Jew Store (35 page)

The preacher said, “Let us stand and pray,” and I wobbled upward next to my mother and half-lowered my head, listening out for “In Jesus's name” to tell me the thing was over.

The preacher retreated, and Roscoe Pinder moved forward. He explained about needing a loan of forty-five thousand dollars to keep the factory open, though, he said, “Y'all must know I ain't feeling too hopeful at this point.”

To which my father muttered, “With
zutz
like that, he'd have a hard time getting a dog to give up its fleas. This crowd wants to be pepped up, not laid out.”

Mr. Pinder sat down and the mayor got up again to give a rundown on how important the factory was to “our town.” He too looked joyless, though he had a new thought—that we didn't “want the shame and disgrace of knowing our people had to move away to find jobs.” He concluded with, “Let's be good citizens and support this cause.”

Now to the front came Ernest Fetzer, a heavy man, with a heavy man's walk, and looking as if he were there as a favor to everyone. He took off his glasses, blew on the lenses, polished them with a handkerchief pulled from his pocket, put them back on. Taking his time, being important. He gave the audience a long look, grasped the sides of the lectern, and at last was ready to speak. He began with a grievance. “I reckon y'all think this is my fault,” he said. “By damn, everything's always the banker's fault.”

“Listen to who thinks he's the injured party,” my father grumbled.

Mr. Fetzer went on in the complaining tone. “I'm here to tell y'all that Ernest Fetzer ain't nobody's sucker.” He paused to give the crowd time to appreciate his remark, though the snicker that it brought was ambiguous. “If somebody don't like me, well, I won't expect his vote in the next popularity contest.”

“You got it right this time,” my father said sotto voce.

When Mr. Fetzer left, Mr. Pinder returned. He stood with
his arms crossed and looked uncomfortable. “If y'all come up with some money, that's fine. If you don't, that's your privilege, and we'll all go home.”

“Send in another quarterback,” my father said over his shoulder to the girls behind us, football fans all. “This one's out of plays.”

When Mr. Pinder asked, “Has anyone got any spare cash?” Mayor Canaday got off his chair and said he'd give a hundred dollars, “to start the ball rolling.”

“The ball will roll about three inches,” my father said.

Eaton of Dalrymple-Eaton's Department Store rose up to pledge a hundred dollars as well.

“Thank you,” Mr. Pinder said. “I appreciate your generosity.”

“That's about as generous as a size-five shoe fitted to a size-ten foot.” My father bounced around in his seat, grumbling, mumbling, hooting about these “phony-baloney” pledges. “They're handing Jack Dempsey a powder puff and telling him to go knock somebody out,” he growled to my mother and me.

One of the factory hands stood up. He said that none of the factory men had much but if the plant closed, they wouldn't have anything. He pledged twenty-five dollars and said he hoped some of the other men would see fit to do the same.

A farmer rose and, with his voice shaking as if he were riding in a wagon, pledged two acres of cotton, redeemable when he got paid for it. “In about two months, I reckon,” he said.

There was a brief spate of clapping. A few other farmers made offers: a couple of acres of corn, an acre of tobacco, part of a steer, a pig.

The pledges started dying away. When it happened that whole minutes went by between pledges, everyone in the room knew that there were to be no more.

Mr. Pinder jerked his head from one side of the auditorium to the other. “I ask one more time: Any pledges?”

The question hung in an auditorium gone quiet, as if it had suddenly emptied. Then in the silence a strong voice was heard. “Attention!” the voice said. “I want everybody's attention!”

It was my father's voice. He was standing at his seat, his hands cupped around his mouth.

In a moment he had all eyes. “Bronson's Low-Priced Store pledges five thousand dollars!” he shouted, and pushing past my mother, he shot down the aisle and raced up the stage stairs to the lectern, yelling, “Let's get this thing going!”

The crowd came alive. There was jumping up, cheering, whistling. My father held his arms out and grinned hugely, as if welcoming an old customer who had been laid up for a while. He had the key, the grin seemed to say, the one that would unlock the treasure. “
Sha
,” he said at last, “
sha
, let's talk.”

