Old Mr. Flood (8 page)

“Whichever it is,” said Mr. Flood. He turned to me and said, “Pull up a chair and fix yourself a drink. I got something I want to show you.” He took a photograph out of his wallet and handed it to me. It was a photograph of a horse, an old white sway-backed horse. “Look at it and pass it around,” he said. “I was going through some papers in my trunk the other day and came across it. Thought I’d
lost it years ago. It’s a snapshot of a horse named Sam. Sam was a highly unusual horse and I want to tell about him. He was owned by George Still, fellow that ran Still’s Oyster and Chop House. Still’s was on Third Avenue, between Seventeenth and Eighteenth, middle of the block, east side of the avenue. It opened in the eighteen-fifties—1853, I think it was—and it closed in 1922 because of prohibition, and it was the finest oyster house the country ever had. It was a hangout for rich old goaty high-living men—Tammany bosses and the like of that. Some of them could taste an oyster and examine the shell and tell you what bed it came out of; I’m pretty good at that myself. And it got crowds of out-of-towners, especially people from Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Norfolk, and New Orleans, the big oyster-eating cities. Mr. Still handled a wider variety of oysters than any restaurant or hotel in the world, before or since. He had them out of dozens of beds. From New Jersey he had Shrewsburys and Maurice River Coves. From Rhode Island he had Narragansetts and Wickfords. From Massachusetts he had Cotuits and Buzzards Bays and Cape Cods. From Virginia—they were
very fine—he had Chincoteagues and Lynnhavens and Pokomokes and Mobjacks and Horn Harbors and York Rivers and Hampton Bars and Rappahannocks. From Maryland he had Goose Creeks. From Delaware he had Bombay Hooks. From New York—the finest of all—he had Blue Points and Mattitucks and Saddle Rocks and Robbins Islands and Diamond Points and Fire Places and Montauks and Hog Necks and Millponds and Fire Island Salts and Rockaways and Shinnecocks. I love those good old oyster names. When I feel my age weighing me down, I recite them to myself and I feel better. Some of them don’t exist any more. The beds were ruined. Cities grew up nearby and the water went bad. But there was a time when you could buy them all in Still’s.”

“Oh, God, Hughie,” said Mrs. Treppel, “it
was
a wonderful place. I remember it well. It had a white marble bar for the half-shell trade, and there were barrels and barrels and barrels of oysters stood up behind this bar, and everything was nice and plain and solid—no piddling around, no music to frazzle your nerves, no French on the bill of fare; you got what you went for.”

“I remember Still’s, too,” said Mr. Bethea. “Biggest lobster I ever saw, I saw it in there. Weighed thirty-four pounds. Took two men to hold it. It was a hen lobster. It wasn’t much good—too coarse and stringy—but it was full of coral and tomalley and it scared the women and it was educational.”

“That’s right,” said Mr. Flood. “That’s the way it was.” He poured himself a drink. “In addition to the restaurant,” he continued, “Mr. Still did a wholesale oyster business in a triple-decked barge that was docked year in and year out at a pier at the foot of Pike Street, upriver from the fish market. The barge was his warehouse. In the old days all the wholesalers operated that way; they brought their stock in from the beds in schooners that’d come alongside the barges and unload. At the time I’m speaking of—in 1912—there were fourteen barges at Pike Street, all in a row and all painted as loud and bedizy and fancy-colored as possible, the same as gypsy wagons; that was the custom. George Still is dead, God rest him, but the business is there yet. His family runs it. It’s one of the biggest shellfish concerns in the city, and it’s right there in the old barge, head
office and all—George M. Still, Incorporated, Planters of Diamond Point Oysters. Still’s barge is the only one left, and it’s a pretty one. It’s painted green and yellow and it’s got scroll-saw work all over the front of it.

“Back in 1912, Mr. Still delivered his oysters to hotels and restaurants and groceries with horse-drawn drays. He owned nine horses and he thought a lot of them. Every summer he gave them two weeks off on a farm he had in New Jersey. One of those horses was Sam. Sam was the oldest. In fact, he was twenty-two years old, and that’s a ripe old advanced age for a horse. Sam was just about worn out. His head hung low, his eyes were sleepy and sad, and there wasn’t hardly any life in him at all. If some horseflies lit on him, he didn’t even have the energy to switch his tail and knock them off. He just poked along, making short hauls and waiting for the day to end. Mr. Still had made up his mind to retire Sam to New Jersey for good, but he was one of those that puts things off; tomorrow will do.

