Part 4

Henry, in spite of a wide streak of plain badness, was a man of unquestioned charm, and the possessor, when he cared to avail himself of them, of extraordinary native wit, skill, and intelligence. He was a good hand aboard a fishing vessel, an expert mason, a better-than-average carpenter, a wit and raconteur, and to the mutual misfortune of himself and society in general, he was also a rare man with a bottle and a glass. A wise employer would pay Henry his wages only at the very completion of a job if he ever expected to see him again. This was entirely satisfactory with Henry who was aware of his own weakness and had the greatest respect for employers who treated him accordingly. For when pay day for Henry came at last, a week or more of outstanding celebration would follow, just as surely as the night the day. One such celebration ended with his return from New York in a taxi with a monkey and a parrot for fellow passengers. Directing the driver to a neat, white house, Henry requested him to wait while he went inside for the money with which to pay the fare. The driver has obviously been impressed with the easy manner and good fellowship of Henry but, after some minutes had passed without sign of his fare, the driver hurried to the door of the house. An elderly and gentile Cape lady answered the hasty knock.

“Where is your husband?”, the cabbie demanded.

“My husband?”, echoed the good lady. “My husband has been dead for twelve years!”

Of course it was so and there was nothing to do about it. Henry, knowing that his Cape neighbors were not much for locking doors, had casually let himself in at the front and, without being seen, made a quick exit out the back, into the safety of neighboring woods and familiar haunts.

Henry’s episodes generally took place during the spring and summer months because he planned on spending the cold days at Barnstable, enjoying the warmth, food and hospitality of the County Jail. He was always expected there then, and he hardly ever varied the routine. He was popular with fellow inmates and with prison personnel and, if his crimes were frequent, they were always of a comparatively minor nature. Once, though, he betrayed the rules of hospitality and it can be believed that his hosts must have taken a very dim view of it, indeed. That was the time when Henry, having completed one of many sentences, emerged into a bustling Cape springtime looking considerably stouter than usual. It was not surprising. A mile or so down the road he drew a prison blanket from under his swollen coat and sold it at a bargain price to an unsuspecting householder. With these funds he obtained a bottle and commenced the celebration of his release.

Henry, whose spirit of independence knew no limits and who knew better, nevertheless, took the attitude that a certain village constable, who then was the only force of law and order in the village, was the sole cause of his various “persecutions”. In the village for many years life became a constant kind of cat-and-mouse game between them. The constable was probably a good man, who in a town that was almost without crime was hardly called upon to be a brave one, but he had an almost overwhelming sense of the importance of his own position and it was probably that trait that made him the everlasting butt of the revellers of the Night Before the Fourth. On that night, his home, on the lonely outskirts of the village, would become an armed camp while he, with a carefully-polished badge of authority on his chest and shot-gun on his knees, prepared to withstand an assault which never failed to materialize and never failed of success. His outhouse toppled readily like a leaf before the storm, firecrackers boomed beneath his veranda and beneath the very window where he sat in the darkness. Each time he peered from behind his curtain the assault began anew. Finally, as the first gray light of Independence Day filtered across the eastern sky he would be hung in effigy in his own dooryard.

Henry was usually at the head of the attacking forces, of course, and it was Henry, of course, who conceived the idea of giving our Constable a memorable ride on one Night Before the Fourth. In the village cemetery, in those days, there rested an ancient town hearse, a curious, horse-drawn vehicle that was shaped like an elaborate coffin on wheels and whose walls and top were entirely of glass. So it happened that, on one Night-Before, the hearse was quietly pulled up to the Constable’s house and he, protesting violently but uselessly, was placed within it, listening to the heavy clasp close above him, an unwilling captive in a glass cage on wheels. Then with great ceremony, in the manner of Timberlane home from the wars, the procession and its prisoner wound through the village streets. When, at length, the conquerors tired of the sport the constable was abandoned in the middle of Main Street where the first light of day and the earliest-rising villagers discovered him in his glass prison. Law and order was restored and he was released to try to restore his lost dignity. He never really did--but he did learn that when some Cape Codders went out to celebrate their independence they really meant it. For, ever after, on the afternoon of the Night Before, our Constable could be seen driving his Model T in the general direction of the canal with never a look backward towards our village. On the morning of the fifth he would be back with us, his badge freshly shined and his billy-club at the ready to maintain law and order for another year--or, at least for another 364 days.

