Long Gone Cannibal Blues

Lord, I miss her.
After all these years, why should it be so?
I cannot tell you.
I was 8, and corn simple,
When, at 83, she stepped back into a life
She could not have imagined
With people who would have fed her
Cold oats and rainwater
Made her sleep on stones.

Her eyes half-closed
She only smiled.

Only those few passing years, housemates,
Yet I feature her sitting on the wooden floor
Tiny, barefooted, her legs tucked daintily
Beneath while she combed out
Still coal-black hair, singing
In some strange accent
About a bird, white-eyed,
Flying across the sea.

1
I was born seven seconds after midnight on January first, 1930, which made me the official New Year’s Baby for Empire County and got me my picture in the Port Whitcomb Star. Even though it took a couple of days to sort out who was the real First Baby from the ranks of pretenders–of which, as my mother tells the story, there were four. Two of the other three Almost The First Babies don’t concern this story at all, and in fact, to my knowledge, I’ve never even met them. The other one, however, Miss Janice Martella, would eventually become my wife, but that was not till I got back from Korea, twenty-four years later. Whenever I tell this story, Jan insists I put in that she was bigger by a pound and a half. So there you go, Jan.

Of course I don’t really remember much of anything from the first few years of the decade, but I have other people’s memories to go on, and there are books and old newspapers and whatnot, so I remember them after a fashion. Strange as it seems to think on now, our little town of Port Whitcomb was a major shipping transit point for bootleg alcohol brought down from Canada. The real ports up and down the coast were crawling with patrol boats and big revenue cutters, so getting the booze in there was tricky. It could even get you shot at by cannon. But because we were such a dinky little port in a forgotten rural county in the rugged northern part of the state, the Coast Guard overlooked us, and bootleggers could do business in relative calm. Almost like they were legitimate businessmen buying and selling canned sardines. Which, as my Pop always had it, they were.

The actual port wasn’t ever much to speak of, and in fact, when up-stream logging picked up again after the war, the whole thing silted in and it’s now a good two miles from what’s left of the town to open, navigable water. But back in the golden days of prohibition, there was just enough room for schooners to dash in out of the fog bank, deposit their cargoes and skedaddle out again on the same tide. And because we had, for much of the year, serviceable rail and even highway connections, a fair amount of the rum and whiskey consumed in northern California during prohibition passed through our little town. I think we’re all still secretly proud of this fact.

Pop owned ran both of the Port Whitcomb warehouses and the sardine cannery, which made him, at least in his telling, the hub around which the town and everybody orbited. Years and years later, when he was busted out and had to live with us, he’d sit at our kitchen table and count how many people never thanked him for what he did. “Sharky Sheridan. I put Sharky Sheridan’s kids through school. And did he even once take me to dinner? Did he ever once take me fishing? Not once!” When he’d get like that, and start reciting who never did what for him, it was all too easy to tune him out.

But now, as I sit here thinking back on those days–how the hotel was almost always full, how there were restaurants on nearly ever corner, or boutiques, or hair salons… I distinctly remember a fancy hat store right next to a first-rate little movie theater with rocking seats and a popcorn machine… and how all that civic energy seemed to have peaked between the time prohibition was lifted and the second world war started–I have to admit, maybe the old guy had a point. Or a shadow of one, anyway.

