Old Songs in a New Cafe: Selected Essays Read online

Questions yielding not to

  Force but only to

  Subtle strands of

  Intelligence and feelings

  Woven full and pure

  Into a cloth that

  Catches the soft wind

  Of enlightenment

  Like a billowing,

  Saffron-colored sail

  Upon an endless river,

  The answers are feared

  So the questions are scuttled.

  For the answers,

  If they are firm

  And truly given,

  Would require change.

  Those who profit now

  Would profit less.

  Enlightenment

  Gives rise to

  Kindness

  And

  Simplicity

  And

  Quietude.

  Little profit

  Can be found

  In any of those.

  And, like yourselves on a

  Warm autumn day,

  When it seems the

  Croupier can be denied

  Forever,

  They are reluctant

  To rise.

  With that, he would swim away and pretend to busy himself at feeding along a shore where the wild rice yet grew. We will miss Zachary.

  Word has traveled far, and we have heard about the condor and the falcon. And the little sparrows of the Florida swamps. We have seen the canvasbacks languishing and the streams turning dark with soil from the fields. The places for living are being taken or sullied with poison.

  Behind me, I hear a small sound. I turn to look at Malachi and see his damaged wing flapping out of harmony with the good one. There is more blood coming from his injured eye. Fear screams from the other. He begins to fall away.

  I start to follow him, but clearly he is gone. His bad wing no longer is stroking, and I watch him drop toward a small grove of trees through a winter twilight. He crashes into branches and lies tangled there, hanging head down and still.

  Southward we move, pounding through the snow with Lobu guiding us. The only sound I hear are the Words. From our wings they come, and sweeping back along the wind they find and comfort me.

  A Matter of Honor

  ______________________________________

  Through cracks in the floorboard of an old Chevy truck, I watched a blur of gravel streaming by underneath my feet and thought about whatever twelve-year-old boys thought about in 1951. Baseball, maybe. Or, the still-distant possibility of girls. The dust blew in loose spirals behind us and lay finally upon the grass along the road, long after our passing.

  My father drove, looking straight ahead, thinking of business, a Camel pinched between the first and second fingers of his left hand. I knew the look of him without turning. Blue cap, Osh-Kosh B’Gosh striped bib overalls, clean gray work shirt, wire-rimmed glasses.

  At the end of his thin legs, high brown shoes worked the pedals of the truck that took us along the roads of summer. His right hand steered, and when a car or truck or tractor passed us going in the opposite direction, the first finger rose and dropped in the customary Iowa finger-wave.

  I rode next to him, in the middle, a seating arrangement influenced by parental concern, since the passenger-side door had a tendency to swing open when we hit especially violent bumps. Larry, the hired man, dealt with the perils of the outside position and told me that chewing Wrigley’s Spearmint gum while smoking tasted good.

  I used to wonder if Larry might just disappear into the dust sometime, Spearmint gum and cigarette with him, the whirling child of a spring chuckhole wedded to a faulty door latch. But it never seemed to bother him. In those days, you took your risks and danced or fought at the Castle Club in Charles City on Saturday nights.

  We were headed northeast out of Rockford toward a farm near Colwell. The Chevy, larger than a pickup and smaller than a grain truck, was loaded with chicken coops stacked high and roped down, cinched tight with the same slipknots I now use to fasten my canoe on car tops. The wire partitions for corraling feathered things that preferred not to be captured rattled between the coops and sideboards.

  And wedged securely into the left-hand rear corner of the truck box was the Fairbanks & Morse portable scale. Though the scale was merely an intermediary device for converting poultry into money, the events surrounding it on this day would take the measure of something more than chickens.

  We pulled into the farm yard of Ol’ Lady Smith’s place about eight in the morning. My father called most farm women “Ol’ Lady,” Age or looks had nothing to do with it. It was his preferred term, one that substituted for “Mrs.” or “Miss” or anything else you could conjure up, and he meant no disrespect by the use of it. As for the last name, I am using “Smith” here because I cannot recall her name and wouldn’t use it if I did remember.

