn’t thought about it. We just had a lot of apples back at the house. Interesting coincidence, though.�
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  “Must be fate.”

  Beneath tree limbs heavy with foliage, Houghton considered those words from Annabelle, how they reminded him of something. The thought occurred to him with a ping as distinct as tobacco gleet hitting the inside of a cuspidor. “I was thinking about fate the first time we met,” he said, repositioning himself a few inches closer to her.

  “That so?”

  “I was thinking about how us meeting that day was fate. I was thinking about how fate is simply chance plus time.”

  “You know what the only thing stronger than fate is?”

  “Tell me.”

  “Will.”

  Houghton was now close enough to feel each breath from Annabelle. In that moment, before he could convince himself otherwise, he decided to prove her point.

  He kissed her.

  Decades later, over drinks at The Brook one evening, William K. Vanderbilt II would jokingly ask, “What gave you the nerve to even try to land a Teague?” to which Houghton answered that it was the same thing that let their ancestors think about leaving the old country, the same thing that helped those first settlers wrest farmland from the wilderness, the same thing giving their waiter that look of defiance tempered with envy, but on August 6, 1890, the smell of honeysuckle flowers in the air and the taste of apple pulp on his lips, the most profundity Houghton could muster while kissing Annabelle was the thought, Thank God this happened sometime before I die.

  Both of them leaned back on the blanket. With the palm of his hand Houghton buffered Annabelle’s head from the hard ground, and with the fingers of his other hand he traveled the stars. He touched her freckles, the faint smudge where her earlobe curled in on itself, the tiny circle of brown above the pulse in her wrist, the dark nebula showing through the fine hairs of her elbow, all of which constituted what Houghton had come to think of, since he first noticed them in the rye field, as the Annabelle constellation. Those freckles, he could have sworn, radiated celestial heat.

  The world around the two of them seemed to grow more alive the longer they kissed—flowers had heartbeats and clouds had friends, trees had dreams and puddles had families—to the extent that, for a brief moment, Houghton thought the train whistle in the distance was the hoot of an owl.

  “Is that the four twelve?” Annabelle asked.

  “I suppose so.”

  All in a single motion, she pushed Houghton off from her, sat up, and laced the front of her bodice. “If we aren’t back when my father takes his tea, he’ll start to wonder where I’ve been all day.” With the blanket she balled up what was left of their picnic, as though to hang it from the end of a stick, and then shoved the whole clattering mess into the basket. Annabelle began to hurry through the stalks of rye. To catch up Houghton had to sprint.

  “You didn’t tell him where you were going?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Think he’ll be upset?”

  “He certainly won’t be delighted,” Annabelle said, already halfway to the wagon. She left out the part about how her father wouldn’t care where she had gone so much as with whom.

  * * *

  Royal Teague declined the offer of a cigar from Tewksbury Forster. He was in no mood. On the porch of Forster Rex-for-All in the early evening, the two men sat opposite each other, one rubbing his sore foot and the other striking a match as they waited for their children to return.

  “Houghton is always back before nightfall whenever he makes these trips,” Tewksbury said. “I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about. Houghton’s a good boy.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  Born into wealth, privilege, and class—his parents were diagnostic rather than prognostic in their naming of him—Royal had been raised to believe that “blood tells.” He expected his daughter, Annabelle, to follow the same axiom. She was meant to be courted by men who could one day be governor. She was meant to give birth to children who could one day be president. Given such high expectations, Royal had been dismayed to learn from the hotel manager that Annabelle had ridden off sub rosa with some local boy named Houghton, the runt son of a nostrum peddler.

  “Mind if I sweep past y’all?”

  Out the front door to Forster Rex-for-All walked the biggest Indian that Royal had seen in all his life. Tewksbury said, “Go ahead,” to the Indian. Despite the permission for him to sweep off the porch, the giant Indian stood still, broom in hand, spine straight, and feet planted firm, a stance so wooden and statuesque that Royal mused, amid the cigar smoke, whether this was a drugstore or a tobacconist shop. Then he followed the Indian’s gaze down the street.

  The wagon had just rounded a corner and was trundling slowly toward the store. His daughter was sitting far too close to the boy. Even worse, however, was that the two of them, in the plainest of sight, were holding hands. Royal felt liable to faint from anger. What had happened to his little girl? His propriety was dyed in the wool but hers had apparently died on the vine. As the wagon drew up to the store, its bangboard thumping a racket and its horse team chuffing heavily, Royal limped down the porch stairs and reached toward his daughter, saying, “Get down out of there before you make yourself into even more of a disgrace.”