“Sam’s driver was a man named Woodrow and he was attached to Sam. Sam was noted for his good disposition, but one morning in October,
1912, Woodrow went to put the harness on Sam and Sam kicked at him. It was the first time that ever happened. Next morning Sam was worse. Every single time Woodrow got near, Sam kicked. He was so old and awkward he always missed, but he kept on trying; he did his best. Every day that passed, Sam got more free and easy. He’d rear back in the shafts and tangle up the strappings on his harness, and sometimes Woodrow would tell him to whoa and he’d keep right on going until he was good and damn ready to whoa. He got a mean look in his eye and he kept his head up and he walked faster and faster. He’d toss his head to and fro and dance along like a yearling. One day, all of a sudden, up on Sixth Avenue, he started running after a bay mare that was hauling a laundry wagon. It was all Woodrow could do to pull him up. And Sam kept on doing this. Every day or so he’d catch sight of a mare somewhere up ahead and he’d whinny and whicker and break into a fast trot and Woodrow would have to brace himself against the footboard and seesaw on the lines and curse and carry on to stop him. Sometimes a crowd would collect and cheer Sam on. Woodrow worried about
Sam, and so did Mr. Still, but they didn’t know what to do. They couldn’t figure him out.

“One of the places that Woodrow and Sam made a daily delivery was a chop house on Maiden Lane. Sam would stand at the curb and Woodrow would shoulder a barrel of oysters off the dray and roll it in. The cashier of this chop house was an old lady and every morning she’d step out to the curb and pat Sam’s nose and coo at him and give him sugar. She’d been doing it for years. She was one of those old ladies that just can’t leave horses alone. One morning she came out, cooing, and she put her hand out to pat Sam and Sam bit her. He bit her on the hand and he bit her on the wrist and he bit her on the arm. She was all skint up. As you might expect, a great deal of screeching took place. They sent for a doctor, but that didn’t quiet the old lady. According to Woodrow, she kept screeching she didn’t want a doctor, she wanted a lawyer.

“Woodrow led Sam back to the barge and broke the news to Mr. Still that he had a damage suit on his hands. Mr. Still called in a veterinarian to see could he find out what was the matter with Sam, what ailed the old fool. The veterinarian looked
Sam over and he punched and he thumped and he put his head against Sam’s belly and listened. He said he couldn’t find anything wrong except extreme old age. Then he happened to look into Sam’s feed bag, and what in hell and be damned was in there, mixed in with the oats, only some shucked oysters. They weren’t little nubby oysters; they were great big Mattitucks. And what’s more, Sam was eating them. He was eating them and enjoying them. The veterinarian stood there and he looked at Sam and he said, ‘Well, I be good God damned!’ He said he’d run into some odd and unusual horses in his practice but that Sam was certainly the first horse he’d run into that’d eat oysters.

“Mr. Still called his help together and inquired did anybody know who put the oysters in Sam’s feed bag. Finally one of the oyster shuckers confessed he did it. Said he just wanted to see what would happen. Said he’d been slipping them in for about a month. Said he’d go out on the pier, where Sam was hitched between hauls, and he’d make believe he was petting Sam, and he’d slip the oysters into Sam’s feed bag. Said he started with one oyster a day and worked up to where he was giving him
four and five dozen a day. Mr. Still was put out; at the same time, somehow, he was proud of Sam. He decided to fire the shucker and send Sam to hell and gone to New Jersey, but he changed his mind. What he did, he cut Sam down to one dozen oysters a day. That worked out all right. It wasn’t too few, it wasn’t too many. It was just enough to keep Sam brisk and frisky, but it wasn’t enough to make him cut up and do ugly. People would come from all over the market just to see Sam get his one dozen oysters. Everything was just fine until Christmas Eve. You know how it is on Christmas Eve; people get high-spirited. And you can just imagine how high-spirited they get around an oyster barge on Christmas Eve. When it came time to feed Sam, the fellows got generous and gave him six or seven dozen oysters, compliments of the season. And that night Woodrow was driving Sam back to the stable and Sam caught sight of a mare about three blocks up and he took out after her and there was ice on the street and he slipped and broke a leg and God knows they hated to do it, but they had to shoot him.”

A glint came into Mr. Bethea’s eyes. “Hugh,” he said, “I was just thinking. Suppose you took and fed
a race horse on oysters! I bet you could make a lot of money that way.”

Mr. Flood snickered. “Tom,” he said, “there’s a certain race horse on the New York tracks right now that’s an oyster eater. He’s owned by an oysterman here in the market, but the way I understand it, just to throw people off that might possibly get thoughts in their head, he’s registered in the name of a distant cousin of this oysterman’s wife. He’s not much of a horse—no looks, no style; he only cost eleven hundred dollars—but he wins every race they want him to win. They don’t let him win every race he runs; that’d look peculiar.”

I watched Mr. Flood’s face. It was impassive.

