You are being provided with a book chapter by chapter. I will request you to read the book for me after each chapter. After reading the chapter, 1. shorten the chapter to no less than 300 words and no more than 400 words. 2. Do not change the name, address, or any important nouns in the chapter. 3. Do not translate the original language. 4. Keep the same style as the original chapter, keep it consistent throughout the chapter. Your reply must comply with all four requirements, or it’s invalid.
I will provide the chapter now.

E
10
The Skrup Shoe
arl Roberts, known in Pottstown as Doc, had long heard the rumors of
the Jewess in Chicken Hill hiding the Negro child from the state
illegally. He had learned about it from his distant cousin Carl Boydkins.
Carl worked for the state welfare office. The two men were not close. They
had grown up on neighboring farms as boys. Both families were said to go
back ten generations to the Blessington family, said to have arrived on the
Mayflower all the way back in 1620. It was a point of pride for both
families, although, as it turned out, neither was tied to the Mayflower at all.
The family was actually tied to an Irish sailor named Ed Bole, a distant
relative who worked as a manservant for Chinese emperor Chaing Kai Wu
in Monashu Province in 1774. Bole, an English seaman and a drunk, had
been tossed from the English freighter Maiden that year after the captain
grew tired of his drunken shenanigans and left him at the port of Shanghai.
He was picked up by Chinese authorities and dragged before the emperor,
who found the idea of a white man serving him tea and Chinese crumpets,
known as mantou, wonderfully satisfying. After three years, Bole escaped
and made his way back to England, announced himself as Lord Earl
Blessington of Sussex, and with his newfound knowledge of the Chinese
language and China teas talked his way into a job at a British shipping
company, where he eventually made a fortune in salt and Chinese medicine,
marrying the daughter of an English trader in London. In 1784, when a
distant cousin of Bole’s in Ireland showed up in London and started asking
questions, Bole hastily packed his wife and four young children onto a ship
called the Peanut and sent them off to America, a land where nobody asked
questions about white people’s pasts. Three days after the Peanut sailed,
Bole choked to death on a char siu bao pork bun, for which he’d developed
an affinity while living in the Land of Wonder. Luckily, he’d sent his wife
and children abroad with a tidy sum of four thousand dollars, a fortune in
those days, plus a nanny to help them, with the idea that it would be some
months before he would join them—an idea that ended, unfortunately, when
that char siu bao pork bun slid down his windpipe.
When news of the death of Lord Blessington, née Bole, reached his
widow in America, it prompted the usual hand-wringing, howling, and
hairpulling, after which she collapsed in tears and into the arms of her
faithful nanny. The nanny hugged her tightly. Sparks flew. The two women
promptly fell in love, decided to live together, pulled out a map, saw a creek
near Pottstown, Pa., far from the prying eyes of New York society—which
regarded the widow with suspicion anyway, since she seemed to eye the
male species with neither contempt nor scorn but with total disinterest
instead—and moved to Pottstown as the Blessington sisters, buying a huge
tract of land off Manatawny Creek. They raised the children, with the help
of local servants and farmers, and split the tracts among the four children
after the women died.
Neither Doc nor Carl had interest in questioning their family lineage, for
their childhoods were as full of as much happiness as any descendant of the
Mayflower might enjoy. They were white Christian men born in an America
seemingly ready-made for them. The two families, now splintered off and
bearing different last names, were happily ensconced on neighboring farms
at Pine Forge on wonderful acreage bordering Manatawny Creek, full of
sunflowers and pastures and rich soil. The two families lived across the
creek from one another: Doc’s family, the Robertses, on one side; Carl’s
family, the Boydkinses, on the other. The two families often traveled to
church together on Sundays by carriage—Presbyterian, of course. The
civilized services filled the sanctuary to the brim with good white people.
Those were wonderful days, Doc’s childhood, full of strong men whose
handshake was their bond and women who knew how to cook and raise
children. Nice, clean families. This was before the “new people”—the Jews,
the Negroes, the Greeks, the Mennonites, the Russian Orthodox—arrived.
