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For me memories cluster thick as hiving bees about that high-swung porch at “Monkey Wrench Corner.” It was where I spent many and many an hour watching the shifting pageant of river life or, what had a still greater fascination, I harkened with twitching ears to the true talk of our elder statesmen and the big talk of resident bragsters and the tall talk of some of the most gifted prevaricators then inhabiting the temperate zone of North America. Clever fictionizing was encouraged there, never deplored.

From that perch I saw Tom January, the man-eating mate, rout, singlehanded, a whole mob of rebellious rousters; and I saw that gaunt and gimlet-eyed dreadnaught, Policeman Buck Mount, he who had a nervous mannerism of shooting people, fetch down a fleeing malefactor at a hundred yards, the first shot.^[1] Once after a skiff capsized, I shudderingly saw two swollen bodies hauled ashore, the stiff arms still interlocked.

I was present on the memorable day that Pilot Eph Ballowe, a renowned and versatile romancer, offered his narrative of the imaginative mule and the crib of stored popcorn—how at the climax of the most terrific and prolonged hot spell in the history of the valley, the sun’s rays set that crib afire and it burned up and the popcorn popped and fell two inches deep all over a five-acre lot and the mule mistook the white fall for snow and laid down in it and froze as stiff as a board.

Still I think the most vivid picture in the album had to do with the notable occasion—in that venue it remained notable for years on end—when Mr. J. Shrewsbury, late of the Army of Northern Virginia, had his encounter with old Dr. Bell, the talking prescriptionist of Sweatnam & Rountree’s drugstore.

Had I the commission and you, kind reader, the patience I could write a whole book about Mr. J. Shrewsbury. For eccentricities, for lovable whims and unaccountable crotchets, for a scalding tongue and a blistering pen and a self-kindling temper, I doubt if he had many peers, if any, among his generation. Certainly his equal never dawned on our provincial horizon.

To my older sister and my younger brother and to me, he was, by adoption, our worshipful “Uncle Jo,” more beloved to all three of us, I’d say, than had he been of blood kin. At the wedding of my father and mother he “stood up” as best man and until death divided them, he remained my father’s closest friend.

Inasmuch as he had never married and furthermore had renounced most of his people back in the Kanawha River country for siding with the North, whereas until Appomattox he served under General Robert E. Lee, our family was practically his family. For my middle name I bore his last name, so the tie between us was especially close.^[2] From my sixth birthday on until my thirteenth, I was by day his faithful tagging shadow; and by night I dreamed dreams about him, wherein he did large heroic deeds and I went along and held his coat and helped bury the unregrettable dead.

He had a small property, enough for his bachelor needs, but because he loved the job he maintained an indefinite sort of affiliation with our chief daily, the Evening News, contributing when he pleased to its pages and for his honorariums accepting orders against merchants who patronized the advertising columns. He specialized in two differing literary realms: wrote barbed paragraphs about people and causes he didn’t like—there were, oh, so many in this classification—and with equal fervor wrote sympathetic obituaries about people he did like. He was full of such paradoxical traits: a budget of contradictions.

For instance, he never became reconstructed, speaking always of Republicans as “Black Radicals.” Nor would he concede that West Virginia, where he had been born, was not properly still a part of Old Virginia. Yet for at least three Union veterans he had a tremendous affection. Only he wouldn’t admit it. He said he just kept them for cussin’-out purposes.^[3] Repeatedly he drummed it into my juvenile ears that if I hoped to grow up a true Southern gentleman, I must acquire these cardinal qualifications, to wit: Become a finished horseman (I can’t recall ever seeing him on horseback), read, write and speak Latin (he couldn’t speak it himself), learn to dance (he never danced), and play the fiddle (he couldn’t play a note). At his knee I took my first stumbling lessons in Latin grammar, and out of his own pocket he paid for dancing lessons, until old Professor Leopard, the chronically tipsy French dancing master, gave me up for a hopeless case, inasmuch as I, being practically tone-deaf, could not keep time, let alone tell a waltz tune from a schottische or polka.

