“J.F.”
My good friend, J.F. Small, who kept a grocery store in our Cape village, might not be considered a great man by today’s standards but I considered him to be in the years that I was growing up and I always shall. He was kind and honest and efficient and he had a philosophy that was the equal of any situation.
J.F.’s store was a kind of hub of the community in those days and it was a good store, not one of the new kind where you wheel a little wagon around and feel foolish and can’t find anything, but one in which he helped you graciously and simultaneously to good merchandise and good conversation, and everyone had plenty of time anyway. It was a well-built store, a kind of Greek-revival with a Cape Cod accent, meticulously clean within and shining without. Only its huge front windows and pale yellow siding set it apart from the village of neat, white houses that sprawled around it. To compensate for that, there was, atop it, a fascinating cupola from which you could get a view of the Sound. Along the front of the store there was a commodious porch with two large benches. The benches carried on their slatted back a faded advertisement for Dr. somebody-or-other’s Bitters but bitters were already out of fashion and you could hardly have read the advertisement anyway because the benches were never empty. They had been placed just so to catch the pleasant breezes from the Sound and they were for resting and conversation.
Inside the store and along each of the two side walls were rows and rows of narrow wooden shelves that reached right up to the ornamental tin-ceiling. The shelves held a colorful mass of tinned goods and Quaker Oats and tea and if you wanted something from the high ones J.F. would secure it for you with a boat-hook. His aim was deft and true and it was always a temptation to ask for some of the little-called-for merchandise from the heights. In front of each of the tiers of shelves there was a long counter which held made-up orders and daily specials but most especially they held some very wonderful and tantalizing glass show-cases. The glass case to the right of the store held corn cob pipes and cut plug, shoe laces, work gloves and fish hooks, all in an ordered disorder that made everything easy to get at. No matter how much was sold this display always appeared to be miraculously unchanged. But it was the glass case on the left-hand counter that always drew my attention for inside it in regimental rows were displayed all the wonders of a small boy’s world. There were sleek, curly licorice whips and cigar-shaped licorice sticks; banana-tasting candy in the shape of bananas, mint-tasting candy in the shape of mint leaves, peanut butter candy in the shape of pink, satiny bolsters; there were heart-shaped peppermints with red mottos like “I love U” and “Oh you kid”, there were large, round, chocolate Old Fashioneds, orange and white “corn kernels” and many another item to keep a boy in agonizing, wonderful indecision. Time was only responsible to your own appetite and once you had made up your mind the penny candy would be carefully counted out and put helter-skelter into a small brown bag with a string around its neck. It would be discovered only later on the walk home that, somehow, several extra pieces had been slipped into the bag.
At the back of J.F.’s store there was a wrapping counter with a huge roll of butchers paper and a fascinating string that dangled down from an ornate iron cage at ceiling height. To the rear of the store also were the massive sliding doors of the cold room where all the good cuts of meat were hung. And then there was a stove-hole, neatly disguised in summer by a handsome chromo of Lake Como but, in winter, holding the shiny pipe that lead to a large coal stove. The cheerful glow from that stove in winter was a real attraction to the men of the village who seemed to much prefer it to the warmth of their own kitchens. There was always a cluster of rocking chairs about it and they were never empty. They were for resting and conversation.
J.F. ran his store alone, except as the summer population began to grow he would hire a boy to make deliveries, with horse and wagon for many years and, finally, with a small truck with the name of the establishment modestly proclaimed on its sides. He was leisurely and when he became successful it was almost as though it had been inevitable, even though you knew better. Once a Cape bank asked him to join its Board of Directors.
“I drove over to that shiny, new building,” he told me, “and it seemed as if even the car was hanging back on the way. When I got there I just walked up and down outside and looked at the bank and thought, ‘this is no place for you, J.F.’. Finally I got up courage to go in and they were all sitting around a table waiting for me. They introduced me all around as if I was really somebody and then they got down to business. I tell you it was nothing but trouble. It didn’t seem as if there was anything for me to say but I thought about it some and I didn’t like it. Seemed to me there’s plenty of trouble in the world already without my sitting there and hearing about more of it and passing judgment on folks I don’t even know. So when it was all over I came home and wrote them a letter and said I would be pleased to stop being a director and I never went back.”
J.F. thought a minute and then a look of puzzlement, incredulity and good humor came over his face.
“You know what?”, he said. “There’s a big picture of me hanging on the wall of that room. There’s a brass plate under it with my name and ‘Former Director’ on it!”
Perhaps J.F. was already out of place in the twentieth century. His first, uneasy recognition of this did not come until the thirties when the store was still prospering and life in general was as uncomplicated as ever.
It was in the thirties that a lot of new terms began coming out of Washington and the Cape first heard of “the little people” and the “forgotten man.” No Cape Codder would think of himself or his neighbors as little people and no one locally, at least, was ever forgotten. J.F. had always extended credit and had often given merchandise to help neighbors over the rough spots of poor cranberry or fishing years. A catastrophe such as a fire was the direct responsibility of the whole community. Otherwise, most people in our village, in those days, helped themselves—and had never imagined there was any other way. Nevertheless, the wheels of government had begun to grind and there was no doubt in Washington that the Cape was a part of the United States. Each mail brought J.F. a new form to be filled out. It was either an inquiry into matters he had always considered to be personal or a set of regulations to be followed in running the grocery.
Whatever professor devised those forms it was a sure bet from the beginning that he had never been inside a village store. Poor J.F. would squint through his glasses for hours at the devilish forms. Sometimes he would ask me for an opinion but, fresh as I was from college, and full as I was of the concept of the “century of the Common man”, I could make no more head nor tails of the forms than could he. Finally he would shrug his shoulders in mystification and shuffle the forms into a pile at one end of the wrapping counter.
As the weeks passed the pile of forms grew until at last it was too big for the wrapping counter. Then they were set upon the floor where they were nearly out of sight and would have been out of mind except that the letters became more and more frequent and the demands more forceful. At the end of six months the pile of government verbiage was monumental and the letters had become almost violently threatening.
One day there came a letter from Washington by Registered Mail. It looked very ugly and very important. J.F. never told me what was in that letter but soon after reading it he stooped down and gathered up the monumental pile of forms and placed them on the wrapping counter. He wrapped them neatly and methodically in the good butcher’s paper and he tied them securely with the string that dangled down from the little iron cage at the ceiling. To the huge bundle he attached an envelope addressed to the government at Washington and inside the envelope he had written a note in his neat, meticulous script:
“Dear Sir:
I do not know what it is you want me to do and
I am too old now to take the time to figure it out.
I give up. I am closing the store.
Respectfully,
J.F. Small”
When he had made the bundle ready and inspected it for mailability, he picked it up and walked past the glass cases of candy and cut plug and he never looked back all the way to the Post Office. The Grocery Store was closed.
All of the merchandise in the store was hurriedly disposed of, but J.F. kept the building, and the chairs that were for resting and conversation and the stove that was for warmth in winter. He also kept the wide front porch with the two benches that had been set just so to catch the breezes from the Sound. I would sit there with him often, looking through the large windows to the clean, but empty, glass cases and the haunting shadows that the long-gone cans had left behind them on the rows of shelving. We would sit there and smoke and talk, or sometimes not talk, and we would watch the sleek, new cars of the summer visitors going by lickety-split to the new Super-Market down the street.