Читать книгу Exit Laughing - Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury - Страница 11

Table of Contents

Six days out of seven the jumbled enclosure which I have sought to describe yielded forth its pleasures: fit dens for robbers, slanted ship-decks for pirates, delightful ambuscades for lurking Indians. But on the seventh day it turned to a prison compound and reasonably indulgent mothers and aunts were transformed as the keepers of an unyielding and rigorous code. For, mind you, this household then all at once became as straitly blue-stockinged as any to be found this side of Aberdeen. We didn’t spend the Sunday; we kept the Sabbath and that, if you’ll take my solemn word for it, was a vastly different thing.

Through the morning we were pressed for most unwilling attendance at a certain old meetinghouse. This was a gaunt, slab-sided, hopelessly homely structure with a spire like a chiding finger and an entryway like a dark tunnel and a balcony that suggested an overgrown martin box. It was aloft there that the negro worshipers sat, mostly old family servants who followed the faith of their employers. The window panes were painted a numb cold gray, the idea, I take it, being to shut out the paganish sunshine or perhaps to provide a matching gloom for the spirits of troubled Fundamentalists. Its pews truly were penitential perches for uncomfortable, dangle-legged youth, being high-seated and straight-backed and very hard on juvenile flesh. I don’t seem to recall any cushions. But I do recall the passionless congregational singing and the pastoral prayers that ran as serials, and the blistering potbellied stoves in the winter, and in summer the slow-timed hypnotizing movements of a whole forest of palm-leaf fans. If a woman were in mourning or if she were matured in age, the blade of her fan invariably had a border of black tape sewed on it. And always somebody coughing or else a blowing of the human nose in a subdued and half-hearted way.

I place just two patches of color to relieve the drabbed austerity of that antique kirk. One was a pulpit cushion of dark red velvet upon which The Book rested and the other, framed in black walnut and hung above the inner door lintel where all coming hither might see and heed, was a scroll audaciously done in blue and green letters, which read:

GENTLEMEN WILL NOT USE

TOBACCO IN THE HOUSE OF GOD.

By which, of course, was meant gentlemen who chewed. Most gentlemen did, and some there were moreover who dipped snuff.

First off, to the dismal accompaniment of bells sounding from the steeple, came Sunday school and that, or such was the feeling, lasted for month on weary month. Then the smaller children were taken away and Nature or their nurses revived them out of their comatose state. But the rest of us must stay on to be sermonized by Dr. Hendrick. Now he was a dominie out of Scotland herself and behaved as such. He never preached for less than a century. Sometimes, or so it seemed to me, he preached on and on until the present Christian Era threatened to run out before he ran down. He was a dear kindly gentle old man with the face of a saint and delighted in good deeds, and so lavishly he dealt out such doctrinal beatitudes as Infant Damnation and Predestination and on occasion painted a graphic picture of that most awful nethermost pit of the Calvinistic Gehenna wherein demons, all hoofed and horned, stoked the flames, and tormented souls, like squirming frog legs, grilled eternally on the red-hot hobs of a Hell which had no fire escapes to it. I don’t believe I could have been more than eight years old, or maybe ten, when some vague adolescent sense of the plain fitness and fairness of things bade me secretly to revolt against a plan of unutterable, unendable punishment for poor faulty fallible mortals, let alone for innocent babes whose baptisms had been overlooked. How kindly folk, otherwise compassionate and charitable toward their fellow creatures, ever swallowed down such bitter theological boluses without gagging is a matter which will puzzle me as long as I live. But they did, for many a long year, until a tempered and more merciful interpretation of the Laws and the Scriptures came to be accepted, and their creed lost some of its harrow teeth.

From church, with the lardy smell of sinners fried on both sides still warm in our impressionable young noses, we marched homeward, two by two along the narrow pavement, like so many downcast lambkins going into the Ark and, if it were warm weather, hating every tortured step we took because of our toes that were so cramped and burning. Except on high days and holy days we boys went barefoot from mid-April until school “took up” in September and those thick stockings and those stiff shoes were as penances added to a routine already distressful enough.

Arriving, we ate of the enormous Sunday dinner—all the vegetables available, up to nine or ten separate varieties; chicken or pork products or both; at least two kinds of hot bread, usually fat biscuits and crunchy corn pones; and dessert and preserves and the like; and, as inevitable as the cruet stand rising like a lighthouse in the center and the moored regatta of pickle dishes surrounding it, a pitcher of New Orleans molasses and a cold-boiled ham. Indeed, no matter what else might be provided, the molasses pitcher and the boiled ham were staple fixtures on that table, three times a day, every day in the year.^[1]

Howsomever the scope of this vast meal never daunted me. From my earliest recollectable moment I was ever a sincere and earnest eater, and while with age my hair has thinned and the few remaining teeth have become stately ruins, I am proud and happy to announce that my gastric juices are still quite boyish. For me and for my contemporaries the welcomed interlude of dinner ended all too soon because immediately thereafter our gorged and distended warders reinaugurated the grim Sabbatical ritual, with all its abhorrent rules and regulations, and this continued through the dragging long “evening.” In our vocabulary “evening” began at the turn of midday and lasted until twilight; and after that it was “nighttime.” We hardly knew there was so snobbish a term as “afternoon.” Certainly we never used it ourselves. That practice was for benighted people from “up North” who naturally wouldn’t know any better.

