Chapter 14: More Business in Rockville

1871

Robert leaned on the small oak table in the sitting room of the farmhouse where he and his family had lived for more than two years. The clapboard home with its two frail-looking chimneys perched on a rounded hilltop near the road to Darnestown, barely a mile from the center of Rockville and the busy store where he worked ten or more hours a day, six days each week. He could hear his wife upstairs getting their children to bed, his son squalling as usual about wanting to stay up later.

Johnny was now three, very active and, as his grandmother put it, quite full of himself. He insisted on playing with the older boys every chance he got and constantly came home with scraped knees and elbows as well as torn clothes and an occasional shiner from their rough and tumble games of make-believe train robberies or Indians raids on the brave, but usually outnumbered, cavalrymen. It was a good thing he went barefoot most of the time, for he was constantly outgrowing his shoes or cutting them to shreds. He had learned to tie his laces, after a fashion, although they seldom stayed that way.

The baby, little Patricia, was still at her mother's breast and, with her tight curls and happy nature, a sometimes startling reminder of her parent's first child, now four years in the grave but never forgotten especially in the springtime. Patty had just started to crawl and pull herself up on her chubby legs and had learned to say both 'dog' and 'cat' but not always for the proper animal. She enjoyed saying 'cat, ' and would sometimes say it a dozen times in a row just to hear the sound it made.

Robert worked diligently on the five-year report that his father-in-law had requested, totaling up the number of customers with monthly accounts as well as the few to whom he now refused to extend credit. He smiled as he reached the O's and found he had a half-dozen Offutts among his regular clientele despite the fact that Nick Offutt's store stood only a few blocks from his and was stocked with much same merchandise. He wondered, in passing, how many former slave owners were among Offutt's customers compared to his.

Zed had brought in a number of his friends and relatives early on and now the store served the needs of quite a few black freeholders, mainly men who had owned property long before the end of slavery. His store was one of the few that would extend them credit, and that fact brought in more business, especially from hardscrabble tenant farmers, both black and white.

Within eighteen months the rented store's storage space had proved completely inadequate, and Mr. French had purchased a lot near the intersection of Commerce Lane and Adams Street where there was already a good bit of trade. He had built a large, brick-fronted store with a high facade with a very deep warehouse behind the wide selling area. It had been a somewhat risky investment, three times the size of other stores in the neighborhood, but both Robert and his father-in-law were convinced that when the railroad came to the County seat, both business and population would boom.

Almost everyone in Rockville was sure that the long-anticipated branch of the B & O would be arriving soon, if not this year then surely the next. They talked of little else except for refighting various battles of the unforgotten war.

Caroline quietly came down the stairs and took a chair, her hair knotted up on the crown of her head, a milk-stained baby napkin still on her shoulder.

"Get you anything?" she asked, pushing his scattered papers into more orderly piles.

He shook his head. "We've actually doubled our business since the new store opened?"

She smiled at him, proud and concerned at the same time. "You've been working awfully hard."

"I hope your father is as happy about it as I am."

"He's worried about something," Caroline said. "I'm not sure what, might be all that railroad stock he bought. I'm sure he borrowed to do that."

"Hm," said Robert, aware that Mr. French was hoping to make a killing in the rapid expansion of Southern rail lines. "Do you know how many of those hundred dollar mowers we've sold, the Sprague machines?"

"I know the market is not to be trusted," she said. "But Father claims that what happened two years ago with Fisk and Gould couldn't happen again."

"He didn't lose anything in that fiasco, did he?" Robert asked, wiping his pen nib carefully with a square of felt.

"No, not really, except for his faith in President Grant, but it scared him, scared a lot of people I suppose." She put her darning in her lap.

"Everybody who bought gold anyway. Glad we were too poor to get involved." He took a deep breath. "There's the total, the five-year total."

"Very impressive," she said. "I'll just check your arithmetic." She hoped he did not mind, but she had always been good at adding up long columns.

He leaned back, rubbing his eyes and stretching his sore back muscles. And then sat quietly in the glow of reflected lamplight, admiring his wife's profile and her ability to concentrate, seeing the tip of her tongue occasionally at the corner of her mouth, the tendril of hair she kept tossing out of her eyes. For some reason the errant curl reminded him of the ill-fated school dance. That fracas now seemed an eon ago. He touched the faint scar in his eyebrow.

"I saw Seth late yesterday," he said as the silence dragged on too long and Caroline's brow had furrowed as she ran the total for a second time.

"Um," she said, tapping the numbers with her fingernail.

"He was squiring one of the Pettigrew girls, the long-legged one."

"Margaret?"

"I suppose. Anyhow he looked hale and happy. They were headed for the candy store, Bouic's."

"Total's right," Caroline said, giving her husband a pleased smile. "Maybe we ought to stock some penny candy, licorice, horehound."

"You know what it says on our sign? Farm Supply, woman, that's what it says." He made a false grimace at her, showing his teeth.

"And how about some ice cream in the summer. I'll bet that would bring them in," Caroline said, grinning at her gaunt husband's mock exasperation.

"What've you heard lately 'bout dat railroad?" asked Zedediah Snowden, his hands and forearms white from unloading bags of powdered phosphate.

"Not much, why?" said Robert, ticking off the delivery manifest.

"Talked to m'uncle Luther t'other day," Zed said, wiping his hands on his worn britches, "tole me a bunch a'men was laying out a line over by the Cat'lic church. B and O men, so he said, surveyors, puttin' down stakes."

"That so?" Robert said. "Doesn't your family have some property out that way, on north of here."

"Sure do," Zed said with a smile. "Me an' my brother inherited it; we's ready t'sell t'anybody's got cash, lots a'cash."

"Don't sell too fast. If those tracks go out that way, heading for Gaithersburg, we might need some land for a warehouse or at least a storage yard. How much do you own?"

Zed nodded. "We only got us a couple a'acres. Now Miss Minnie, she's the one to talk to 'bout acres."

"Is she now?" Robert said, picturing the bent woman in his mind, waving her cane at one and all as she wove along the stone-paved walkway. "Well, give me some advice about dealing with her. I've only heard her name and her ah - her colorful reputation."

Zed smiled and scratched his ear. "Dat lady, she's done buried three husbands. Got lan' from each one, she did. Like a pig on ice, dat's her."

Robert waited, sipping a glass of cold water from the deep well that his store shared with the Braddocks next door.

"She's got hersef five or six houses, rentin' 'em out, and a real big garden, biggest one in d'run, grows ever'thing. Got all the gran'chillun pickin' bugs and pullin' weeds."

"Can I take her a present, maybe some candy? How about you come along and introduce me?"

"Uh uh," Zed said politely, "no'suh. We ain' on good terms, her and me. But you know 'bout dat lady down the street what makes dem fancy hats?"

Robert nodded. "She advertises that she won a blue ribbon at the fair."

"D'one, uh huh," Zed nodded. "Get her to make you a hat for Aunt Minnie. She won' sell hats to no black folks. You get a hat wif flowers on it, lots a'flowers."

A month later, on a bright and brisk Sunday, Robert took his wife and children down the Pike to have a chicken dinner with his mother and his brother and sister, Seth and Annie. Young Margaret Pettigrew was already there when they arrived, and little Johnny jumped down to run and terrorize the chickens and ducks. Annie, now a blossoming fifteen-year-old, met them at the back door and immediately captured the baby. Caroline relaxed, feeling wonderfully at ease, after offering to help in the busy kitchen.