Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  (1939)

  I Blame It All on Mamma

  MRS COPENHAGEN CALHOUN, who lives on a riverbank watermelon farm in Black Ankle County, about a mile from the town of Stonewall, is the only termagant I have ever admired. She has no fondness for authority and is opposed to all public officials, elected or appointed. Once a distinguished senator came to Stonewall and spoke in the high-school auditorium; just after he finished telling how he made it a practice to walk in the footsteps of Thomas Jefferson, she stood up and said, ‘Senator, you sure are getting too big for your britches.’ A mayor of Stonewall once tried to get her fired from her job as cook in the station restaurant of the Charleston, Pee Dee & Northern Railroad. A woman who got drunk in public, he said, was a disgrace to the town. She kept her mouth shut until he came up for reelection; then she went up and down Main Street making speeches which helped defeat him. ‘Why, the stuck-up old hypocrite!’ she said in one of her speeches. ‘He goes to the country club on Saturday night and gets as drunk as a goose on ice, and Sunday morning he stands up in the Methodist choir and sings so loud the whole church echoes for a week.’ She believes that public officials are inclined to overlook the fact that Americans are free, and when she is brought into court for disturbing the peace she invariably begins her address to the judge by stating, ‘This is a free country, by God, and I got my rights.’ She has a long tongue, and Judge Elisha Mullet once said she could argue the legs off an iron pot. She has many bad qualities, in fact, and her husband often complains that she has made his life a hell on earth, but when I go back to Stonewall for a visit and find that she is still insisting on her rights, I always feel better about the vigor of democracy.

  I was in the tenth grade when I became one of her admirers. At that time, in 1924, she was unmarried and had just come up from Charleston to cook in the station restaurant. It was the only restaurant in Stonewall; railroad men ate there, and so did people from the sawmill, the cotton gin, and the chewing-tobacco factory. After school I used to hang around the station. I would sit on a bench beside the track and watch the Negro freight hands load boxcars with bales of cotton. Some afternoons she would come out of the kitchen and sit on the bench beside me. She was a handsome, big-hipped woman with coal-black hair and a nice grin, and the station agent must have liked her, because he let her behave pretty much as she pleased. She cooked in her bare feet and did not bother to put shoes on when she came out for a breath of fresh air. ‘I had an aunt,’ she told me, ‘who got the dropsy from wearing shoes in a hot kitchen.’ Once I asked her how she came to be named Copenhagen. ‘Mamma named all her babies after big towns,’ she said. ‘It was one of her fancy habits. Her first was a boy and she named him New Orleans. Then my sister came along and she named her Chattanooga. Mamma was real fond of snuff, and every payday Pa would buy her a big brown bladder of Copenhagen snuff. That’s where she got my name.’

  One Friday night, after Miss Copey had been working at the restaurant a couple of months, the station agent wrote her a pass and she went down to Charleston to see her family. When she returned Monday on the 3:30, she was so drunk the conductor had to grab her elbows and help her down the train steps. She paid no attention to him but sang ‘Work, for the Night Is Coming.’ She bustled into the kitchen, kicked off her shoes, and began throwing things. She would pick up a pot and beat time with it while she sang a verse of the hymn, and then she would throw it. ‘Work till the last beam fad-eth, fad-eth to shine no more,’ she would sing, and then a stewpot would go sailing across the room. I stood at a window and stared. She was the first drunken woman I had ever seen and the spectacle did not disappoint me; I thought she was wonderful. Finally the chief of police, who was called Old Blunderbuss by the kids in town, came and put her under arrest. Next day she was back at work. In the afternoon she came out to sit in the sun for a few minutes, and I asked her how it felt to get drunk. She gave me a slap that almost knocked me off the bench. ‘Why, you little shirttail boy,’ she said, ‘What do you mean asking me such a question?’ I rubbed my jaw and said, ‘I’m sorry, Miss Copey. I didn’t mean any harm.’

  She leaned forward and held her head in her hands like a mourner and sat that way a few minutes. Then she straightened up and said, ‘I’m sorry I slapped you, son, but that was a hell of a question to ask a lady. Drinking is a sad, sad thing, and I hate to talk about it. I was a liquor-head sot before I got past the third grade, and I blame it all on Mamma. I had the colic real often when I was a little girl, and to ease the pain Mamma would take Pa’s jug and measure out half a cup of liquor and sweeten it with molasses and dose me with it, and I got an everlasting taste for the awful stuff. If I knew then what I know now, I would’ve got up from my sickbed and knocked that liquor outa my mamma’s hand.’ She sighed and stood up. ‘Still and all,’ she said, and a broad smile came on her face, ‘I got to admit that it sure cured my colic.’

