Severance

By A. Everette James

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 14, 2003
• ISBN: 9781469113784

A. Everette James

Author’s Profile for Deep Fried Southern Tales Everette James grew up in rural Eastern North Carolina. His family was tobacco farmers, warehousemen, and owned a small tobacco “redrying” plant. Dr. James is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke Medical School. He did his residency at Harvard, attended Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and taught in medical schools for thirty years. Moving back to rural North Carolina he changed from writing medical texts to nonmedical fiction and nonfiction. Dr. James has produced three novels, two texts of nonfiction and a book of short stories. This short story compilation is a result of observation and experiencing the culture of the rural South.

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Severance

A. Everette James Jr.

Copyright © 2003 by A. Everette James Jr..

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or

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and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the

copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents

either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used

fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or

dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Contents

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

This novel is dedicated to the

family household of my youth.

Growing up in a home filled with five adults and no modifying siblings provided some of the inspiration for this novel.

At best they taught me the value of all people and at worst they held to certain ideas about ancestor reverance that explained behaviors that I was convinced were never genetic in origin. I only wish they were here to critique this work.

CHAPTER 1

Stonewall Barnhill Roebuck, Jr. was self entombed in his dilapidated Victorian on Millionaire’s Corner and was the source of the few legends and mysteries that still existed in the sleepy town of Severance. Lil Stoney’s life had been a metaphor of this small agrarian village located in the Coastal Plain of Eastern North Carolina. Severance conceived at the end of Reconstruction was buoyed by the expanding American industrial dream following the turn of the century. The town had spawned its initial generation of heroes and legends during the First World War and its martyrs from the flu epidemic in the late teens. Its past had been more glorious than its future. The Chief turned to his deputy and said, I think this family was tainted by all that stuff that happened. When I was a kid, Stoney’s daddy had it all his way.

When they laid the railroad in the first decade of the 20th century and organized a tobacco market where the local farmers could bring in their money crop to auction, these events created widespread enthusiasm about financial growth. This was evidenced by the formation of the Bank of Severance and symbolized by construction of an architecturally important building just for it on the corner of Main and Railroad. It was not just the fathers and husbands.

Serious about following the Lord from decades of reading, believing, and adhering to the Word, the women of Severance erected a proper church with a steeple and working shutters. They used their physical and fiscal leverage to convince the male elders that this edifice was a monument to their faith and not merely their pride and their impressive steeple not the modern equivalent of the Tower of Babel.

From the church opening forward, the women of Severance took on an entirely different posture in the eyes of their fathers, uncles, and boy children. They still confined their public endeavors to the Bronte Book Club, the Roanoke County Historical Society, the beloved and often maligned Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and the Lottie Moon Circle; but in the confines of the home, their voices now carried weight and the menfolk showed great respect for their opinions. After all, if that bunch of women could erect a building that was beautiful enough to represent an affront to the mighty hard shell Baptist Convention which controlled the flatlands and scrub pines of the Coastal Plain, they were a force to be reckoned with.

Just so long as the meals were prepared for the individual tastes of the male members and the cook and servants seemed happy and properly subservient, there was little harm in any of the activities the ladies were up to. These men were very certain that Longfellow and Thoreau were not as important in the scheme of things as Gentleman Jim Corbett or even Shoeless Joe Jackson; and if the ladies wanted to insert a little Jane Eyre or Emily Dickinson in the 3R’s, it was probably alright as long as they stayed clear of Harriett Beecher Stowe. All of this was superfluous because none of it was necessary to work a furrow or to figure the potential of the new National Cash Register they had acquired at Taylor’s Mercantile. The only history you needed to know as a teller at the Bank of Severance was the relation of Andy Jackson’s portrait to his worth declared by the United States Office of the Treasury. That didn’t require a complete knowledge of the importance of the Battle of New Orleans after the Frogs had signed off on the whole thing.

