Sometimes an illegal load of liquor would be cached in shallow waters off-shore to await picking up at a later date; sometimes the Coast Guard pursuit would be close enough so that a sense of propriety indicated jettisoning the cargo before making a swift escape to the enveloping darkness of the Sound. Then, with the typical vagaries of Cape tides, the huge piles of burlap sacks would be exposed at the ebb and with rubber boots and wheel barrows (and a tacit understanding that there was no need to notify the authorities until morning) the people along the shore commenced a new kind of harvest from the sea. Cargos that may have been worth upwards of $100,000 were split up to find their resting place at last in Cape Cod cellars and barns. From behind a barricade of imported—and almost priceless—Scotch whiskey the new Cape Cod fishermen smiled sympathetically, but happily, at an arid and land-locked United States. Of course many of the cargos did reach their intended destinations across the canal. One went in a hearse that was part of an elaborate funeral procession and a red-faced constabulary did not realize it until twenty-four hours after they had solemnly and respectfully assisted in its easy passage up the Cape and to Boston.
The Cape Codders who had participated in the harvest of the burlap bags full of straw-covered bottles of joy were following a time-honored tradition of beach-combing and salvage. Many would have been incredulous at the suggestion that any gift of the sea was not rightfully a case of finders-keepers. It is doubtful that any game of finders-keepers was ever carried out with greater enthusiasm until, at last, the Volstead Act was repealed and the liquor traffic came to a halt. For some it had not been the proudest page in Cape Cod history but it had undeniably been one of the most interesting.
There is this much too about the Cape. There is people. There have been—and will be again—some very great ones, and there have been and will be again some middling poor ones. There are heroes of song and story, and there are the everyday kind of heroes who live brave and good lives and no one hears about it. A Cape Codder is not much of a one for blowing his own horn. He’s not much of a one for an argument either. His response to the perpetrator of an intolerable rudeness is to ignore him. That is why some Mainlanders go home to lecture folks about the “coldness” of Cape Codders. There is an inherent wholesomeness about him which, like his work and play, his home and health, is colored by the land and sea and the salt breezes that sweep over them. The land and the sea have worked upon him just as surely as he has worked upon the land and the sea. And when he goes away it is to dream of a cottage by the sea and a coming back to the land that is home.
“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.”