(A Shannon O’Day Story)
For those who have read the ongoing stories of Shannon O’Day (in the author’s previous books), this here sketch, is how he came to become friends at Dickey’s Diner, which was hardly mentioned (somewhat of an interlude between the previous stories)…; also it is an overall sketch of many
parts of his life; conceivably you could call it a synopsis…
in addition the reader will get a new happening
thus far untold of Shannon’s working days
at the foundry (in part two
of these two sketches)
(Part one, is an overview; part two, is a new sketch)
Part One of Two
Narrated by: Clayton Claymore Sycamore
((Observer at Dickey’s Diner, partisan and Journalist for a local periodical) (1968))
Mr. Sycamore is sitting at the diner counter talking to folks to his right and left, and a new cook, an assistant to Old Josh…Clayton is also talking to him, as he is cooking their food, as is a waitress nearby listening as she stands ready to serve them once the young cook puts the food on a plates, as Clayton C. Sycamore tells the life, and times or what he knows about them of Shannon O’Day, who had did a year earlier…
So when we first saw Shannon O’Day walking into the diner giving off that rough, independent, worn solidarity look, impression as if in another minute our flesh itself would burn off through our garments—looking more cleaver than a cobra, or even the devil himself—in some kind of disorderly-haste, he—O’Day—didn’t even pay no mind to us, not one iota, folks staring at him, it seemed to us we were watching fate of which both he and us in the diner were meat to meet, and perchance be future victims. It was our first time we laid eyes on each other. We didn’t need to, and I suppose for some of us, we didn’t want to. We assumed of course he was an unregenerate, he’d simply slip out of the diner after he ate, the same way he appeared to have slipped in—but we were not sure of that either. By some devious charm or method he got to know us all quite well—as if he had laid in ambush, just to get to know us, find a new hangout, because more than just he had won, been excepted, thus our new decade, was set. But not solely with him, on the contrary, we were all closer to each other (or in time would be, because of him).
We didn’t ask how it came about, we simple were all allies—in due time that is, his confidents, you could say. Our whole diner (Dickey’s Diner, here in St. Paul, Minnesota) was accessory to that drunk and cuckold—all though we had no proof he was a husband of an unfaithful wife (gossip perhaps feeds the imagination to no bounds, and in our case it did), he simply was never home much, so we assumed so. He was amicable with us; that is, when he was not under the influence of alcohol (though it was hard for us to decipher, he drank from sunrise to sunset).
We were not against Mrs. O’Day, we didn’t even know her, and it was perhaps we had not yet read, or even seen the whole picture. We were never in favor of infidelity, wrongdoing: we simply liked Shannon O’Day and heard about his wife (although I think he had three in sum total, this was his first wife I’m talking about), you see, they drank a lot in the cornfields together, then one summer morning, before he woke up in those cornfields, she had already up and left him, just like that, for what most of us called ‘ordained fate.’ Luckily, the diner didn’t supply their battleground (but for all intent and purposes, there was no battle, as I said, she just up and left, just like that; one morning there simply was no more of her).
Even Mr. Ingway (who works for the foundry, a friend of Shannon’s and who ate here at the diner), and old Josh, the night cook at the diner now, and even that young lad who sings those Ricky Nelson songs at night here in the diner, who sits in the back in the corner, we all said to the rest of the folks here at the diner—in one way or another back then, ‘This diner isn’t that big. Shannon he’ll come back he just went to Erie to get a breath of fresh air. He doesn’t want to stay there, what for, nothing there worth staying for…!”
Then we learned he was back in town.
Shannon got a job at the foundry a while back, for a while, and somewhere along the line, he made friends with that negro from down south, I think Ozark, Alabama, his brother Gus, never took a liking for him, said once, “That damn nigger burned my cornfields…!” but Shannon whispered to Josh on one occasion, “It Aint so, he’s got it all wrong, but I can’t tell you the truth, so don’t be judging the wrong man for the wrong crime!”
But he never was all that serious about anything after he came back from the war, the Great War —I hear tell—, he was a hero of sorts, that’s when his drinking went from moderate to chronic. Never very serious, not any connections between his loves, life and long friends, only liberty to do as he wanted to do, when he wanted to do it.
I don’t suppose even he knew where his life would end up, where he was headed. He retired before he even began any long term employment. And then he died in those cornfields he so adored—in his late 60s, out by his brother’s farm, after his brother had died a decade earlier. He even talked to us as those cornfields being a most pleasant idea for drinking and conversation.
“Why not?” He’d say to us.
But he’d stay out all night drinking, until he passed out in those cornfields, and we all had regular jobs.
A Third Person Narration
Part Two of Two
At the Diner Counter
Said the partisan to the left side of Clayton Claymore Sycamore, Henry Aldrich, sitting at the diner counter:
“Tell us something nobody knows, I heard about this guy and that’s kind of old news?”
“That’s what…” said Clayton?
“Sir,” he said, “old news.”
“Why not!” said Clayton, looking about the diner to see if any old timers, partisans new Shannon well, were around—not wanting to start trouble, or alleged gossip.
At first he laughed, then he looked at the young cook, he was just finishing up frying his hamburger.
“At the foundry, where Shannon worked a short while, he was the low last man in the hierarchy, and he was drinking a lot in those days, and he was not happy with his second marriage, marriage, sentimentalized by a few as a hero of lost gallantry, now lost and irrevocable tragedy, if not misfortune. This all lead to what he’d do, and no one but a few would find out.”
“Here’s your hamburger sir,” said the young cook, whipping his hands on his apron, ready to mix some pancake blend, said, “I think I heard that story too.”
“He,” Mr. Sycamore said, “he hid the iron, and copper and brass all right, where no one could find it. Not even Ingway could find it. Because it wasn’t where he thought Shannon put it, said he had put it, because after Shannon told Ingway he took it, he shortly after that, was accused of taking it, Ingway had told the foreman, but Shannon had already moved it, denied it; because Shannon was no match for wasting time when it came to certain things, and he wanted drinking money.”
And Ingway said to Shannon, “What did you do with it?”
That was when Ingway let it go…,” because Shannon said he sold it, but he didn’t, not yet anyhow.
“You,” said Ingway to Shannon, “made me look stupid in front of my boss!”
“I hope so,” he remarked.
It was nearing twilight, when he got off for a break, carrying his lunch pail to make it look proper, he sat near the shower room eating, because Ingway saw him. Well, Shannon told me, “Me and that old Indian, called Cochise, for short, not sure what his real name was, we threw it out the back window by the shower, and picked it up after our shift, no one being the wiser. And we went that evening, he and I out to my brother’s cornfields, and drank the weekend away.”
Though by the time it got dark, and there was no light to the side of the shower room, outside, so it was dark enough for somebody, I suppose anybody to walk about and take the items thrown out the window, put into three or four sacks, and sell the next morning at the junkyard, but he even had that figured out, he called Jefferson Thomas, the owner of the junkyard off Mississippi Street, to keep the place open, and they weighed the items, and he had brought near a half ton of iron, brass and copper to him.
No: 482 (September 30, 2009) •• Part one of Two “The Diner”
No: 483 (October, 1, 200) • • Part Two of Two “At the Diner Counter”