  Miss Copey had not worked at the restaurant long before she got acquainted with Mr Thunderbolt Calhoun. He has a watermelon farm on the bank of Shad Roe River in a section of the county called Egypt. He is so sleepy and slow he has been known as Thunderbolt ever since he was a boy; his true name is Rutherford Calhoun. He is shiftless and most of his farm work is done by a Negro hired boy named Mister. (When this boy was born his mother said, ‘White people claim they won’t mister a Negro. Well, by God, son, they’ll mister you!’) Mr Thunderbolt’s fifteen-acre farm is fertile and it grows the finest Cuban Queen, Black Gipsy, and Irish Gray watermelons I have ever seen. The farm is just a sideline, however; his principal interest in life is a copper still hidden on the bank of a bay in the river swamp. In this still he produces a vehement kind of whiskey known as tanglefoot. ‘I depend on watermelons to pay the taxes and feed me and my mule,’ he says. ‘The whiskey is pure profit.’ Experts say that his tanglefoot is as good as good Kentucky bourbon, and he claims that laziness makes it so. ‘You have to be patient to make good whiskey,’ he says, yawning, ‘and I’m an uncommonly patient man.’

  After Miss Copey began buying her whiskey from him, she went on sprees more often; his whiskey did not give her hangovers or what she called ‘the dismals.’ At least once a month, usually on a Saturday afternoon, she would leave her kitchen and walk barefooted down Main Street, singing a hymn at the top of her voice, and she seldom got below Main and Jefferson before she was under arrest. Most of the town drunks meekly paid the usual fine of seven dollars and costs or went to jail, but Miss Copey always took advantage of the question ‘What have you got to say for yourself?’ First she would claim that the right to get drunk is guaranteed by the Constitution, and then she would accuse the judge of being a hypocrite.

  ‘I got a right to let loose a hymn when I feel like it,’ she would say. ‘That don’t harm nobody. Suppose I do make a little noise? Do they put ’em in jail for blowing the whistle at the sawmill? And anyhow, I don’t drink in secret. There’s nothing so low-down sorry as a man that drinks in secret. You’re a secret sot, Judge Mullet, and don’t try to deny it.’

  ‘I like a drop now and then, to be sure,’ the Judge would reply, ‘but that don’t give me the right to run up and down the highways and byways in my bare feet.’

  ‘Now you’re trying to tell me there’s one law for a judge and another for a railroad cook,’ Miss Copey would say triumphantly. ‘That’s a hell of a way for a judge to talk.’

  Miss Copey had been cooking in the station restaurant about two years when a stovepipe crumpled up and fell down on her head, stunning her. It made her so angry she quit her job and threatened to sue the railroad for a thousand dollars. She settled out of court, however, when a claim agent offered her a check for seventy-five. ‘I haven’t got the patience to fight a railroad,’ she said. She cashed the check, insisting on having the sum in one-dollar bills, and hurried out to Mr Thunderbolt’s to buy a Mason jar of tanglefoot. When he saw her roll of bills he said he felt they ought to celebrate. He drew some whiskey out of a charred-oak keg that had been buried in the swamp for five years,
and they sat in rocking chairs on the front porch and began to drink to each other. After an hour or so, Mr Thunderbolt told her he was a lonesome man and that he had grown mighty damned tired of Mister’s cooking. He wound up by asking her to be his wife. Miss Copey broke down and sobbed. Then she said, ‘I’ll make you a good wife, Thunderbolt. We better hurry to town before the courthouse closes. If we wait until you’re sober, I’m afraid you’ll change your mind.’ Mister drove them to Stonewall in Mr Thunderbolt’s old Ford truck. They stopped at Miss Copey’s rooming house and picked up her trunk; then they went over to the courthouse and were married. Judge Mullet was surprised by the marriage but said he guessed Mr Thunderbolt’s star customer wanted to get closer to the source of supply. For a week the bride and groom went fishing in Shad Roe River in the morning, got drunk in the afternoon, and rode about the country in the Ford truck at night. Then, Saturday morning, Miss Copey woke up, looked out a window, and saw that the figs were ripe on the door-yard bushes; she shook her husband awake and said, ‘The honeymoon’s over, Thunderbolt. I got to get busy and can them figs before they drop on the ground.’