Henry would never have served as a model of deportment on the Cape and his good neighbors deplored his multitudinous misconducts. But his crimes were generally petty and they had a Falstaffian flavor which made him something of a legend. At one time or another you might find his counterpart in any Cape village, and in a day when bad movies had not been replaced by bad talking movies, and when radio had not even suspicioned television, Henry’s latest escapades provided pretty good conversation during long winter evenings on the Cape. Certainly the celebration of Independence Day could not have been the same without him.

SOME PURVEYORS OF NOSTRUMS

Look at any copy of the Register of fifty to seventy five years ago and you will find that, if you can believe advertisements, there was hardly any ailment then of man or beast that did not have a cure. In the old newspaper columns you would find advertisements for Hop Bitters--Invalid’s Friend and Hope (“no vile, drugged, drunken nostrum but the purest and best medicine ever made”), Hood’s Sarsaparilla (a “reliable invigorant that excites the liver to action”), Dyke’s Beard Elixir (“guaranteed to force luxuriant mustaches or grow hair on bald heads in from 20 to 30 days”), and a hundred and one sulphur tonics for females suffering from “general debility and delicate health”. For the gentlemen there was Dr. Dye’s Voltaic Belt through which “electricity” could “restore health, vigor and manhood” and for everyone, particularly in spring, there were a number of Ginger compounds. Ginger, which rode the clipper ships back from the Orient, was an especially favorite ingredient of spring tonics, which was often combined with other ingredients, enough to exhilarate anyone. For example there was Sanford’s Compound of Ginger which noted on its label that to fine ginger had been added “genuine French Brandy, rendering it very much superior to all other preparations on the market.” Inasmuch as the alcoholic content was duly listed as 67% it must have been superior indeed, and there would be little wonder if large segments of the population might not be almost excessively exhilarated come springtime.

The Cape was not left out of the race to make the greatest of all “specifics”. A Hyannis doctor contrived the formula for Fletcher’s Castoria, still a favorite household remedy which babies have been crying for--or at--these many years. And part of the memories of springtime for many a Cape Codder is the little bottle, full of an untasty, brown liquid, called Speedy Relief, that still rests at the back of many a Cape Cod medicine chest. This remarkable remedy, which, from the label, seems to have been equally effective whether used internally or externally, must have brought shudders to many a Cape child before he hustled off to the comfort of a soft feather bed and the joy of a hot soapstone in a flannel bag to drive off the spring dampness that seeped into the unheated rooms above-stairs.

Speedy Relief was the invention of William F. Kenney of South Yarmouth and many Cape people today hold a clear memory of the man with reddish side-burns who carried a black bag full of small bottles and whose calls were as regular as springtime. Of course Speedy Relief was only a sideline with Mr. Kenney who was, in addition to being a manufacturer, an inventor, the village jeweller, and in charge of the telegraph office at South Yarmouth. In addition he had a tintype studio and many a Cape scrap book is filled with pictures of belles and beaus who posed before the broken Greek column in his studio. Nevertheless, so sensitive are Cape Cod taste buds, that it is mostly the memory of Speedy Relief that has lived on.

The wide-spread popularity of the Cape’s own specific played a part in providing a new minister of the town of Yarmouth with some unpleasant moments. His first service was progressing nicely, and it was clear that he had the concentrated attention of all his parishioners. Then he launched into his prayer on which he had spent considerable preparation. All went well until he solemnly intoned, “and to all our sick, bring speedy relief”. These words nearly brought down the house with a wholly unexpected and unlooked-for reaction. The good parson must have been sorely perplexed, indeed, until he was at length let in on the fact that he had, all unwittingly, issued a kind of commercial for a local panacea.

There was another kind of commercial and it may have been the forerunner of all the terrible advertising jingles we are subjected to today. It had a kind of fascinating ring to it, and it is certain that all Cape children of the area were familiar with it:

“Speedy Relief is my belief And so it is of many. Put up in bottles With little cork stopples And sold by William F. Kenney.”

Less popular, but with its own solid core of supporters was Aunt Sophie’s Bitters which were brewed in the little house at the corner of Upper County Road and Depot Street. Aunt Sophie was a natural artist as a brewer of herbs and potions, for she was the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, and what more was needed to imbue anyone with all manner of special powers. Was something lost? The neighbors would ask Aunt Sophie about it, and like as not she could tell them where to look for it. Above all, she looked the part she had made for herself, and acted it also, for, as she picked herbs in her yard she would carry on serious conversations with the scraggly brood of hens that picked their way about her, and they would appear to be listening intently to her every word. Needless to say, small fry, on their way home from school made a wide detour around Aunt Sophie’s house. But young men on their way to sea--and young girls sick with love for them--would go to her for their “fortunes”, and come away with wonder at the prospect of their “futures”. Usually they would come away also with a bottle of the grim tasting bitters which found their way into many a Cape pantry in springtime.