By the same token, I still know nothing of violin music except that sometimes I like it but generally don’t; and I am an indifferent horseman albeit with a unique style. No matter what the horse does, I canter. I’m afraid that had he lived I should have been, on at least three of these counts, a profound disappointment to my Uncle Jo, although surely he would have been pleased that, after a fashion, I followed in his journalistic footsteps.

He was fond of music, and particularly of singing. But he had a devastating antipathy for anyone who whistled. The mere sound of a trill issuing from some passer-by’s puckered lips would send him off into almost a maniacal fit of rage. Once he deliberately upset a ladder upon which a persistently whistling sign painter was mounted, and cheerfully paid for the patching up of his victim’s torn scalp. He said it was money well spent because now the sorry scoundrel would know better than to whistle within earshot of decent people.

In a section where cornmeal in some shape was a daily staple on every table, he never touched it in any shape. Once he told me why. For the last six weeks in Virginia before the Surrender he lived on an exclusive diet of gritty hoecakes and, after the meal ran out, on the parched grains. When from this his gums were so bloody and his teeth so sore that he no longer could chew the ration, he lay one night half-delirious from hunger, in an abandoned stable. A fat rat crept out of the walls. Uncle Jo killed it with a kick, skinned it, skewered it on a borrowed ramrod and ate it to the last bite. “It was the best meal I ever ate,” he said. “I’ve never repeated it, yet I reckon I’d be ready to if the chance came along and I was as near to starving as I was that time. But from that day to this I’ve never touched cornbread in any form and I don’t aim to, either. I’ve eaten my share of that stuff.”^[4]

By the hour he could quote from the classics and ordinarily he used scholarly English. When aroused though he spouted boozing ken language until he ran out of all the stock swear words. Then, under pressure of great provocation he fetched forth oaths of his own coinage—“God-overeaten,” a mysterious qualifying adjective, and “Sapinpaw,” which was what he used when he couldn’t think of any regular noun that fitted the contempt in which he held the ignominious object of his vituperation. He wouldn’t waste either of these though, reserved them for high occasions.

He never stirred abroad without his walking stick, a heavy staff of oak with a shepherd’s crook handle. At Soule’s drugstore, which was his favorite loafing place, there was a particular spot on a particular railing where, when indoors, he invariably hung this staff and woe be unto any individual who either accidentally or with malicious intent, shifted it by the breadth of a single inch. There was a gaping crack in the cane and this crack he regarded with deep affection. Attorney Henry Burnett had been an intimate of his but they quarreled and Uncle Jo, being Uncle Jo, cherished the feud forever. Seeing Mr. Burnett and Judge Jesse Gilbert at fisticuffs one afternoon on “Legal Row,” he ran across the street and thrust the cane into Judge Gilbert’s hand for a weapon with which, haply, to brain the enemy. The Judge did his manful best but the descending cudgel struck the iron cross brace of a sidewalk awning and suffered a compound fracture. Uncle Jo refused to have the damage repaired. “It’s an honorable wound,” he said. “The aim was poor but the intentions were most laudable. Let it be.”

In pleasant weathers Uncle Jo liked to sit in a cane-bottom chair against a certain panel of the facing of Mr. Soule’s establishment—not any chair or panel but inevitably this chair and this panel. As with his jealousy for his cane so with his chair. It was a hardy soul who dared to move that chair during the regular tenant’s temporary absence or, worse still, sit down on it and be caught doing so. The resultant explosion would rattle showcases and echo against the front of the prescription cases.

On a June morning Uncle Jo was tilted back on his throne chair, viewing the passing show and from time to time acidly commenting on various of the performers in the show. There came along, filling a pony cart to overflowing, a redoubtable matron, the widow of perhaps the most distinguished statesman the district ever had sent to Congress. This formidable personage was renowned for piety on Sundays and for her spectacular outbursts of profanity through the week. In her way she was as corrosive a verbal adversary as Uncle Jo and nursed almost as many prejudices.

At sight of him her hackles rose—if a highborn lady could be said to have hackles?—and she checked her pony to a stop.

“So there you sit, Mr. Shrewsbury,” she shrilly proclaimed, “passing remarks on every self-respecting female who goes by.”