  For a couple of months, Miss Copey was a model wife. That autumn I hunted squirrels practically every afternoon in the swamp that runs alongside Mr Thunderbolt’s farm, and I used to stop by and see her. She showed me scores of jars of watermelon-rind pickles and fig preserves she had canned and arranged on the cellar shelves. She had spaded a pit in the back yard for barbecues, and in the corncrib she had a big barrel of scuppernong grapes in ferment. She had bought four Rhode Island Red hens and four settings of eggs, and she had a yardful of biddies. She proudly told me that every night when Mr Thunderbolt came home from the swamp, worn out after a day of squatting beside his still, he found a plate of fried chicken and a sweet-potato pie on the kitchen table waiting for him.

  After a while, however, she began to get bored. ‘It’s too damned still around here,’ she told me one evening. ‘I need some human company. Sometimes a whole day goes past and I don’t get a single word out of Thunderbolt. He lived by himself so long he almost lost the use of his tongue.’ There is a Baptist church a half mile up the river, and one lonesome Sunday she attended a service there. She picked an unfortunate time, because there was a fight in progress in the congregation. In fact, at that period, which was the autumn of 1926, there was dissension in many rural Baptist churches in the South over the ceremony of immersion. One group believed a convert should be immersed three times face forward in the still water of a pond and the other favored a single immersion in the running water of a river. The opposing groups were called the Trine Forwardites and the Running Riverites. Miss Copey became a churchgoer merely because she wanted to sing some hymns, but she soon got mixed up in this theological wrangle. The second Sunday she attended services she was sitting in a back pew when a man got up and advocated changing the name of the church from Egypt Baptist to Still Water Trine Forward Baptist. He said any sensible person knew that a calm pond was more spiritual than the troubled waters of a river. This did not seem right to Miss Copey; she arose and interrupted him. ‘Jordan wa’n’t no pond,’ she said. ‘It was a running river. On that rock I stand.’ ‘That’s right, sister!’ exclaimed a man up front. ‘You hit the nail on the head.’ He went back and asked Miss Copey to come forward and sit with the Running River faction. ‘Why, I’ll gladly do so,’ Miss Copey said. ‘What’s this all about, anyhow?’

  Presently the argument between the factions grew bitter, and Miss Copey arose again and suggested singing ‘On Jordan’s Stormy Banks,’ a revival hymn. The leader of her faction said, ‘Let’s march out of this church as we sing that hymn.’ Thereupon seven men and women marched up the aisle. Miss Copey got up and followed them. In the yard outside, they held a meeting and decided to organize a new church and call it the Running River One Immersion Baptist. ‘You can meet at my house until you locate a more suitable place,’ Miss Copey suggested. ‘Let’s go there now and sit on the porch and do some singing. I feel like letting loose a few hymns.’ The Running Riverites were pleased by this suggestion. With Miss Copey leading, they marched down the road singing ‘There Is a Green Hill Far Away.’ When Mr Thunderbolt saw them heading up the lane, he was sitting on the porch, playing his harmonica. He leaped off the porch and fled to the swamp. Miss Copey arranged chairs on the porch and announced that her favorite hymns were ‘There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood’ and ‘The Old Time Religion Is Good Enough for Me.’ All afternoon they sang these hymns over and over. At sundown Miss Copey said, ‘If you’re a mind to, we’ll meet here again next Sunday. We’ll show those Trine Forwardite heathens!’ Then the meeting ended. Late that night Mr Thunderbolt came in, raging drunk. ‘Listen, you old hoot owl!’ he shouted. ‘If you bring them hymn-singers to this house again, I’ll leave you and never come back!’ ‘Don’t threaten me, you drunk old sinner,’ Miss Copey said. ‘You start threatening me, I’ll pull a slat out of the bed and fracture your skull.’