It was a long, slow decline, of course. At first it seemed like the town would just keep on growing. But then a second, grander hotel was abandoned in mid-construction and burned down, spectacularly, a few years later. People just scratched their heads and wrote it off to fate. But then the next year, Ruby’s International Cafe & Dance Hall closed and the building sat empty forever. Families started moving out and, here and there, empty houses were slowly eaten by wild mustard. Year after year, the air sort of went out of everything, and I guess people just gave up on the idea of having a town. But wasn’t actually until the big Christmas flood of ’55 that the town proper vanished. Jan, our son Pete, and I sat up on the roof of our little house out on China Bluff Road that Christmas morning, feasting on canned peaches and watching the old downtown–the Methodist Church, the elementary school, the Empire Hotel, Vern’s Blue Room Cafe, the Brownie River Mercantile, the Camille Theatre, and even the old Texaco Station–all get washed down the Brownie River and out to sea. After that, nobody saw much point of even pretending that there was a town. And though the county maps still show roads and alleys with impressive names like Lincoln and Grant, and Union, there’s not much left of the town now but the name of a one-lane tarmac, Port Whitcomb Road, a large concrete pier anchor sitting in the middle of a grassy field, and on a little rise about a quarter of a mile up the road, our old house. Which is now the Port Whitcomb B&B.

But back to the 30′s. Specifically the summer of my eighth year. In 1938, I lived in the biggest house in town, my Pop drove a long green Buick Murphy Town Car, and we had a one hundred foot radio tower that sometimes even picked up shows all the way from New York City. When I was eight, I had my own gang of toughs who prowled the dock and the alleyways looking for rats and coppers and spies–a service for which we were paid in thick ropes of licorice by Mr. Nielsen at the Mercantile. In the summer of 1938, I followed the adventures of Mr. Howard Hughes as he set a world record for flying around the world in 91 hours. And it was also the summer my 83 year-old cousin, a tattooed cannibal, was kicked out of Okinawa by the Jap Army and came to live with us. So far, it’s the strangest thing that has ever happened to me. And I say that as a man in his 80′s himself.

:::

It’s funny that I’m writing a book, now. My second grade teacher, Mrs. Addison, would surely have been surprised that I actually turned out to enjoy reading. My early education didn’t go well. The poor lady, I remember she tried. I drove her to tears several times. Apparently I had the habit of reading things that weren’t on the page — words, even whole phrases. She’d sit with me during recess trying to get my eyes to focus on what she was pointing to, but I was a distracted sort of fellow in the best of times. Reluctantly, she came to the conclusion that I was “slow. “

She walked over to our house one Saturday morning, unannounced, before school ended to deliver this news in person. I remember sitting in the front parlor boiling at the twin injustices of having my weekend violated by weekday business and at being hollered in from my secret spy patrols. I missed the preamble, but got the gist of what she said. “You mean, he’s an idiot, a dope,” Pop summed up. He turned and looked at me. “Your teacher says you’re a dope, boy.” My mother sort of sagged and burried her face in her hands “I know. It’s because I fell down the steps when I was pregnant…” and burst into tears. My Pop kept me in his sights. “Well, boy. what do you have to say for yourself?” I shrugged. As an idiot, what could I say?

“Now, Mr. Doyle,” my teacher cut in, “It’s not Billy’s fault… or even yours, Mrs. Doyle,” she said reaching out atnd touching my mother’s arm. “Sometimes–who knows why?–children develop at their own paces. You just have to give Billy time…”

But Pop had already decided I was a dope, and that was that. Long after Mrs. Addison had gone, he sat at the dinning room table trying to make sense of this terrible news. “Well, it’s good he’s big. At least he can work with hands–fishing , or lumber.” And somehow, eventually, Pop managed to be reassured news that his only child was a dope. “I always thought there was something wrong with the boy. Now we know. Well, Billy, ” he said turning to me, “‘slow’, huh? Yeah… that makes sense” he said brightening as if he could see it all plain.

I had no idea what he was talking about, but apparently, now that it had been pointed out to him, he’d known it all along. Every time I goofed up something–spilled my milk, skinned my knee, forgot to do a chore–all this could be chalked up to an obvious and innate deficiency. And it was nobody’s fault! I soon took to practicing looking dopey in the bathroom mirror: I’d knit my brows together, cock my head about fifteen degrees to the left and slightly thrust out my upper lip. I’d forget and leave a tool out in the rain and when Pop would start to storm, I’d hit him with my Confused Look and the anger would morph into exasperation and fade away into sighed resignation. The only real downside was when I finally did start to read on my own, I know I had to do it on the sly. But for the next several years, until he snuck up on me and caught me reading the newspaper about V-J Day, I got away with murder.