The men did want the little boys to know that Old Hickory shot the fellow that spoke ill of his wife ‘cause that is what any honorable man in long britches should do and that didn’t keep him from getting to be the President. Jackson was a particular favorite of the men of Severance. He was a man of action, broke the mold that the more enlightened states of Massachusetts and Virginia had on the First Office, and demonstrated that if a candidate’s flaws were manly, he could get elected to the highest post of the land. The fact that many believed North Carolina had a legitimate historic right to claim him as a native son made Jackson an even more genuine hero in the hearts of Severance men.

Severance in the years following the war survived the flu epidemic and later the first stock market crash of the teens, gathered momentum in the 1920s, and developed a true sense of small town pride. The people of Severance participated only peripherally in the financial euphoria of the 1920s but built solidly on the institutions that were set in place there after the turn of the century. Gradually the net worth of many of the citizens became such that they had the time and opportunity to consider how individual resources and collective assets might move the entire community forward. This same reasoning was employed whether it was the formation of a local baseball league or the erection of two hotels beside the railroad to accommodate businessmen and other travelers that might be in Severance for reasons that would benefit the local economy. These activities allowed the ladies to expand their purview of the Garden Club to the beautification of common lands and to open up Town Park poetry reading and small concerts to the general public.

Everyone contributed to the holdings of the public library which they formed over the objection of a group of men who felt this might evolve into a gathering place where the young people could be exposed to some of the Red vile that got all that trouble started over in Russia or spawn a group reading of the Marquis de Sade. What they really objected to was the womenfolk had not offered them censorship of the proffered tomes that were being contributed daily.

There was a very practical reason the distaff side of the Literary Guild had not incorporated this into their plan; the men had not ever read most of the material and the ladies knew they would reject those offerings out of hand. This, of course, bespoke of their realization of the existence of a tragic but powerful flaw, masculine insecurity in the face of anything unknown or outside their personal experience. For centuries, the stronger sex had been covering this up with obstinance and bravado, while the weaker sex had been obviating any confrontation with the use of guile and diplomacy. Thus, Beatrice Potter, Charlotte Bronte, Jane Austin, and the maligned Harriett Beecher Stowe occupied the shelves along with Emerson, Mary Chestnut, and Longfellow.

Even with the hotel the women had their say. They had the effrontery to suggest to their fathers, husbands, and uncles that the hotels might adopt a strict gender policy regarding the acceptance of guests. They recommended that the single female or couples without proof of the legitimate bonding be deemed inappropriate. The women introduced this concept in a most skillful manner by having a community project to select an appropriate name for the town hotels and at the same time they inserted their ideas on acceptable policies of operation.

A considerable number of the men suspected that this was not just a female ploy but some type of plot by the women to arrest the governance for their project; but just as Adam, who must have believed that the sample of Red Delicious was not the only implication, they looked at the alternative and took a healthy bite. They simply couldn’t divine the intent of their wives, sisters, nieces, and aunts. Many of these women had either seen them buck-naked as little boys or viewed them unswathed at some later time.

These monuments to the progress and promise of Severance became known as the Lodge and the Sir Walter named in honor of the financier of the initial building project of the State of North Carolina. Interestingly, the men of the town who had borrowed their own money from the Bank of Severance to construct the two hostelries soon realized they knew nothing of the operational mechanics of the business. Even such mundane activities as keeping the bathrooms presentable were far beyond their personal managerial skills. This shortcoming, of course, was not lost upon their wives who seized the opportunity to become tacit partners and to also demonstrate to their daughters and nieces the growing realization of the value of women. The fact that this coincided chronologically with the success of the Women’s Suffrage Movement made it all the more meaningful.

The two hotels were strategically located adjacent to the Bank of Severance which was the only three-story building in the whole of Roanoke County and had a marble exterior column at the entrance on Main and Railroad with interior marble flooring as well. The general public had to imagine what the appurtenances were on the second and third floors because they were reserved for the officers and Board of Directors. One might also guess that auditors, examiners, and those representing the Internal Revenue Service might also be granted the privilege of entering Severance’s sanctum sanctorum.

They had built an outside entrance to the stairway leading to the upper two floors, obviating the necessity of entering through the bank itself. While there was mild paranoid speculation about this arrangement, observation and even scrutiny by the most suspicious had failed to uncover any sinister motive or evil activity. No suspect flow of human traffic between the two hotels and the back entrance of the Bank of Severance was ever reported; and, thus, the true reason for this structural design was never known until the building was reconfigured in the 1930s. It had only briefly functioned as a bank and even then decades later the explanation for this arrangement was not totally complete.

