Читать книгу Exit Laughing - Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury - Страница 15

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Sitting here, looking over my shoulder at what lies so far and away behind me, and fumbling with my pen for a proper place to begin this chapter, I conjure up a panorama which in some parts is keen as copperplate and in others is mercifully beclouded so that only the better side of it stands out. It is as though I looked in a mirror and around its edges the mirror is flawed and blurry but in the main it throws out bright facets—the shifting, varying pictures of a border Southern community as that community reflected itself before a youngster’s inquisitive eyes in the tag end of the last century.

The Paducah of the eighties and the early nineties—now there, I’m telling you, was a town. It had its baser aspects and after some hazy fashion I must have been aware of them—the petty feuds, the small pretensions, the spleens and jealousies and all such bilious little spites as thrive like bad weeds in any spot where human beings herd together. And beyond doubt it was a sloven and a leisurely town, one that was untidy and content to be untidy. Outside of prim New England, most towns were like that in those distant decades and some of them, in isolated and insulated localities, still are. It was dusty in summer and vilely muddy in winter. There were no sewers for drainage but only open gutters and except when offended nature sent her cold snaps to seal the clotted scum with ice, those gutters stank to the skies.^[1]

But unless your own childhood was unbearably dreary, I’m sure time has compounded for you, as it has for me, a narcotic to deaden the recollection of inconveniences and shortcomings in the environment which suckled us as cubs. Having loyalty and affection to strengthen this agreeable anesthesia within us, we invoke memory, not as an honest scroll unreeling to expose the less pleasant phases of our youth along with the pleasant ones, but rather as a kaleidoscope which we shake and, lo, the prisms are all gracious and gay and all shot through with fine brave colors. Glamor is largely a state of mind, I figure. One man beholds a rain of molten gold in the atmosphere of an Indian summer afternoon; an unhappier wight fears his hay fever is coming back on him.

Even so, I need be no incurable optimist to discern that there was spice of romance and an inherent dramatic quality in that past-tense Paducah of mine. Somehow—no doubt a psychologist could appraise exactly how—out of its soil and its setting and its tinctures it bred unique personalities and peculiar institutions, a pungent native wit and a tangy philosophy, and it nurtured a people who were high-spirited and self-sufficient and who loved to laugh. Lordy, how they did love to laugh!^[2] These people may not have known much about hygiene—who did, back yonder?—but they knew all there was to know about hospitality. They practiced it as a religion. There were among them those who were ragged and perhaps lacked for rent money but I’m sure none, white or black, ever went hungry, yet if there was such a thing as organized charity except in some hour of emergency, I don’t seem to recall it.

Offhand I’d say an average of fully fifty per cent of the succulent treasures stored annually at hog-killing time in my Grandpa Saunders’ smokehouse went during the ensuing year, a ham or a shoulder or a whole side of cured middling meat at a time, to individual applicants, without regard to race or color. And often he bestowed the free gift of a young calf or a spare milch cow or a likely mule colt upon some improvident acquaintance in the county. I might add that when he died it was revealed that on his books he had carried a careful tally of amounts due him for professional services rendered to close friends or to needy persons who were not his close friends, but seemingly he had never sought for payment of any of these sums. Some of the uncollected, and as transpired, uncollectible accounts dated back twenty-odd years. Yet for his time and place he left what was called a handsome estate, mostly in real estate and farm lands. He had a passion for buying farm lands; he had been reared on a farm.^[3]

We had our own “Emperor Norton.” This was “Brother” Jackson—if ever I heard his first name I long ago forgot it—a plump, rubicund, strutty, little Santa Claus-looking man, even to the round belly and the tuft of snowy chin-whiskers and the radish-red button on the end of his nose. He was a Londoner born and through sixty-odd years in America never altogether lost his Cockney accent. In the seventies he had been the town’s leading hatter and was included among its outstanding philanthropists. He gave to one of the churches its big brazen bell. He lost all that he had though, and thereafter to the end of their days he and his shy little wife lived in modest comfort in a rent-free cottage on the grateful bounty of the citizenship. Did his dapper wardrobe need replenishing, local merchants ungrudgingly saw to it that a new frock coat was provided. Summer and winter he wore the frock coat. Or some stiff-bosomed shirts or a stock of white linen ties or new boots for his amazingly small feet would be forthcoming. Always he carried a gold-headed cane and always wore a high hat which lovingly he polished with a yellowed old silk handkerchief—both cane and hat, not to mention the silk handkerchief, being treasured relics of his prosperity. He was most dignified, always incredibly immaculate, with a pompous, really a pontifical manner, and he was very condescending in a lord-of-the-manor way to those he regarded as his social inferiors; and these folk, entering into the spirit of the thing, humored him as though he had been an indulgent patron instead of the communal pensioner.

