My mother’s maiden name was Black.
Clarence Wiggie Black was her great-grandfather. I always figured Wiggie was a family name and given the convention of the times, most likely his mother was a Wiggie, but I’ve never been able to find out for sure. It’s kind of an unusual name.
He was a barn builder. The county was mostly country when he learned the trade. He got calls to raise barns up and down from border to border. He was known for his skill and his honesty.
He was on the roof of a barn he erected north of Phoenixville, laying down the finishing touches. It was October 1911 and weather had turned cold following a long Indian summer and frost slicked the shingles. He went to kneel and his boot skidded and he went over the side landing hard upon his back on a gravel lane.
Newspaper accounts praised him for his courage when told his injuries were fatal. He lingered for several hours, but couldn’t rise from the ashes of his pain and died in the farmhouse that night just short of being 58 years old.
There are people who say bad luck skips a generation.
May be.
His son took over the business. His name was Rutherford Black, named for the president, who had taken office the year he was born – 1877. Rutherford was even a more skilled carpenter than his daddy. Plus he had a head for business and he left off barn building to construct houses. Many of the homes that stand along Shoelace Road between West Ruhig and Wilmillar are Black built.
He trained his sons in the construction trades. One was a plumber, one an electrician, one went to school and came back to tend the business books and the oldest son was a carpenter like his father and his grandfather. The oldest also got his grandfather’s name, thus becoming Clarence Wiggie Black II. He was known his entire life as Blackie.
Rutherford never fell off rooves. He lived to an old age, long enough that I knew him as a youngster. His wife died in 1950. He couldn’t stand life without her, so he lay down on his lonely bed and died less than a year later. I got a picture of them. He was a round-faced man with a baldpate fringed in gray and a long, droopy moustache. She was a small woman with a little oval face, hair pulled back in a tight bun and wearing an overlarge apron over a gingham dress. In the picture they could be that couple in “American Gothic”.
The family building business was long over by then. Depression came and the people in the county had a hard row of it and nobody had money to order a house built. Clarence had to scrounge jobs off the farmers, working for a dollar a day pulling weeds. His wife, my grandmother, walked the few miles into West Ruhig and got a maid’s job for some of the rich folks that lived in the big houses sitting on the hill where you came into the borough from the north. My mother was working down in the damp and dark of the local mushroom plants by the time she was fifteen. Her name was Ruth, named for her grandfather Rutherford. She had no middle name.
At the turn of the fourth decade, Ruth married Lyle, a young man who lived over beyond Coldsdale. He’d met her at an amusement park on a blind date and he just kept coming around. He would walk seven miles between Coldsdale and The Willows, the village where Ruth lived, and then he’d talk himself into a dinner invite, and sometimes sack out on her front porch for the night.
Clarence never quite trusted Lyle, but that’s who married my mother and became my father. Trouble for me was getting born in 1941. I barely made my appearance, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and my daddy went sailing off to the South Pacific. Even when he came home after the war, pretty much a stranger butting into my life as far as I was concerned, he didn’t hang around like other fathers. He got a job driving a truck long-distance and was away most all week.
When daddy went to war, momma packed me up and moved in with her parents, and we lived back at The Willows for a brief while. Then Clarence landed a job at the Wilmillar Iron Works and we moved into town.
There were a couple boyhood periods when my parents rented a place of their own, but it didn’t make no never-mind, cause they dumped me with my grandparents every weekend anyway. Clarence became my real daddy.
Now Clarence was a gruff man. If you ever saw “I Love Lucy” and remember the character Fred Mertz; well, that was Clarence. He wasn’t tall; my grandmother towered over him. He was heavy, with a thick stomach. His face was round and his head was large on his shoulders, made more so because he only had a narrow fringe of brown hair that ran just above his neck from ear to ear. When he went anywhere, he wore a battered brown fedora.
He smoked cigars. The kind of cigars you could buy at the nearby gas station. He would give me some coins and send me to purchase a couple stogies for him. My reward was the band that went around each cigar. He'd peel off the cellophane, slip off the band carefully and stick it on my finger. God, I loved that. Probably why I still light up a cheap cigar now and again.
He took me with him every weekend. We’d jump in his car and he’d make rounds to his friends; two buddies on the road. He kept a pint of Jack Daniels under the front seat and a pouch of Redman in the glove compartment. You met Blackie and it was a snort and a chaw every time.
Fox Hunting was his sport. He’d owned a pack of hounds once. I remember them lined up in little doghouses along the side yard when I was a toddler. I don’t have an idea where they went by war’s end. He probably sold them to one of the farmers who rode in the hunts.