The town of Severance spent most of the 1920s establishing itself as a commercial and agricultural oasis surrounded by small independent farms producing rows and fields of the money crop of tobacco and some cotton as well. Roanoke County was blessed with a granular soil that, if one exercised a modicum of responsibility with proper plowing and crop rotation, could yield a profitable harvest. The result was leaf-filled stalks to make smoking tobacco which was sold all over the world, as well as large bolls of alabaster white, soft cotton fibers converted to textile goods that had as widespread distribution as the tobacco products. This is not to imply, however, that it gave the farmer, laborer, merchant, or banker of Roanoke County or Severance a hint of global perspective. They were almost entirely focused on their personal lives and the microeconomics of their endeavors. This created a social order, that while never articulated, was understood at some level and respected by all. The farmer who owned the land saw it in functional terms. Annually, he would borrow the money to finance his enterprise. The funds were necessary for the purchase of farm animals, fertilizer, to pay his laborers, and feed and clothe his family. This debt would await the sale of the harvest and the opportunity to momentarily square these debts. Hopefully, there would be a meager amount of money left for discretionary purposes, but often there was not. The expression land poor was, indeed, accurate.

In those years when catastrophes such as a hail storm or fire during curing in the tobacco barn or too little rain or boll weevil (often misnamed boil weasel) struck, not only was there no extra money, but a bridging loan might be required adding to the marginality of the farmer’s existence. However harsh these conditions might seem, they had generally positive implications. These farm operations were family endeavors in which everyone had a role and an identity. The task at hand was not only understood by every member but their expected contribution was apparent to all, not negotiable, and universally accepted because of its primary place in the natural order of their lives. The men tended the fields, with the help of the male children, and cared for the livestock while the women kept the house in order and prepared the food with the assistance of their girls. Girls moved into womanhood by a series of physiological changes and graduated activities assisted in the later progress by the advice and counsel of their mothers, aunts, grandmothers, and older female siblings.

The boys emulated their fathers, uncles, and older brothers. For the males, there seemed to be much less verbal interchange and their progress to the achievement of full malehood was mainly observation and mimicry. In some areas, this was indeed unfortunate as the breeding of farm animals often proved too simplistic and brutal to enhance an otherwise successful bonding with the opposite sex. The carryover of these unstructured observations into a marital relationship often produced a chronically unrewarding union.

The laborer in this rural, bucolic environment was usually black. They might be hired only in times of harvest on a daily wage for what was usual and customary, for there were no unions or any activity of collective bargaining, and no alternatives of employment as well. This was, indeed, manual labor or with assistance in some activities by the farm animals.

The alternative to the hired hand was the tenant farmer who lived with his family, often an extended one, in a small, usually inadequate dwelling on the farm. The entire family of the tenant would have as his responsibility his contribution to the general welfare of the farmer and his family, by the raising and harvesting of the crop. The role of each member of the tenant’s family was a product of evolutionary decisions born by experience and the realization of the continuum of that individual’s capabilities at the time. Older children could pick cotton long before they could break tobacco. One activity was relatively mindless and not performed in a regularized succession while the other required decisional responsibility in selecting a lug from a leaf or a tip each at a different location on the stalk.

In the process of bringing the golden leaf, literally and figuratively, to market the boys might move from trucker to breaker while the girls would graduate from looper and tier to grader. The women at the end of the day would hand their sticks laden with tied green, sap-filled leaves to the men standing on the rafters to load the barn for curing. The girls could not aspire to place themselves above the curing pots because this was defined as man’s work. Grading was a time in which the girl children were a captive audience and the women could impart to them a vast fund of knowledge on such subjects as men, marriage, and manners.

