CHARLEY SOARES: Ghosts of the North End village

He always looked like he just rolled out of bed. His thin, wispy grey hair was tousled and the expression on his face along with the Scotch tape patchwork repair to his eyeglasses made him look like an auditor who had just discovered a million-dollar deficit. He awakened early, worked all day and read deep into the midnight hours. Old Jack was a few months shy of a fourth-grade education, leaving school at the ripe old age 14 to carry lunches to a local textile mill until a promised job as a sweeper came open. What the old timer lacked in formal education, he made up in street smarts and a desire to acquire knowledge about everything he found to be interesting.

At the time of the Great Depression, his efforts turned from trying to put a few dollars away for the future to surviving and he did everything necessary to put food on his table and keeping a roof over his head. During the depression, he developed a survival mindset that he adhered to for the remainder of his life. He and his wife were never blessed with children but he kept two old beagles he bred from very good stock who, like their master, were well on in years. Our friendship began in a peculiar fashion, explained here in the past, but once you were a friend of Jack, you were his friend for life. I learned a great deal about the depression and fishing and hunting for the table from that old man who could have survived if he had been born in the 1800s.

His legs were failing him, but when the tautog were in he headed for the Brightman Street Bridge and his favorite spot directly over the second pier on the down tide side of the granite abutment where the big white chinners, with their chiseled teeth, pried mussels and barnacles off the face of those rocky surfaces. Jack’s wife baked and stuffed most of those tautog like you would a Thanksgiving turkey, but I preferred them baked with the stuffing on top which is what she served my family when we were invited there for dinner. Jack had many reasons to be depressed with old age, and failing health, but one thing that really bothered him was not being able to hunt or exercise his two beagles. I knew those dogs were excellent hunters, not just by Jack’s account but from the old timers who hunted with him or watched him come back over that old bridge after a mornings hunt with a game bag full of cottontails and perhaps a pheasant or grouse that got in the way of his No. 6 shot. At least once or twice a week, in season, he would ask me to take his aging beagles hunting.

The truth is there was nothing I would rather do than take those dogs into the Somerset woods, but beagles, as with most hounds, are notorious for staying on a track come hell, high water or a highway. I knew I could not stop them or get them to come back to me and I had nightmares about returning to Jack’s home without one or two of those animals which were much more than beagles, they were his children.

Despite his disappointment he never held it against me and I believe that deep down he understood why I never took those dogs out of his kennel. Every time I drive up route 79 and take a right onto Brightman and onto Lindsey, I pass my old house, still standing with the ugliest siding of blue vinyl, rather than the handsome red cedar shingles that weathered on its bones until I left there. I pass the Sportsman’s Cafe where the locals quaffed their nickle drafts and shots of cheap bar whiskey they called, boilermakers. If I look hard enough, I can see the caretaker, hunched over, shuffling along at the end of a hard day, turning the corner at Leonard and Brightman and heading toward the Sportsman’s Café. He lifted and wrestled moorings and skiffs that would take two strong men to move because he understood how to use leverage. He spent the better part of his long days crawling under boats or in the bilges working on engines, plumbing and lining up shaft logs.

It was a wonder he could walk upright at all. At the Café he could jaw, catch up on local gossip and tell a few tales of his own while tipping a few before heading home to crash on the couch. Such was the life of a bachelor. Manuel 'Benny' Benevides led two separate and distinct lives and the village was a much better place for that. He was a mill worker from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. and shortly after that I would see him crossing the empty lot across from my home carrying his black lunch box. He was headed to the second floor of his neat two-story home at the bottom of Brightman Street to take a shower then turn the key and open the door in the building underneath which was Benny’s Hardware store.

That neat shop where the scent of feed and grain along with aromatic pipe tobacco, was a meeting place for farmers, fishermen, watermen and those working in textile and construction jobs. It was not the best of economic times but men shared a smoke and a sip and swapped tales that were soaked up by a young boy eager for knowledge and entertainment. Separating the main aisle from the cash register was a glass counter with a large assortment of knives. Back then knives were tools and I didn’t know anyone who didn’t wear a belt knife of some kind or carry a pen knife in their pocket. At a very young age I was given a very old Barlow by an old timer in the presence of my father. We sat on a smooth rock along the shore as the old timer and my dad instructed me in the ways of blade safety. I could only take the knife out of the house if I was with my dad until a few years later when he was convinced I was responsible and allowed to take the knife on my own. I even brought it to St Michaels school where a nun who used a pocket knife misplaced hers and asked to use my knife to open up a big cardboard box. At the river end of Brightman Street was the Bridge Gulf on the south and Potvin’s Shell on the north and across the street the iconic Bridge Diner.

I miss sipping a hot chocolate from one of their heavy, usually chipped, tan coffee cups. I recall one man dropping his coffee on the floor and then watching Cynthia pick it up, rinse it off and refill it for the gent who was pleased with the outcome. I just found a photo of the Singing Bridge, the old Slades Ferry, which a HERALD reader sent to me years ago. It was called the singing bride because as the tires rolled over the diamond shaped steel roadway they gave off a particular kind of noise. That bridge, although older and in much better conditions than the Brightman, was taken down first because it was very narrow and they no longer used the railroad tracks that ran trains over the top section then travelled to the Lees, Coles and Palmer Rivers on their way to Providence. There is a great deal of interesting outdoor history along this waterfront and several readers have challenged me to produce a book of short stories from the Herald columns I have written over these many years. It is something I have been considering. If you have any thoughts on this you would care to share, please drop me a line at linesiders2000@yahoo.com.