  Larry and I unloaded the scale and coops and catching equipment while my father talked amiably about weather and prices with the fortyish Ol’ Lady Smith, sharpening his pencil with a jackknife. We had come to buy 750 leghorn broiler hens on this Wednesday,

  I poured water into the sponge of the dust mask my father made me wear. His lungs suffered more from the dust of ten thousand chicken houses than from cigarettes, and he was determined that I would remain pure of breath for the tasks that awaited me in a larger world.

  Wading into a large shed with hundreds of frightened, flying, running, screaming chickens is a torment I would reserve only for my enemies. But for eight summers that’s what I did.

  My father started me out in the back room of our produce house where we warehoused the chickens while waiting for semitrailer trucks that would take them onward to the cities. Sometimes there were thousands of birds back there, locked in what we called “batteries,” which were large, rolling units of sixteen cages, five chickens to a cage.

  That many chickens produces a fair amount of rather unpleasant output. Therefore, the least-favored task in the business was scraping and shoveling that nasti-ness into trucks for removal. On my first day of working for him, my father took me to the back room and provided me with a scraper, a shovel, and slender words that have fattened over the years: “Son, you’ll always be able to say you started at the bottom.” He smiled, touched me on the shoulder, and walked back to his office, while I contemplated the virtues of perdition relative to what I saw before me.

  So I began there. After I had suffered long, and in silence, I was promoted to the truck, where the air smelled of country mornings instead of manure, except for the chicken houses where the dust flew and the hard slash of ammonia instantly penetrated the most obscure places in your brain.

  Larry and I set up the wire catch pen and drove part of the flock into it. Kneeling down, we grabbed the terrified and flapping hens by the legs, four in each hand, and carried them to the door where my father assiduously put them into the coops. When a dozen or so coops were filled, we went outside to help him weigh them while the Lady Smith watched closely.

  Each coop had been weighed empty, with the tare carefully noted. Filled with chickens, the gross weight was observed and the net calculated.

  My father checked the accuracy of the scale every week. And he went even further than that. I had learned how to round in my studies of arithmetic, but he had his own system. For any ounces over a given pound in gross weight, my father rounded up to the next whole pound, which meant the farmers consistently were receiving a large benefit in poundage.

  I once asked him why he rounded as he did, for my textbooks instructed otherwise. His response was characteristically direct: “So nobody can ever accuse me of cheating them in the rounding, I always give the farmer the next higher pound, even if the weight is only an ounce over a given pound.”

  My father cherished his reputation for honest practice and strove to protect it, so I did not press him further, even though I knew his rounding procedures were arithmetically incorrect and financially draining. The trust in his methods was such that most farmers went on with other th
ings while we collected their chickens and never questioned my father’s numbers.

  We were covered with dust, sweating in the June sun, and had loaded about five hundred of the hens when an event occurred that has stayed with me always. For some reason, Ol’ Lady Smith accused my father of shorting her on the weights.

  He was bent over the scale but straightened up slowly at her words, the Osh-Kosh B’Gosh bibs hanging from his bony shoulders. His face reddened in the kind of anger ! only saw on certain occasions, such as that night when, caught in the frenzied grip of some glandular malfunction, I used my shortstop’s arm to fire an apple through the screen door of a town official’s home.

  My father said nothing. He just looked at the Smith woman, looked at the sky, then looked at Larry and me. “I want you boys to take every goddamn chicken out of those coops, one at a time, very carefully, and put them all back in the chicken house.” He closed his weight book with a slap, tucked it into the front pocket of his bibs, shoved his pencil in after it, and lit a Camel.

  I was as angry as my father, for I had watched him lean against the currents of dishonesty time after time in his life and business. Larry didn’t seem to care one way or the other. It was still four days to Saturday night, and whether we loaded chickens or unloaded them was of little concern to him.

  So we put the chickens back into Ol’ Lady Smith’s chicken house, one by one, and carefully. At about chicken three hundred, she decided she had been wrong in her accusation and said so. My father refused to look at her. “Just keep unloading, boys,” he instructed us.

