Uncle Dockery did not often leave his farm, but once, during a series of revival meetings at the General Stonewall Jackson Baptist Church, he spent the night in Stonewall at the home of his married daughter. In the middle of the night there was a frightful uproar in his room, and his daughter and her husband ran in to rescue him. They thought someone was trying to murder him. They found he had got out of bed to get a drink of water and had pulled the electric-light cord loose from the ceiling. He said, ‘I tried to turn the damned thing on, but I couldn’t somehow seem to make it work. I thought maybe if I grabbed hold of it and gave it a jerk, the light would come on.’ He was so maddened by his mistake that he wouldn’t spend the balance of the night in the room. He asked his daughter to take some blankets and spread a pallet for him outside on the porch. In the morning he denounced her for having electric lights installed in her house. ‘A fat-pine knot or a kerosene lamp was good enough for Grandpa, and it was good enough for Pa, and it was good enough for Ma, and by God, Miss Priss, it’s good enough for me,’ Uncle Dockery told her.
Although I always called him Uncle Dockery, we are not related. Most of the families in Black Ankle County have been there since the time of the Lords Proprietors, most of them are Scotch-Irish, and most of them are related. (There are, however, no aristocrats in the county; in fact, the first mint julep I ever saw was in Lundy’s seafood restaurant in Sheepshead Bay in the summer of 1934.) Because almost everybody in the county is at least a cousin by marriage of everybody else, it is natural for young people to use the word ‘Uncle’ for old men they like. People in the county seem to take it for granted that everybody is kin to them.
I remember an incident which illustrates this. There is a ragged, epileptic old Cherokee Indian in Stonewall. He wears a rooster feather in the band of his hat and his beard comes down level with his belt buckle and he looks like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. People call him Uncle John. He goes from house to house saying, ‘Have you please got something for poor old Uncle John?’ and housewives customarily give him a nickel. One time an aunt from South Carolina was visiting us and she went to the door when Uncle John knocked. She was rather frightened by him. The old Indian bowed and said, ‘I don’t think you know me. I’m Uncle John.’ My aunt said, ‘Goodness gracious! Which side of the family are you on?’
I spent a lot of time at Uncle Dockery’s when I was a boy. I liked him, and I liked Aunt Dolly, his wife. When I was fourteen, I was given a horse and I used to ride out in the country after school and I often stopped at his farm. Most people in Stonewall disliked him. They used to say, ‘That old man would just as soon shoot you as tell you howdy-do.’ He always went out of his way to be sarcastic, and they considered him a public nuisance. On his rare trips to Stonewall he would walk down Main Street grinning to himself, as if he had a private joke on the human race. Once he saw a display of electric fans in the show window of the Stonewall Hardware & General Merchandise Co. and commenced to laugh. He went in and said, ‘Sell many of them things?’ The clerk said, ‘Selling quite a few.’ Uncle Dockery said, ‘Be damned if the whole town don’t belong in Dix Hill. A man that’d pay out good money for a breeze shouldn’t be allowed to run loose.’ One time he visited the Black Ankle County Fair and stood around in front of a game-of-skill tent until the barker yelled at him, ‘Why don’t you try your luck, old man?’ Then Uncle Dockery pointed to the shabby merchandise offered as prizes and said, ‘Hell, Mister, I’m afraid I might win something.’ Uncle Dockery was particularly disliked by Senator C. B. McAdoo, the wealthiest man in Stonewall. Uncle Dockery knew a disgraceful story about him, and told it every time he got a chance. ‘C.B. hasn’t spoken to me in Lord knows when,’ Uncle Dockery used to say, ‘but I knew him real well when we were boys. He was raised on a farm right down the road a piece from me, and we grew up together. He was every bit as stingy then as he is now. One summer when we were boys there was a big celebration in Stonewall. They had just finished laying the tracks for the Charleston, Pee Dee, and Northern Railroad, and the first train was due to come through, and the whole town was going to take a holiday and celebrate. All the country people for miles around drove in, and the streets were crowded. A peddler came up from Charleston and set up a lemonade tent night near the depot. He brought some ice packed in sawdust in a barrel. Ice in summer was a highly unusual sight in those days, and the people stood around and watched him crack it up. And lemons were unusual, too. The peddler squeezed out his lemons and made a big tubful of lemonade, and then he hollered out, “Made in the shade, stirred with a spade, come buy my lemonade.” Well, C.B. walked up with his girl, Sarah Ann Barnes. C.B. was a big, overgrown country boy, and he was all dressed up. He had garters around his shirtsleeves and his hair was slicked back with tallow. He and his girl went up to the lemonade tent. C.B. reached away down in his britches and drew out a nickel, and he put the nickel on the table, got a glass of lemonade, took a swallow, and smacked his lips. Then he turned to his girl and he said, “Mighty good stuff, Sarah Ann. Better buy yourself some.”’
