The Pawnshop
Recollections of Shannon O’Day’s father
(1959, as told by Shannon O’Day to Otis Wilde Mather)
I wasn’t born yet, so it was Gus my brother who was ten-years my senior who was old enough and big enough to remember for it all to make sense. That is, it was Gus and Sally O’Day, my cousin, my father’s brother, Uncle Marty. They both—Sally and Gus were nine-years old at the time, both born the same year as one another. My mother, Ella, her sister Emma, married my father’s brother. But when Gus just called her Sally and dropped the cousin thing—he said it sounded too bonehead like, well, so did I when I got born, and was old enough to reason it out. We all lived in the same city, of St. Paul, at the time. Anyhow, I still hadn’t gotten born yet, so this is what Gus knew and Sally knew until I got born and big enough for them to tell me about it. And so when I say—we, I mean, all three of us, and the city of St. Paul to boot.
One day one fall, my father drove up an alley with Sally and Gus in the back seat, and some merchandise to sell at this here pawnshop. A friend of his owned it, down on Wabasha Street by the Lyceum Movie Theatre, across the street from the World Theatre. Hawk Gordon owned the shop, and drove this big yellow Cadillac of his. He kept the yellow beast for twenty years, I even remember it.
Gus saw through the back window of the pawnshop a man with red hair (Hawk Gordon), grease all over his hands and shirt and face, wiping his hands on an apron—Gus said he thought he was working on an old clock, a short kind of fellow, thin, unfriendly looking chap, with deep embed eyes, in square eye sockets, sunken deep into the pits of his tiny head, with a fat smashed-in nose, like a wino has with big pore holes in them, his hair sticking out everywhichway.
After that meeting, Gus and pa carried all those items he had in the trunk, and front seat, and back seat and on the floors, into the pawnshop, and mom and pa and Gus moved into the backroom, and six months later I was born.
“I give you six months and you’ll be drinking and drunk out on the street again,” Hawk Gordon told my pa.
That was the first fall, of 1899; the first time ma even had met Hawk Gordon. He was shrewd, and pa was working for nickels and dimes from him at the time, but I got born in a warm room, that’s about all I can say, he was a piece of work that’s for sure, if you know what I mean.
But all ready pa was spending his earnings on food and whiskey and gambling, he barely seen us boys, and mom did the required work at the pawnshop.
So pa didn’t know at the time he would go up to Alaska to work, he didn’t even know yet he would ever consider it seriously. But he did tell Gus, talked to Gus about it, said; “I’d like to go someday to Alaska.”
It was a nice thought to keep in mind, and to ponder on deeper, but with pa’s drinking and all, he was going to hell in a hand basket, quick. Mr. Gordon wasn’t all that wrong about pa; no flies on him.
He and Gus got to talking a lot, in those days, I suppose because pa only went to 8th grade in school, spent much of his younger years drinking and travelling, and Gus sounded smart, and told pa he was going to buy a farm, and he did buy a farm in years yet to come. Pa was born in 1874, so at this time he was all of twenty-six years old, but looked twenty-years older.
He, pa, started to sell vacuum cleaners on the side for awhile, he said he sold them before when he travelled, along with doing some swapping and trading, he was good at that.
Pa didn’t like the South, he told Gus many a-times, he said he hung around and played cards with some black folks, down in Huntsville, Alabama. And the white folk got wind of it, and told him to get his ass out of Alabama before they hung him, which would have been by the KKK, the next day, and so when the next day came, pa was gone. It was a poor Blackman’s farm house trifling farmers, and pa seemed to get along with them quite well.
I asked Gus “What made pa go to Alaska?”
“I don’t know,” Gus told me, “whatever it was, Sally’s father Paul went with him,” Paul Cotton. “I suppose they thought Alaska would be safer and a man could make lots of money. Or at least more than at Hawk Gordon’s pawnshop, and what they found in Alaska, the first winter was one horrid winter, and knew nothing about its environment, its wildlife.” Gus explained.
Between Gus and his thoughts, his talking to me was vague at best on pa, and Alaska—at first anyhow. Some hidden grief maybe, under his thin hair, and skin and hard skull bone, because when mom passed on and I moved in with Gus and his wife, to live until I went to War, the Great War, he got an official letter from the State of Alaska. And all that information about pa’s death was in that envelope, it took those official fellows, over ten-years to get him that information.
“Oh ay,” I remember saying, “let me in on the secret,” I told Gus as he chewed his fingernails wanted to open that envelope up, but not opening it up, because once he did, he’d know, and knowing he was dead for sure was worse than not knowing and thinking he was alive someplace in Alaska drinking away like he always did, laughing and poking jobs at things that were not funny, and slapping the behinds of pretty young waitresses.
Mother died, worked herself to death when I was thirteen or near thirteen, or perhaps I was fourteen, I rightly can’t remember now, it was that simple, it was that there was not enough of her to go around, just to small for any human female package to hold onto, so much life to deal with, too much of perhaps, doom, too much assortment in life.
I can’t say for sure, no gratitude from Gordon, just for her being his, off and on, mistress after pa was found dead, eaten up by hungry wolves, something Gus knew, but had no proof of until he got that envelope that one day from the State of Alaska. And Gordon being a male and ma in his space and time, and lonely and hurting, and trying to feed two boys, forever in a kind of despair, because she knew, and Gordon knew, there would never be enough of her of any one woman to hold onto grief, and no other men would ever do. That was what he discovered in time; Paul, he died of a heart attack that same year, in Alaska too, and mom of double-pneumonia.
Otis Wilde Mather:
“And that yellow Cadillac, what ever happened it Shannon?”
“Every year or so, someone wanted to buy it. It was a wild yellow, like a canary: when Hawk Gordon died, in around 1940, he put in his will to bury it with him. Well, his children got wind of that, and said ‘no dice,’ and sold it, Judge Finley said it was okay, after, one of the kids went into his back room in the courthouse and offered him 10% of whatever the auction would bring.
Written 2-28-2009 xx No: 409
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