  The Smith lady began to apologize fervently. She pleaded with my father to take her broilers. He smoked, said nothing, and began to tie down the stacks of empty coops on the truck. We lifted the Fairbanks & Morse into its place, put the tailgates in their slots, and slid into the truck.

  My father was silent all the way back to Rockford. His face was still red, and he worked his jaw back and forth in anger at the undeserved humiliation.

  Then the phone calls began. Every night, Ol’ Lady Smith would call our home and beg my father to come pick up her chickens. She knew our price was better than she could get anywhere else. You see, we had a contract with a large Milwaukee firm that specialized in supplying various ethnic groups in that city with certain types of food required for holiday occasions.

  On Tuesdays, the Milwaukee folks would call and place their order with us: two thousand broiler hens about three to four pounds, six hundred capons, one hundred ducks, and so forth. Because of this custom work, my dad was able to pay higher than the market rate for poultry, He would call around the countryside, locate the needed stock, and make his deal over the phone. So the woman with the broiler hens regretted her spasm there in the dust of an Iowa farmyard, burdened more, I believe, by the threat of pecuniary loss than by any sense of true remorse.

  This went on for about a week. Her broilers were growing too heavy for our needs, and she knew it. So did my father. Each evening, he spoke politely to her and said that he was not interested in doing business with her. Then one night, with no advance notice to any of us, he simply told her that we would be there first thing in the morning to get her chickens.

  So we loaded Ol’ Lady Smith’s hens a second time. She chattered around, servile. My father was civil, but distant and cool. He weighed the chickens, wrote her a check out of the long book that said “Waller Produce Company” on the front, and sent Ol’s Lady Smith’s broiler hens to the ethnic groups of Milwaukee, covered as they were with both feathers and righteousness.

  He bought her poultry for years after that and never once mentioned his fury at her accusation, though I knew it rested inside of him like a lump of hot chicken fat. His ultimate revenge was fair profit. He was both practical and principled. He could space the two when his honor was threatened and then close the gap when the time was right.

  Matters of ethics and honor are difficult, can become confused and abstruse. You learn about such things not from books, but from example. You learn about them standing on your feet, in the sun outside of o1’ Lady Smith’s chicken house, watching your father’s face harden, his eyes turning to liquid hydrogen, his voice saying, “I want you boys to take every goddamn chicken out of those coops, one at a time, very carefully, and put them all back in the chicken house.”

  For honor is hard to come by. And pride that flows from honor is not false. Slowly, implicitly, you begin to understand that. You pick it up riding beside a thin and bony man in striped bib overalls, watching the Iowa roads run backward in time through the cracked floorboards of an aging truck, watching the dust blow in loose spirals behind you before coming to rest, once and finally, upon the summer grass, long after your passing.

  “WALLER IS AN AMAZING STORYTELLER.”

  —Washington Post

  Robert James Waller began the pieces in this book on a warm, green morning in the summer of 1983. He hadn’t set out to be a writer. He just needed to record his feelings about people and animals and things he cared about. His first story, “Ridin’ Along in Safety with Kennedy and Kuralt,” told about being young and a musician, and how playing “The Wabash Cannonball” one day in a roadside bar changed the rest of his life. The Des Moines Register printed the essay, and people began asking for more.

  The result is Old Songs in a New Café. A work of nonfiction, it takes you inside Robert James Waller’s mind and world…revealing insightful experiences from his own life and, with his special magic, illuminating those poignant moments most of us share. Few writers possess the power to move us. Even fewer become legends in their own time. Robert James Waller has done both. Just as you have loved his best selling novels, you will love…

  OLD SONGS

  IN A

  NEW CAFÉ

  “Before Francesca Johnson and Robert Kincaid, before Jellie Braden and Michael Tilman, Robert James Waller wrote about his wife, his daughter, his cat, and the last dusky seaside sparrow on Earth.… There is good writing in OLD SONGS IN A NEW CAFÉ…dip into his nonfiction and meet the man.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  Essays in this volume were selected from Just Beyond the Firelight and One Good Road Is Enough, originally published by Iowa State University Press.

 

 

  Robert James Waller, Old Songs in a New Cafe: Selected Essays

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