BIG SOUTHERN CHAPTER 49

1962

HENRY AND DAVID

Disrepair comes quickly. The cinderblock building in Pingree, erected two years ago to take advantage of re-routed traffic on the new highway, already shows how quickly promise crumbles. Poorly lit, dusty corners, grimy edges, cracked naugahyde stools, scratched counters, all matching the clientele's shabby demeanor and dress. The customers don't gussy up to come here, it's a way station not a destination. A place to whittle away a stretch of time, for the most part, and for some it's the day's, maybe the week's, highlight.

When Verlyn walks in with David at his side, Henry is sitting at the resurrected antique poker table with John Vitale, each of them sipping coffee just served by Joe Rossi's daughter, Debbie. Joe, less nimble since polio hit him in '56, shuffles behind the bar, his arms doing the work that his legs once performed. One arm locks on a bullprick cane—a gift from the late Daniel Blossom, the Canal Company's manager, to John, the building's owner—and the other uses the bar as a crutch to sidle back and forth on. No one but strangers arm wrestle Joe anymore—not for money, at least—, his strength in two limbs now the equivalent of another man's four, his quickness double, too.

Henry, of course, doesn't talk except where a single word or two suffices to convey meaning, and John's discourse, peppered with Italian dialect and even his English straying with added vowels, runs constant, removing any need of Henry's—or others'—involvement.

It's Saturday, collection day, those who owe John money on mortgages or other loans often meet him here. He gave Verlyn the cash to buy a 1948 Studebaker five years ago, when Verlyn was strapped for money after buying the farm from Pete Shelman. This is Verlyn's last payment, an occasion for small celebration: coffee for him, Nehi soda for David.

The building bypasses Pingree's old bar, Gus's, a hundred yards away on the old Roosevelt Highway, off the beaten track now thanks to progress so doomed to failure. Verlyn's last drunken binge ended there, Bragitta buying yet another new pair of shoes to equal his wastefulness. That habit she had taken up as a kind of financial revenge; ten pairs in was enough to stop Verlyn's habit.

David sets down a clinking box full of empty bottles, both beer and pop, the former getting a penny and the latter two cents. He collected them on the river road, sportsman littering at will, the borrow pits yielding enough wealth every month or two for a soda. Joe gives him his earned change, David proudly works the vending machine and pulls out a Nehi Orange. He sits at the counter with Verlyn and starts flipping through the jukebox pages. The song list doesn't much interest him but the contraption keeps his attention. Simple as it is, he finds it fascinating, turns the pages inside the glass using the knob above, sounds out the songs through the bubble in front—he can read pretty good now. Three or four times through the pages and he's already bored, looks up at Verlyn, who says, "Go ahead." His father knows he wants to go in back and play at the pool table.

John leases the building to Joe, a distant cousin whose father was from the old country. Since Joe can no longer farm, running a tavern is something he can do to support his four kids. John also, just a little, likes to provide an alternative culture to the predominant one. Though the bar reeks of smoke after only a couple years, it is still a figurative breath of air relieving the staleness of the religion that he has watched, through the last forty years, overtake the Presbyterians and Catholics.

Henry sometimes sits in on the weekly event, this parade of family and small farmers. Wealthy by local standards, standards that shift upwards once you leave Pingree, John accumulated his wealth a dollar at a time on his lengthy pathway from sheepherder in the teens to bootlegger in the twenties to present day rancher and farmer. He gathered up shell casings after WWI in the Dolomites—having left his job here to fight for Italy against the Germans—and sold them as scrap. He came back to find a new branch of the old Skeen canal snaking through the elevated and rocky ground behind Pingree, acreages that other Italians had tried to dry farm. They hadn't intended to do so when they claimed the land, expecting instead a promised canal which did finally come—just ten years late. He picked up one acreage from Danilo Valenti for a dollar and back taxes, made a go of it, and was lucky enough to be friends with the canal overseer, Daniel Blossom, who took a liking to his wife's cooking, wine and coffee. Blossom kept him apprised of land coming up for sale in the late twenties and thirties—the dry farmers' pieces, now able to be irrigated, having gone to the County for taxes and the Depression forcing others off their homesteads. Bit by bit, John acquired ground, sold some of it to relatives he coaxed over from his own Italian village, and then held the mortgages, becoming so widely known as the Bank of Pingree that even non-Italians, unable to secure loans at the bank, came to him for aid. If he trusted you and he had the money, he would back you.

