American Pop

by Snowden Wright

  Even the surname was a matter of chance. Despite the etymology of cola, its taste, as can be verified by anyone who has chewed a kola nut, possesses no real cognate in nature. Cola tastes like its namesake as much as ketchup tastes like tomatoes. Houghton referenced the fruit on sandwich boards outside the store because he thought it sounded intriguingly exotic. “Made from the finest kola nut in all Panola County.” Back then, he could never have foreseen how that seemingly exotic term would soon morph into one of the most domestic in the country, comparable to apple pie, baseball, jazz, and blue jeans.

  In order for Panola Cola to become as nationally known as cola in general, though, Houghton hired a consultant, Seymour Chessman, best known for his book The Democratic Market.

  “What’s the one thing a business strategist does not want to hear? ‘Let’s keep it regional,’” Chessman said to Houghton. “This isn’t just a drink for southerners. This drink deserves to be known the world wide.”

  The result was PanCola. Although the company itself remained The Panola Cola Company, its signature product became known primarily by its abbreviated name, one that could soon be seen painted on barn sides, stamped into tin sheets, and lettered in flashbulbs throughout the United States. The soda-water habit grew, as the century turned, into the ten-cent tradition. Despite the increasing number of competitors—a man named Pemberton sold a cola that was popular in Georgia and a man named Bradham sold one that was popular in North Carolina—PanCola was the leader not only in sales but also in what, decades later, would be described as brand recognition. The company achieved that rare linguistic feat of a specific product integrating with its general category. In the Northeast, carbonated drinks were called “soda.” In the Midwest, carbonated drinks were called “pop.” Across the Southeast, however, they were called “Pan.”

  At the same time as that word became synonymous with cola another one became synonymous with wealth. “Forster” had connotations similar to “Astor.” That was why Houghton worked so hard. He wanted to make a name for his family so his children could more easily make a name for their own. His ultimate goal was the cultivation of a lineage that embodied the twentieth century in America. It has been widely agreed he was successful in achieving that goal, though discord remains on what respect, the ascent or the descent, connected his family most to the trajectory of its country.

  Part 2

  2.1

  The National Centennial—Sweets for the Sweet—The Malediction—Betsy Ross’s Legacy

  Tewksbury Forster chose not to celebrate the Fourth of July, but the decision had nothing to do with his patriotism. Ever since he had arrived in America less than a year earlier, an immigrant from the Scottish Highlands hoping to start a medical practice, Tewksbury loved nearly everything about his new country, regardless of its refusal to issue him a license for anything but pharmacology. He paid every cent of his taxes without acrimony. He put his marker in voting booths with pride. The reason Tewksbury was not marching in the parade down Main Street was that his wife was in labor with their first child.

  The year was 1876. In a cottage three miles north of Batesville, Mississippi, which her husband had designed himself based on her specifications, Fiona lay on the floor, dress hitched up to her knees, sweat crowning her brow. She counted the rafters in the ceiling to avoid thinking of the pain. The cottage had been a belated wedding gift from Tewksbury. “Are you right-handed or left?” he had asked when drafting the plans. “I’ll put our bedroom on the east or west side, depending.” Fiona’s surprise that her husband did not yet know which hand she favored was supplanted by the question of how he’d build a house by himself. She received both an answer and an additional surprise when their neighbors offered to help. Back in England, the country she doubted she’d ever stop thinking of as home, people tolerated, at best, the occasional interloper from distant outposts of the empire, with their strange accents, their strange attire, their strange customs. Now here in these United States she was the stranger. But instead of making hurtful comments, asking Tewksbury where his kilt was or telling Fiona to go bow to her queen, the people of Mississippi had offered to help them build a house. How truly remarkable, this southern hospitality!

  Yet, when their neighbors had offered to help, it turned out, they had meant they would loan out their “help,” the people Tewksbury, trying to avoid the more aggressive terms preferred by the locals, sometimes called “those dark lads.”

