Free Clarkton by Howard Fast Page A

weight, and his flesh hung in loose folds, but he had a grin for Ryan, and a warm handshake for Mike Sawyer. The soup kitchen was set up in an empty, ancient store, one that had been unoccupied for years. A union crew had set it to rights, given the inside a coat of whitewash, put a coal stove in the rear, and erected a long sawboard table which could seat about forty people at once. The place was warm, too warm when they came in out of the cold air, and heavy with the smell of food.
    About a dozen men and women were sitting at the table, dipping into steaming bowls of stew. A rail of beaverboard, about four feet high, separated the cooking section from the eating section, and behind this, three women and two men stirred pots, washed dishes, and peeled vegetables. Saropoles led them into the makeshift kitchen, and introduced them to each of the workers in turn. For the day shift, chief cook was Max Levy, who had learned the trade in the army, and who told them proudly that during the day before, this one kitchen had fed six hundred and fifty-two people with four hundred and twenty soups, five hundred and fifteen solid dishes, sixty-two dozen doughnuts, thirty-five dozen rolls, not to mention one thousand three hundred and nineteen cups of coffee.
    â€œâ€¦ Which is our main problem,” Levy said. “Coffee. That way, it ain’t no different from the army. You got coffee, and you got a piece of the morale problem solved, and we got a break with five hundred pounds a buddy of mine in Spring-field sends me. I call him up, and he tells me, he don’t sympathize with me, but it gives him such satisfaction to find me behind a stove again that he’s willing to drop five hundred pounds down the hole, but that ain’t going to last forever.”
    â€œMax is a good cook in an American way, which is what they teach them in the army, you know, with no inspiration,” Saropoles said, “but he’s too modern. You haven’t got enough headaches running a place like this, he’s got to introduce vitamins and proteins. How in hell are we going to find vitamins and proteins if this damn thing lasts six months? I remember I was working in Ohio during the big steel strike back after the last war, and we got a hundredweight of peas and a hundredweight of blackeyed beans, and by God, we fed a thousand men out of those two bags with whatever trimmings we could dig up.…”

6. C urzon was waiting for the people from the plant when they came down to police headquarters, and he shook hands with each of them eagerly, telling Lowell, “I knew your father well, Mr. Lowell. A fine man—a really fine man, like you don’t meet many of these days,” and then led them into his office. Coming into the place, Lowell had felt a strange, somewhat remote apprehensiveness: he realized, a while later, that it was at least thirty years since he had come into this ugly gray-stone pile that reared its Victorian-Gothic spires alongside the Morrisana Hotel, equally old, equally ugly, but in a more mellow ochre. At that time, he and Elliott had done something—although for the life of him he could not think what it was—and a policeman had led the two boys here, put them in a room, and left them alone for two hours until it was discovered that he was Lowell’s son, after which there were ample apologies and a wiping-out of the whole incident. But he did remember that his own cockiness had not been enough to overcome Elliott’s fears, and that enough of those fears had been communicated to him for him to retain this feeling he had now, three decades later. As he thought about it, he was also quite certain that was the only occasion he had ever been inside a police station, a thought that made him smile now, that restored some of the comfortable normalcy of life which had been removed in the past several days. He watched Gelb as they walked into Curzon’s office, a big, square room with