The Pickle Barrel

I was sitting in a diner up near D.C. when I struck up a casual conversation with a young Irish Priest. He obviously hadn’t been around very long, he was full of questions about Maryland.
He asked me if I was a native Marylander. I told him that as far back as I could trace my family tree, that since the 1600’s all of my ancestry had been born in Maryland with the exception of my maternal great grandmother who had been born in County Clare Ireland and left for America as a young girl when they ran out of potatoes in the 1840’s.
His eyes lit up when I mentioned the old sod and then he began to question me about Maryland. I answered as many of his questions as I could and faked through the ones I didn’t know.
But when he started to ask about the eastern shore and far western Maryland I couldn’t fake it anymore. None of my ancestors were Eastern Shoremen or hillbillies.
Then he switched off to religion.
He asked me if I knew the way to heaven.
That was easy.
Just go straight down Md Rte 5, turn right at the halfway house, another right at Morganza, and that would put him on the straight road to heaven.
But, then I remembered, the Halfway House is no more. Razed to the ground and hauled away. Replaced by a WaWa. Sounds like a baby crying, and it’s enough to make a grown man cry.
The last home style, sit down and eat restaurant in the county, replaced by a lot of glass and glitter.
I don’t know what Billy Hill was thinking about. I watched him grow up, I knew his mother and father and all of his grandparents.
When WaWa flashed their millions on him he took the money and ran.
We didn’t have many restaurants back in the good old days but we had a county store on every corner. The proprietor would slice you off a few slices of bologna, you could grab a handful of crackers out the cracker barrel, a big rancid dill pickle from the pickle barrel and you were ready to eat and enjoy.
If your taste ran to cheese you could buy a wedge of the sharp, black rind cheese. It sat there for weeks at room temperature and got sharper and sharper.
For beverage you could buy a glass of sweet cider from the cider barrel, but you had to get there early. In a couple of weeks the sweet cider would ferment till the alcohol content would knock you flat. In a couple more weeks it would turn to vinegar and you could fill your jug with apple cider vine.
These city slickers who have moved here in the past few years are used to the sterile, plastic wrapped “food” they sell in WaWa & 7-11. They would puke if they had to eat in one of our good old country stores back in the good old days.
Three or four mangy fox hounds curled up under the wood stoves, unwashed farmers sitting around all chewing and spitting toward the ashbox (and usually not hitting it), sweaty farm hand (before invention of roll on deodorant) crowded around the counter.
No, general store eating was not for sissies. Bruce Long’s at Hillville, Hurry’s at Clements, Stephen Yate’s at Morganza, they were real stores.
My sixteenth summer I was rolling logs and stacking lumber at Mattingly Guy’s sawmill. It was bullwork. NO hydraulic lifts, no conveyors, nothing. You grabbed the big oak timbers and ran to the pile, and then ran back for another one.
You didn’t dare let the lumber back up, because you knew that Mr. Guy would just run the mill faster for spite. Mattingly Guy was a very head strong man, and when you saw him hitch his fedora down over his eyes and clench his cigar in his teeth you knew Mr. Guy was P----- Off.
He would rather tear up his mill than slow down the mill.
Anyway, that kind of labor would make a man hungry, especially a sixteen year old man who was perennially hungry anyway.
We would run out to Stephen Yate’s store for lunch.
Now, I’ve told you how raunchy those old stores were, and Yate’s store was the worst of the worst.
No ice for the meat, no ice for the beer.
You drank the beer at whatever temperature it came off the truck.
But they had good lagers back in the “good old days”. Senate, Gunther, Old German, they were real beers. Not like this Mcbeer they serve now-a-days. Budweiser? Coors? They have to serve them ice cold so you won’t taste how awful they are.
And best of all. Nobody carded you.
If you were doing a man’s work, and had 15 cents in your pocket, you got a man’s beverage.
You can’t roll logs on cocoa.
But the last straw that would make on of these latter day arrivals really puke were Mr. Yate’s old tom cat.
“Git off the scales, Goddammit cat, git of the scales, these men gotta eat”.
After the cat stretched and yawned Mr. Yates would slap you a half pound of bologna down on the scales. No deli paper, no saran wrap. He would snap a brown paper bag open in the air and drop your hairy lunch into the bag.
“Now git outta here. Next!”
But the best treat was getting one of those big Kosher dills or a pickled pig foot.
If you were there early, Mr. Yates would spear you pickle with a fork after he wiped it several times across his trousers for the sake of sanitation.
If you were one of the last customers at the pickle barrel or the pig foot barrel Mr. Yates would have to roll up the sleeve on his hairy arm and fish in the brine for your lunch. If after several fishes in the brine, and finding no pigs foot, he would have to find a hammer and knock the top out of a new keg. If you had time to wait you would get a nice new pickle from the top of the new barrel.
But usually your time would run out and Mr. Guy would be hollering, “Get in the goddamn truck, we ain’t gonna eat all day.”
Mr. Yates would be rummaging around looking for some tool to open the new barrel and you would have to go back to work with no pickle.
Pickles were an essential part of the diet for a young man stacking lumber in that 90 degree heat.
It kept you thirsty so that you could consume the gallons of water every day to replace sweat. When they came with the bulldozers and cleared off every acre of road front and built all of these Safeways, Super Freshs, Giants and Harvest Markets, we all asked “Who’s going to us all of these stores.”
We found out.
Nobody. They are all going bankrupt.
All closing. Hot Dog!
Maybe our old stores will come back.
Jimmy Hurry is still hanging on in Clements. The Architects could use Hurry’s store as a model of what a country store should be.
The county has all of these over paid sanitarians running around “protecting people’s health”. Cat hair baloney!!
We were healthier back in the “good old days”.
We had a football coach at Charlotte Hall, Jeff Heath. Mr. Heath liked to call his boys together in mid August for physical conditioning.
Charlotte Hall had a small enrollment and we had to play those big suburban schools with thousands of athletes to choose from.
At our little school every man-jack able to walk had to suit up on opening day.
When I didn’t respond to Mr. Heath’s letter he came looking for me.
He found me there at the sawmill, chest and shoulders swollen like Charles Atlas, biceps like superman, pigfoot grease dripping from my chin.
“Steve, I was going to chew you out for not showing up early for physical conditioning, but (he glanced at my sweat dripping 200 lb frame) just forget it. Be there opening day.”