  Next Sunday afternoon the hymn-singers held another meeting on Miss Copey’s porch, and that night Mr Thunderbolt did not come home at all. Monday night he was still missing. Early Tuesday morning, Miss Copey went down to Mister’s cabin and found that he was missing too. She looked in the barn and found that the Ford truck was gone. On my way home from the swamp that afternoon I stopped by to see her, and she was sitting on the front steps, moaning. There was a carving knife in her lap. ‘I’ll cut his black heart out,’ she said. ‘I’ll put my trademark on him. The wife-deserter!’ I sat down and tried to comfort her. Presently two of the hymn-singers came up the lane. ‘How are you this fine fall day, sister?’ one called out. Miss Copey ran out to meet them. ‘You come another step closer, you old hymn-singers,’ she said, ‘and I’ll throw you in the river! You’ve turned a man against his wife! You’ve broke up a happy home!’ After a while we went in the house and she made some coffee. We were sitting on the back porch drinking it when Mister drove up in the Ford truck. ‘Hey there, Miss Copey!’ he yelled. ‘They got Mr Thunderbolt in jail down in Charleston.’ ‘Why, bless his heart,’ said Miss Copey. She ran in the house and got her hat and her purse. ‘Get back in that truck,’ she said to Mister, ‘and take me to him.’ The three of us climbed in the seat.

  In Charleston, the jailer let us go in and see Mr Thunderbolt. He was lying in his cell playing his harmonica. He was in fine spirits. He told us the hymn-singing had made him so angry he had ordered Mister to drive him to Charleston. There was a moving-picture theatre near the place they parked the truck, and Monday night he decided to go in and see a show; he had never seen a moving picture. Mary Pickford was in it, he said, and he became so absorbed in her troubles that he crouched way forward in his seat and got a cramp in his left leg. At first he tried not to notice it, but when he could bear it no longer he decided to try the old-fashioned remedy of kicking the cramp out. He got out in the aisle, held on to an end seat, and began kicking backward, like a mule that is being shod. All the time he kept his eyes on the picture. ‘I didn’t want to miss a thing,’ he said. People began to yell for him to sit down, he said, and an usher hurried up and told him to stop kicking. ‘Please go away and don’t bother me,’ he told the usher. The usher got the manager and together they grabbed him. ‘I couldn’t properly defend myself,’ Mr Thunderbolt told us. ‘I couldn’t fight them two busy-bodies and keep up with what was happening to Miss Mary Pickford and kick the cramp out of my foot all at the same time. It was more than any one human could do.’ The usher and the manager hustled him to the lobby, and when he realized he wouldn’t be able to see the rest of the picture, he put all his attention on self-defense and knocked the two men flat. Then a policeman came and arrested him for disorderly conduct.

  ‘Why, it’s a damned outrage, honey,’ Miss Copey said. ‘I’m going right down and bail you out.’

  ‘Just a minute,’ Mr Thunderbolt said. ‘You’re not going to bail me out until I get your solemn promise to leave them hymn-singers alone. It’s real quiet
in this jail.’

  ‘Oh, hell, Thunderbolt!’ said Miss Copey. ‘I threw them hymn-singers in the river before I left home.’

  (1940)

  Uncle Dockery and the Independent Bull

  I OFTEN FIND it comforting to think of Uncle Dockery Fitzsimmons, a serene old bright-leaf tobacco farmer who lives in Black Ankle County, about six miles from Stonewall. He is the only man I have ever known who has absolutely no respect for the mechanical genius of Western civilization. One day, when I was about fifteen, we were fishing Little Rump River for blue bream and a motorboat chugged by, scaring all the fish to the bed of the river, and Uncle Dockery said, ‘Son, the only inventions that make sense to me are the shotgun, the two-horse wagon, the butter churn, and the frying pan. Sooner or later such contraptions as the motorboat will drive the whole human race into Dix Hill.’ Dix Hill is a suburb of Raleigh, where the North Carolina State Asylum for the Insane is located.

  Uncle Dockery is still opposed to the automobile. ‘I don’t want to go nowhere,’ he used to say, ‘that a mule can’t take me.’ His hatred of automobiles embraces people who ride in them. One summer afternoon we were sitting on his veranda, eating a watermelon, when a neighbor ran up the road and said, ‘There’s been a terrible auto accident up on the highway, Mr Fitzsimmons.’ The news pleased Uncle Dockery. He placed his rasher of watermelon on the rail of the veranda, smiled broadly, and asked, ‘How many killed?’ ‘Four,’ said the neighbor. ‘Well, that’s just fine,’ said Uncle Dockery. ‘Where were they going in such a rush?’ ‘They were going to the beach for a swim,’ said the neighbor. Uncle Dockery nodded with satisfaction and said, ‘I guess they figured the Atlantic Ocean wouldn’t wait.’