Daily he pushed an imperious abdomen down Broadway, his walking stick whirling, a small market basket on his arm. Invariably on his lapel was a wee blossom, preferably a tuberose bud (donated by the local flower-garden man). Invariably a richly freighted breath (donated by representatives of the retail liquor traffic), like a gust from a hot mince pie, heralded his approach. He promenaded leisurely through Market Square, selecting from this huckster’s stall a muskmelon or a soup bunch, from that butcher’s stand a brace of lamb chops; here a couple of fresh caught fish and there a ration of roasting ears or new potatoes. He so distributed his patronage that no dealer suffered too often by reason of these small raidings. When he thirsted—which was frequently—the courtesies of the Richmond House bar or Don Gilberto’s or Boyd and Wash’s sample room were his. He never paid for anything. Nobody ever expected him to pay for anything or questioned his right to a moderate share of the town’s plenty. Had any tradesman denied him or hurt his feelings, I am sure the offender would have felt the weight of popular displeasure. I am equally sure it never occurred to us that his place was a unique one and, in its way, beautiful.

When he died, after uttering a sonorous deathbed farewell and leaving explicit directions for the stately manner of his earthly disposal, hundreds attended the funeral and subscriptions bought the lot in Oak Grove Cemetery where his dropsical little body was buried. I think it needed a Paducah to protect and cherish a Brother Jackson, just as it needed a great, gracious-hearted San Francisco to tolerate the demented whims and honor the privately issued currency of her immortal “Emperor Norton.”

These Paducahans took their politics very seriously and their not infrequent homicidal outbreaks almost casually. A pistol affray was a “shooting scrape” and a killing (among the better families) a “regrettable occurrence.” They were unafraid of poverty, which was prevalent and, taking the wealthier class by and large, not overly arrogant in affluence. The surest sign of a vulgarian was apologizing to a guest for a shabbiness of the house or the meagerness of a meal. Except in the very rudest groups—and sometimes even there—behavior was exact and punctilious. You see the average man went armed, and a suspected weapon on the other fellow’s flank was mighty conducive to politeness. You might have called it laziness, but those folk took the time to be courteous and accommodating to the stranger, took time for indulging in small grace notes and complimentary flutings amongst themselves. They read Sir Walter Scott and Lord Chesterfield’s Letters. They did at our house.

So I’m glad I’ve forgotten or have almost forgotten about the weeds in the garden; glad I still can smell the flowers blooming along the pathway to all those vanished yesterdays. I reckon it’s easy to dream and be a sentimentalist if you have a dependable liver and mine has never given serious cause for complaint.

Until it came to be a divisional center for two railroads, Paducah’s main supporting industries were four and all four of them colorful—steamboating, tobacco, lumber, whisky.

Mule-breeding and horse-breeding, tanning and leather-working, furniture-making and grist-milling, wholesaling and job-lotting were lesser commercial factors and these filled in the chinks of a thriving structure which made Paducah the market place and the trading ground and the chief shipping point of a considerable territory.

Time and the changes of time diminished, one after another, the major industries. The multiplying railroads crippled, then ultimately extinguished the packet lines. The sawmillers and the crosstie cutters hacked away at the splendid stands of virgin timber in that area, of hickory, poplar, cypress, oak, walnut, cedar, eventually even the persimmon and the dogwood, until the bottoms and the flats alike were stripped of their crowns of glory.

Altered tastes, the loss of foreign markets and night-rider troubles shrank the tobacco business down to a fraction of what it once upon a time had been. Automobiles came chugging along and pretty soon there were no livery stables left, nor tanneries, nor harness shops, nor wagon works, nor hub-and-spoke works and mighty few blacksmith shops.

