Candle Salad

by RICHARD BISSELL

I DON’T very often favor this spot I mostly go over to the Rex Club down by the Ruby Street bridge but as long as I’m here I don’t mind telling you the spot is OK and although the bartenders act like they was related to English royalty we will skip that. Now mister, you and I will sit here by the end of the bar and if we find each other’s company tedious and tiresome why we can at least look through that fine expensive plate glass window at the colorful holiday throngs treading the sidewalks and loaded down with Yuletide gifts for the little ones. For myself I’ll have a whisky and sour in fond memory of a girl in St. Paul who run off to Billings, Montana, one night when we was down at the Robert Street landing loading supplies. After the ceremonial whisky and sour I’ll indulge in something more interesting and you can reveal all your various troubles in life’s thoroughfare and I’ll give you mine.

You’re a salesman and you just made three calls and got shut out. OK. I’m a boy from Aurora, Illinois, and not half as nuts as I sound being the Second Engineer over here on the canal on a very large and commodious diesel towboat whereby they pay me a grand total of 375 dollars each and every month with room and board thrown in. Considering my old man worked thirty-five years as bookkeeper at the Acme Sheet Metal to get up to 50 per week this is not so bad and proves what a glorious age we live in when we slop and consider I will be twenty-three and no percent of age at my next birthday.

So I will lead off with a Christmas story as it is plain to be seen I am off watch and nothing to do until 6 P.M. and the boat is laying over at the landing waiting on empties to come down the canal from Chicago. I want to hear something about your different experiences in the selling game but first I will tell you a nice little story about how Christmas come to the motor vessel Irene in the midst of all the dirt and grime of the Chicago ship and drainage canal.

Picture a nasty little 200 horsepower pushboat shuttling coal barges from here in Joliet into Chicago and back. With a crew of four on deck, three in the engine room, and a cook. Pretty rotten outlook you’d say it was actually even worse than your imagination could picture it. From being on this lousy run we was all at each other’s throats once or twice a week and in between times we was none too friendly and ate our meals more or less in monosyllables if you see what I mean. The goddamn canal stunk like the back door to hell in the summer and in the winter it was so cold it would freeze the hinges on same. She was a mighty rough go but before you get aboard a good boat you simply got to put in some time on the rattraps it’s the same on every job I imagine your trouble is they got you on a bum territory and a bunch of lousy accounts.

I thought so.

Well we argued and fought our way from week to week and there wasn’t what you would call much merriment and good spirits aboard but we moved the coal and could get uptown maybe once a week and away from the sight of each other thereby avoiding any murder being committed but at the same time it was no demonstration of the happy carefree life that we advertise so highly to the folks at home who wonder what we are doing out here in the first place.

But they understand the wages. I’ll guarantee that.

My story don’t, really have any big moral result to it, it is just a little story about, the fact that life is never as bad as it seems especially if you got somebody to point out the fact to you when the going is tough.

I guess I’ll have another of the same, Frank, in memory of the girl in St. Paul with the black hair and the big brown eyes. Some girl. No, this one is on me, mister, you get the next one.

2

IT WAS about two weeks before Christmas and the cook had family trouble with some old boy taking his wife out while he was running up and down the canal so he quit and went, home to check up on things and got a job as short-order cook over here at the Elite Lunch. The next day the office sent us a new cook and that’s where the story begins, with the new cook coming aboard at the landing one night at 2 A.M. when we got down from Chicago with four empties.

After we picked up our loads and locked through at Lockport and had passed by the butterfly dam I run back to the galley to set the coffee pot on. You have to stay in the engine room most of the time here in the canal because it’s pretty close work for the pilot and you never know when he’s gonna ring a bell. Pilothouse control is just something you read about, to our company — the engineers do the handling, and I mean that’s a full-time job and keeps you as busy as a cat on a tin roof mostly every watch.

Well when I come into the galley, which sets aft and is about the size of a dollar-fifty room in a cheap hotel, here is the new cook taking inventory of the supplies with one hand and cleaning the stove with the other and he has a fresh pot of coffee all ready and waiting.

“That stove,” I says, “ain’t been cleaned since Peaches Browning was a kid.”

“ I can see that,” he says, “ but it’s getting cleaned now. What would you like with your coffee?”

