Chapter 4: Longwood

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     "That bone of yours," plots Henry's father, taking a gulp of fried apples cooked with onions and fatback, "it's just the ammunition we need to keep the old man from selling off the orchard."

"What's an old femur got to do with the LaFollette developments?" Henry asks, ladling a dollop of brown gravy over the steaming biscuits on his plate.

"He'll want to keep it quiet that there's a cemetery under his hill, son," the leather-skinned farmer explains, digging into the green beans and bacon.

"I'm more worried about my job," Henry replies. "The foreman caught me favoring the bad hand this morning and had to send extra help."

"You keeping that job and me getting first rights on the lots around Longwood ought to be worth burying that bone before some reporter from the Chronicle finds out."

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     A nationwide craze for the new science of anthropology was underway in early twentieth century America.  Just forty miles from Bound Brook, at the American Museum of Natural History, a curator named Franz Boas was demonstrating that culture was more significant than genetics for determining the physical characteristics of racial groups. All over the country excavations for new construction were being halted by amateur scientists exclaiming over old bones.
     The LaFollette wealth from antebellum slave-based businesses had been slowly diminishing as they sent cash back to struggling family members in reconstructionist Virginia. For just that purpose, George the elder had invented a form of paper for checks that was invisible through envelopes and turned white when altered. His company, National Safety Paper, would grow to be the largest manufacturer of banking papers in the world under the tutelage of George the younger, but labor was expensive in the north. The family was systematically selling off lots around the old mansion to build a new and electrified estate house as well as to fund George junior's race for a U.S. senate seat.
     One such property was Longwood, a one-hundred-sixty acre orchard with bottomland groves along the Middlebrook and a tender's cottage on a little rise beside a spring. The Hanken family had lived there and operated the orchard ever since Henry was born in 1900.

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     "Just listen to you two," scoffs Henry's mother delivering another bowl of gravy from the cookstove. "Fretting over work and land when you should be trying to save that hand."

"I stuck some heal-all in there this morning," Henry reports, holding up his hand to reveal the plant material poking out of the bandage.

"Give it here," she commands, pouring a cloudy reddish-yellow liquid into a large glass bowl. "We'll soak it in my cider vinegar three times a day."

Chapter 3: Catching A Bone

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   "Ouch!" Henry hisses, trying to stifle a cry after stubbing his finger stub into something hard in the hillside he's digging into.

"You okay over there?" calls the foreman from the next lot where he's checking the foundation measurements of a new home construction on Ware Court.

"Fine," Henry calls back, shaking out his left hand as he grabs a mattock with his right.

__________

     Henry's hand was anything but fine. The snapping turtle had taken the second and third phalanges of his left ring finger, leaving the bare bone of the fourth metacarpal that was still oozing two weeks after that fun-filled night at the point. It was a minor miracle that it was a clean amputation right at the joint line. Less serendipitous was the microbiome of a snapping turtle's mouth. The white tip of the bone peaked out of a tent of blackening skin exuding foul-smelling pus. The doctor at the Bound Brook Hospital had said to keep it dry and clean if he wanted to save the hand, but the bandage was turning yellow from within and reddish-brown on the outside from the hard clay of the only hill in the little town tucked up against First Watchung Mountain.
    The construction site was beside the Evergreens, the old LaFollette mansion built onto the top of an earthen mound overlooking the floodplain of the Raritan River to the south. The family has just moved to their new Piedmont Farms estate on the Watchung slope north of town and had started developing the land surrounding the old place.

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     "Aw, did nancy hurt her little finger?" chides another mason assistant sent over to help at the stubborn bank.

"You try digging with one hand," scowls Henry.

"My pleasure," responds the wiry sixteen-year-old swinging his pick one-handed into the packed earth of the bank. "I'll use the other to dig into some rich girl."

"The knuckles of my right hand are just fine," Henry shoots back. "Besides, what chance does the crippled son of an orchardist have with the daughter of a big shot banker?"

"Aw Hank, I was just joshing," sighs the teenager with a two-handed heave of a pick down into the hard hillside. "My grandparents came here to escape a vineyard in Bordeaux."

"The LaFollette orchard is no vineyard," Henry counters while using his bandaged hand to help shovel up the fallen dirt into a wheelbarrow. "We grow six different apples, Bartlett and Bosc pears, even freestone peaches."

"Speaking of jobs, I'm applying at the new chemical plant," the young digger pivots, reaching up to pull out a clump of purple-flowered plants growing just above their pit. "You should too, and, while your at it, try this on that stump. Grand-mere always used a Prunella poultice on cuts."

"Woa!" exclaims Henry, leaping in and catching a long bone that tumbles out of the bank along with the clod of roots. "What do we have here?"

Chapter 2: Conscription

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     "Jeez Hank, I'd cut off my finger too if Molly LaFollette would be my nurse," exclaims Thomas Biondi as they make their way along the train tracks to the Somerset County Courthouse five miles away.

"Hush Mr. Biondi," whispers Henry glancing around to see if anyone had heard. "She's just my fishing friend."

"That's what they all say, cuz," quips the twenty-five-year-old bricklayer from the tough West End. "I'd still like a naval engagement with her."

"I'll take navy, army, or air force," deflects Henry while snapping his head to fling mahogany locks out of his eyes. "So long as they send me somewhere over there."

"Fat chance with a hand like that, little buddy," begins the squat Italian man, but he's interrupted by shouting from a group of people carrying signs outside the gate of the Cott-A-Lap Company.

Henry and Tom Biondi cross the creek and are nearly out of sight of the chemical plant when Henry looks back over the shorter man's head.

