BOMB NO. 4 IN LEVEE WAR
SPLINTERS WEST SIDE SALOON
a report printed Wednesday that a patient in a private pavilion in St. Luke’s Hospital undergoing an operation for the extirpation of a cancerous growth at the base of the tongue was General Grant was denied by both the hospital authorities and Lieut. Howze who characterized the story as a deliberate fabrication
The Camera Eye (13)
he was a towboat captain and he knew the river blindfold from Indian Head to the Virginia Capes and the bay and the Eastan Shoa up to Baltima’ for that matter and he lived in a redbrick house in Alexandria the pilothouse smelt of a hundred burntout pipes
that’s the Mayflower the president’s yacht and that there’s the Dolphin and that’s the ole monitor Tippecanoe and that there’s the revenoo cutter and we’re just passin’ the po-lice boat
when Cap’n Keen reaches up to pull the whistle on the ceiling of the pilothouse you can see the red and green bracelet tattooed under the black hairs on his wrist
Ma soul an’ body ole Cap’n Gifford used ter be a frien’ o’ mahne many’s the time we been oysterin’ together on the Eastan Shoa an’ oysterpirates used to shanghai young fellers in those days an’ make ’em work all winter you couldn’ git away less you swam ashoa and the water was too damnation cole an’ the ole man used to take the fellers’ clothes away so’s they couldn’t git ashoa when they was anchored up in a crik or near a house or somethin’ boy they was mean customers the oysterpirates ma soul and body onct there was a young feller they worked till he dropped and then they’d just sling him overboard tongin’ for oysters or dredgin’ like them oysterpirates did’s the meanest kinda work in winter with the spray freezin’ on the lines an’ cuttin’ your hands to shreds an’ the dredge foulin’ every minute an’ us havin’ to haul it up an’ fix it with our hands in the icy water hauled up a stiff onct What’s a stiff? Ma soul an’ body a stiff’s a dead man ma boy a young feller it was too without a stitch on him an’ the body looked like it had been beat with a belayin’ pin somethin’ terrible or an’ oar mebbe reckon he wouldn’t work or was sick or somethin’ an’ the ole man jus’ beat him till he died sure couldn’t a been nothin’ but an oysterpirate
Janey
When Janey was little she lived in an old flatface brick house a couple of doors up the hill from M Street in Georgetown. The front part of the house was always dark because Mommer kept the heavy lace curtains drawn to and the yellow linen shades with lace inset bands down. Sunday afternoons Janey and Joe and Ellen and Francie had to sit in the front room and look at pictures or read books. Janey and Joe read the funnypaper together because they were the oldest and the other two were just babies and not old enough to know what was funny anyway. They couldn’t laugh outloud because Popper sat with the rest of The Sunday Star on his lap and usually went to sleep after dinner with the editorial section crumpled in one big blueveined hand. Tiny curds of sunlight flickering through the lace insets in the window shade would lie on his bald head and on one big red flange of his nose and on the droop of one mustache and on his speckled sundayvest and on the white starched shirtsleeves with shiny cuffs, held up above the elbow by a rubber band. Janey and Joe would sit on the same chair feeling each other’s ribs jiggle when they laughed about the Katzenjammer kids setting off a cannon-cracker under the captain’s stool. The little ones would see them laughing and start laughing too, “Shut up, can’t you,” Joe would hiss at them out of the corner of his mouth. “You don’t know what we’re laughing at.” Once in a while, if there was no sound from Mommer who was taking her Sunday afternoon nap upstairs stretched out in the back bedroom in a faded lilac sack with frills on it, after they’d listened for a long time to the drawnout snort that ended in a little hiss of Popper’s snores, Joe would slip off his chair and Janey would follow him without breathing into the front hall and out the front door. Once they’d closed it very carefully so that the knocker wouldn’t bang, Joe would give her a slap, yell “You’re it” and run off down the hill towards M Street, and she’d have to run after him, her heart pounding, her hands cold for fear he’d run away and leave her.
Winters the brick sidewalks were icy and there were colored women out spreading cinders outside their doors when the children went to school mornings. Joe never would walk with the rest of them because they were girls, he lagged behind or ran ahead. Janey wished she could walk with him but she couldn’t leave her little sisters who held tight onto her hands. One winter they got in the habit of walking up the hill with a little yaller girl who lived directly across the street and whose name was Pearl. Afternoons Janey and Pearl walked home together. Pearl usually had a couple of pennies to buy bullseyes or candy bananas with at a little store on Wisconsin Avenue, and she always gave Janey half so Janey was very fond of her. One afternoon she asked Pearl to come in and they played dolls together under the big rose of sharon bush in the back yard. When Pearl had gone Mommer’s voice called from the kitchen. Mommer had her sleeves rolled up on her faded pale arms and a checked apron on and was rolling piecrust for supper so that her hands were covered with flour.