The crowning blow befell when Prohibition went into effect. The blight wiped out the distillers, the rectifiers, the wholesalers and saloons. So the devastated, gallant town had to make itself over into a factory town and a machine-shop town and a shipping center for strawberries and garden truck, and this transformed its whole face.

In my adolescence each downtown quarter had its distinctive smell. By sniffing the air a blind man could tell where he stood—the almost suffocating rankness of the heavy fire-cured weed as the hands sang at their work in the stemmeries and in the rehandling plants, or the marketable product was “prized” on the “breaks,” upon the floors of the vast warehouses, to a clattering accompaniment of loosened hogshead staves, and, overtopping that, the chant of the auctioneer and the grunted bids of the buyers; the lovely savor from stacks of fresh-cut lumber and mountain ranges of moist sawdust along a two-mile stretch of river front; the heavy alcoholic reek of “Whisky Row” on Market Street; the all-pervading ammoniacal scent that rose off wagon-yards and mule-trading pens.

Nowadays, through the regimenting uniformity of chain stores and service stations and mail-order agencies and modernistic store fronts, this looks like almost any interior smallish city you’d a mind to think of. And what with soft-coal smoke and monoxide gas and spilt gasoline on greasy concrete, it smells like any man’s town. But I love to think and I think I’m right that my town has kept some of its outstanding elements of the former days: the saving grace of tolerance, the joke-loving, yarn-spinning tendencies, the instinctive hospitality, the noble and commendable vanity of its self-satisfaction; the abiding courage under adversity or disaster.

There never was but one Paducah; there never will be but one Paducah. So Paducah’s loyal, boastful children claim. I’m claiming it for her, too.

I was well along in my teens before the inter-related steamboating interests ceased to dominate the picture. Until then the river either touched the lives or furnished the living for nearly every household—tragically took its toll from them too. From the very beginnings, when a cluster of log huts sprang up about a woodyard and a hand-ferry at the mouth of the Tennessee, this had been true. Indeed there might never have been any town here at all were it not for three great rivers funneling together within a stretch of fourteen miles to feed into the near-by Mississippi a flow almost as great as the mighty mother stream’s. Or if there were a town decreed it would have found its place in the range of low hills farther back, rather than along the flattened lands facing the low banks where floods could menace it and, on occasion, devastate it.

On a single day in the flush years I’ve seen ten or twelve steamers, lordly deep-bellied sidewheelers and limber slender sternwheelers, ranked two or three abreast at the landing; and the inclined wharf, from the drydocks almost up to the marine ways, literally blocked off with merchandise incoming or freight outgoing—cotton in bales, tobacco in hogsheads, peanuts in sacks, whisky in barrels and casks, produce and provender of a hundred sorts. Transfer boats, and ferryboats and fussy tugs and perhaps a lighthouse tender or a government “snag boat” would be stirring about; both of the squatty scowlike wharf boats bulging with perishable stuffs; “coon-jining” rousters bearing incredible burdens and still able to sing under their loads, swearing mates and sweating “mud-clerks”; drays and wagons and hacks and herdics rattling up and down the slants; twin lanes of travelers dodging along the crowded gangplanks; a great canopy of coal smoke darkening the water front; a string band playing on the guards of some excursion steamer; maybe, for good measure, a calliope blasting away from the top deck of a visiting showboat—French’s New Sensation, or Robinson’s Floating Palace, or Old Man Price’s; scape pipes shrilling and engine bells jangling; and, over-riding all lesser sounds, the hoarse bellow of the whistle between this or that pair of lofty stacks as one of the packets gave notice of her departure.

Barring floodtimes with which no human hands could cope, only midsummer brought a slackening-off in these profitable ramifications; not always though but frequently. Those years the channels shoaled and kept on shoaling until the bars stood up high, like great turtles bleaching their backs in the heat, and the “chutes” went bone-dry and in the formerly convenient “cut-offs” only the catfish and the gars and the buffalo fish might navigate—and sometimes even they got sunburnt. Regular liners hunted the bank then and stayed there, and the owners fumed and prayed for torrential rains at the headwaters and the pessimists amongst them lamented that in this accursed business it was always either a feast or a famine; while the crews temporarily transferred to the “mosquito fleets,” these being chartered boats of such skimpy draft that, as the saying went, any one of them could run on a heavy dew. But let a general break occur in the weather and the lean pickings would be at an end in a jiffy.

