Pride. William Wharton
we’d knock down one of those old-style porches, my Dad’d always nail a few boards across the kitchen door, temporarily, so somebody wouldn’t forget and wind up smashed dead.
Our side of the alley is higher than the other because these rows are built along the side of a small hill. I guess that’s why they call this part where we live Stonehurst Hills. It’s a nice-sounding name for just rows of houses.
Our back porches are built out into the alleys and aren’t much. Each house in our row is sort of a reversed twin of the one next door. The old-style back porches were built so there was only one set of steps going up to each pair of houses. I don’t exactly know why they built those steps anyway; it’s easier, and makes more sense, to go through the kitchen, down the cellar stairs and out through the cellar door; that’s what everybody does.
The back porches are mostly used only to walk out on and hang clothes. Each house has a pulley clothesline going across the alley to the back of a house on the next street.
Our pulley has a line across to the McClosky place on Greenwood Avenue. They have one coming across to our place. All down the alley there are these pulleys with clotheslines.
The McCloskys are probably the only people we even know over on Greenwood Avenue. Nobody knows anybody on another row. In fact, I’m afraid to walk along Greenwood Avenue; there are some mean, tough kids living there, especially down near the end on the other side of the passageway. Practically none of them go to St Cyril’s where I go; mostly they go to Stonehurst, that’s the public school.
I don’t know when everybody agreed to put up those pulleys but it gives each house a chance to hang out clothes. In winter, or when it rains, we hang clothes in the cellar. On Mondays, in good weather, when most of the women in our neighborhood do the wash, you can hardly see down our alley for the wet clothes hanging out. Walking down that alley, coming home from school on Monday for lunch, there are so many clothes dripping it’s like walking through a rainstorm. And, on any day, there are almost enough clothes so you feel as if you’re walking under a tent.
There are fifty houses in our row, on our side of the street, the seventy hundred block of Clover Lane. There’s just that narrow passageway going through the alleys halfway down. The passageway is between 7048 and 7046. Our house is 7066.
The houses across the street, in front, uphill from us, have the odd numbers. There aren’t any numbers on houses in back alleys, the way there are on front. I know the McCloskys’ house must be 7067 Greenwood though I’ve never checked. It has to be.
As I said, we live on a hill. You wouldn’t know it, walking along any of the streets like Clover Lane or Radbourne Road or Greenwood Avenue because they’re all straight around the side of the hill. But going the other way, it is a hill. Radbourne Road is higher than Clover Lane and even the other side of Clover Lane is higher than our side. Our front lawn is flat but the lawns on the other side of the street are hills. It’s nicer having a flat front lawn for a garden but the hills are good for playing King of the Hill or digging tunnels.
One time I went into the front bedroom of Jimmy Malony’s house across the street on the hill side. I looked out his window there and could see all the way down the hill, all the way to Baltimore Pike almost. It was something I hadn’t expected. Jimmy’d taken me up to his parents’ room to show me some of his mother’s underwear but the view out that window interested me more.
We can’t see over top of the houses on Greenwood Avenue from our back bedrooms. Those houses are a little bit lower than our houses, so we drive up a small hill to get into our garage and they go down a little one to get into theirs. Still, we aren’t high enough so we can see over the houses on the other side of our alley. We just look smack into their windows surrounded by brick wall.
There are twelve steps up to the front porches of houses on the high side of Clover Lane. When you’re on the front porch of Jimmy Malony’s house you look right across into the bedroom windows of our side, but the street with the lawns and everything make it a long way across, so they probably can’t see anything, even with a spyglass.
It’s down in the alley where the iceman comes. He carries ice up the porch stairs if there are steps left: I mean if Dad and I haven’t built the new kind of porches without steps. If we have, the iceman comes through the cellar and up the cellar steps.
Most everybody has a yellow card in the kitchen window if they want ice; sometimes it’s in the cellar window. It has 25, 50, 75 and 100 printed in the corners. You turn it up to how many pounds of ice you want. If you don’t want any, you turn it backward. A few people are starting to have refrigerators now and don’t have cards in the windows.
If you’re in the alley when the ice truck comes, the iceman will always chip off a piece of ice for you, or sometimes there are pieces of ice splintered off from where he’s split a chunk of ice before. The floor part of the ice truck is wooden, soaked wet all the time and with shining silver metal tracks to make the ice slide easier. The iceman can cut off perfect cubes of ice or larger pieces just using his icepick. Sometimes it only takes one or two swings and he gets it cut through. He has a pair of big ice tongs and uses them to pick up the ice and throw it over his back onto a wet burlap sack. Our iceman is short, but he’s really strong. I don’t know where he lives and he doesn’t speak much American.
Also, the man who sells fruits and vegetables comes through our alley. His truck is old and painted dark green. He stops the truck and yells, ‘Fresh fruits, fresh vegetables’, but if you didn’t know, you wouldn’t know what he’s saying: he runs it all together and practically sings. He’s Italian and is hard to understand.
When Mom sends me down to buy something from him, she always tells me to watch the scale and check the change because he’ll cheat me. But, so far as I can see, he cheats himself more than anybody. He always throws one more of anything onto the scale after he weighs it and charges for only the two pounds or whatever it is you’ve bought. Also, he usually gives me some fruit to eat, for free. He does this for everybody, not just me.
Down our alley also comes the man who sharpens knives and scissors and the man who scrapes horseradish from big horseradish roots. He mixes it in jars while you stand there; you have to bring your own jar. My dad loves horseradish. It makes me cry. I think it’d even make a horse cry. The ashman, trashman and garbage man come down our alley, too.
The milkman with his horse comes down the front street. He has a white horse with pale gray circles all over. This horse knows the milk route so well he goes from house to house without the milkman telling him. Mostly the milkman comes early in the morning and I never see him, but sometimes the bottles rattling in the metal holder or the sound of the horse’s hoofs wake me up and I’ll sneak down to watch him from our front porch. This is only in the summer when it’s light early in the morning.
In winter he comes in the dark. When it’s really cold the cream freezes in the bottle so it pushes right up, lifting the cardboard lid with the little tab, like the lid on a Dixie cup. That frozen cream is almost ice cream, and it’s delicious on cornflakes, shining slivers of ice tasting like cream.
The coal comes into the coal bin through a tiny window in front. We buy five tons a year. The coal truck is the same truck as the ice truck but two men drive it and they’re not our iceman.
The coal comes in big burlap sacks and the truck has a long metal coal chute attached. They stick it through the window into our cellar. One man dumps sacks of coal onto the chute and the other keeps it sliding along with a big shovel. The coal is wet and makes a lot of noise; coal is cheaper if you buy it in the summer so that’s what we do, even though the coalmen always break our snapdragons and tromp the grass flat.
One of my jobs is picking up the pieces of coal that fall on the lawn. I usually get half a bucket that way, and it keeps coal from getting caught in the lawn mower. I mow the lawn and trim edges in the summer. Trimming’s the hard part, especially around the picket fence. Dad put up the picket fence to keep dogs out of our yard; kids too, I think.
The breadmen come by in front, but that’s usually