I learned a lot from Uncle Dockery. He taught me how to bait a hook for blue and red-breast bream, how to use a shotgun, how to tell the age of a mule by examining his teeth, how to set a hen, how to dress partridges for the skillet, how to thump a watermelon to tell if it is green or ripe, and how to chew tobacco. He was what is called a ‘target chewer.’ He would light a candle and stick it up on a stump; then he would take up a stance five yards away and extinguish the flame without upsetting the candle. I admired this trick and he tried his best to teach it to me. He advised me to practice on pigeons, saying, ‘It’s always best to practice on a moving target.’ There were pigeons all over the front yard and he would point to one and make me aim at it. He told me I might get a job with a circus when I grew up if I became a good shot. If I had been blessed with perseverance, I might be travelling about the country right now with Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey.
Sometimes when I rode out, Uncle Dockery would be busy, and I would turn my horse loose in the mule lot and go fishing in Briar Berry Swamp with Little Dock. When Uncle Dockery was almost sixty, he and Aunt Dolly had a son. Aunt Dolly always referred to her husband as Old Man Dock, and their son came to be known as Little Dock. Their other children had grown up, married, and left home, and the old people were extremely fond of Little Dock; Aunt Dolly used to say, ‘He was mighty slow getting here, but he’s the best of the lot.’ He was a wild, strange boy. When people in the village wanted to be polite about him, they said, ‘The poor boy isn’t quite bright.’ Otherwise they said, ‘He’s crazy as a bedbug. Takes after his Pa.’ I was three years older, but I liked to fish with him. He was a wonderful fisherman, except that he talked all the time. He would strike up a conversation with anything, animate or inanimate. He would talk to a fence post. He would catch a fish and say, ‘Hello, little sun perch, quit flopping around. You’re going to make a nice supper for Little Dock.’
He took a great interest in religion, but Uncle Dockery wouldn’t let him go to Sunday school in Stonewall because he was afraid the town boys would make fun of him. Little Dock was always asking his father about Jesus. One day the three of us were sitting under the shed of the tobacco barn, and Little Dock said, ‘Pa, where is Jesus located, anyhow? Is he located up in Raleigh, or in Washington, or where?’ Uncle Dockery, who was, in his own way, a deeply religious man, told him Jesus was everywhere – in the air, in the sky, in the water. Little Dock smiled, as if he didn’t altogether believe the explanation. Later that afternoon, however, he pointed excitedly toward the top of a wild plum tree and said, ‘There goes Jesus! Lord God, how he can fly!’ Uncle Dockery said, ‘Son, you musta got Jesus confused with a jay bird. I don’t see nothing up there but some old blue jays.’ Little Dock said, ‘Oh, I saw him all right. He waved to me when he flew over the plum tree.’ I have always admired Uncle Dockery’s behavior on that occasion. He patted the boy on the shoulder and said, ‘Son, I’m proud of you. It ain’t everybody that’s got such goo
d eyesight.’ Anyone who joked about Little Dock’s peculiarities in Uncle Dockery’s presence made an enemy for life.
Little Dock aped his father. They talked alike. Uncle Dockery often spoke of himself in the third person. He would say, ‘Dockery went fishing this morning and brought back a trout big as a ham.’ Little Dock often spoke in the same manner. Once he told me, ‘Little Dock tried to harness the mule and got the hell kicked out of him. Little Dock sure does hate that mule.’ Uncle Dockery and Little Dock got a lot of pleasure out of talking to each other. And sometimes, on autumn afternoons, they would sit on kegs in the corncrib and drink sour persimmon beer and sing together. They sang ‘By and By We’re Going Up to See the King,’ ‘The Hell Bound Train,’ and ‘If You Don’t Like My Peaches, Please Quit Shaking My Tree.’ Their favorite, however, was a minstrel-show song called ‘Just the Same.’ I remember two verses of it:
‘White girl wears a high-heel shoe.
Yellow girl does the same.
Black girl wears no shoe at all,
But she gets there just the same.
‘White girl lives in a big brick house.
Yellow girl does the same.
Black girl lives in the county jail,
But it’s a brick house just the same.’