And pretty soon then, coming on the crest of the fall rise, the big towboats from the “Head of the Hollow” would go chugging by out in mid-current, each one shoving acres of loaded coal barges before her squared bows, and their yawls racing in for provisions and supplies, then racing back out to overtake the plodding convoys. This also was an approved season for the lumbermen to drift down the Tennessee with their huge rafts, and the rafts would be broken up and the timbers imprisoned by the thousands within the “gunnels” of the sawmills and the woodworking plants along shore. Some of the raftsmen got impounded too—in the calaboose. For with all that good log money in their pockets they went on most gorgeous sprees.

Later, when ice had locked the Missouri and the Upper Mississippi and the Upper Ohio, the inner two-mile stretch of Owen’s Island, for all the way between the lower towhead and the farther tip where it aimed at Livingston Point, would be lined and often in favored anchorage double-lined and triple-lined with all fashion of craft brought hither to “lay up” in the safest winter haven for a thousand miles of tributary waterways—the famous Duck’s Nest. And over on the town side, snuggled amongst the protecting fringes of willow and cypress where Island Creek emptied in, would be a jumble of “shanty boats” and “joe boats” populated by amphibious guilds: fishermen and trappers and market-gunners; poachers and foragers; cobblers and tinkers; peddlers, fortune tellers, “root-and-yarb doctors,” itinerant preachers of curious creeds; ginseng-diggers, tie-hackers; mussel-dredgers; owners of “tintype galleries” and penny peep shows; floating junk collectors, Cheap Johns and Jacks-of-all-trades, dealers in live bait and in notions and knickknacks and dubious patent medicines, all hibernating together until spring sent them voyaging upstream or down, with their babies and their dogs, their trotlines and their gill nets, to spend nine months of pure gypsying.

Now water-farers, whether the water be salt or fresh, have always been a separate subspecies, more picturesque than plodding stay-at-homes. It was so with us. Our deck hands were swaggering bravos who talked a strange professional jargon and counted themselves a hardier breed and a more reckless one than their brethren ashore. Our mates notoriously were trigger-fingered. Once aboard, masters and pilots became imperious overlords. It was a chancy calling which these mariners of ours pursued and they carried themselves accordingly. If you couldn’t snap your fingers in the face of danger you couldn’t qualify. For the river, which gave these men their daily bread, was not alone an uncertain provider but a most fickle mistress. There was no taming her. She was like a snake which wriggled sluggishly along in seasons of drought, only to strike, like a snake, when the onrushing freshets put a twisting, swirling viciousness into the swollen coils. Moreover, what with boilers to blow up and snags to rip the bottoms out of lightly built hulls and fires to turn the matchwood upper structures into flaming furnaces and some quick fierce storm to capsize a heavy laden carrier, it was a small wonder—it was no wonder at all—that the lines of graves in the cemeteries were punctuated with the headstones of those who had lived by the river and by it had lost their lives.

Sometimes the same surname recurred on the slabs. For there was a clannishness, a sort of freemasonry about the whole thing. If your father “followed the river” it rather was expected that you, growing up, would travel the same lane. For a typical example take my father’s case. As far back as 1818 his grandfather, shrewd and forehanded Vermont Irishman that he was, had given up keelboating to buy part ownership in the first steam-driven craft that plied the Cumberland River. At the peak of the family fortunes my father’s father controlled a small fleet of short-haul steamers, manned largely by his own slaves. And my father himself was a steamboatman—with a master’s license and, for the better part of his life, a place as traffic manager of a navigation company, so that the unbroken span of operations for his people extended through upwards of seventy years.

