Searching for Caleb

By 1942 Bess had saved enough money to buy a cafe of her own in Box Hill, a town some twenty miles away. Caleb wasn't sure he wanted to go; he liked it where he was. But Bess had her mind made up and so he followed, amiably enough, lugging his fiddle and his pennywhistle and a flute and a change of clothes. This time he took a job as short-order cook in Bess's cafe. He found a park to do his fiddling in, a new crowd of children and courting couples to hear him in the evenings. Only nowadays more and more of the men wore uniforms, and the girls' clothes too were uniform-like-square-shouldered, economical of fabric-and he wondered sometimes, playing his same old music, whether people could really understand it any more. In his head, White-Eye Ramford still sang of despair and jealousy and cruel women and other rich, wasteful things. The couples who listened seemed too efficient for all that.

There was some trouble with Caleb's fingers-a little stiffness in the mornings. His bow hand could not get going at all if the weather was damp. And by now his hair was nearly white and his whiskers grew out silver whenever he went unshaven. On several occasions he was startled to find his father's face gazing at him from mirrors. Only his father, of course, would not have worn a dirty Panama hat, especially in the house, or a bibbed white apron stained with catsup or trousers fastened with a safety pin.

Bess's cafe was close to the freight tracks, between a seed store and a liquor store. There were some tough-looking men in those parts, but nothing that Bess couldn't handle. Or so she said. Till one evening in March of 1948 when two customers started arguing over a mule and one drew a gun and shot Bess through the heart by accident. Caleb was fiddling at the time. When he returned, he thought he had walked into a movie. These milling policemen, detectives, and ambulance attendants, this woman on the floor with a purple stain down her front, surely had nothing to do with the real world. In fact he had trouble believing she was dead, and never properly mourned her except in pieces-her good-natured smile, her warm hands, her stolid fat legs in white stockings, all of which occurred to him in unexpected flashes for many years afterward.

Of course now Caleb was free to go anywhere, but he had the responsibility of Bess's boy Roy, who was only thirteen or fourteen at the time. And besides, he liked Box Hill. He enjoyed his work as short-order cook, frying up masses of hash browns and lace-edged eggs in record time, and since the cafe now belonged to Roy what else could they do but stay on?

Year by year the cafe became more weathered, the sign saying "Bess's Place" flaked and buckled. Roy grew into a stooped, skinny young man with an anxious look to him. They took turns minding the business. Evenings Caleb could still go out and fiddle "Stack O'Lee" and "Jogo Blues." But his hands were knotted tighter and tighter now, and there were days when he had to leave the fiddle in its case. Then even the pennywhistle was beyond him; there was no way to tamp the airholes properly when his fingers stayed stiff and clenched. So he set about relearning the harmonica, which he had last played as a very young man. The warm metal in his hands and the smell of spit-dampened wood reminded him of home. He paused and looked out across the counter. Where were they all now? Dead?

He wiped the harmonica on his trousers and went back to his song.

Roy said they needed a waitress. This was in 1963 or so. They had the same small group of customers they always had, railroad workers mostly and old men from the rooming houses nearby. Caleb couldn't see that they had any sudden need for a waitress. But Roy went and got one anyhow, and once he had then Caleb understood. This was a pretty little blond girl, name of Luray Spivey. Before six weeks had passed she was Mrs. Roy Pickett and there was a jukebox in the corner playing rock-and-roll, not to mention all the changes in the apartment upstairs, where he and Roy had lived alone for so many years. She covered the walls of Roy's bedroom with pictures of movie stars torn out of magazines, mainly Troy Donahue and Bobby Darin. She brightened the living room with curtains, cushions, plastic carnations and seashells. She followed Caleb around picking up his soiled clothes with little housewifely noises that amused him. "Hoo-ee!" she would say, holding an undershirt by the tips of her fingers. But she wasn't the kind to run a man down. She knew when to stop housekeeping, too, and sit with Roy and Caleb and a six-pack of beer in front of the second-hand television she had talked Roy into buying for her. In the cafe she cheered everybody up, with her little pert jokes and the way she would toss her head and the flippy short white skirt that spun around her when she moved off to the grill with an order. All the customers enjoyed having her around.