Uncle Dockery had his bad points. He was too stubborn and contrary for his own good. One bleak January his two mules got sick and died of something the veterinarian called vesicular stomatitis, or horsepox. Uncle Dockery was so indignant he refused to buy new mules. He owned a big bull and he decided he would force it to take the place of both mules. ‘I’ll make a work bull out of him if it kills me,’ he said. A few mornings later, a bitter-cold morning with snow all over the ground, he woke up and found there was no firewood in the house. It was so cold the water in the pigpen trough had frozen solid. Aunt Dolly had no stovewood with which to cook breakfast. Uncle Dockery had some firewood cut and piled in the swamp but nothing he could use to haul it up to the house except a two-horse wagon, and he didn’t think the bull could pull it without help. He called Aunt Dolly out of her cold kitchen and said, ‘Dockery is going to harness himself and the bull to that two-horse wagon and haul some wood.’ Alarmed, Aunt Dolly begged him to go borrow a mule from a neighbor to work beside the bull, but he said, ‘I ain’t the borrowing kind.’ He took the heavy mule collar off a harness, tightened it up, and put it around his neck; then he strung some leather traces from the collar to the whiffletree of the wagon. Then he hitched himself securely to one side of the wagon tongue. When that was done, he ordered Aunt Dolly to harness the bull to the other side of the tongue. He said, ‘Dockery and the bull make a fine team, better than any two mules I ever saw.’ When everything was ready, he reached over and gave the bull a kick and said, ‘Let’s go, bull.’ The bull, made frisky by the cold day and the unaccustomed snow, hurtled forward, pulling the wagon and Uncle Dockery with him. The driverless wagon rattled and bounced. The bull kept circling the house with a head-long lope and it was all Uncle Dockery could do to keep up with him. Although the harness restricted him, Uncle Dockery took high, nimble steps, because he knew if he stumbled once, he would fall down and the bull would drag him across the frozen ground. Aunt Dolly stood in the front yard, moaning. Every time the bull and Uncle Dockery clattered past, she waved her apron, which frightened the bull and made matters worse. Finally the bull got tired and he and Uncle Dockery slowed down simultaneously to a walk. Aunt Dolly ran to her husband’s aid. She rushed up and started to take his harness off. Uncle Dockery was frantic; he was afraid the bull would start away again. He caught his breath and said, ‘Dolly, don’t bother with me.’ He pushed her away and said, ‘Take out the bull. Dockery will stand.’ That afternoon he limped into Stonewall and bought a span of mules. When he got home, he and Little Dock butchered the bull for winter meat. Uncle Dockery said, ‘On a farm, it’s teamwork that counts, and I can’t stand a bull that won’t cooperate.’
(1939)
Old Mr Flood
Author’s Note
THESE STORIES OF fish-eating, whiskey, death, and rebirth first appeared in The New Yorker. Mr Flood is not one man; combined in him are aspects of several old men who work or hang out in Fulton Fish Market, or who did in the past. I wanted these stories to be truthful rather than factual, but they are solidly based on facts. I am obliged to half the people in the market for helping me get these facts. I am much obliged to the following:
Mrs James Donald, proprietor; James Donald, head bartender; and Gus Trein, manager, of the Hartford House, 309 Pearl Street.
Louis Morino, proprietor of Sloppy Louie’s Restaurant, 92 South Street.
Drew Radel, president of the Andrew Radel Oyster Company, South Norwalk, Connecticut.
The late Amos Chesebro, one of the founders of Chesebro Brothers, Robbins & Graham, Stalls 1, 2, and 3, Fulton Fish Market, and the late Matthew J. Graham, of the same firm. Mr Chesebro died in December, 1946, lacking a few weeks of reaching the age of ninety-three.
Joe Cantalupo, president of the Cantalupo Carting Company, 140 Beekman Street. Mr Cantalupo is an antiquarian; he collects prints and photographs of old buildings in the fish-market district and environs. His company, which was founded by his father, Pasquale Cantalupo, sweeps and hoses down the market and carts the market trash – broken barrels and boxes, gurry, and discarded fish – to the city incinerators. His trucks are decorated with this sign:
‘A LOAD ON THIS TRUCK
IS A LOAD OFF YOUR MIND.’
F. Nelson Blount, president of the Narragansett Bay Packing Company, Warren, Rhode Island. Mr Blount dredges black clams.