So it went. If you were a Rollins or a Pell or a Cole or a Beard you almost inevitably were destined to be a pilot. There were eleven Pells who had held pilots’ papers, including “Yankee” Pell who, against his private principles, had been pressed to steer a Federal gunboat, and “Rebel” Pell who quit his wheelhouse to fight under Forrest; Slick Pell who was smooth-shaven and Curly Pell who wasn’t; Big Ed and Little Ed, Old Charley and Young Charley and Young Charley’s Charley, all sizes and ages, but all Pells. The Dunns usually were pursers, just as a young Hoey or a young McMeekin was a potential mate, and a Dozier was destined for an engineer’s berth. An Owen inevitably would be in the ferryboat traffic. Through three generations the Fowlers were steamboat owners—the name was renowned from New Orleans to Pittsburgh, for they also owned wharfboats and a “boatstore.” And the lives of two of them were sacrificed to the greedy waters. One, before my time, burned to death after a boiler exploded and the other, a handsome promising lad serving his apprenticeship as a junior officer, was drowned doing rescue work when a sinking occurred in the night-time.

My mother’s eldest sister was married to one of these Fowlers, who died fairly young from the after-effects of the privations he had endured as a trooper in Morgan’s Cavalry; hence, submitting to a cruel edict then prevalent, she wore the mourning garb ordained for widows for almost half a century until the end of her days. Those black folds cloaked a lady whose tongue was a lancet tipped with a mordant and a devastating humor. Most witty women, I’ve noticed, do carry chilled-steel barbs in their wit. My Aunt Laura stung her victims in a mortal spot and left them where they fell. In her circle of intimates was a rather elderly spinster who so flutteringly was taken up with good deeds and club activities that she sometimes overlooked the soap-and-water attentions which a less zealous gleaner in the grape arbors of the Lord might have bestowed upon herself. In her absence—which was fortunate for all concerned—someone referred to this devoted Dorcas as being wishy-washy. Up spoke Aunt Laura. “She may be wishy,” she stated briskly, “but God in Heaven knows the woman is not washy.”

Speaking of Aunt Laura reminds me of a little thing which came to pass on a long-ago Easter morning. Betimes, my mother and my aunt went around the corner to their own church where they were convinced the Almighty naturally would make His headquarters when, as and if, in Paducah. Having worshiped after the somewhat bleak formulas of old-line Presbyterianism, they decided to call in at the Episcopal Church to observe how the communicants there carried on, what with a surpliced choir and altar drapes and, by the standards of these two, other practices bordering on the semi-idolatrous. They expected the worst, seeing that the parish had lately acquired a new clergyman out of Virginia and he was inclined to be High Church or, at least highfalutin, and the rumor was that he had insisted on some ultra-formalistic innovations for the service this day. At the door the pair of them were met by a youngish vestryman whom they had known all his life. As he ushered them, he murmured, “Good morning, Mrs. Fowler, good morning, Mrs. Cobb”; and then, obviously pestered and as obviously obeying instructions from his rector, he added: “Christ has risen.”

“Ah, indeed!” said Aunt Laura grimly, and lifted her nose—she had a gift for nose-lifting—and sniffed a sardonic sniff.

Halfway up the aisle, their abashed escort turned them over to a senior vestryman, Mr. M. B. Nash, who likewise was an old and, ordinarily, a greatly esteemed friend.

Motioning them to places in a pew reserved for visitors, Mr. Nash, also betraying the embarrassing signs of having been rehearsed, half-whispered:

“Christ has risen.”

“Yes,” said Aunt Laura in a chilled, far-carrying tone, “so Lawrence Dallam was just telling us—it must be all over town by now.”

The titular head of the Fowlers in those times was deep-voiced, big-framed Cap’n Joe Fowler, my aunt’s brother-in-law, and on various counts he enjoyed more than a parochial repute. If he got angry, which he frequently did, or excited, which he did almost daily, or was deeply moved, he stammered to a dead halt and could only regain the power of coherent speech by saying “Dam’ it to hell!” It wasn’t swearing exactly, it was the only prescription he had for getting under way again. Through stress of emotion, he was known to have whipped out a vehement “Dam’ it to hell” while endeavoring to utter words of condolence in a household newly bereft. From the stub of a poisonous black cigar he lighted a fresh one. My father had the same habit, and, like my father, Cap’n Joe would chew tobacco while smoking. Although a well-educated man, he generally chose to speak in the pithy vernacular of the harbor front. And he had a fine talent for satire. His favorite loafing place was the front porch of the old Fowler-Crumbaugh boatstore at “Monkey Wrench Corner” whence he could command a view of the union of the rivers. It was from that porch that Cap’n Joe had descended when he saw a lady tourist come up the slope of the land from a south-bound excursion steamer, carrying in the crook of one elbow the first Mexican hairless dog ever seen in those parts—a timorous tiny creature which sounded off in thin treble, rather like an infuriated canary, as he approached.