“They pick a day,” he continued, “and two days in advance they start feeding him raw oysters or raw clams, according to season. They experimented and found he runs about as fast on clams as he does on oysters. They give him five dozen the first day, eight dozen the second day, and one dozen the morning of the race. He always comes through; you just get a bet down and think no more about it. I don’t know how many are in on it. I do know that this oysterman and all his friends were rolling in
money. He was nice enough to let me and Birdy in on it. Whenever the horse is ready to run an oyster-fed race, we get notified, and naturally we’ve picked up a dollar or two ourselves.”

“Hugh Griffin Flood!” said Mrs. Treppel. “I’m shocked and surprised at you. You were told about that horse in the strictest confidence. It’s a highly confidential matter, and you know you shouldn’t talk about it. Suppose it gets out. They’ll be stuffing all the race horses full of oysters, and then where’ll we be?”

“I know, Birdy, I know,” said Mr. Flood. “I’m sorry. Anyhow, I didn’t tell the name of the horse.”

“You keep your big mouth shut from now on,” said Mrs. Treppel.

“Speaking of the old days,” said Mr. Bethea, “it seems to me businessmen were different in the old days. They had the milk of human kindness in them. Like George Still. Like the way he gave his dray horses a vacation.”

“It’s the truth, Tom,” said Mr. Flood. “They weren’t always and eternally thinking of the almighty dollar.”

“I was doing business in the old days,” said Mrs.
Treppel, “and that’s something I never noticed.”

“You always remember the bad, Birdy,” said Mr. Flood. “You never remember the good.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Mrs. Treppel. “Take for example, were you acquainted with A. C. Lowry that they called the finnan-haddie king?”

“I was,” said Mr. Flood. “Old Gus Lowry.” He nodded his head. “Gus was a fine man,” he said, “a fine man.”

“He was like hell,” said Mrs. Treppel. “He was the meanest man ever did business in this market. He was the lowest of the low.”

“He was,” said Mr. Flood, reversing his judgment without batting an eye. “He was indeed.”

“What form did his meanness take?” asked Mr. Bethea.

“Well, to begin with,” Mrs. Treppel said, “you couldn’t trust him. You couldn’t trust his weights or his invoices or the condition of his fish, not that that was so highly unusual down here and not that people necessarily looked down on him for that. After all, this isn’t the New York Stock Exchange, where everybody is upright and honest and trustworthy, or so I have been told—this is the Fulton
Fish Market. No, it wasn’t his crookedness, it was the way he conducted himself in general that turned people against him. He was stingy. He believed everybody was stealing from him. He treated his help in such a way they didn’t know if they were going or coming. And he grumbled about this and he complained about that from morning to night; everything he et disagreed with him. I worked for him once—he had a fresh-water branch on the Slip around 1916 and I had charge of it. I worked for him a year and a half and it aged me before my time; when I took that job I was just a girl and when I gave it up I was an old, old woman. Gus was into everything. He did a general salt-water business. He owned a trawler. He handled Staten Island oysters and guaranteed they came from Norfolk, Virginia. And he had the biggest smoking loft in the market—eels, haddies, kippers, and bloaters. He was an old bachelor. He had a nephew keeping books for him, Charlie Titus, his sister’s son, and everybody was sorry for Charlie. It was understood that Charlie was to inherit the business, and God knows it was a good sound business, but the beating he took, we wondered if it was
worth it. Charlie was real polite, Uncle this and Uncle that, but it didn’t do no good. Three or four times a year, at least, Gus would get it in his head that Charlie was falsifying the books. He’d see something in Charlie’s figures that didn’t look just right and it’d make him happy. ‘I’ve caught you now!’ he’d say. ‘I’ve caught you now!’ Then he’d grab the telephone and call in a firm of certified public accountants. Those damned C.P.A.s were in and out of the office all the time. They’d go over Charlie’s books and they’d try their best, but they couldn’t ever find anything wrong, and it’d make Gus so mad he’d put his head down on the desk and cry. ‘You low-down thief,’ he’d say to Charlie, ‘you’re stealing from me, and I know you are. You got some secret way of doing it. My own flesh and blood, and you’re stealing every cent I got.’ Charlie would say, ‘Now, Uncle Gus, that’s just not so,’ and Gus would say, ‘Shut up!’ And Charlie would shut up. I remember one morning Gus was having his coffee at the round table in Sweet’s, and there was a crowd of us sitting there, four or five fishmongers and some of the shellfish gang, and Charlie came running up the stairs and asked Gus a question
about a bill of lading, and Gus hauled off and shied a plate at him. ‘Get out of here, you embezzler!’ he said. ‘When I want you,’ he said, ‘I’ll send for you.’ Right before everybody.