“True indeed,” answered Uncle Jo, rising and making a low bow, “but only the self-respecting ones. Pass, Madam, pass in peace.”

The iconoclast rather libeled himself there because toward womankind in general he could be as courtly as any Walter Raleigh. Likewise for children he had understanding and kindliness, provided they showed no signs of growing up to be whistlers.

The negroes at Mr. Stewart Dick’s livery stable, on the corner hard by his living quarters, practically idolized him; and when he set out, as on occasion he did, to get ceremoniously tipsy, there wasn’t a barkeeper but sought, by subtle dissuasion, to tame his alcoholic impulses.

He dispensed charity upon the unfortunate with a generous hand—indeed a spendthrift hand, his own estate considered. But pretenders and prigs and upstarts and tiresome folks—these were his pet hates. And hotly he railed at religious bigots—a freethinker in the finest sense of the term. Long before I grew out of short pants he was converting me to tolerance for all creeds whatsoever, counseling that I must never set myself against the practice of any faith but only against its narrow-minded practitioners, if any. I’m proud to think that his preachments soaked into me and mixed with the other ingredients and stayed in there.

Since dullards stood high in his gallery of aversions it was inevitable that Dr. Bell, that well-meaning but everlasting bore, should irritate him beyond the bounds of self-control—not that Uncle Jo had much self-control to start with. Dr. Bell was a plumpish elderly man who went about droning futile questions and, did no one else answer, endlessly answering them himself in dreary, maddening accents. He would put you in mind of one of those leftover houseflies, usually they are gross fat houseflies, which in winter crawl out of hiding to buzz against a windowpane. Only Dr. Bell’s buzzing knew no season. He wore a high hat the year round, and in summer went collarless and coatless. On sultry days—and Paducah could have some very sultry days and, for that matter, still does—the sight of Dr. Bell pacing along a simmering pavement with the ardent sunrays shimmering on the bulge of his burnished headpiece and against the armor plating of his shirt bosom, was a thing calculated to make onlookers turn suddenly dizzy and even bring on heat prostrations.

Nor was this the top of his unwitting offending. Breaking off his own conversational flow, he meticulously would tear from a convenient envelope or paper sack a tiny strip, moisten it with his tongue, squeeze it into a pellet and, arising with the gravity of a yellowhammer storing away acorns, he’d find a cranny or nail hole and carefully pack the wad into the crevice and then, reseating himself with the air of having completed an important undertaking, would resume where he had left off.

Once, tempted beyond his strength by a third repetition of this achievement within an hour’s space, Uncle Jo bounced up with a hoarse outraged bellow, hauled a Courier-Journal from his pocket, crumpled it up, copiously bedewed it with his chew of tobacco, cud and streaming amber included, and snatching Dr. Bell’s battered bee gum from its astounded owner’s head, rammed the great dripping bolus into its crown and jammed the hat back on the other’s pate and literally ran for the open air, uttering choken and intemperate parts of speech. But Dr. Bell took no offense, merely clucking his regrets that a gentleman should be given to such utterly unaccountable displays of temperament. He couldn’t afford to take offense—it might cost him an audience.

It was a drowsy torrid summer afternoon. I was hunched on the whittled guardrail of the old boatstore porch aforesaid. Against the brick façade behind me sat three cronies—Cap’n Joe Fowler, and my father, and Uncle Jo. In harmony they discussed some congenial theme, perhaps the military mistakes of Braxton Bragg, perhaps the iniquities of a high protective tariff, anyway some issue on which they were in perfect accord. Without warning, the chubby form of Dr. Bell appeared in their disturbed midst. With his little pitter-patter gait, he had come upon them. He paused in the doorway, beaming upon the company. A quick pregnant hush befell. Daniel had invaded the lions’ den, but this Daniel didn’t realize his peril.

“Good evening, Joseph,” he said formally, as was his wont.

Cap’n Joe grunted morosely beneath his grizzled mustache.

“Good evening, Joshua.”

My father nodded and fretfully he plucked at a sandy-red goatee.

