King's Cafe

JRC, Jasper, achieved the rank of aviation cadet and got his wings while in the Navy 1943-1945.

Because I was a girl, I had to sit out on the front steps of King’s Café and Barber Shop while Mr. King cut Daddy’s hair.  I didn’t mind because I liked to watch the cars go by on Highway 59, and if the door was propped open I could listen to the men talk freely without the inhibitions a female child in the room would cause.

King’s was one of the town gathering places for men like my dad, Jasper. Males young and old allowed Mr. King to “lower their ears” and we teased the boys for their “white walls” after a fresh haircut. No one ever left Mr. King with too much hair.

On Saturdays especially the male elders -school people, farmers and ranchers - gathered to get hair cuts and shoot the breeze, tell jokes and lies that kept the men laughing and in a good mood.  From King’s porch, I could always tell when Jasper was telling a story because the place got as still and quiet as an empty sanctuary for several long minutes before I heard the men laugh.  Jasper always laughed first and loudest.

Earlier I was in the backyard throwing mud clods at a wasp nest in the eaves of the house when daddy yelled out the back door to get into the car.  My two younger sisters were sitting around the tv watching cartoons and eating cinnamon toast, and my mother was cleaning up around them. Jasper often took one or two of the sisters with him when he went to town or out to Al and Clara Mae’s especially on Saturday mornings.

Jasper graduated from high school in 1943 and went straight into the service ending up in naval aviator school. Some of the time he spent in Georgia where he made a name for himself boxing. He got his wings at 19 just as the war ended, so he left the Navy and went home to college. One time he attended the University of Texas on a football scholarship and majored in journalism. Eventually, he played football at three colleges and on one team that had four All-Americans. He was good enough at tight end to be drafted by the Pittsburg Steelers, but by that time, he had married my mother, Mary. He never spoke of it, to me anyway, but around this time in his life, he made a commitment to stay in Corrigan near Al and Clara Mae for the rest of his life. I know of several offers that came to him to move to a new job, but no amount of money or powerful job title would lure him out of Polk County.  He wanted to stay home and maybe do good things for the home folks, so he joined the faculty of his hometown school, coached and taught business classes and was named principal at aged 22. At age 31, the school board hired him as superintendent, the job he kept for the next 30 years.

When Jasper called out to me that Saturday morning, I stopped chunking mud clods, ran to the front of the house, got into the car and tried to act invisible. My daddy was not a mean person; in fact, most of the time he was the most congenial good-humored man alive. At his funeral people from all over the state gathered to remember his stories, his good humor and the positive influence he had on their lives. However, some close friends and family also remembered a special physical attribute of his that I have never encountered in anyone else I’ve ever met. 

He was a big man - 6’4” and well over 200 pounds – but what set him apart from everyone else was a “look” that was so intimidating, so unnerving, so unsettling to the depths of one’s soul that if inflicted on you, self-preservation overtook any other human instinct. I know this to be true, for I had seen the “look” many times.

Displeasure, anger or his personal imperative of punishing ignorance could initiate the “look.”  I tried to be as well behaved as possible at all times especially in his presence.  If it meant sitting stone still, I would do it. Anything rather than be submitted to the potential wrath that might emerge from the “look” on that face.  Even when he was cracking jokes and putting everyone at ease with his humor, you felt he was just one spilled Coke away from giving you the “look.”

That “look” of his put the fear of God into anyone in its path.   Once I witnessed the reputed meanest man in town who was upset over some perceived affront to one of his kids cower in fear when Jasper’s “look” hit him square in the eyes. 

Despite being the subject of many “looks” over the years, I suffered corporal punishment from my dad only twice in my life.  The first time, I was still in grade school, and my friend Ray and I were playing in the football parking lot just as school was letting out across the street from the high school.

“I dare you to jump out in front of those cars,” said Ray, slowly savoring a piece of apple his mother had given him after school.

I thought a minute and when the first car pulled out of the parking lot, I jumped in front of it, then back to the side of the road without getting hit. This was easier than I thought. The driver hit the brakes and yelled, “Watch out!” and drove on.

I did the same for the next several cars, but before long the wily teenage drivers had caught on to the game and slowed down considerably when they pulled out onto the street near Ray and me.

Bored with the pace of the game, Ray and I went back towards the football field and played there awhile before heading back to our separate houses. When I got home, Doc Edison the Ag teacher was in the den talking to Jasper.  Their conversation was muted, and instead of Doc’s usual teasing, he averted his eyes from me and abruptly left the house.

I was headed to the kitchen when Jasper stopped me.

“Come here,” he said, clutching a hot dog.  I obeyed, and I felt weak all over from the tone of his voice.  I couldn’t figure out what I had done wrong in the few minutes I had been in the house.

“Were you jumping in front of cars with Ray after school?” he asked, his face a mask bearing the “look.”

I tried to say yes but my throat was too dry.

            “Well, go to the bedroom and wait for me.”

            Thus began the longest five minutes of my life as my dad gave me time to think about the whipping I was about to receive while he finished his hot dog. He entered the room taking his black leather belt from around his waist.

            “Do you know what you did wrong?” he asked.

            “Yes, sir.”

            “What?”

            “I jumped in front of cars.”

            “And why was that wrong?”

            “I might have gotten killed.”

            “Mr. Edison saw you and Ray.  Let that be a lesson that someone is always watching.”

            Pop. Pop.

            The crying commenced, and the whipping was over, and ignorance was punished.

When we got to King’s, Jasper gave me a quarter for a Coke.  I went into the café side of the building and looked around for the short, round woman with near translucent white skin and enormously teased blue-black hair. 

She saw me first and screeched, “ Girl, you are growing like a weed! What can I get for you?”  She was almost hidden behind the cash register, and I finally spotted her after scanning down the counter.

“A Coke,” I said. “Daddy’s gettin’ a hair cut, and I’m supposed to get a Coke and sit on the steps.”

“What grade are you in now?” she asked, looking down her nose at me, tilting her head as if to size up more than my height.

“Fifth,” I said.

“Well, that’s too old for yo’re Daddy to bring you to the barber shop to sit on the steps.  Yo’re too big for that nonsense now.”  (Yo’re instead of “your” was an invective meaning “I am serious.”)

“About courtin’ age, aren’t you?” she continued.  “You are surely courtin’ size,” she laughed wildly at that last part, tickled at the joke she made.

“You tell him I said that,” she added, and I said okay even though I’d rather stick straight pins under my fingernails than tell my daddy something like that.

She got the Coke out of the icebox and handed it to me. “You can sit in here with me if you want to,” she whispered as if passing a secret between us.

“That’s okay,” I said handing her the quarter. “I like to sit on the steps.”

“Suit yourself,” she snarled in a dramatic change of mood, and I worried that I upset her by not taking her advice and crossing over that imaginary boundary from childhood to adolescence on a Saturday morning at King’s Café.

(C) Copyright 2016  Carolyn Elmore