automobile. Dempsey was sympathetic. When he did turn someone down, he did so with compassion and a suggestion that they should try again in a few months.
He also spent a lot of time with little Roger Scoby and even that boy had emerged from his shell. He was no longer the sensitive, sequestered little kid who barely mumbled “hello” and looked at his feet when he spoke. Roger had turned into a typical seven-year-old and at least part of the credit had to go to Dempsey, for while Ben Scoby was a pleasant man, honest as a ten-cent piece, the kind of man for whom the description “salt of the earth” was invented, he had never spent proper time with his son. He adored both his children and although it had taken him almost a year to recover from his wife’s death, recover he had, only to settle into a dull, complacent routine at the bank. He was secretly pleased when Louise and Fred started dating. Ben Scoby knew in his heart that it had been unfair to burden his teenage daughter with the responsibilities normally reserved for motherhood. She had grown older than her time under that yoke, and Fred Dempsey seemed to have rekindled her youthful spirit. And so it seemed to Ben Scoby and to the wash-line gossips of Drew City that this was truly a match made in heaven.
Louise reserved Saturdays for Roger, for shopping, getting her hair done. And for Fred Dempsey.
Although the Scobys lived less than a mile from town, Roger was permitted to go into the village only on Saturdays and on special occasions, his father reasoning that once a week was enough temptation for a seven- year—old. So it was always a special experience for him. There was a sense of security for the small boy, knowing week by week that everything was still there, still in the same place and unchanged. Well, almost. Occasionally a new store would open or change hands, like the new Woolworth’s Five and Ten. The manager, whose name was Jerry, had come from back East in the fall to get the store started and had once given Roger a kite that came all the way from Japan and then flirted with Louise. Roger was old enough to tell
Every Saturday, Louise and Roger would walk into town together. He would tuck his hand in hers and he always managed to get on the right side of the street and steer Louise past the filling station and garage, its floor slick with oil and grease. The station scared him, though he wasn’t exactly sure why. It wasn’t the stacks of tires or the rows of motor oil on sagging shelves, or the pungent odor of gasoline heavy in the air. It was the oil pit. To Roger, there was something dangerous and foreboding and mysterious about the grave-like hole in the floor. And he secretly admired Frankie Bulfer, whose father owned the station, because he was only seventeen and he went down in the dread hole with his little light and worked on automobiles. Roger would stand at the garage door and watch, his eyes saucer-like, and listen to the clicking of ratchet wrenches and the hissing of the air hose as Frankie performed his operations on the bowels of the boxy automobiles that straddled the pit over his head.
There followed the Dairy Foods, which was fairly new and was the high school hangout and the only place in town where you could get Coca-Cola at the fountain. Then came Otis Carnaby’s grocery store, Mr. Hobart’s meat market, the Christian Science reading room, which Fred had explained was kind of like a small library. Then there was Barney Moran’s Lunchroom with its oilcloth counters and cracked linoleum seats and the welcome odor of strong coffee and pancakes and burned toast and the sounds of bacon and sausage sizzling on its blackened grill. And finally his father’s bank, the Drew City Farmer’s Trust and Guarantee Bank, which was on the corner.
Across the street in the middle of the block was Roger’s favorite place of all, the Tivoli Movie Palace, framed on one side by The Book Shoppe, run by the spinster lady, Miss Amy Winthrop, and on the other by Lucas Bailey’s General Store, a place of velveteens and sateens and buttons on little cards and galoshes and dress patterns and bib overalls and cellophane shirt collars. There was a smattering of toys—red wagons, jigsaw puzzles, stamps for collectors, wooden whistles—in the store but its real allure to Roger was the glass case near the cash register filled with penny candy. Roger usually spent a nickel, half of his weekly allowance, at Mr. Bailey’s, poring over the trays of jujubes, caramel swirls, jawbreakers, all-day suckers, twists of red and black licorice, chocolate kisses and Necco wafers, painfully making his choices. He saved the other nickel for the matinee at the Tivoli.
The most taboo alcove on the main street was Joshua Halem’s poolroom, adjacent to the general store. It was forbidden to boys until they were fourteen for it was here the men gathered to tell the latest bawdy stories and occasionally resort to less than studious language. Roger and other young boys would gather around the front window thick with years of grease and dust, peering past the NRA and WPA signs with the Blue Eagle and the slogan, “We do our part,” at the forbidden green felt tables lit by Tiffany-shaded lamps. Old Halem, who had lost a leg in the war and had a genuine, honest-to-God peg-leg, was always perched high on his long-legged stool near the front, his wooden spike sticking straight out, overseeing every table, and when he frowned at the youngsters scanning the pool parlor and gave them his evil eye, they would scatter.
Then came Isaac Cohen’s furniture store, a dark and cramped place with rows of chairs, beds, mattresses, rockers, cribs and sofas, all jammed together, and beside it, Nick Constantine’s barber shop smelling of talcum powder and shoe polish where Roger had received his first haircut and where he went once a month to keep it trim. Above it on the second floor was the town’s beauty parlor run by Mildred, Nick’s wife, and on the corner across the street from the bank, The Zachariah House, a rundown hotel where traveling men and drummers could spend the night on sagging springs for two dollars. The only legitimate bar in town was in the rear of the lobby, a place forbidden to children
One of Roger’s favorite places was Jesse Hobart’s butcher shop, for it was there he had seen his first real-life “miracle.” Mr. Hobart had brought the chicken from the back where the pullets were in cages and held it up, all flapping wings and clucking, for Louise to inspect. “Nice fat one,” Hobart had told Louise. “Should dress out at about five pounds.”
“That’ll be perfect,” she had answered and turned her head as he whirled the chicken around at arm’s length until it was totally dizzy, then laid it on the wooden block and
Roger had described the headless chicken incident in detail many times to Poppy Scoby and later to Fred. Bending his head down to his chest and folding his arms up under his armpits, he ran around the kitchen bumping into things as the chicken had done. He flailed his arms over his head and made disgusting squishing sounds as he described the blood spurting from the running chicken’s neck, and then he collapsed on the kitchen floor and imitated the pullet’s last violent twitching moments as he concluded his description of the bizarre incident. Poppy had explained that it was a reflex action and that the chicken was really dead all the time, which only made the phenomenon more intriguing to Roger.
On this particular Saturday when they got to the market, and after two years of thinking about it, Roger mustered the courage to request a repeat performance. He cried out, “Put him on the floor and let him run around,” as Hobart began whirling the chicken around. Louise turned immediately to him, shocked.
“Rogie, how dare you even