  One, two, three, Fiona continued counting the rafters, each number somehow increasing rather than decreasing the labor pains. Four, five, six. Tewksbury was in the kitchen, looking for his medical kit. He had barely used it since their arrival in the States. During their courtship, Fiona had been proud, even boastful, about the fact that Tewksbury was a doctor, but since the Forsters’ trip to this country, taken a week after their nuptials, she had never seen him practice medicine other than to prescribe, sell, and provide drugs to rural farmers with only a pittance to spare. Had he ever aided in childbirth? Could he be trusted at her side? Handsome but mysterious, charming but distant, Tewksbury had wooed her into their engagement with promises of a new life in America, untold riches around every corner, limitless opportunity, elegant culture, a land of boundless splendor.

  Once they’d reached America, they had to travel through Europe all over again, encountering Irish immigrants on their stop in New York, Spanish when they rounded the tip of Florida, French while docked in New Orleans, and German as they departed in Tennessee. Fiona and Tewksbury had spent the entire voyage interacting as though they were but a touch above acquaintances. Not once did he mention his kinfolk. Rarely did he speak of his childhood. Only after their arrival in Memphis on a steamboat named Fortune’s Hostage, as they traveled south by stagecoach to the small town in Mississippi where they planned to settle, did Fiona question whether Tewksbury really was an honest man. The thought occurred to her as they secured the curtains of their private coach and, with the steady creaking of the wagon axles their only distraction from the awkwardness, finally summoned the nerve to consummate their marriage. The act hurt more than she had imagined.

  “Don’t leave me here alone,” she called from the pine floor. “The pain’s getting worse.”

  What was Tewksbury doing back there in the kitchen? He confounded Fiona so often these days. True, he had built her a house. True, he made a living with his vials. True, he had kept to a gentle nature. Still, despite such qualities, Fiona harbored an indeterminate suspicion of her husband, perhaps a result of his Scottish brogue, which had begun to devolve into a southern twang. He’d adopted trouser galluses for fashion, taken to spitting chaw, and declared intentions to farm. His behavior confused her as much as the peculiarities of their new homeland. America guaranteed its citizens life and liberty, for example, but also promised that happiness would always be out of reach, a thing to be forever pursued. It didn’t make any sense to Fiona. Sometimes she wondered if she had made a mistake in moving to a country she barely understood with a man she barely knew.

  One rafter, two rafter, three rafter, four.

  * * *

  In the kitchen, Tewksbury was busy not being able to find his black leather medical pouch, which had been given to him years ago by his mentor, Dr. Phillip McAllister. Tewksbury had been a twelve-year-old orphan when his acquaintance was made with the good doctor.

  The brethren at the orphanage had told him his parents had died in India. Tewksbury’s father had been counselor to Governor-General Lord Canning, explained the brother to whom he was closest, and based in Fort William during the years leading to the Uprising of 1857. “Both your parents died valiantly at Her Majesty’s Service after the Curry Mongers chose not to bite cartridges dipped in bacon grease.” Tewksbury took their word for Gospel. Born near Inverness but later moved to Bristol, he had been especially naïve as a child, considering the roads and cottages of Ashley Down to be the center of the known world, accepting Director Muller as a saint, and believing it a miracle when the No. 2 Hous
e received fresh milk and bread by mere serendipity. “The baker’s cart broke down at our door,” one of the brethren said to him, “due to the cobblestones placed there by God!” Tewksbury was so green to all forms of duplicity that at the age of twelve, while being led away from the orphanage carrying a tin trunk with two sets of clothes, he asked his new guardian’s name, to which the strange man who had taken over his supervision said, “I’m your uncle, fool,” causing the young boy to mistake the nominative of address for the given name of Dr. McAllister.

  Tewksbury gave up on finding his medical kit and went to check on the condition of his wife. In light of his missing equipment, not to mention the sheer dread of making a mistake on a patient so close to him, he decided to take her to another physician. Dr. Phelps kept a small office on Main Street. Without any delays Tewksbury could get Fiona there in an hour. He lifted her from the floor, carried her through the house, and placed her in the wagon.