The crowd laughed and moved to sit back down. “Okay, who's gonna come up with another five thousand?” my father shouted.

“I will!” came an answering shout. Miss Brookie, way in the back, was struggling to her feet. Once there, there was a moment of hesitation before she spoke again, before she said, “Or rather, I
might
.”

She spoke loudly to Roscoe Pinder. What she said that was she would meet my father's pledge if Roscoe Pinder would meet hers.

Mr. Pinder shared a look—a half smile—with the crowd, the one that said we all knew that Miss Brookie could be very harebrained indeed but was owed the courtesy of a hearing.

I was like T: I never read anything harebrained into Miss Brookie's ideas. And there was certainly nothing harebrained about this one. It was not complicated, not abstract, not irreligious. It was very simple: If the townspeople were being asked to came through for Mr. Pinder, then he ought to be able to find his way clear to coming through for them. “What you need to do is stop hiring children,” Miss Brookie told him.

I thought of what Miss Brookie had said that day when we had gone to Mr. Pinder's office, about how you never knew what kind of dance would take place when “the fiddling got to going.” Were the fiddlers playing? I thought they were, and it was a tune Miss Brookie had called. I waited for the dancing to begin.

My father contemplated Mr. Pinder, and Mr. Pinder contemplated back. “Miss Brookie thinks you got to help the town,” my father said.

Mr. Pinder said that working to keep his plant open was “help aplenty.” And how many people wanted him to stop hiring children anyway?

My father looked out at the audience and asked if anybody shared Miss Brookie's thought.

To my surprise, and most certainly to her own, here suddenly was my mother rising. She stood at her seat, and then in a very small voice, she said, “
I
do.
I
share her thought.”

In the end there was a show of hands. When those opposed to children working showed the most, my father said to Mr. Pinder, “I guess Concordia don't want to be known as a town where children work in a factory.”

Mr. Pinder was trying to hold to the principle that it was his plant and he ought to be allowed to run it the way he saw fit. He looked around at the others on the stage, as if calling upon them to affirm this. “I got that privilege,” he said.

Miss Brookie for one did not believe he had this “privilege.” “Not if you want my five thousand, you don't,” she yelled.

“It's your call,” my father told Mr. Pinder.

Mr. Pinder waved a hand, as if resigned to dancing to Miss Brookie's tune, and said, “Bronson, if you ain't the limit.”

Miss Brookie's five thousand could be counted on, but more was needed. “Now who else?” my father asked the crowd.

No answer. My father undertook a survey of the audience and spotted Mr. Spivey down front. “Look here, Mr. Spivey, I got
a proposition with your name on it: You put up five and I'll match it with another five!”

The crowd waited.

Mr. Spivey got to his feet and said he wanted to “understand” what my father had said. “You'll match my five thousand with your five?”

“You bet!”

“A five with a five?” Mr. Spivey smiled his little smile, as if about to make my father miserable. “How about more?”

My father hesitated only a second. “Yessir! Any amount!”

The hint of pleasure on Mr. Spivey's face went away. “Ah, all right then, I'll pledge . . . well, I reckon I'll pledge three . . . yes, three's about right.”

“Glad you could see your way clear, Mr. Spivey.” It gave my father an idea: If that's what it took, he'd match every pledge. “Who else? Come on, take my money! What Tennessee yokel wants to see the color of Jew money?”

At this the audience roared its delight, which Ernest Fetzer did not share in. He had come to the lectern with advice for my father, to tell him to stop leading everybody astray. He asked Tom Dillon's set question: “Lord, what did Concordia do to deserve Jews?”

My father made a joke of it. “I'll tell you, Mr. Fetzer—the only place you won't find a Jew is in a Christian cemetery.”

The crowd laughed at this, too, and Ernest Fetzer sat back down.

My father went back to exhorting, pleading. “Do it for Concordia. Do it for yourselves. Do it for your children.” He grinned. “Do it for me.” He grinned wider. “How am I going to make a living if this thing don't come out right?”