“Good evening, Joel.”

My uncle said nothing, but under his scowling brows his eyes began to gleam with a baleful light. Here at the very start was a well-nigh unendurable affront. He disliked his Christian name when spoken in its full two syllables; never used it himself, always signed himself “J. Shrewsbury.” I expected an immediate combustion, but with a visible effort he held in.

“Warm evening, heh?” continued Dr. Bell, fairly atwitter with geniality. “Or anyhow warmish. Wouldn’t you say warmish?”

Nobody said.

Dr. Bell appeared to realize that his debut had been inauspicious. There ensued a somewhat embarrassing stage wait, a foreboding little silence. The new arrival cast his daunted glance about, plainly seeking an object, any object, for monologuing. It was, you’d say, like a drowning man clutching blindly at straws. His hopeful eyes fell upon the packet Clyde lying at the wharf just below, where she loaded for her regular weekly trip up the Tennessee. Her name was printed on a flag which hung limply between her stacks. In rich gilt it was painted on her pilothouse. Hugely, in flaring yellow and red with black shadings, it was repeated on the nearer flank of her boiler deck bulkheads, aft.

Slowly Dr. Bell spelled out the lettering: “C-L-Y-D-E. Joshua,” he inquired, “is that the steamer Clyde?”

My father got no chance to reply, even were he minded to.

As though he had been hornet-stung through the seat of his trousers, Uncle Jo sprang up. With one continuing frenzied movement he uncovered himself and dashed his black slouch hat to the floor, then danced upon it in a Zuluish kind of war dance.

“No,” he screamed. “No, you God-overeaten old Sapinpaw, that’s the Confederate ram Merrimac!”

Half a minute later, strangers, if any, along the lower stretches of our main thoroughfare must have been amazed to behold a squarely built, square-whiskered, middle-aged gentleman erratically tacking uptown, now addressing the unresponsive heavens in convulsed accents, now beating with a great clubbed walking stick on hitching posts and signposts, now belaboring the inoffensive wooden Indian in front of Little Hymen’s cigar store, now viciously attacking the red-and-white-striped pillar that marked Green Gray’s barbershop, and so behaving, ultimately to vanish in the dusty, heat-pulsing distance.

But down on the boatstore porch good Dr. Bell was murmuring in a shocked and sympathetic quaver:

“Dearie me, suzz, dearie me! What has come over poor Joel? Joseph, do you and Joshua suppose Joel’s mebbe has a t’ech of the sun? I’d better follow him up and find out.”

“Better start in by taming a Bengal tiger and then gradually work up to it,” counseled Cap’n Joe. “Or else give that Shrewsbury about six weeks to cool off in.”

Well indeed for Dr. Bell that that day he did not overtake Uncle Jo. There might have been murder. Here was one who could be driven just so far.

From my Uncle Jo, who encouraged me to draw pictures—I had from babyhood some crude knack with pencil and colors and my adolescent desire was to grow up to be a sketch artist—and who guided me in my then secondary ambition to write down on paper what I saw, I got my love for a newspaper office and for the smell of a newspaper office—that alluring stench which is compounded, or was in those days before linotypes and manifolding presses came, of the contributary lesser stinks of wood pulp and sour flour paste and dirty type faces and half-molten composition rollers and musty files and perhaps the frowsy garments of a tramp printer or so.

That smell, for upwards of forty years it is now, has abided in my nose or if not actually in my nose, at least in my consciousness, binding me fast to the workbench of the journeyman scrivener. One way or another it has shaped my course for all my days. I have no regrets. It has taken me where the wheels of the world went ’round.