  It grew near impossible for Tewksbury to overlook the ire in how his darling Fiona muddled through her pain. She called him a scoundrel for having put her in this wretched state. She said he was a fraud who could but hardly fix a sore thumb. Even though he worried she may have been correct in the first accusation—“Damn near ruffled my heart,” he would tell his granddaughter—Tewksbury knew she was wrong when it came to the second. His uncle of no genuine family relation had taught Tewksbury well enough throughout his time as an apprentice. Together they had toured Europe as traveling physicians. During the half decade he’d spent assisting the doctor, Tewksbury learned all the common techniques of their trade, such as what diet to prescribe for a strain in the back and how to lance a boil at no risk of infection. He also learned that the practice of medicine was not as lucrative as the sale of it.

  “Just stay with me for a little piece more,” Tewksbury said over his shoulder to Fiona. “Go on clinching your toes like I told you.”

  Despite his claims to have been “taught the humors” at Cambridge, Dr. McAllister earned most of his money selling a bubbly elixir said to cure “all manner of malady.” Seldom were the occasions for Tewksbury to observe complicated procedures. What he would have given to witness just a few seconds of open surgery! Instead, Tewksbury spent most of his time aiding in the continual improvement of the doctor’s special curative, purchasing tinctures on gas-lit streets overlooking the Thames at midnight, visiting Morocco to sample black market extracts of various foreign herbs, all the while having to listen to Dr. McAllister proclaim the virtues of effervescence.

  Although Tewksbury considered such experiences the opposite of storybook, his grandson Montgomery would years later be taken with the novels of Charles Dickens, finding in them an expansion of the anecdotes his grandfather sometimes let slip. Monty was carrying his favorite of those Victorian cliffhangers inside his AEF overcoat the evening he saw his best friend’s skull encounter a half-inch cylinder of German industrialism. Thereafter it became impossible for Monty to read a single word of Great Expectations.

  In 1870, during his apprenticeship with the doctor, Tewksbury had laid the foundation of either coincidence or providence by traveling across what would one day become the Western Front. Dr. McAllister was taking him on a sales trip to Belgium. Instead of barbed wire they strolled through tulips in full bloom. Instead of artillery blasts they listened to larks at song. What made Tewksbury’s trip to the Flemish provinces a toss-up between coincidental and providential was that the beauty of the area inspired him to emigrate to America, a country for which Tewksbury’s grandson would feel such patriotism he did not hesitate to enlist in a war that would leave his hands shaking even as they gripped the Winchester Model 12 that would still them forever.

  * * *

  The wagon jostled through a rut Fiona thought seemed deep as a trench. In the back of the wagon, racked with labor pains, she rested her head on a damp sack of feed, mentally accusing her husband of deceit. Why could she not have seen it? Her gullibility, decided Fiona, was congenital. Established in 1839 by Fiona’s father, Wadsworth Confections had been, in more ways than she could tell at the time, the primary influence on Fiona’s early life in Yorkshire. She passed most of her childhood bagging out mixes by the pound. Fiona now supposed that her intimacy with licorice satins, Catherine wheels, tiger’s paws, sugar mice, Turkish lumps, and bonfire toffee had led to her relationship with Tewksbury. Only the daughter of a man who owned a sweet shop would be so oblivious to the bitter nature in others. Under heavy breath Fiona cursed Tewksbury for beguiling her. Hindsight made it all blatant. The stories of his teenage years abroad, from what little she had been told, now seemed bred of knavish fancy. An orphan apprentice? For mercy’s and heaven’s and pity’s sake.

  Even how they first met smacked of artifice. Here in the back of a wagon, squinting down the trail at a wooden sign, batesville, panola county, pop. 392, which meant her ordeal was almost over, Fiona could remember clearly the road, thousands of miles away, where she literally fell for Tewksbury. That day two years ago, she had been in a rush. At a crossing near her father’s shop, Fiona, without having checked for oncoming traffic, was sideswiped by a carriage horse. The harness left a gash along her hand. On sight of the blood, Fiona grew faint, tripping to a seat curbside.

  All she saw of the man at first was his medical kit stitched of black leather so old it looked as supple as cloth. From his bag the man removed a small jar of ointment, and with his kerchief he daubed the ointment along her wound. Fiona’s senses returned to her right as the man finally spoke. “It’s just a balm for healing. Called aloe vera. I picked it up in Egypt.” He leaned toward her hand, lips pursed as though to give a kiss, only to blow on the treated gash.