The crowd guffawed once more, and my father said, “If you can't help your friend with money, at least help him with a sympa-the-tic groan.”

At this the crowd emitted a loud, fake groan and laughed loudly at its own drollery.

My father teased, “What're you going to do with all the money you got, you folks? Ain't you never noticed that shrouds don't have pockets?”

Amid the laughter, my father found Dalrymple, the other half of Dalrymple-Eaton. “Mr. Dalrymple? Ain't you got something you want to do?”

It seemed maybe Mr. Dalrymple did. He got to his feet and cleared his throat. It appeared his partner, Mr. Eaton, had “underestimated the need” and he, Dalrymple, was “pleased” to make it five thousand. He sat down, got back up. “We'll want to take back the other pledge, of course.”

My father laughed and said, “What can I say? It's a deal.” Now who else wanted to see “a tightwad Jew” spend his money?

Pledges came in: a thousand from the drugstore, another thousand from the U-Tote-'Em. All the merchants pledged something, and if they hung back, my father heckled them until they came forth. “Don't be shy,” he might say. “We ain't in church. It ain't no sin to discuss money matters in here.”

Each new pledge was greeted by a wave of cheering, even after the pledges began to come in smaller—hundred-dollar ones, ten-dollar ones, children's single-dollar ones.

Finally my father held up his hands. “
Sha, sha
, hold your horses.” He turned to Mr. Pinder, to find out where things stood.

Mr. Pinder waved the tally sheet. The money was there.

And now the crowd truly erupted. They stomped their feet. They clapped their hands over their heads. They put two fingers in their mouths and whistled. A few pushed into the aisles and danced. Mothers held their infants up so they could say in later years that they too had been in on that night—that glorious night when Concordia had been saved.

The crowd walked my father all the way home and came on
in. It was like the aftermath of a football game or a music competition when Concordia had won.

L
ate that night, when we were finally alone, even with all the praise and all the excitement, my mother, maybe not completely
modren
but certainly practical, wondered how much it was going to cost us.

And of course my father had it all in mind. If his figures were not down to the penny, they were down to the hundred. He figured he had pledged twenty-two thousand dollars. Of course, Pinder had promised to pay back all pledges, but who knew? “It's worth every cent,” my father said to my mother. “For how good we did the town, it's worth every cent.”

My mother thought it was worth it, too: On the way home Miss Brookie had called her a mensch.

O
f course, before too long the euphoria of “the night Concordia was saved” played itself out and was replaced by the reality of hard times.

Very quickly the whole country was down with the Depression disease, and Concordia was deathly sick with it. The shoe factory, though able to stay open, was operating with a skeleton workforce, and farmers were all but giving away their crops. The Negro women who worked as domestics opened their hands on payday to find there even fewer dollar bills. Some found no dollar bills at all, just maybe twenty-five cents. Some found nothing. “You'll have to wait til next week” became routine. Even totin' privileges were carefully monitored. Those whose wages went unpaid for weeks at a time might finally arrange a trade of some sort—work exchanged for a couple of home-put-up items or a dress just run up by the mistress out of fabric that had been put by perhaps years before.

When the stores on First Street started closing, my mother was newly alarmed with each
GOING OUT OF BUSINESS
sign. And when Mary Hyams had to be let go, she was icy with fear. My father tried to reassure her and said over and over that we could
tough it out, that we had the kind of prices people liked. “But,” he would add, “I wouldn't want to be in Dalrymple-Eaton's shoes, no sirree.” And as if in confirmation, in a couple of months Dalrymple-Eaton's closed.

My father would tell my mother to stop thinking about going to New York (for he knew that's what she was thinking), that now was no time to be in New York. Up there they were selling apples from behind a little box on the street, didn't she know that? “Is that what you want me to do?” he asked her. No, my mother did not want my father selling apples on the street, but couldn't we sell the store and live on what we got for it?

“So who's going to buy a store in times like these?” he reminded my mother. Nobody, she had to say, nobody would buy a store in times like these.