The two families lived peacefully until just before the Great Crash, when
Doc’s father saw the future and sold out, thank God. But the Boydkins
family stayed, and they suffered, for the new owner of the Roberts tract was
a good Christian man who forged iron bits and steel parts, which produced
smelly garbage and black runoff from dyes even though he promised the
Boydkinses he would bury his garbage rather than pour the muck from his
forge into the beautiful creek. They were pleased when he made that
promise and believed him. He was, after all, a good Christian.
Shortly after, he was joined by a second man, another good Christian,
who also kept his word. Then a third partner came, another good
Christian . . . who, well, he was said to want to be a good Christian, which
counted for something, though he left his wife for a fifteen-year-old girl
named Uma who had boobs the size of cantaloupes and was said to have
spent time in the Muncy penitentiary. The fellow eventually moved to New
Orleans with his new wife and was replaced by a new man, an Irishman
named Fitz-Hugh who was said to have made his fortune in opium. Fitz-
Hugh bought out the original owners and thereupon the small one-man mill
became two mills with four workers apiece. Then three mills, then four tiny
mills. The Boydkins clan soon found themselves waking up and peering out
their kitchen window to see eight workers slogging back and forth to the
bank of the Manatawny, dumping buckets of sludge into the creek all day
long. In six months the eight workers became nine, then twelve, then
nineteen. The four mills became seven, then eight, splitting like amoebas,
dotting the hillside above until the mills were replaced by small factories
that made pipe nipples and tiny bolts and iron pieces, belching smoke from
small chimneys into the clear Pennsylvania sky. The small factories then
split into bigger factories that crafted iron pipes, steel fittings, and glass
bottles for whiskey distilleries, followed by bigger factories that crafted
eight-foot iron beams, joists, barrels, pipe fittings, castings, signs, entire
window frames, and steel girders. In eight short years, the tiny mill was
gone and in its place was a rambling, rumbling, half-mile-long gray factory-
fortress that thrust a hundred-foot smokestack into the sky that belched gray
fumes twenty-four hours a day. The crews of workers who tossed black
muck to the Manatawny were gone, replaced by three six-inch pipes that
vomited churning, filthy sludge into the once beautiful streams that fed the
Boydkinses’ cows and watered the crops. By the time the Boydkinses cried
foul, three one-hundred-foot chimneys churned black smoke into the sky;
225 cursing, laughing workers speaking every language under God’s sun
trooped in and out of the buildings in three different shifts; and the work
whistle shrieked three times a day including Sundays—all within 150 feet
of their kitchen window.
The Boydkins family protested, saying that the unholy cursing of the
workers within earshot of their kitchen table and children was outrageous
and the sludge was ruining their land and making their cows sick. But it was
1932, and by then, Flagg, Bethlehem Steel, and Jacobs Aircraft Engine
Company had arrived—along with their smooth lawyers in starched collars
and shiny Packards. And the lawyers were firm: We have to make engines
for the mighty American airplanes that will carry freedom across the world,
they said. We have to make the great steel girders for the Golden Gate
Bridge that will allow wonderful automobiles to cross. We need gunpowder
and shell casings and steel for the war that is coming. In desperation, the
Boydkinses approached the city fathers of Pottstown, who laid down the
law: The war is coming. You have to move. So the Boydkins family was
forced to sell their 147 acres bordering the creek for pennies on the dollar to
keep America free. It had to be done.
It was a bad decision to remain on the Manatawny back in 1929, and
Doc was grateful for his father’s foresight.
He and Carl were not especially close in high school, in part because
Carl was tall and a good athlete and all the girls loved him, whereas Doc
was a bookworm who’d had polio, which affected his left foot. The foot
curled oddly and bore a cleft in the middle where toes two and three should
have been. It ached from the time he was aware of it. When he was a child,
his mother instructed him to always keep it covered, but it ached so much
and no shoe fit well so he ignored her orders as much as possible. He
secretly felt his left foot didn’t look that different from his right, but he
learned a painful lesson in first grade when he slipped his sock off in gym
class. The boys saw his foot and howled, calling him Hoof. From then on,
he never bared his foot in public again.