  If her heels hadn’t been on the curb Fiona’s head would have been over them. Egypt! She had never met anyone who had traveled so far. Her visualization of pith helmets brought to mind certain private aspects of the male anatomy, which in turn made her blush, a symptom that thankfully brought on further attention from the handsome man clutching his medical kit. Tewksbury had that very same look of attention now as he carried Fiona toward an office into the door of which was carved al phelps, m.d. Why would one doctor need to take his wife to be treated by another, she wondered, particularly somebody who couldn’t be bothered to spell out his full first name?

  “She’s already deep into the throes,” Tewksbury said as he carried her into the office of Albert Phelps. “Help me get her up on this table.”

  Odds were good that Phelps had been celebrating the Fourth for a very long while. Tewksbury could smell the Speyside. Notes of cask-smoky peat and aridly sweet heather wafted among cedar tongue depressants and ether-inhalant bottles. The doctor was sufficient proof in himself. On the dusty floor he dropped a forceps, and in the dirty sink he washed a speculum. He stifled a belch with his hand. During the last few years of his life, Dr. McAllister, who had begun regularly taking his own elixir to abate the tuberculosis corroding his lungs, showed similar disregard. Often he could not even be trusted to set a bone correctly. At last the situation reached such a threshold that Tewksbury quit his appointed duties, rendering laudanum, synthesizing salicylates, processing quinine, so he could take over for Dr. McAllister in matters that required a more assured hand.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Fiona asked Tewksbury. “Is something wrong with him?”

  She had to admit it was the strangest thing. There Fiona lay perched on the table, nether parts exposed to the room and mind reeling in pain, when her husband, who had brought her all the way into town just to be treated by this man, pushed Dr. Phelps aside. “I’ll handle it from here, tosspot. You’re in no condition.” What on earth? The same man whose hands had shaken when she told him her water had loosed was at present handling the birth with nary a drop of sweat forming on his brow. Fiona almost had a mind to feel sorry for her recent misgivings of his character, if only she weren’t distracted by another swell of pain. She gnashed her teeth. She clenched her fists. Then, through a fog, she heard Tewksbu
ry say he could see the head.

  Tiny bits of molar loose in her mouth and a row of half-moons cut on her palms, Fiona was in such agony, pushing, pushing, that she just about failed to notice, pushing, pushing, when the agony was over. Across from her Tewksbury held a tiny person. Even though she’d never believed in a higher power, Fiona, staring at her limp and silent newborn son, cursed God for taking his life so soon. It was at that moment the child lurched awake with the shrillest of cries.

  Fiona’s elation at seeing her son come to life was matched only by her terror from having blasphemed the Lord. That she previously had no religion did little to mitigate her belief in a curse. Her child was doomed. She knew it. Her child was doomed. Over the following decades, Fiona would be proven half correct as the supposed curse skipped her son but came for his descendants, plucking them from the world like petals from a flower, with Fiona unable to do anything but age and watch. Henceforth she called it the Malediction.

  Once Tewksbury had given Fiona time to hold the baby—she certainly was acting odd, but that was likely due to the strain—he took his son back for the labor’s third stage. He figured that in such a benign operation Phelps was about sober enough to provide assistance. Despite a few hand tremors while clamping the cord, Dr. Phelps performed admirably, cutting through the umbilical with a clean swipe. Tewksbury said, “Obliged.” He coo-chee-coo’d over to the window, where the afternoon light was stronger. Ten fingers and ten toes, ten toes and ten fingers: he counted them twice, not for fear they wouldn’t add up, but simply to dote. For a moment Tewksbury thought of Dr. McAllister on his final day. Back in their room at the public house, Tewksbury finally asked his mentor, whose entire shirtfront was caked in maroon spittle, why exactly he’d chosen him, Tewksbury, over all the other boys at the orphanage. “I asked for the smartest,” Dr. McAllister told him, smiling with such warmth, “and they gave me you.” Seven years after the death of the closest thing he had ever had to a father, Tewksbury, while holding his newborn son, remembered those words, thinking how, though he would never have presumed to ask for the most beautiful child in the world, he had now been given it.