Observe now how Sunday from the nooning on became one prolonged endurance trial: We might not play at indoor games because such would be grievous affronts before the watchful eyes of the late John Knox and all the lesser luminaries of a hand-picked Heavenly Host. We might not cavort about or whistle or make loud outcry. We might not even scratch ourselves, or at least not in an open manner, yet under the twin spells of humidity and monotony, we itched mightily, as who would not? If we sat very quietly, which meant very miserably, we might read books but only such books as contained Bible lessons and godly tales and uplifting examples; or Aesop’s Fables which already I knew off by heart; or ponderous history books, or the collected works of certain standard poets, Longfellow and Wordsworth and Sidney Lanier for choice. Once on a bored prowl in the “lumber room” I unearthed a large volume devoted to diseases of the horse. In sheer desperation I read it through from cover to cover. So I learned about glanders from there, also distemper, farcy and the botts.

As a great concession, one which tottered on the verge of downright evil-doing and only granted after a grave counsel of our elders, we were permitted to frequent an old and creaky wooden swing which, providentially shielded from the public gaze, stood behind the kitchen. But this boon had its deadening limitations. For we might not “pump ’way up high” or “run under,” might not indulge in shrill speech or boisterous antics while thus employed. After more than fifty years I still associate those dolorous summertime Sundays with a conglomerate of indented impressions—little heat waves jigging in the distance, little dust devils whirling through the slumbering street, and up in the silver-leaf poplars, locusts sawing tiny gashes in the broody silence; whiffs from heat-baked horsehair furniture and various hot varnishy smells oozing out through the slitted parlor door; the snoring of torpid adults as they stretched on sofas or hunched up in tilted chairs; the pangs of prickly heat under our starchy stiff linen collars and down our dripping spinal columns; and always the agonized whine of its warped thole pins as that decrepit swing traveled slowly to and fro, to and fro, while despondently and yawningly one of us “let the cat die.”

Once in a while there was a respite for the establishment’s harassed little inmates. My grandfather had a moral ordinance of his own which he lived and which bore no religion’s herd mark; and he might select one of us to accompany him on those delectable buggy rides of his. Then again my father would scheme on our behalf, for he had been raised in the Episcopal flock—with Catholicism further back—and privately entertained heretical views touching on the stricter dogmas. There were illustrious occasions when he smuggled us out—my older sister, my younger brother and I, and often a swarm of cousins—through a broken board in the high back fence and took us on past the crawfish towers and dried-up mud holes of the simmering municipal commons to a friendly woodland where we indulged in such heathenish offendings as wading in a branch and chasing minnows across its gravelly shoals and “chunking” at squirrels and in general reverted to a state of riotous savagery. But not too often did he dare repeat this outrageous kidnaping for fear of stout disapproval at home and the criticisms of properly scandalized neighbors.

Still and all, for every seventh day of stiff statutory discipline, there were six compensating weekdays made all the sweeter by contrast, when within limits, we might live our own natural, unruly lives amid the facilities of that cluttered venue. Two who aided and abetted us in these endeavors were Mandy and Uncle Rufus. Mandy was the fractious but affectionate despot of the kitchen department who’d spank us with enthusiasm for trespassing on her domain and then as willingly would gird up her loins and roll up her sleeves and charge out into the alley to lead a counter-attack against any intruders who had annoyed or threatened us. One of the worst whippings I ever got—and I got plenty—was when my mother caught up with me after Mandy, vengefully waving a skillet, pursued me out of her kingdom wherefrom I had just surreptitiously borrowed a piping hot dried-apple turnover—what a benighted ignoramus of a Northerner would call “a fried pie.” It wasn’t so much for filching the turnover that I was switched; that was but a minor misdeameanor. It was for the infinitely worse crime of calling Mandy “an ole black nigger” as I fled with my spoils.

Right now I can shut my eyes and see her, all gnarled and painfully kinked, and so bossy and loudmouthed and competent. Perhaps because sundry forward-looking sophisticates of her race were inclined to sneer at what they called a “handkercheef-haided darky” she rarely wore a bandana turban. She preferred a puckered skull-cap made from the leg of somebody’s discarded stocking and for special outdoor occasions a man’s battered slouch hat perched on top of this fez-like effect. The moderns were licked then; they had no word for that combination.

She was chronically rheumatic and what was rare among negroes, a dyspeptic, and she was as cranky as all get-out; but for forty-two uninterrupted years she served one branch or another of our family and died, an enfeebled pensioner, in that service. Two weeks before she went where the faithful loving souls of this earth go, my uncle wrote her will for her. The estate consisted of her life’s savings—one hundred and twenty dollars in cash. Of this she decreed that one hundred dollars be spent in burying her tired-out body. The residue she left to her “Baby,” meaning by that the youngest of my girl cousins who had been her special charge from the hour when the child’s mother died. The child wasn’t a child any more; was by now a woman grown. But to old Mandy, she still was “Baby.”