Irrespective of whether the laborer was a hired hand or a tenant, the compensation was roughly equivalent and the graduated wage scale was based upon the task performed. The breakers received the most, the truckers who had to be skilled enough to handle the mules pulling the wheeled wagon or sleds with runner were the next on the pay scale; and the handers and tiers, who were almost exclusively women or very young males, the lowest paid. Tenant farmers and hired laborers also understood the rules of conduct which were a product of traditional laws, but were later described by what the Southern whites believed to be liberal newspapermen and authors of the same persuasion as Jim Crow. The laborer’s personal experience with that particular farmer family was important as well. Loyalty, especially in the face of mutual adversity, was the most revered virtue in rural Eastern North Carolina.

Life was physically hard on the farm. To a certain extent the economic uncertainty was shared by all. While the laborers were underpaid and led a life in the ongoing edge of poverty, the blacks were severely discriminated against by the Jim Crow laws, but there was a degree of acceptance that represented the traditional mindset of those times. Hardship and frustration seemed a mutual burden between the employer and those he hired. Everyone believed that there were no alternatives to this arrangement that could be reasonably considered. Neither the laborer nor the farmer had the prerequisite education, skills, or funds to significantly alter their circumstances so in Roanoke County the creed was that’s how it is and just make the best of it.

The black man and his white employer could feel the same degree of despair as they looked at the cavernous orifices in the leaves of their tobacco by destruction rested upon them by a 10-minute hail storm. While implications upon their future might be disproportionate, it was a mutual state of less for both. The laborer had already begun the farm year in a more disadvantaged position. Their grief was a shared experience and in its perverse way a bonding one at that.

The merchants and financiers of Severance also shared their fate with the farmers and laborers of Roanoke County. They were perceived as controlling the system but somewhere in their collective mind, everyone realized in the long haul they were in this struggle together. Their identification with the land was indirect, but it represented the reality of every small agrarian community of the Coastal Plain of North Carolina.

There were no beaches or historic houses to provide the core resources to attract vacationers, no place of higher learning was nearby, and the climate and scenery were neither convivial or quaint or awe-inspiring. They didn’t even have a beautician’s school or a proper town hall; the most architecturally significant building after the Bank of Severance was the Davis Building, better known as the Buggy Shop where a carriage maker had plied his trade for a time. There was not going to be any real estate windfall so the fortunes of the merchant class was inexorably linked to the farmers who were also their fellow parishioners and personal friends. When your clientele are so few and you succeed and suffer together, neighbors become like an extended family, and your codependency becomes a system of bonding that is well defined and pleasant in its predictability.

Some of the merchant class had been off to school; but in almost every instance, it didn’t take for the males and ended in the local classroom as teachers for the girls. Teachers had an in-between social status as they were certainly the recipients of better formal schooling than the general populus but, in fact, might be compensated less than a hired hand and the same could be said of the men of the cloth. The exception being the hard-shell or Primitive Baptist ministers who had no educational requirements for ordination but were called. This was often reflected in their fiery sermons where their lack of content was offset by rhetoric and volume. After a two-hour sermon describing sin, including the original, in detail and covering a number of their own, the congregation felt the weight of the Word upon them in a very personal way.

The Word had a different effect and duration based on gender. For the women, it lasted until the next sermon on the grounds; but for the most resolute male sinners of Severance, its half-life was less than that of the deviled eggs and fried chicken they consumed following the preacher’s last admonishment. The little boys who had survived the hard splinter-laden, grain-painted pews or the Miss Muffits who had endured the honor and horror of having their feet washed by the parson soon forgot all of it and were alternatively trying to attract and repel the boys using techniques as old as the Word itself.

Severance in the 1920s and 1930s was a work in progress itself with everyone having a role, identity, and even some general idea that this was just a large social jigsaw puzzle with larger and smaller pieces and the edges of some were not at all well delineated and a bit more difficult to fit to achieve a broad picture. The only defined streets were Main and Railroad and they were composed of the sandy soil of the Coastal Plain that retained the ruts and furrows from the buggies and wagons. There were few automobiles and they became almost invisible during the Depression. No proper hitching posts for horse and buggy were located on Main Street so folks sort of alighted from the conveyances, conducted their business promptly, and were soon back on their way.