David darts to the back room pool table. When no one is playing Joe lets him bounce the cue ball—'don't scratch the felt'. "Hands off the cue sticks," Verlyn warns.

The ashtrays, nearly full from last night's doings, yield their butts to him. The ashes stink but the butts collect a different odor, not pleasant but interesting. He peels the yellow paper from the filters, getting a kind of inexplicable pleasure from a simple use of technique—from having a small impact upon the universe. Once he's exhausted that available resource, having unwrapped each, David bounces the cue ball against the rail, creating different paths utilizing different angles. The banter in the other room, muted, yields an amusing rhythm and array of sounds. He stops and listens for a minute when he hears swear words peppering the conversation. They elicit his giggle and a furtive look around him to see if anyone was watching. Joe's family's interaction is on display, too, a high school age boy arguing with Joe about using the car, Joe ordering his oldest girl to prepare the beer order, the youngest two fighting and chasing each other. Joe's wife, Thelma, works the bar with Joe, wryly fielding the teasing comments uttered by Verlyn's counter mates. She sells Avon on the side, shows up at their house from time to time.

Dim lighting, a sense of bending the rules (no one under 21, the sign says) and subverting authority, being in the proximity of the adult world—a secret place otherwise, oft spoken of but rarely experienced by a child—, all these things contribute to a sense of accomplishment, of having magically crossed a boundary.

He hears his father talking with Thelma, the occasions here among the few Verlyn gets to experience outside the family, beyond the farm. The dairy holds his time and range to the most minimally sized windows, they don't attend church and while he has brothers nearby—three live within a couple miles of his mother's place, his father having died just three years ago—and a big set of second cousins in the vicinity, their interaction is limited.

Going with his father to Joe's equates to another child's visit to the circus, so exotic is the occasion in terms of normal, everyday life. David doesn't actually like the circus. Or the fair. Or the rodeo. He saw them all advertised on TV, heard his sisters and school friends talk about them, but every time he went he felt deflated, his anticipation turned to a sticky, gooey mass. Those events flooded him with sensation. They don't terrify him, though his family thinks they do, they just paralyze him—there are too many places in the universe he can go at those events, too many parts of them coming at him. But here, each detail, since there are so few, he gets to savor, investigate from all angles.

Noise pours in from outside, gets nearer, the door slams. Three, four, five voices, all boisterous, call attention to themselves. David pays close heed to the commotion.

Joe's voice cuts through it. "Didn't get enough last night?" he says.

"Still goin'!" says one, and the others roar, another one adding, "Goin' strong!"

Yet another of them orders a round as they round the corner into the pool room. David is cornered.

"Looks like we got competition, boys!" The man sounds like he's trying to be an actor in the movies. "Rack 'em up, young man!"

Thelma sticks her head around the corner. "You let him be." She stands by David. "C'mon, let me get you an ice cream cone."

The men all work across the highway at Johansson's packing shed, which has been in operation here for thirty years, more if you count when Ernie's one-legged dad shipped out uptrack at Rockford. Forking spuds, stacking train cars, heaving hundred pound sacks—Shoshonis sew the sacks and do much of the sorting. Henry sometimes pulls a shift himself when Ernie needs extra help, moving sacks from cellar to boxcar, forking spuds into the bins, cleaning up edges as the Spudnik operator runs the mobile conveyor. That machine had changed the process; for those accustomed to weeks of heaving spuds onto the sorting table it is a godsend. For Henry, though, even with a conveyor belt it was all work, all the same, just of a different ilk. It was all in the attitude you went at it with.