:::

In all my life, I’ve only seen an actual telegram once. Back around the time I was weaned, telephone service finally made it all they way up the coast to Port Whitcomb, and the Western Union office out at the Shawsferry Station saw only occasional business. We got a telegram on a Thursday evening about a month after I’d been officially declared an idiot, and Pop went nuts. “Christ almighty!” He slapped the table hard, then stood up and looked around wide eyed. “I can’t believe she’s still alive.”

“Who, dear?” Mom asked. “And please don’t shout at the dinner table. It’s ruinous for the digestion.”

“Cousin Anne,” he said like he was chewing on tin foil. He collapsed back down into his seat, and then seeing the incomprehension on our faces added, “Grandma Doris’s cousin?” The color drained out of Mom’s face. “You mean… The Heathen?” Pop nodded grimly. “The one who…”

More nodding from Pop. Mom blinked several times then said, “Oh, dear.” Mom was silent for a moment and Pop hung his head in his hands. Finally Mom spoke, “What about…” and she tipped her head my way.

Yeah, what about me? I wanted to know. Long after I went to bed that night, I lay in the dark trying to figure out what was headed my way. The Heathen. I narrowed it down to one of two possible meanings. One, it meant some sort of witch, and though that thought terrified me, I figured I could learn to live with magic spells and cackling and whatnot. Or, and this thought made me want to actually scream, heathen meant some sort of cannibal, and since I was the youngest, and probably the tastiest, I’d be first on the menu. The next day, the train was four hours late and I played down by the river until I heard the whistle coming down the river valley. “Billy!” my Pop shouted from the bridge, “Get up here. Your cousin’s coming.”

As a family, we were not prepared for the tiny apparition that shimmied down out of the caboose.

I still hadn’t worked out the meaning of the word “heathen,” but I could guess just by looking at her. It didn’t help matters that she had long white hair curled up in a huge volcano on the top of her head, or that her simple dress was cut from some brightly patterned fabric that, as far as I could tell, could have easily come from the factories of Planet Mongo. But what clinched it for me was that the backs of her wrists, hands and fingers were tattooed in weird dots and thick lines, only slightly darker than the wrinkly skin of her tiny monkey hands. Pop marched up to her. “This is a respectable town, and we’re a respectable family” he said, first thing out of his mouth, “so you… you’d just better…or I swear to God…”

As if she hadn’t heard a word he’d said, or at least given him any more attention than she might a chicken in the yard, she tottered right passed him and zeroed in on me. She bowed slightly, then very formally, stuck out one of those strange hands. “How do you do? You must be my cousin, William,” she said. “Please call me Cousin Anne.” It took all my nerve to take her offered hand, but I did, and I was amazed at how light and fragile her tiny hand felt. Like it was made not of skin and bone, but of celluloid or thin sheets of mica.

She was the only passenger on the platform, and I think we were all relieved that nobody was around to watch us load her one bag into the trunk of our car. She belonged to us, it seemed, and it was as outlandish a package to trundle into our car as an ostrich or the sarcophagus of an Egyptian mummy, either of which I would have dearly preferred. The local train station was several miles upriver at Shawsferry, now the main town in these parts, where the WallMart is. But back then, it was not much more than a loading platform for the Danish Creamery, a roadhouse or two, and little string of cabins rumored to function as informal whorehouses. Usually, it was a big deal for me ride in my Pop’s car to Shawsferry and back. Pop would let me stand up in the back, even when Mom was along, so I could sing along with the radio and feel the wind blast me full in the face. But on this day, as I sat quietly in the back seat next to the witch trying to make myself as small as possible–with my eyes closed so I wouldn’t have to look at her–I prayed, oh how I prayed, “Please God, don’t let her eat me before we get home!”

Chapter 2ish

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