If the business at hand was expected to take some time, they parked their buggies in several grassy patches or vacant lots on Main Street or behind the buildings. Since almost all the commerce taking place in Severance was conducted on Main Street except for that in the cavernous train depot and the two hotels on Railroad, respectful citizens did not leave their animals very long, not for fear of theft but because they might obstruct the path of their neighbor. Additionally, they might not wish to have speculation as to why they were in whatever establishment so long. This practice had its origins in both courtesy and secrecy; traits that were pervasive in a small Southern town like Severance.

The one person whose buggy was clearly identifiable and was literally his signature item was the town’s only physician, Dr. Wardlaw. Everett Wardlaw was literally conceived as a doctor, treated as if he were an embryonic surgeon through his entire childhood, schooled and protected by his mother and widowed aunt up to the moment he simultaneously entered the state university and acquired his first pair of long britches at the tender age of 15.

Legend had it that his grandfather had been a surgeon for Joseph E. Johnston and was personally responsible for returning so many Graycoats to combat that they stopped Mr. William Tecumseh Sherman in his tracks at Bentonville. This feat covered three days despite the fact the Rebs were outnumbered three to one. Most of the Severance men said that was a DAR fabrication and the grandfather had actually been Nathan Bedford Forrest’s physician. The women never would own up to that one because after the war Forrest got duped into being the head of the Knights of the White Camellia which later was redefined as the Klan. While the KKK were still roaming around the lower South, and the southern counties of North Carolina, for that matter, the women of Severance considered themselves enlightened and were incapable of assimilating Nathan Bedford Forrest into any Severance lore, however remote.

While Everett Wardlaw’s granddaddy’s career might be in dispute, all the old-timers remembered his father who practiced in Severance for 30 years and died in his buckboard on a house call at age 53. Like a good Southern Baptist doctor’s son, Everett Wardlaw Jr. had matriculated to the little country town of Wake Forest where he overcame his primary education from Roanoke County Public School to complete his premedical work, laced with an extraordinary dose of required biblical history, he did not need and certainly did not want. Everett Wardlaw held private aspirations of matriculation to Johns Hopkins to study at the feet of Halstead and Osler but had failed to translate these lofty ambitions into his classroom performance at Wake Forest. While he was more than competitive, his performance was not stellar and Everett enrolled in medical school in Augusta at the University of Georgia. This was a Southern school with a long historical tradition of success in training young doctors for practice in rural communities; an excellent fit for Everett’s long-term intentions and those of his family. Upon completing school in Augusta which would have qualified him for general practice in his home state, he moved to Richmond to receive an additional year in surgery.

This year changed the life of Everett Wardlaw Jr. in a number of ways. When he returned to Severance, he continued the family legacy of the Wardlaw practice of medicine, but he brought surgical skills not offered by his father and not present in any of the surrounding communities. This greatly enhanced his status as a physician and that of the entire town of Severance as well. Almost as much as the Bank, the train depot, and two hotels, the medical opportunities embodied in Everett Wardlaw differentiated Severance from the adjacent farm communities. He was as much a source of community pride as if he had been a Thomas Edison or a Ty Cobb.

In the days prior to antibiotics and other effective medical therapies, it was often said, and was partly true, a chance to cut is a chance to cure. Surgical removal of infection or offending body tissue was indeed the most definitive and efficacious therapy existent at that time. Dr. Wardlaw’s skills in this arena elevated him far above the stature of a simple general practitioner. He was spoken of as the surgeon and his fellow practitioners in adjacent communities were as willing to refer critical cases to him as he was to receive them. As a consequence he was also exempt from any church, Masonic, or civic function he elected not to attend—and they were numerous. He had friends but he was thought of as self contained. His father had been more gregarious and met most of his social obligations.

Everett Wardlaw Sr. was faithful to one organization, the Roanoke Rod and Gun, that bastion of male brotherhood located on the bluffs of Currituck Creek as it widens into the Flat Swamp. The women of Severance had long held individual suspicions about the goings on of this band of overgrown boys as they characterized them. They suspected their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons were bound by the level of their imagined testosterone, but these concerns by the women had never been voiced enough to support any inquiry. Probable cause had almost been broached once; during an outside fish fry. There was the misidentification and use of a box of shells by an inebriated member thinking it was an empty produce crate used for kindling. Despite the resemblance of the ignited shells to the firepower imposed during Pickett’s charge, none of the esteemed members of the Rod and Gun were even grazed.