But that didn’t prevent Doc from enjoying high school. He loved
biology, was voted president of the school debating team, and despite
having what girls called a walnut nose—it protruded from his face like a
bumpy walnut—he discovered that girls liked guys who were clever. He
read books on comedy, love, biology, and sex, the latter revealing all kinds
of secrets about what girls liked, including special go-to secret places where
wiggly fingers doing feathery work could make girls do anything a guy
wanted. He memorized a few of these tricks and tried them out junior year
on Della Burnheimer, a bouncy blonde cheerleader who felt sorry for him,
agreeing to picnic with him at the creek in nearby Saratoga Park. As they
lay on a blanket after lunch, Doc confessed to her that he’d never kissed a
girl and would like to try. Della, a generous soul, glanced at Doc’s funny
shoe, felt even more sorry for him, and agreed. Doc proved to be an
enthusiastic kisser, leaping in and giving her full-on mouth-to-mouth
resuscitation as his hands slid into her underwear, where he made good use
of the wiggly-fingered techniques he’d read about. To his surprise and hers,
Della moaned her approval. But in a burst of self-control, she suddenly sat
up and suggested they wade into the nearby creek and hold hands like a real
couple instead of doing things that would get them in trouble in the church
they both attended. Doc agreed, a decision he would later regret, for when
he removed his sock and Della’s blue eyes took in his cleft foot, she
declared that she wanted to go home. No more action for you, buddy.
Doc was not a particularly sensitive soul, but his mother was, and when
he confessed to her what had happened with Della Burnheimer—leaving
out the steamier details of the wiggly-fingered, warmy-swarmy, kissy-kissy
part—she marched him up to Chicken Hill, where the town’s best
shoemaker, Norman Skrupskelis, lived. Everyone in town dreaded Norman,
a grim, cigar-chomping Jew who rarely spoke and was rumored to wander
Chicken Hill’s muddy roads at night like a hunchback, terrorizing the
town’s Negroes and taking their money. But he was a shoe-crafting genius,
for his glistening shoes adorned the windows of all three shoe shops in
Pottstown.
When they knocked, Norman led them to a dark basement workshop—
no cage in sight, Doc’s mother noticed. He sat at a stool before a cluttered
worktable and didn’t look at Doc’s face once. Instead, he glanced at Doc’s
disabled foot clad in a shoe made by a shoemaker in Philadelphia—a shoe
his parents had paid dearly for—and pointed to a chair next to his worktable
and barked in a thick accent, “Shoe off.” Doc sat and complied, handing
him the shoe.
The old man tossed Doc’s old shoe aside like it was an empty bottle and
clasped Doc’s aching, throbbing foot in his rough hand. His hand resembled
a claw, the hard fingers feeling like sandpaper turning the foot this way and
that, as if it were a pound of old beef, carefully examining it, twisting it
from side to side in his hard palms. When that was finished, he dropped the
foot as if it were yesterday’s paper and turned to his worktable, pulling
leather and supplies off racks above him.
He didn’t say a word, so after a few moments, Doc’s mother, standing
nearby and blinking in embarrassment, said, “Aren’t you going to measure
it?”
The old man simply waved his hand at her over his shoulder. “Come
back in a week,” he said.
“What about the price?”
“We’ll talk about it then.”
A week later they returned and the shoe was magical. It was an
extraordinary work of art, gleaming black leather, beautifully stitched,
perfectly matched to the arch of Doc’s foot, with an insole that was
carefully crafted to give him comfort and support while the outer
appearance was close to that of his existing shoe. The old bugger even
added an inch to the sole and sloped it carefully, which made Doc’s limp
less noticeable and brought almost instant relief to his aching foot and even
his back. All this for a surprisingly low price. Doc’s mother was ecstatic.