“Janey, come here,” she said. Janey knew from the cold quaver in her voice that something was wrong.
“Yes, Mommer.” Janey stood in front of her mother shaking her head about so that the two stiff sandy pigtails lashed from side to side. “Stand still, child, for gracious sake… Jane, I want to talk to you about something. That little colored girl you brought in this afternoon…” Janey’s heart was dropping. She had a sick feeling and felt herself blushing, she hardly knew why. “Now, don’t misunderstand me; I like and respect the colored people; some of them are fine self-respecting people in their place… But you mustn’t bring that little colored girl in the house again. Treating colored people kindly and with respect is one of the signs of good breeding… You mustn’t forget that your mother’s people were wellborn every inch of them… Georgetown was very different in those days. We lived in a big house with most lovely lawns… but you must never associate with colored people on an equal basis. Living in this neighborhood it’s all the more important to be careful about those things… Neither the whites nor the blacks respect those who do… That’s all, Janey, you understand; now run out and play, it’ll soon be time for your supper.” Janey tried to speak but she couldn’t. She stood stiff in the middle of the yard on the grating that covered the drainpipe, staring at the back fence. “Niggerlover,” yelled Joe in her ear. “Niggerlover ump-mya-mya… Niggerlover niggerlover ump-mya-mya.” Janey began to cry.
Joe was an untalkative sandyhaired boy who could pitch a mean outcurve when he was still little. He learned to swim and dive in Rock Creek and used to say he wanted to be motorman on a streetcar when he grew up. For several years his best friend was Alec McPherson whose father was a locomotive engineer on the B. and O. After that Joe wanted to be a locomotive engineer. Janey used to tag around after the two boys whenever they’d let her, to the carbarns at the head of Pennsylvania Avenue where they made friends with some of the conductors and motormen who used to let them ride on the platform a couple of blocks sometimes if there wasn’t any inspector around, down along the canal or up Rock Creek where they caught tadpoles and fell in the water and splashed each other with mud.
Summer evenings when the twilight was long after supper they played lions and tigers with other kids from the neighborhood in the long grass of some empty lots near Oak Hill Cemetery. There were long periods when there was measles or scarlet fever around and Mommer wouldn’t let them out. Then Alec would come down and they’d play three-o-cat in the back yard. Those were the times Janey liked best. Then the boys treated her as one of them. Summer dusk would come down on them sultry and full of lightningbugs. If Popper was feeling in a good mood he’d send them up the hill to the drugstore on N Street to buy icecream, there’d be young men in their shirtsleeves and straw hats strolling with girls who wore a stick of punk in their hair to keep off the mosquitoes, a rankness and a smell of cheap perfume from the colored families crowded on their doorsteps, laughing, talking softly with an occasional flash of teeth, rolling of a white eyeball. The dense sweaty night was scary, hummed, rumbled with distant thunder, with junebugs, with the clatter of traffic from M Street, the air of the street dense and breathless under the thick trees; but when she was with Alec and Joe she wasn’t scared, not even of drunks or big shamblefooted colored-men. When they got back Popper would smoke a cigar and they’d sit out in the back yard and the mosquitoes ’ud eat them up and Mommer and Aunt Francine and the kids ’ud eat the icecream and Popper would just smoke a cigar and tell them stories of when he’d been a towboat captain down on the Chesapeake in his younger days and he’d saved the barkentine Nancy Q in distress on the Kettlebottoms in a sou’west gale. Then it’d get time to go to bed and Alec ’ud be sent home and Janey’d have to go to bed in the stuffy little back room on the top floor with her two little sisters in their cribs against the opposite wall. Maybe a thunderstorm would come up and she’d lie awake staring up at the ceiling cold with fright, listening to her little sisters whimper as they slept until she heard the reassuring sound of Mommer scurrying about the house closing windows, the slam of a door, the whine of wind and rattle of rain and the thunder rolling terribly loud and near overhead like a thousand beer-trucks roaring over the bridge. Times like that she thought of going down to Joe’s room and crawling into bed with him, but for some reason she was afraid to, though sometimes she got as far as the landing. He’d laugh at her and call her a softie.