What, would I like with my coffee? Now there was a novel thought at 3 A.M. This cook was not only bound in determined to clean that stove but he was all set to make me something to go with my coffee.

“I got to get back to the engine room,” I says. “I only come up here to grab a cup of Java on the fly.”

“How would a denver sandwich set with you?” he says. “I’ll bring it up.”

“Like a new suit of clothes and a bonus,” I says, and I went out and up the deck and in the engineroom door. We was plowing through the broken ice and far off over beyond the bank of the canal there was some lights burning where the sensible people lived. After a while sure enough in he come into the engine room with a denver sandwich on a plate all wrapped up in a napkin in one hand and the coffee pot in the other.

“Thanks,” I says, “but brother you better get some sleep.”

“After I get cleaned up back there,” he says. We was both shouting at each other of course with that old diesel blamming away beside us and the generator likewise. So he went out.

The next evening we had candle salad. Yes that’s what I said. You take a ring of pineapple and put it on a plate and then you stick a banana in it upright with a cherry on top — see, it looks like a candlestick with candle and all and the cherry represents the flame.

“I got that, one out of Your Home magazine,” he says. “It’s a killer ain’t it?”

“It’s a killer all right,” says the Captain, but he ate it. The Captain for a captain was a story in himself; he was ex-secretary of the teamsters’ union down at Peoria only he stole the funds and had to make himself scarce so he went off steamboating. For a captain he was a bird all right and could entertain you by the very hour with tales of Peoria if you got him in the proper mood. But ordinarily very sour. Just like the rest of us.

“Where are we at, the Ladies Aid Society?” says my boss the Chief Engineer when he sat down and confronted his salad. He was a disappointed man. He married a woman from down at La Salle who supposedly owned a dance hall which was reputed to be a gold mine but after the honeymoon, which was spent on a trip to Fort Dodge, Iowa, to see her folks, what was left of them, as she was no debutante herself, tipping the scales at about fortynine years, he learned the painful facts which was she didn’t own the dance hall at all but only the bar concession and the bartenders was robbing her blind.

“Where are we at,” he says again in case none of us heard him the first time, one of his particularly aggravating habits, “the Ladies Aid?”

But he ate his candle salad and he ate up all his Swiss steak, too, and kept reaching for those good hot rolls like he was wound up on a spring. There was hardly a meal from this time on where we didn’t have hot biscuits or rolls, and on top of it all this cook would rather stay up all afternoon, instead of snoozing in his bunk over some periodical magazine, and make pies and cake, oh this boy was nothing less than a regular character on the Chicago ship and drainage canal.

“ I got into a funny one on the Lakes,” he told me one afternoon when I slipped into the galley and found him working up a coconut lemon layer cake, “on one of them big ore ships. You see I always use to stay up and bake all afternoon and the union steward said I was working overtime and should get paid for it. I told him I says I can’t sleep in the daytime and it is just relaxation to me to bake I don’t want no overtime. Nevertheless he called a grievance, over my protest, and from then on I was to get paid for my afternoon work. It didn’t set right with me so I quit the baking much to the disgust of the crew and it got so mean I walked off when we got to Duluth.”

“How come you knock yourself out with all this here candle salad and peach pie?” I said. “Why we’d be satisfied with fried potatoes and pork chops. And as for the deck hands, the most of them never seen a layer cake outside of a magazine before.”

“Just a funny habit I got, I guess,” he says. “I like to see people eat.”

3

THE canal into Chicago is all right if you check your brains someplace at the entrance and just live from watch to watch and try to overlook the ever present facts that you are going crazy by degrees with the monotony of the thing. But it takes an awful toll in a man’s natural desire to enjoy life and extract some satisfaction out of doing the job.

I got so tired, for example, of hearing about them thieving bartenders down at the Chief Engineer’s concession why I could gladly have buried a wrench in his head, but this is part of the life and you learn a fine lesson in self-control with only an occasional lapse to the point where you give him an opinion on your true interest in them bartenders, for example.

Point? There ain’t no point. I told you already. Have another Corby’s Reserve and relax. It’s too late in the afternoon now to get any buyers interested in your line anyway. Especially with the Yuletide rush in full swing. Frank, let’s have a repeat here. Yeah, the same for both of us.