While Doc was grateful, he was also humiliated. The old man never said
a word to him. Not even hello. But he made a wonderful shoe, and each
year Doc was obliged to return to have the shoe replaced. Doc dreaded the
visits to Norman’s basement, for despite Norman’s gifts, he found the
shoemaker’s arrogance unacceptable. Didn’t he know who he was dealing
with? Didn’t he know respect?
The resentment stayed with Doc for years, and after Norman died and his
sons Irv and Marvin took over the business, Doc avoided them, paying
three times what they charged to have his special shoe made in
Philadelphia. Who cared that the Skrupskelis twins were as talented as their
father and made some of the finest shoes in the state and were
recommended by doctors all around? He knew them back when! They were
just like their father: arrogant. How dare they! Doc bought his shoes from
an American shoe store in Philadelphia, not from immigrant Chicken Hill
Jews who didn’t know their place.
After his disastrous date with Della, Doc quit his dating adventures. Still,
it was not lost on him during those high school years that there was one
other student at Pottstown High who shared his fate with shoes and old man
Skrup: the Jewess Chona. She was a year behind him in school, but when
she limped past him that first day of class, he noticed her immediately, for
the limp was familiar. He looked down at her feet and saw it right away: the
Skrup Shoe. She vanished down the hallway and he was glad. He avoided
her at first, which was not hard, as most of those Chicken Hill Jews stayed
together and avoided glee club, class trips, and after-school activities. But
he noticed the Jewess was often shadowed by a willowy black girl from the
Hill.
She morphed out of his sight that year and the next, but in his senior
year, the two were assigned lockers on the same corridor, and on the first
day of school, he spotted her from behind, fumbling with something inside
her locker. When she closed the locker door and turned to face the hallway,
he took one look and suddenly saw a haze of stars and heard the sound of a
thousand jazz trumpets blowing on New Year’s Eve. The gimpy, mousy girl
had morphed into a gorgeous, matter-of-fact, nonchalant, straight-up-and-
down beauty. A proud straight-backed teenager with black curly hair,
bouncing boobs, beautiful hips, lovely ankles, the legs hidden by a simple
woolen dress, and a light shining in her dark eyes that seemed to illuminate
the entire hallway. Staring at her from his locker, Doc forgot all about Della
Burnheimer. Chona was gorgeous. How come he hadn’t noticed that
before?
He eyed her in awed silence as she vanished down the hallway. He
watched her clandestinely that first week. He imagined working up the
nerve to take her out. What would other students say? What would his
mother say? His father? So what if she was Jewish? She was beautiful. He
imagined the two of them walking along Manatawny Creek talking about
big things, maybe him becoming a doctor one day; telling her about his
family, their great history, the great Blessingtons of Pottstown who arrived
on the Mayflower, and how the Manatawny was so beautiful before the
factories came, the Sundays going to church and getting ice cream after.
Maybe she could convert. She could be flexible, couldn’t she? He was sure
she could. She knew what it was like to be on the outside, with her foot.
They had that in common at least. She could convert, of course she could!
The feelings built up in him week after week then receded, then returned
month after month and receded again; then one afternoon in the spring,
nearing graduation, he finally drummed up the nerve to invite her to join the
debate team, of which he was president.
He was clumsy and nervous—he was not accustomed to talking to Jews
—and the moment went badly, for he had seen a Dana Andrews film
recently and had taken to talking boldly the way he’d seen the actor do.
Chona was standing at her locker when he approached, and when she turned
around to see him standing close, she seemed startled. He managed to
mumble his invitation and then watched her beautiful eyes dance over his
shoulder down the hall, then back to him, his heart pounding.
She chuckled nervously and said, “Oh no, I can’t do that,” and slipped
off down the hallway, followed by the tall, slim Negro girl who shadowed
her everywhere.
He watched her back, feeling destroyed. A day later, his desolation gave
way to indignation and finally to outrage. He had done the Christian thing.
He’d reached out to haul her up to his level and she was too blind to see it.