Colorful as they may have been, the independent purveyors of nostrums were definitely out-classed by the village pharmacies which were, are, and very likely ever shall be, the heart of every Cape village. Here, on a cold, dark February night one finds the only light, and the only warmth, on an otherwise silent and deserted Main Street. Here, in summer, all is pleasant turmoil and confusion with a long line of small fry guzzling ice cream in the way that small fry always have since the beginnings of ice cream. And about the racks of multi-colored postal cards older folks gather, scantily-clad, but bronzed and happy, only momentarily perplexed by the problem of choosing the most appropriate card for Aunt Ella. Here are an endless variety of magazines with colorful covers that only slightly exaggerate the adventures to be found within. Likely as not some of them have never been sold, but there is, somewhere, someone who enjoys walking into the store to look them over each month. Many avail themselves of this benevolent library service and it is a rare Cape pharmacist who would make an objection. For the winter nights are quiet and long, and company, even intently-reading company, is not so bad. In winter, the pharmacy is a place to go, “up-street”. There you can feel the slow, hibernated pulse of the town, hear an evaluation of local and national issues, and woe to the candidate who fails to cover all the pharmacies. The Cape pharmacist is doctor, librarian, caterer, banker, after-hours post master, good listener, psychiatrist, moderator and custodian of the local Forum where the freedom for expressing an opinion is a sacred right, and where the news is born that has become stale before the daily paper is delivered. Nowadays, nearly all pharmacies have a druggist who has learned to decipher the illegible scrawl of the local doctor and prepare the life-saving wonder drugs for the sick. But this was not always so, and even now the shelves are filled with some of the old-fashioned remedies which have their zealous partisans.

Once, in a Cape village, there was a pharmacy without a druggist, and when a modern establishment opened nearby which boasted one it didn’t really make much difference. There were few, if any, defections among the established clientele. Late into the darkness of even a summer’s night it would be the only light on Main Street, and the gooey sundaes that were dispensed in its ice cream parlor were, for all small fry of the village, the very high spot of the day. By today’s standards it was a rather small and dark store. The clutter of its window displays, which hardly ever changed from year to year, held back the lights, and, from the old stove, that was a comfort in winter, the smell of kerosene lingered on well into the summer. There was an extensive library that was hardly ever disturbed by a purchase--and there was a proprietor who was my very good friend, as well as white-coated steward to our ice cream club. There was nothing he would not have done for us in all the years of our growing up, and his presence in the village drug store lent an air of stability to a community that had already begun to undergo drastic changes at the hands of more and more summer folk who had discovered its charm. He was never anything but kind and helpful and, when we were old enough to recognize the strong smell of “medicine” that he occasionally dispensed to himself in the shadows of a back room, we were careful to avoid mentioning it, and only hoped that he would soon be feeling better. Once, though, I nearly let him down.

For years he had ordered the Sunday New York Times for us, and for years we had paid fifteen cents for it. Then I discovered, by chance, that a store in a neighboring village stocked the same paper for ten cents. Five cents was then the price of an ice cream cone, and it seemed very important, indeed.

“Did you know that you get fifteen cents for the Times while so-and-so up the street only gets ten?” I asked him one day. He always acknowledged a greeting or a bit of conversation with a characteristic lift of the eye-brows so that when he didn’t feel a response necessary you would know that he had heard you just the same. This time the eye-brows raised at once, and the reply came quickly:

“That a fact?” I had a moment of weakness and was sorry that I had gone into it, for even five cents was not an excuse for hurting an old friend. But, standing my ground, I answered, “Yes, that’s a fact.”

But now I was treated to a series of facial expressions that would have done justice to a Barrymore. Commencing with the raised eye-brows his face ran through the whole gamut, from disbelief to pained surprise to complete puzzlement until, finally, scratching at his thinning hair, he looked me straight in the eye, and said,

“Well, now ... _ain’t they foolish_!” I knew when I was licked and I paid the fifteen cents then, and for many a Sunday after.