There was a punitive justice in the disposition Mandy made of her hoard. She left out her only blood kin and for a reason. A few months earlier she went, lamed as she was, on the first extended journey of her entire career. By invitation she went to St. Louis to visit her niece. She failed to return though on the date appointed, nor was there any word from the absentee although letters of inquiry were written. The whole family grew anxious.

Opportunely, a prosperous and highly respected hack-driver called on my uncle at his law office.

“Judge Bagby,” he told him, “I knows you-all at your house must be frettin’ about Mandy. I found out about her when I was over there last week. Them two low-flung scalawags—her niece and her niece’s husband—has practically got that pore ole crippled-up thing under lock and key. She’s perishin’ to git back here where she belongs at and they won’t let her. Mandy never told a shore-nuff downright lie in her life, but I reckin she did talk kind of bigotty about whut-all money she’s got laid by and they’re pesterin’ after her night and day to give a writin’ leavin’ it to ’em after she’s gone or else let ’em have it right away. And she jest natchelly pinin’ away frum bein’ homesick and fightin’ off that there pair of bloodsuckers.”

“Andy,” said my uncle, reaching for his pocketbook, “how soon can you get back over yonder again?”

“They’s a train leavin’ fur St. Louie about two hours frum now, suh.”

“You be on it.”

Hackman Andy’s warrant was to secure the prisoner’s release by threats or main force or, if need be, by appeal to the authorities—he carried credentials vouching for him—and to fetch her home at the earliest possible moment. Late that night he raised my uncle on the long distance telephone.

“Judge,” he said, “we’re ’rivin’, Mandy and me, Sunday mornin’—that’s day after tomorrow. We could git there tomorrow evenin’ but she p’intedly says we got to wait fur Sunday. And nothin’ would do her but I must call you up fust and give you the schedule about her ’rival. I can’t make out whut’s in her funny ole haid—mebbe she’s gittin’ flighty—but this here is the way she says ever’thin’ is got to be ’ranged. I warns you, suh, they’s quite a passel of fussin’ ’round to be done.”

And so there was. Nevertheless a puzzled household carried out the transmitted directions, just so. Sunday afternoon when the indomitable old crone had been put to bed, and she all worn down bodily, but swollen with a tremendous exaltation, she said to one of my cousins:

“Douglas, honey, go git some paper and some ink and take your pen in hand and write me a letter to that wuthless tore-down limb of a niece of mine. Put it down, word fur word, jest lak I tells you.”

Here—and some of us gloatingly can still quote its pregnant passages—is what she dictated:

“Gal, lissen unto me. The chillun meets me at the depot. They teks and loads me in an open carriage behind the two finest w’ite hosses they is in this entire city. They drives me past my church jest ez church is lettin’ out so that one and all kin see me ridin’ by in due state. They gits me home and a refreshin’ glass of blackberry cordial and a bokay of flowers is waitin’ fur me on the bureau of my own room. I reclines there, not doin’ nothin’ a-tall, twell it comes dinnertime and then a feast is made in my honor. I has fried chicken and whut-all fixin’s goes with it. I has boughten ice cream and floatin’ island and lemon-jelly layer cake. And these is my own w’ite folks that you kept tellin’ with your own lyin’ tongue they didn’t keer nothin’ fur me no more. And now, I’se jest layin’ back takin’ my ease and the chillun is standin’ by waitin’ on me hand and foot.

“Trustin’ these few lines will find you the same, I remains your lovin’ aunt that used to be but ain’t never ag’in goin’ be your lovin’ aunt, respectfully, Amanda Given.”

[1]

Kentuckians always have been sincere and painstaking trenchermen. A hundred and odd years ago, at Whitley Hill on the Old Wilderness Trail which Daniel Boone traced into the Blue Grass country, Colonel William Whitley, a transplanted Virginian but already saturated in the Kentucky tradition, used to run, once a year, for his guests and neighbors, a series of races over his own private track starting as soon as there was light enough to see by. During the early morning, coffee and toddies and hot snacks were served but breakfast proper ensued as soon as the last race had been run. As copied from the Whitley family records, this was an average menu:Chicken soup with rice ... Baked Ohio River salmon ... Bacon, Cabbage and Beans ... Barbecued Lamb ... Roast Wild Duck, apple sauce ... Roast Wild Turkey, cranberry sauce ... Roast Beef ... Broiled Squirrel ... Leg of Bear ... Baked O’Possum with Sweet Potatoes; Roasting Ears, Hominy, Boiled Potatoes; Baked Sweet Potatoes, Hot Cakes, Corn Dodgers, Buttermilk, Plum Pudding, rum sauce; Punkin Pie, rum sauce; Log Cabin Pie, Assorted Cakes, Fruits, Vanilla Ice Cream, Coffee, Apple Jack, Claret, Transylvania Bitters, Peach Brandy and Honey, Old Bourbon Whisky, Port and Champagne.Not even a Kentuckian could think of anything to ask for after that breakfast—unless it might be bicarbonate of soda and a place to lie down.