She lived on Chicken Hill, for God’s sake! Her father ran a grocery store
that served niggers, whereas his father was a city councilman and a
Presbyterian associate pastor. He was a man of importance. He had reached
down to pull her to his level and she had shunned him. Imagine. She was
just like the old Jew shoemaker Norman, with his mean, arrogant self. The
whole business disgusted him. Jews. She and old Norman probably made
fun of him when he wasn’t around.
The sting of it disappeared when he left for college and medical school at
Penn State, falling into a whirr of biology, cadavers, and clinical studies,
standing shoulder to shoulder with students from well-to-do families in
Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and even New York. And while his fellow medical
students had big plans to move back to their big cities after medical school,
he couldn’t imagine being anywhere other than his hometown. He’d
dreamed of moving to the big city at one time, working at a large hospital,
living in an apartment in a high-rise with a Negro maid and a glamorous
blonde wife. But who would look out for him in those places? There were
too many strange people—Italians and coloreds, big markets and fancy cars
and families whose money went back generations. The idea frightened him.
It was safer to stay home, to return to his hometown to heal the sick. Even
his snide medical school professors, two of them German and one of them
Jewish, respected him for his commitment.
But the hometown he returned to after medical school, where decent
white people knew each other by name and attended the same Presbyterian
church and ate ice cream at Bristol Ice House after service, had become a
town of immigrants. Greeks who drove trucks, Jews who owned buildings,
Negroes who walked Main Street like they owned it, Russians, Mennonites,
Hungarians, Italians, and Irish. The quaint horses and buggies of his
childhood were replaced by tractor trailers hauling steel, the dairy farms
replaced by oily, grim factories that belched smoke. Main Street was now
filled with cars on Saturdays, and not one but two traffic lights and a trolley.
His lovely Pottstown had become a city where no one seemed to know
anyone else. Still, when he chose for his wife someone his father approved
of, a simple farm girl from nearby Fagleysville, the wedding made the front
page of the Pottstown Mercury. That was a big deal and a good thing.
But the years of tending broken legs and sewing fingers back onto the
broken hands of factory workers chipped away at him, and his
disappointments grew. More factories belched more smoke and more
foreigners came. And when the simple farm girl he married turned out to be
a lazy, dull soul who lived for bingo nights, cheap novels, and blueberry
pie, which added to her burgeoning waistline as she proudly drove around
town with their four children in the brand-new Chevrolet she insisted he
buy every two years, he lost interest in her. He’d seen his youth vanish, his
town crumble, the blood of its proud white fathers diluted by invaders:
Jews, Italians, even niggers who wandered Chicken Hill selling ice cream
and shoes to one another while decent white people fought off the Jewish
merchants and Italian immigrants who seemed to be buying everything. Not
to mention the Mennonites in town with their horses and buggies. And the
Irish at the fire company. And Greeks mumbling their business at diners.
And Italians kicking ass at the dairy. And niggers from the Hill wanting
factory jobs instead of being maids and janitors like they were supposed to.
Now Jews were buying homes on Beech Street, making plans to build a
bigger Jewish synagogue, and what’s more, they were polluting the town’s
good white Christian teenagers with Negro music—jazz—brought to town
by none other than Chona’s husband, yet another Jew who owned not one
but two theaters. Where was America in all this? Pottstown was for
Americans. God had predestined it. The Constitution guaranteed it. The
Bible had said it. Jesus! Where was Jesus in all this? Doc felt his world was
falling apart.
So a few years after medical school when friends approached him about
attending a meeting of the Knights of Pottstown to spread good Christian
values, he agreed. And when that Knights of Pottstown meeting actually
turned out to be the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan instead, he saw no
difference. The men were like him. They wanted to preserve America. This
country was woods before the white man came. It needed to be saved. The
town, the children, the women, they needed to be rescued from those who
wanted to pollute the pure white race with ignorance and dirt, fouling things
up by mixing the pure WASP heritage with the Greeks, the Italians, the
Jews who had murdered their precious Jesus Christ, and the niggers who
dreamed of raping white women and whose lustful black women were a
danger to every decent, God-fearing white man. Not all of them were bad,
of course. The White Knights would decide who were the good ones. There
were a few good ones. Doc knew several.