Old Mr Flood
A TOUGH SCOTCH-IRISHMAN I know, Mr Hugh G. Flood, a retired house-wrecking contractor, aged ninety-three, often tells people that he is dead set and determined to live until the afternoon of July 27, 1965, when he will be a hundred and fifteen years old. ‘I don’t ask much here below,’ he says. ‘I just want to hit a hundred and fifteen. That’ll hold me.’ Mr Flood is small and wizened. His eyes are watchful and icy-blue, and his face is red, bony, and clean-shaven. He is old-fashioned in appearance. As a rule, he wears a high, stiff collar, a candy-striped shirt, a serge suit, and a derby. A silver watch-chain hangs across his vest. He keeps a flower in his lapel. When I am in the Fulton Fish Market neighborhood, I always drop into the Hartford House, a drowsy waterfront hotel at 309 Pearl Street, where he has a room, to see if he is still alive.
Many aged people reconcile themselves to the certainty of death and become tranquil; Mr Flood is unreconcilable. There are three reasons for this. First, he deeply enjoys living. Second, he comes of a long line of Baptists and has a nagging fear of the hereafter, complicated by the fact that the descriptions of heaven in the Bible are as forbidding to him as those of hell. ‘I don’t really want to go to either one of those places,’ he says. He broods about religion and reads a chapter of the Bible practically every day. Even so, he goes to church only on Easter. On that day he has several drinks of Scotch for breakfast and then gets in a cab and goes to a Baptist church in Chelsea. For at least a week thereafter he is gloomy and silent. ‘I’m a God-fearing man,’ he says, ‘and I believe in Jesus Christ crucified, risen, and coming again, but one sermon a year is all I can stand.’ Third, he is a diet theorist – he calls himself a seafoodetarian – and feels obliged to reach a spectacular age in order to prove his theory. He is convinced that the eating of meat and vegetables shortens life and he maintains that the only sensible food for man, particularly for a man who wants to hit a hundred and fifteen, is fish.
To Mr Flood, the flesh of finfish and shellfish is not only good to eat, it is an elixir. ‘When I get through tearing a lobster apart, or one of those tender West Coast octopuses,’ he says, ‘I feel like I had a drink from the fountain of youth.’ He eats with relish every kind of seafood, including sea-urchin eggs, blowfish tails, winkles, ink squids, and barn-door skates. He especially likes an ancient Boston breakfast dish – fried cod tongues, cheeks, and sou
nds, sounds being the gelatinous air bladders along the cod’s backbone. The more unusual a dish, the better he likes it. It makes him feel superior to eat something that most people would edge away from. He insists, however, on the plainest of cooking. In his opinion, there are only four first-class fish restaurants in the city – Sweet’s and Libby’s on Fulton Street, Gage & Tollner’s in Brooklyn, and Lundy’s in Sheepshead Bay – and even these, he says, are disinclined to let well enough alone. Consequently, he takes most of his meals in Sloppy Louie Morino’s, a busy-bee on South Street frequented almost entirely by wholesale fishmongers from Fulton Market, which is across the street. Customarily, when Mr Flood is ready for lunch, he goes to the stall of one of the big wholesalers, a friend of his, and browses among the bins for half an hour or so. Finally he picks out a fish, or an eel, or a crab, or the wing of a skate, or whatever looks best that day, buys it, carries it unwrapped to Louie’s, and tells the chef precisely how he wants it cooked. Mr Flood and the chef, a surly old Genoese, are close friends. ‘I’ve made quite a study of fish cooks,’ Mr Flood says, ‘and I’ve decided that old Italians are best. Then comes old colored men, then old mean Yankees, and then old drunk Irishmen. They have to be old; it takes almost a lifetime to learn how to do a thing simply. Even the stove has to be old. If the cook is an awful drunk, so much the better. I don’t think a teetotaler could cook a fish. Oh, if he was a mean old tobacco-chewing teetotaler, he might.’
Mr Flood’s attitude toward seafood is not altogether mystical. ‘Fish,’ he says, ‘is the only grub left that the scientists haven’t been able to get their hands on and improve. The flounder you eat today hasn’t got any more damned vitamins in it than the flounder your great-great-granddaddy ate, and it tastes the same. Everything else has been improved and improved and improved to such an extent that it ain’t fit to eat. Consider the egg. When I was a boy on Staten Island, hens ate grit and grasshoppers and scraps from the table and whatever they could scratch out of the ground, and a platter of scrambled eggs was a delight. Then the scientists developed a special egg-laying mash made of old corncobs and sterilized buttermilk, and nowadays you order scrambled eggs and you get a platter of yellow glue. Consider the apple. Years ago you could enjoy an apple. Then the scientists took hold and invented chemical fertilizers especially for apple trees, and apples got big and red and shiny and beautiful and absolutely tasteless. As for vegetables, vegetables have been improved until they’re downright poisonous. Two-thirds of the population has the stomach jumps, and no wonder.’
Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics) Page 43