     "Hey, did you see those signs that said 'No Dyes in Somerville'? They don't even know how to spell, and why do they think they'd die, anyway?"

"Might be you who's the stunad, stunad. What say we forget about those colors and figure out how to get that red bandage past the physical."

_________

      The unlikely pair were reporting to the draft board for the newly minted Selective Service. Two previous rounds had only taken unemployed men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one, but the coming fall offensive against the Kaiser's troops entrenched along the Forest of the Argonne called for a more massive mobilization. All bachelors between eighteen and forty-five were required to report on September 12, 1918, which happened to be Henry's eighteenth birthday.
     One consequence of the recent British naval blockade of German ports was a shortage of European dyes in North America. Clothing mills were clamoring for colors, and Cott-A-Lap was well positioned chemically to convert oil byproducts from the booming new automobile industry to aniline-based dyes. Not so ideally placed was the location of the plant along Peter Brook and beside a growing residential neighboring.

__________

     "Donato Biondi of Bound Brook," growls a stern man in a crisp uniform dangling an empty pant leg behind the registration desk in the courthouse lobby.

"Good luck Tommy!" offers Henry, giving a vigorous shake with his right hand while keeping the left tucked deep into his pants pocket.

"That's the ticket," winks Tom before striding over to the desk and launching a salute that brings on a deeper scowl.

"You missed a checkbox," grunts the military man stuck behind a desk with a disability. "Native born, naturalized, of father's naturalization?"

"I wasn't there," quips Tom scratching his head and screwing his eyes, "but my guess is mom and pop did it naturally."

"Listen here, you dirty guinea," spits the now irate man leaping across the desk with his good leg, "it's no skin off my back to toss you in jail for draft dodging."

"All right, all right, sorry sarge. My parents came through Ellis Island when I was two."

"Army," he grunts, waving Tom past the desk to the physical examination line, "and good thing I won't be your drill sergeant."

     "Henry Hanken of Bound Brook," he continues, shaking his head and hiding a slight smile, "and you'd better not be another wiseguy."

"No sir," Hank barks, standing at attention with his body turned slightly to the left hiding his now unbandaged hand behind his hip.

"At ease soldier!" commands the sergeant, pushing up on the desk with both hands to stand up and scan him from head to toe. "Any physical problems we should know about?"

"Not that I can see," Henry smiles, jamming both hands into his pockets before turning in a circle.

Halfway around his loop the draft official grabs a glass of water, downs it in one gulp, and tosses. Henry manages to grab the glass before it shatters onto his head or the floor.

"Sorry son, you'd need all ten fingers over there."

     Henry's shoulders droop as he slowly shuffles toward the courthouse door.

"Hey Hank, I'll throw you a bone," calls Tom Biondi leaning out bare-chested from behind a screen where he's being examined. "I'll put in a good word for you at the new work site behind the Evergreens."





   

Chapter 1: Nigger Point

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     "Holly Molly, there's something big on the end of this line," exclaims Henry Hanken to his night fishing buddy and secret best friend Molly LaFollette as his cane pole pulls into an inverted J.

"It's probably just a snag, Hank," she calls from the darkness of the muddy river bank a few feet away, hiking her gabardine hobble skirt as she slides over in bare feet and grabs the rod. "Let me feel!"

With arms entwined, they lean slowly back and hear the horsehair line tighten with a ping on the moonless night at the confluence of north and south branches of the Raritan River.

"Hold it right there!" he commands, savoring the tingling from fine hairs standing erect on smooth forearms, brunette waves tickling his neck, the small bulge of a deltoid pushing into his chest, his own bulge straining into wool knickers. "Something's going to give if we pull any harder."

__________

     Molly and Hank were a secret because it was a forbidden friendship. Mary Preston LaFollette was the heiress to three wealthy Virginia families whose antebellum stash escaped to central New Jersey as the War of Northern Aggression succumbed to that perceived northern aggression. The Preston, Kern, and Thweatt families had dabbled in tobacco and wheat before that uncivil war, but the real source of their prosperity was an escalating trade in African slaves.
     As the south succumbed and their estates were being plundered by Union forces, their croplands dispersed to tenant farmers, the eldest daughter was making her way north in a wagon train driven by her Yankee headmaster husband and containing their young son, their heirloom furniture, select household human property, and a trunk stuffed with cash and gold built into each of the twin seats of five spring wagons. Flash forward fifty years and Molly is the fifteen-year-old child of that young son, and she was forbidden from playing with the riffraff of the mill town that the Evergreens mansion presided over from a hilltop perch.

__________

   "What could it be?" Molly gasps as their backward lean slowly gives way to straining legs.

"Probably a log," Hank blurts, holding back the scream bursting to escape from his taught body as the warmth from her contact spreads up his belly and into his chest.

"Logs don't tug," she cries, glancing at him wide-eyed as a strong yank tugs on the line.

"Dad gum, a sturgeon?" he exclaims, redoubling his pull as they stumble back. "Granddad said they used to run the Middlebrook."

"Yikes!" she screams and they both leap back as a dark thing splashes onto the mud.

"Ah-ha," he laughs, regaining his wits and reaching for the line. "It's just the monster of Nigger Point."

"Don't call it that!" she blurts, coming to her senses while brushing the sandy clay off her new skirt. "Our servants hate that word and so do I."

"Huh?" he squeaks, still holding onto the twine with his left hand while turning toward her.

"Look out!"she screams, but the snapper is already wobbling away trailing a bloody line that terminates in a single stub poking out of a huge beak.