On another occasion the Town Council Chair, better known in his vocation as the local distiller, had been imbibing in an abundance of his own product and upon passing out, fell into the fire. However, Dr. Wardlaw convinced the others that the injuries were inexplicably localized and that the self-induced anesthesia rendered the consideration of pain moot; for at least several hours. Continuing on with the festivities, the members of the Rod and Gun failed to recognize the departure of Dr. Wardlaw with his patient who by then was only slightly self-anesthetized.

Thus, the attraction to and the activities of the Roanoke Rod and Gun Club remained unknown to all except the members, who had no intention whatsoever in revealing anything to their respective wives, and confessionals at any level were not part of the practices of any Southern religious group from the affluent Frozen Chosen to the Tent Rollers.

It wasn’t that any of their activities were illegal, immoral, or even antisocial; they were private and, according to the male code of Eastern North Carolina, not to be spoken about and especially not divulged to anyone who was not a member of the brotherhood. The private activities of the Rod and Gun were even more private than the rituals of the Masons, another refuge of hirsute mentality. Brother Masons made up stories like the initiates riding billy goats as part of the ritual but nothing was ever revealed about the true initiation rites to masonry or the qualifications for membership in the Rod and Gun. They didn’t have any trappings or ritual paraphernalia. The membership was diverse from the esteemed Dr. Wardlaw to the affluent Linwood Carson Robinson, partner in the cotton gin and the slaughterhouse, to Leroy Thigpen. Thigpen’s claim to fame was Miss Ester, who wasn’t his wife but the regional champion Bob White retriever. Leroy got so excited after their victory in the Roanoke County Field Trials, he took Miss Ester down to Pinehurst for the Big Southern but did not enter her because he failed to grasp the meaning of partridge on the event roster and his buddies from Rod and Gun were too protective to inform him of his tragic oversight born of ignorance.

There was truly a protective code of conduct exercised without regard to station among the membership. That fact was symbolized by two brothers who had not spoken in a decade following the disputed sale of a family farm. They were rumored to bunk together at the Roanoke Rod and Gun. Obviously, this fellowship of convenience was never confirmed because it, as all others at the RR and G, was simply a private matter. Other than this, the two siblings never communicated except through their respective wives who were truly the best of friends and co-chairs of the First Baptist Church altar guild. One could only imagine what the annual family Christmas repast must have been like with the two brothers requesting a second helping of boiled okra through two women interpreters who must have accepted this arrangement with as much enthusiasm as they did childbirth. This type of male idiosyncracy in Severance was tolerated. Had two women evidenced such comparable behavior, the minister and Dr. Wardlaw would have had them trucked off to Dorothea Dix Hospital at the State Capitol, derisively referred to as Dix Hill.

Despite the perturbations of human behavior and somewhat unconventional societal arrangements, the commerce of Severance prospered in the mid-1920s and even the early 1930s when the rest of America was roiling through the Great Depression. The rural South and the agrarian plain of Eastern North Carolina was subtly affected by this national phenomenon; but for a variety of reasons, the change in lifestyle was not as great as in the Northern urban environments and other more industrialized areas of America. The singular difference in this area of the world from the rest of America was their relationship to the land.

Land, while fundamental to everyone’s existence, had never been treated purely as a commodity in this part of the South. Devaluation of the land did not affect the lifestyle of the farmer so much as the decline in income and the value of monetary instruments did to the city dweller. The farmer had already experienced or had more than one brush with poverty due to the vagaries of nature and knew something about scaling back their already simple but efficient lifestyle. These tillers of the soil were not entirely independent operatives but were afforded a freedom of behavior not enjoyed by the factory worker or even the executive in a business that failed. The land never terminated their employ; it just made it less profitable.

In Severance and Roanoke County, shirts that had been previously purchased from the mercantile store could be fashioned from feed and flour sacks. Much of the food consumed could be produced on the same plot of land that tobacco and