Clarence never rode. As far as I know he was never on a horse in his life. When the horn sounded and the fox was dropped and the huntsmen and hounds charged into the open fields, my grandfather and I followed the action in his old Ford. I don’t know how he knew where to go. We’d drive this road and that and then he’d suddenly pull over by a fence or a clump of brush or by an open meadow and sure enough, in a moment we’d see the dashing fox, the baying hounds, the horses and riders. We’d watch them move across the horizon to another wood and when they disappeared, we’d be driving again to another fence or bush or field. We always caught them.
When the chasing was done and the fox treed or backed into a rock fence, and caged, he would take me to Stringy’s. Stringy’s was a bar that sat in back of nowhere. A low slung white construct with tiny windows made of thick rippled glass. There were little neon signs in each window spelling out different beers. The parking lot was a scooped out patch of dust in front of the place.
Inside, the place was a cave. It was dark and smelled of whiskey, beer and smoke. Most of the illumination came from more neon signs hanging here and about the walls. A horseshoe bar filled most of the room. Tall wooden stools ringed the bar with men like Clarence sitting on them. Men slouched over glasses wearing battered brown hats and short jackets. Everybody knew Blackie when he walked in. Everybody soon knew me.
He’d struggle up onto a stool and order a whiskey neat and an Upper 10. Upper 10 was something like 7 Up or Sprite. It was common in my boyhood and I drank it constantly. He’d push some nickels my way across the bar and I’d go play the shuffleboard bowling game, while he had a few more of his whiskey’s neat.
The men would talk and laugh a lot. They told a lot of jokes, but I never understood any of them. I remember he told a joke back in the kitchen of the house one morning at breakfast. There was some new bathing suits pictured in the paper, maybe it was the first bikinis, I don’t know. He looked at me, “You know what the new women’s swimsuit’s ‘r’ goin’ be?”
I shook my head.
“Two Band-Aids and a cork.”
He leaned back and laughed so hard he ripped the newspaper in half. Grandmother was furious. She waving the spoon she was using to mix oatmeal at him.
“What’cha tell the boy things like that fer?”
Things like what? I didn’t get it until maybe ten years later.
Anyway, I tell you, I couldn’t think of any life better than chasing foxes and crawling bars with my grandfather.
Sure, Clarence was drinking his share, but I don’t remember ever seeing him in what you’d label drunk. He didn’t weave across the road lines after an hour or so at Stringy’s. His speech sounded the same to me before and after. Those problems didn’t come from his carousing days. They came when he couldn’t carouse.
Remember that thing about trouble skipping a generation. Clarence had worked himself up to a foreman’s job at the Iron Works over the underground tank crew. That is what they made, all sizes of underground storage tanks. He was inspecting a large tank with a problem down inside with one of the welds. Clarence climbed up to the top of the tank and started descending the ladder through the opening to the tank floor. He hadn’t taken but a rung down when his foot slipped and he plunged into the darkness below.
It took them awhile to get him out of there and to the hospital. His right leg was shattered from hip to ankle. He came home plastered up in a cast that made him immobile.
He sat around that house for six mouths in that contraption, and even when they took it off, the pain stayed wrapped around his leg. He got back to work, but something was broken and unlike the leg bone, it wouldn’t heal. He was drinking from the time he got home until he fell asleep wherever he was at late evening, be it sofa or floor.
I went to the kitchen one night to get a drink. He was awake, but not with us. He was face down on the old sofa in the dining room and was cursing and muttering in his stupor. I passed near the table, out of reach, so to speak. In the kitchen I grabbed a glass off the drain board and poured it full of Upper 10. I took a sip and almost dropped the glass. It had a strong and bitter taste. He must have had whiskey in the glass. I got a fresh glass and swore I’d never drink that stuff.
Children make a lot of promises they don’t keep.
He died not long after. The doctor listed cirrhosis of the liver as the cause, but it wasn’t that. It was a fall, just like his granddaddy; a fall done killed Clarence II, too. He was just short of 58 years old when he died.
After that I never quite had a daddy anymore. My real daddy was still cowboying across the interstates and when he was home I wished he were away. My dad and I speak. We try to make a connection, but it isn’t there. Won’t ever be there, I guess.
My mother is in her eighties now and doing well
I’ve hit my sixties now and even after all these years I miss Blackie. There’s a song they play a lot on the jukebox in my favorite tavern. They probably play it most every night and I never hear it I don’t cry. It’s called “Desperados Waiting For a Train”. You ever hear that song; you’ll know why it reminds me of Blackie. When I hear that song I raise my glass and I yell, “here’s to every-other generation”, and those around the bar lift their glasses with me and they don’t have a clue to what the hell we’re toasting.
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