“Madam,” drawled Cap’n Joe and removed his hat with a sweeping gesture, “pardon me, but might I ask what that thing is you’re toting in your arms?”

“That,” she said, “is a dog.”

“Is it your dog?”

“It is.”

“Is it the only dog you’ve got?”

“It is.”

“Madam,” said Cap’n Joe, “ain’t you mighty nigh out of dog?”

I’ve heard this story attributed to others but I prefer to think credit belongs where I have here placed it.

For me, until I was bigger than frying size, Cap’n Joe had daunting potentialities. It was to him I owed an emotional shock dating back, I’d say, to about my seventh year—a shock so profound that the details of it remained everlastingly inscribed on the tablets of my memory. On a warm evening my father took me “downtown” to the corner of Locust Street and Broadway where the rival bands of two adjacent variety shows were giving what by courtesy were called concerts. Since both bands played at once, each trying to drown out the other, the combined result was most exhilarating to my infantile tastes. We were standing in the doorway of Sweatnam & Rountree’s drugstore when Cap’n Joe, who had been talking with my father, broke off to advance threateningly upon Mr. Lev. Singleton, toward whom, for the moment, he entertained a pique. It would seem that warnings had been exchanged so, naturally, at sight of the enemy, Cap’n Joe reached for his hip and out came a shiny, long, brass-mounted six-shooter. But either Mr. Singleton was not equipped for battle or he had lost the desire to shed blood. He whirled and dodged through the store, heading for the rear, with Cap’n Joe lumbering along behind him and, for the fun of the thing, firing into the ceiling while the crowd, catching the spirit of the sport, roared with laughter. But there were at least two who did not laugh—long-legged Mr. Singleton, leaping convulsively at each shot, and short-legged Master Cobb. I was well on my way home before my father could overtake me and I had been tucked in bed and had my head under the covers before I regained a measure of calmness.

Not more than two days later and being still in a jittery state, I was lingering at “Monkey Wrench Corner” with my younger brother John, waiting for our father who was busy at his affairs inside the building. Presently he would join us and together we would go to supper. All at once the bulk of Cap’n Joe loomed in the porch doorway right alongside me. He didn’t seem to see us; was staring at something—cluttered shipping of some sort—sheltered under the lea of the island. Suddenly he brought his right hand out from behind his back and I heard a mechanical snap, like a trigger cocking, or so it seemed to me, and I caught a gleam of brassy fittings as he lengthened the bore of an extended, tubular device and brought one end of it up even with his squinted eye, swinging the farther end out into space above my head. I had never before seen a collapsible spyglass, but only two nights before I had seen this fearsome giant going into action with a weapon which, to my stricken gaze, greatly resembled the present barrel-like contrivance except that this one, being larger, presumably would be deadlier and make louder blasts when it went off.

Into my brother’s ear I screamed, “Run, run, he’s going to shoot!” Not once turning my head to see whether he followed me, I left there; anyhow, being smaller, he couldn’t possibly have kept up with me. This time I got all the way home and tore around the house—the front door might be locked—and bursting into the kitchen, collapsed in an exhausted heap at Mandy’s feet.

Eventually I got over my aversion to firearms—gunning long since became my favorite sport—but it took time. It took a lot of time.

[1]