Years later, when the whole world was to have Fords in its Future, and even a fifteen cent Sunday paper was but a memory, I called on my friend for what turned out to be one of the last times, but perhaps the most satisfactory. I had been away from the Cape for four years, in faraway places across the sea, and the face of much of the earth had been changed, and much of the earth would never be the same again. Even Cape Cod had undergone a change in the war years, and it was with rather strong emotions that I walked past the cluttered drug store windows and into the establishment of my friend. Thankfully he was there, a little older and a little grayer, but nevertheless there, behind the counter in his familiar white coat. His eye-brows raised in familiar greeting, and perhaps he looked up from swishing the soda glasses for a longer instant than normally. But when, after a moment he spoke, it was with the greatest casualness. “Hello, Allan,” he said, slowly. “What’ll you have? A coke?”

Then I knew that not all of the earth had changed, and I was glad of it as I felt the memory of four ugly years slipping quietly away into the shadows of the little store. Then, as was customary, he joined me in a coke, and we picked up the threads of our conversation, exactly where we had temporarily dropped them, in August of 1941. It was good to be home again.

MODERN HEROES OF THE SEA

February, on the Cape or elsewhere in the north, is a poor month, an in-between month, throwing the weather book at you when your resistance is weakest, hurling cold winds, sleet and rain, grayness and wetness enough to almost make you forget that spring is not so far away. February can bring a vicious kind of day that is unknown in any other month, a day when Main Street is deserted and battened down, when hurricane winds lash the trees and pile huge breakers upon the shore and you huddle indoors and are thankful for warmth and dryness and an occupation that does not call you out. February brought this kind of a night and followed it with this kind of a day on the seventeenth and eighteenth of 1952. The wind howled in hurricane force and there was snow and there was rain. The telephone wires screamed their resistance and, listening to their radios which could blot out the rage of nature, Cape people, for the first time, heard the names FORT MERCER and PENDLETON.

No one who was not then on Cape Cod can appreciate the horror and the heroism of that night and morning. No one who was then on the Cape will ever forget the pride we had for the men of the Coast Guard, nor the rather special pride for those Guardsmen who were Capers, carrying on in the same great tradition as their forebears who followed the sea. Even now it is difficult to sort out the facts of that terrible night when the incredible happened, and two sister-ship tankers broke in half off Chatham to become four separate derelicts, each with a partial crew, and each at the mercy of fifty foot waves that, with each gust of angry wind, threatened to sink them.

News flashes first announced that the Fort Mercer was in trouble, thirty miles off Chatham light. Finally it was announced that she had broken in half. Meanwhile, the Chatham radar screen had shown two large objects about five miles off the beach. This, it developed, was the Pendleton, which had broken in two some hours before and because of a broken radio had been unable to wire her predicament. Even the Coast Guard, which had promptly dispatched every available vessel to the scene from as far away as Portland, could not, for a time, accept the incredible fact that two, five hundred and twenty foot tankers had broken up within an area of forty miles and a few hours. Even on the treacherous shoals of Monomoy there was no precedent for such an accident. Nor is it likely that some other macabre accidents of that night shall ever be repeated. For example, some time after the Fort Mercer had broken in two high winds caught up the truant bow and threatened to hurl it with tremendous force at the stern section. The stern section, fortunately, still had engines running and the order for “Full speed astern” was immediately given. The broken stern responded just in time to save the Mercer from a terrible and probably fatal collision with her own bow.

Of the hundreds of brave men who answered the Coast Guard’s call to duty that February night, none displayed greater courage nor greater seamanship than the personnel of the Chatham Light Station. It was they who, without hesitation, launched two of their thirty-six foot open boats into the awful nightmare of Chatham Bars. Fifty-foot waves, thirty-six foot open boats, visibility zero, near hurricane winds, bitter cold with sleet and snow and the blackness of night. The small boats were each under the command of Chatham boys, Donald H. Bangs and Bernard C. Webber. Bangs, after a monumental trip across the outer bar to the sea beyond, first made contact with the Pendleton. Webber, through sheer will power and the help of God, forced his boat through overwhelming seas to the Pendleton’s stern section. There, through the most skillful maneuvering, he took off thirty three survivors of the wreck. His trip to and from the wreck was accomplished with himself lashed to the wheel and his crew clutching the bottom of the boat to keep from being washed overboard. The windshield was broken on the way out and water washed freely over the boat and her crew. How Webber succeeded in bringing his heavily overloaded boat back to safety and shore will never be known, but he did it. And meanwhile, other vessels had been rescuing the crew of the Fort Mercer. The great storm, which could easily have claimed the lives of eighty-four, had claimed fourteen, a heavy toll, but one which would have been so much heavier without the watchful eyes and skill of the Coast Guard.