  “Here, let me help you, Mr. Teague,” Houghton said, hopping from his seat and running around the wagon. “You shouldn’t be up on your sore f—” The blow from Annabelle’s father bloodied Houghton’s bottom lip.

  “Address me as ‘sir’ until we’re introduced.”

  From his position in the street, keeled over with one hand on his mouth and the other hanging onto a wagon wheel, Houghton managed to see Branchwater reach for the Bowie knife that, according to stories, had unburdened some forty-odd men of their receding hairlines, bald spots, and touches of gray. Houghton shook his head so subtly, like plucking a guitar string, that only Branchwater noticed. The blade disappeared back into its sheath.

  Houghton straightened just in time to be grabbed at the back of his neck by Mr. Teague. “I could bring you up on charges,” the man said. “Kidnapping, attempted molestation.” Even though he was still conscious, the severe pain in Houghton’s neck caused him to lose track of the different voices, a deep one whispering further allegations, a high one screaming to please let him go. Through the din, however, he recognized a voice, calm but stern, from on the porch.

  “This evening has been spoiled enough, Mr. Teague. I’ll have you kindly unhand my son.”

  On a farm somewhere outside of town a dinner bell rang. Neither that sound nor Tewksbury’s words, however, were the reason Royal let go of Houghton. He let him go because of the stricken look from his daughter. Years earlier, Royal’s wife, only a few hours before she succumbed to the fever, had given him that same look, mouth twisted in pain, brow smoothed by thought, eyes wide from trust, when she made him promise to raise Annabelle to be a lady with superior, untroubled prospects.

  “Come along. Let’s go back to the hotel.”

  “But, Daddy.”

  “Didn’t you hear the bell? It’s time for dinner.”

  With that, as though it were dawn instead of dusk, the Annabelle constellation vanished, all the lovely freckles on her elbow, wrist, ankle, and earlobe hidden by the encroaching dark. Neither father nor daughter looked back as they walked away from Forster Rex-for-All. They did not take a final glance at Branchwater holding his broom, Tewksbury smoking his cigar, or Houghton putting his hands in his pockets, where, unbeknownst to him until that moment, Annabelle had placed a card with her mailing address. The card marked the beginning of a courtship via post. Over the next few years, the two of them would correspond regularly, often several times a week. Each handwritten description of their daily lives reaffirmed a future in which those lives would be entwined. “I invented a new drink that is selling well,” Houghton wrote in his first letter to Annabelle. “Customers have nicknamed it Panola Cola.”

  1.3

  A Soda by Any Other Name

  Word spread fast. During those first couple of months fol
lowing its invention, the house soda of Forster Rex-for-All remained a local treat, known only to the genteel citizens of Batesville proper. Soon enough the county farmers and field hands discovered the drink. In the evenings they would cool down with a glass on their way to deliver a wagonload of hog shorts. In the mornings they would perk up with a glass while eating a drop biscuit made for them by the missus.

  How that popularity went national could be described as the old college try. At the University of Mississippi in Oxford, roughly forty miles east of the drugstore, students became fond of the soda, not only for its adaptability as a mixer with various liquors, rum and whiskey and gin, but also for its restorative properties when consumed the next day. The graduation of those students scattered them across the country. Because of such fortunate circumstances, they spread their taste for the soda from one coast to the other, seeding it as if in some patriotic folktale. Stockbrokers going out for a quick bite on Fulton Street asked their coworker if they could try a sip. Housewives living in suburban Chicago exhorted it as a cleaning agent. Doctors practicing in downtown Houston prescribed it for the gripes. Regulars at blind tigers all throughout the Tenderloin begged their bartenders to order the syrup. None of those things could happen, however, until one deficiency was rectified. The drink needed a name.

  The day after he invented the soda, Houghton, not yet realizing the import of what he had created, asked his mother to sample it. He said, “Just tell me the first words that come to you.”

  “Delicious,” Fiona said with a shrug, her smile turning into a frown when she saw her son wanted more. “Fizzy?”

  Houghton figured that would suffice. What he did not figure was that “Forster’s Delicious Fizzy” would prove too much of a mouthful. Over the first few weeks the drink was served at the store, most customers referred to it by the size they wanted, a tall, a regular, or a short, rather than by its given name. Some called it the good stuff. Others called it the new thing. Then one customer used a handle that stuck. On a particularly crowded afternoon, a stevedore from New Orleans came into the store and, by the serendipitous fluke of an accidental rhyme, asked for “that Panola cola” he’d heard so much about.