Friday after work, the men get their paychecks and make it as far as Joe's in order to cash them. Some men continue on home with their money, these men didn't. Henry overheard Ernie in the office one day, talking to Grace, his wife, wondering if he shouldn't pay on Mondays so weekends didn't spill over so much. The first day of the week, fewer workers showed up, Ernie assumed they were nursing hangovers. Sometimes they never came back at all and he had to make new hires to take their places.

David works his ice cream cone. Vanilla. In the morning! He is back at the jukebox pages, reading the songs, but glances sideways at his father, thinking the moment to be stolen, his experience somehow wrong and thus near its end. "I Fall To Pieces." Chubby Checker. Johnny Cash. "The Runaway". "The Wanderer". One of the men that just came in is at the jukebox inserting money and he punches in numbers. "Hit the Road Jack" starts playing. When the man leaves, David goes over and looks inside the machine. He has seen it change records before and never tires of it. He hums along, tries to snap his fingers but they don't make any sound.

Ernie Johannson comes in. On one hand he's a damper on business but on the other the basis for Joe's entire living—without his and Vanderford's cellars, there wouldn't be much income derived from poor farmers and Mormons. Ernie nods to Henry and winks, nods at John, calls him "moneybags". "Look in da mirror!" John cries good-naturedly. Ernie sees Verlyn, sits beside him where David had been. "Verlyn," he states in greeting. He tips his hat to Thelma, who knowingly is already pouring him coffee. "Are you still hanging on your spuds?" Ernie asks Verlyn.

"Hanging sounds appropriate," Verlyn says, then adds, "My last crop." He pauses. "I swear."

Ernie laughs. "I've heard that before a few times." He sips his coffee. "From you, I believe. Just last year."

Verlyn laughs, too, but without full vigor. "If I say it enough, maybe it will eventually be so."

"I'm picking up the bay next to yours," Ernie says. "This next week."

It is always difficult as a farmer, wondering when to sell, how much to sell for, whether you're being cheated or whether you're cheating the buyer. Nothing is worse about farming. The physical trials and worries are nothing compared to the anticipation and dread that follows harvest, that crucially accompanies a crop as it deteriorates in storage. "Price?" he asks.

"Ninety cents. A dollar if they pack out number ones."

In his mind, Verlyn tacks on the cost of worry if he doesn't sell. While that cost isn't infinite, it's close. He knows Ernie probably knows his distaste for the business end, not so different than most other farmers' feelings, but he trusts him. Ernie has to stay somewhat honest if he wants to retain his business and standing in the community.

"Just move on in to them as you're ready."

The talk between them moves to word regarding their kids. Ernie is a Democratic Party head, kind of a lonely place in this Republican stronghold, so brings up the Berlin Wall's erection the year before. Verlyn, glad to swap politics with someone with ideas akin to his own, feels as good as he has for months. His potatoes being sold helps.

David has wandered over to John Vitale's table, two steps back where he can watch them play a card game with a deck he doesn't recognize. "Never see scopa?" John asks. David shakes his head, moves back from the attention. "Verlyn!" John says. "You no teach the boy scopa?"

Verlyn swivels on the stool and rises. "That Italian stuff is just too difficult," he says. He pulls a check from his pocket and sets it on the table. "I can't thank you enough, John. We should be square now."

John puts the check in his shirt pocket and winks at Verlyn, winks at David. "Your dad, he's a good man." He reaches out and tousles David's hair. Somehow he doesn't mind. He looks at Henry, who was looking at him. Henry lifts his coffee, acknowledging David, gives a long wink and a crooked grin.

David smiles back sheepishly, tucks his head into his collar the best he can.

©2025 Ralph Thurston