It just goes to show you the fine results of a lot of hot biscuits with gravy and a constant succession of candle salad. Why when this old cook come aboard we was at each other’s throats two or three times a week but before long that boat was like a long vacation at Camp Bide A Wee by the lake.

“I’ll take her,” says the Chief to me when he come in to relieve me, giving a burp of satisfaction. “Go on in and get your dinner. You ought to see what that crazy cook has dreamed up now.”

“Peach upside-down cake?” I says. “I seen him opening up the peaches at 3 P.M.”

’You got to see it to believe it,” he says. “He calls it Peach Surprise and it’s got whipped cream all over it. Did you check them valves?”

“No,” I says. “I was handling most of the watch, I never had time.”

This would have been a signal for a catalogue of my different types of ignorance a few weeks back, but all he says is, “OK, if I don’t get ‘em on this watch, see if you can get at it tomorrow,” he says. “Peach Surprise. Some tugboat.”

Christmas was only two days off and we was figuring on the layoff. I had a girl over in Aurora all set to meet the six o’clock P.M. bus Christmas Eve and from then on it was to be an old-fashioned Christmas at the Hotel and Christmas dinner at my folks’ house. When lo and behold on December the 24th at 2 P.M. we run onto something and took off the rudders and knocked a fluke clean off the wheel and there we were. So it was work for all hands and a bonus, but there was no joy in Mudville regardless as you can picture without taxing the imagination.

They sent a boat up to tow us down here to the slip, got two of the shore crew to quit trimming the tree, and Christmas Eve was spent raising the boat and cussing the company in Gaelic and any other languages available. I called up my girl and canceled the love feast and got some damn poor comments on my character for my trouble and after working all evening climbed into the sack cold and tired and sore and as full of Christmas cheer as an old shoe floating in the canal amongst the ice cakes. Christmas Day dawned miserable of course, but the cook had blueberry pancakes and plenty of hot coffee so we set to work feeling a little less ornery, but not wearing any big smiles either. Blueberry pancakes? Why that’s just hot cakes with a can of blueberries stirred into the batter. Sounds nuts don’t it?

We was about half done our repairs at noon and all mad as hops — cold, disgusted, and snarling at each other in the old familiar way.

We went in to eat, restraining the impulse to blow the whole works sixty feet in the air and get new jobs in the television field, but count on Charlie, that cook that liked to see people eat. Man he had turkey and the sauce and the stuffing and the giblet gravy and the roast potatoes and the squash and the hot mince pie and eight or ten gallons of good coffee and he even had cigars paid for out of his own pocket.

“This being a special occasion,” he says, “I made up a little beverage that is said to contain considerable good cheer,”and he passed out the old barrel tumblers and filled all around from a china water pitcher.

I don’t know what was in it but he called it Artillery Punch and good cheer predominated in it to such an extent that within an hour all hands was feeling like Sunday afternoon at the Elks picnic and any idea of finishing up on the damages to the rudders and wheel had fled to the snowy slopes of the Rocky Mountains. The Chief Engineer was telling anecdotes from his childhood down in Arkansaw and the deck hands was planning an expedition to the North Pole to pay old man Santa Claus their respects. The Captain and the cook was playing a duet on the mouth harp while your correspondent assisted with the vocals. The galley begun to look like New Year’s morn and with the cigar smoke and all you couldn’t cut it with a knife.

We had some party over that punch and of all the drinks I ever had that was without a doubt the most welcome.

At the height of the uproar the Port Engineer arrived all dressed up for the festive day just to check up on our progress and found the Chief Engineer under the galley table humming Christmas carols to himself while the Captain was roaring some verses of an old hymn called “Down In the Lehigh Valley.”

“What’s going on here?” he said.

“It’s all very simple,” I said. “All very simple to explain, Mr. Johnson. To put it in the simplest possible terms so even you can understand it, we have left off working on them heathen rudders and we have all got drunk. Pax vobiscum.”

Haven’t had a candle salad from that day to this. When I come to with a swell case of hot pipes the next morning the galley was all cleaned up neat as a pin but no Charlie. He was gone. And we never seen his shining face again aboard the mighty motor vessel Irene.

What was in that Artillery Punch? Damned if I know. But it wasn’t such a bad Christmas after all. I wish there was more cooks loose in the world like that Charlie. He was one for the congressional records, that boy.

OK. I don’t mind if I do.