[1]

Years following this episode, what I shall ever maintain was at once the most restrained and the most admirable example of understatement of which I have had personal knowledge, centered about Patrolman Mount. Caution was a desirable attribute when he was being publicly mentioned. An alien, reviewing his military career before he took on constabulary duties, might have called him an ex-guerrilla, which would have been a risky thing to do. But since he served with Southern irregulars, tact and sectional sentiment dictated that he be spoken of as one who had been a partisan ranger.Early on a Christmas morning a group of youngsters, I being included, were winding up our pre-holiday festivities. That was one night in the year when I was suffered to roam wild and free with my mates until late hours. We set off fireworks, just as Northern-bred boys did on the Fourth of July, and we pranked with signs and gates as those same Northerners did on Hallowe’en, which we never did then, but only on Christmas Eve. We also turned over back-houses.Returning homeward, exhausted but happy over having worked a volume of mischief and shooting the last of our firecrackers and languidly tooting farewell toots on our tin horns, we came abreast of the Bleeding Heart Restauraw and Saloon for Colored Only on lower Court Street. A spring wagon was backed up to the curb and from the interior a number of subdued-looking colored men were fetching forth the limp body of a short, stocky negro. Pressing forward with a morbid curiosity, I saw that the deceased was shot twice through the heart and in the dim light I thought I recognized him as one who had been known for his truculence, especially amongst those of his own kind.At the rear of the barroom, nervously wiping his hands on a greasy apron, stood the proprietor, “Sergeant” Tom Emery, a blocky, dignified mulatto. He stood high, as the saying went, with white and black alike and prided himself on running an orderly establishment. Until General Lloyd Tilghman, our chief military hero, was killed leading a Confederate brigade down in Mississippi, Tom had been his body servant; hence his courtesy title.Through a huddle of strangely silent negro bystanders, I made my way to him. There was much broken crockery about, betokening a mêlée, and a puddle of fresh blood on the floor.“Sergeant,” I asked, “wasn’t that Monkey John those boys just toted out of here?”“Not nobody else,” said he with a somber gravity.“How’d it happen?”“Well, suh, Little Boss,” said Tom, diplomatically weighing his words before he brought them forth, “it seems like he musta antagonized Mister Buck Mounts.” (He even remembered to pluralize the name, which was the wont of his race when dealing with an important white person as tending, I assume, to make the important person yet more important.)

[2]

They cheated me at the baptismal font. The first intention was to name me for my father whose name was Joshua, with Shrewsbury for a middle name. The consultant womenfolk accepted the Shrewsbury part, as having an aristocratic sound but vetoed the beginning of the plan, they holding that Joshua was old-fashioned and countrified, whereas Irvin, which an aunt of mine remembered from reading a popular novel of the period, was regarded as poetic or romantic or something. Accordingly they christened me, I being of too tender an age to protest and having no male adult to champion my infantile cause. But had they consented to the original idea—what a name for a writer and especially a writer addicted to outbursts of alleged humor, I would have worn through life—Josh Cobb!

[3]

At his death—from an overdose of strong sedative taken to ease the after-effects of a spree in celebration of the downfall of a political foe—these same three cronies acted as pallbearers: Captain Ed Farley, from Michigan, who lived down the libelous and utterly undeserved title of “carpetbagger” to become one of the most venerated patriarchs in the county; Mr. Nelson Soule, who, although a Jerseyman, redeemed himself in Uncle Jo’s eyes by being a stalwart Democrat; and Major J. H. Ashcraft, a chronic Federal officeholder, except when Cleveland was president, and a native Kentuckian, who took frequent pains to explain that while he had been a Union officer and was proud of it, he was, by Godfrey, no dam’ Yankee! The remaining pallbearers were fellow ex-Confederates, namely, my uncle, Linah Cobb, and old Judge Bullitt and Dr. John Brooks. In my Judge Priest yarns Dr. Brooks became “Dr. Lake,” and in various chapters of a book called All Aboard I made Major Ashcraft a principal character.

[4]

During the height of the 1913 flood, which pretty well inundated the town, two refugee camps with barracks, tents and mess halls were set up on Buckner’s Hill west of the corporate limits; one camp for white refugees, the other for colored. A new resident, a furniture merchant from northern Indiana, was put in charge of the colored commissary and almost immediately had trouble on his hands. The old-timers among his charges struck against the rations. In his ignorance he had made the mistake of serving them with crusty fresh wheaten loaves and they were going to have their corn pones or die in defense of principle and appetite. As long as he lived he bore the affectionate nickname of “Baker’s Bread” Rhodes.