Household garbage was kept in casks against the periodical calls of one who cruelly was known as “Miss Slop” Johnston. This was a stooped and withered recluse of fearsome aspect who consolidated these unsavory leavings on a rickety pushcart and as provender for her drove of half-wild razorback hogs, carried them down to the bottoms below the “Yankee Barracks” where she lived all alone in a forlorn hovel. She was the unofficial sanitary department—and the only one.The first odorous warning of the old crone’s approach would send me scuttling off to hiding, because customarily I nursed a guilty conscience anyhow and the commonest threat in our neighborhood was that if a small boy flagrantly misbehaved, Miss Slop Johnston would tote the offender away in one of her swill barrels and he would vanish forevermore.There were tales about her past; one that she was the close kinswoman of a famous Southern general. Another and more commonly accepted legend had it that she was the sister of John A. Murrill, that master-criminal of the century before this, whose genius as organizer and director of murderous, larcenous border ruffians made the Al Capones and the Dutch Schultzes of our own Prohibition era seem, by comparison, like mere bungling apprentices. (What a subject for a historical movie John A. Murrill of West Tennessee would make!) Miss Slop rarely spoke, though when she did, used good English and she was kindly enough, I guess, but if you had seen her on her weekly collection tours you might have understood why I dreaded her more than I dreaded such harmless slack-wits as “Cairo Sam” Vance and “Slobber John” and “Bee” Moss and “Crazy Henry” Herscher and “Waterbucket Head” Walter or even glum, black “Wash” Fletcher—they hanged him eventually for butchering a negro girl and to commemorate his crime and his punishment some black minstrel band wrote a song, which still lives in local folklore with its refrain, “Fly high, ole buzzard, you bound to light, some day.” Wash lived in a shanty in the hollow at the corner just below our house amongst the “root-and-yarb” mixtures and the love powders that were his stock in trade; and, as it so happened, these other poor eccentrics either lived on our street or frequently traversed it in their aimless wanderings, which helps to explain why I was so often thrown into a jittery state even though sheltered behind a high picket fence.

[2]

I think I’m not far wrong when I say Paducah produced, twenty years apart, two of the most eminent practical jokers of their generation. First, there was George Muller who drove the horsecar through our street and knew everybody in every house along the route. For a super-treat my older sister Reubie (my other sister Manie wasn’t born yet) and my younger brother John and I, the in-betweener, once in a while were loaded aboard George’s car and in George’s care embarked upon the adventurous round trip to Jersey Bridge and back, each of us carrying a sweaty nickel. Our adored friend George gravely would collect the fares and sort them according to the following plan of distribution: one five-cent piece for the company, one five-cent piece for himself and one five-cent piece for purchasing, at Broadfoot Brothers’ grocery, a watermelon to be shared by the four of us at the end of the run, or dependent on the season, a certain large spicy gingerbread square which was a specialty of Fisher’s Bakery.Serving as a Columbian Guard at the World’s Fair in 1893, George was trapped in the memorable fire which destroyed the Cold Storage Building and was buried in the ruins and reported as dead. He dug out next day and wrote a classic letter to one of the Chicago papers bitterly disowning the scanty notice which had been given him that morning and demanded, as a matter of common justice, a more fitting obituary, which he got in the next issue.Alf Stewart, a contemporary of mine, was no more audacious than his predecessor but had a subtle quality to his pranking and a scope which permitted of operations on a broad scale. On a Court Saturday he practically emptied the neighboring small city of Mayfield of its rural visitors by marching forth from the town armory in a captain’s uniform, with a sword, and accompanied by an ally carrying a Bible, and swearing in unhappy countrymen for immediate duty in Paducah where a desperate and sanguinary race riot was said—he said it—to be raging.Then there was the time when, pretending to be a murderous maniac escaped from the West Kentucky insane asylum, he stampeded a whole revival meeting, evangelist, hired soloist, choir, the saved and the sinners, too. And I remember a night at a wagon yard when I was present and participating, but that tale would make vulgar telling. Alf rounded out his career as assistant adjutant general of Louisiana with the rank of colonel. I’ll wager the National Guard down there was a laughing matter while he helped command it.

[3]

I have been told that in a much earlier period, if a transient of genteel aspect arrived by stage, or by river, or by horseback, some prosperous citizen promptly would call upon him and explain that it would be unfitting were a visiting gentleman suffered to remain at a mere tavern, and would bear the astonished stranger off, bag and baggage, to his own house and there entertain him for as long as he cared to stay—which must have given the town a fine name among travelers but couldn’t have done the local innkeepers any real good. I do know that once a passenger, a New England merchant returning north from New Orleans was fetched, desperately ill, off a steamboat. His young son was with him. There being no hospitalization facilities my grandfather took the invalid to his house and tended him till he died, making no charge, of course, except for medical services rendered. As a guest the lad remained with the family for upwards of a year.