The meetings were more like hobby-club gatherings than actual fire-and-
brimstone events. The men talked of farming and lost property, the
challenges of growing and seeding crops in bad weather, the cost of cattle
and transport, and rising prices. Many were former farmers, others were
factory workers and bankers. Good people. Pottstown people. People Doc
had known all his life. So when Carl approached him one afternoon after a
White Knights meeting about the problem of the Jewess holding the deaf
Negro child illegally, forcing him to work in her store, and keeping him out
of school when a good school was ready to take him, Doc had an interest.
He told Carl to come by his office the following week.
He knew Chona, of course. She had come once to see him about her
fainting when he first set up practice. At that visit, neither acknowledged
he’d actually tried to befriend her in high school years before. He
suspected, even hoped, that she’d forgotten it. He’d not forgotten it, and
when she walked into his office, he still felt the pounding of a thousand
drums in his heart, for she had aged well. The beautiful breasts, the slim
hips, the bright, shining eyes were still there, along with the Skrup Shoe on
her foot. The Skrup Shoe styling, he noted, had evolved into a lean and
handsome number, head and shoulders better than the expensive bricklike
box that adorned his foot and hurt at that moment, and for which he’d paid
top dollar. But that was the cost of principle, which he was happy to pay.
He kept matters professional at that visit, prescribed a few pain pills, and
told her to call again if the spells continued, hoping she would. But she
never did, and again he was offended. Did she think that just because he
was a small-town doctor, he didn’t understand her case? He had friends in
the medical field in Reading and Philadelphia. He read all the latest medical
journals. In fact, two doctors called him from Philadelphia not two weeks
after she left, asking his opinion about her puzzling fainting spells. What
had he found? they asked. They respected him more than she did.
He followed her case when she nearly died, felt strangely relieved when
she recovered, then was outraged when she had the nerve to write to the
newspaper complaining about him marching as a White Knight in the
annual parade. How dare she! Their parades weren’t hurting anybody. They
were a celebration of the real America.
The whole business riled him. But when Carl appeared at his office to
discuss her hiding a twelve-year-old Negro boy, Doc was careful to
maintain his professional distance, for he wasn’t fond of his cousin. Carl
had been a bit of a rooster back in high school, but now his firm football
player stomach hung over his belt. His sculpted shoulders sagged. His once-
clear face bore the trace of whiskers from a bad shave. His fedora was
worn, his cheap tie spotted. Still, Carl delivered a hanging curveball that
Doc found impossible to resist.
“The state will pay you to examine the Negro kid,” Carl said. He sat on
the edge of Doc’s desk as he delivered this news, pulling out a pack of
cigarettes. Doc was behind his desk as they spoke.
“Why do they need an exam in the first place?” Doc asked. “Is he sick?”
“Deaf and maybe dumb,” Carl said, extracting a cigarette and firing it.
“The state wants to send him to a special school. They need a doctor to sign
off on it. Simple as that.”
“Which school?”
“Pennhurst. They got a school in there.”
Doc had seen Pennhurst State School and Hospital. Just down the road in
Spring City. It was a horrible, overcrowded nightmare, but he checked his
tongue. “They take Negroes?” he asked.
“They take anyone who’s insane.”
“Deaf and maybe dumb’s not insane, Carl.”
“Do I look like a Ouija board, Earl?” Carl said, using Doc’s real name, a
sign of familiarity and, Doc thought grimly, disrespect. “The boy’s twelve.
Hasn’t been to school in a long time. They have special things for kids like
him there. It’s better than what he’s got now, living on the Hill and running
around for them Jews up there. The state wants him. They’re burning
precious dollars having me run up and down there looking for him. Every
time I go up there, nobody knows nothing. I even sent a colored up there
who couldn’t shake him loose. The niggers are hiding him up there. And
she’s in cahoots with ’em.”
“Is it her child?” Doc asked.
Carl looked at Doc blankly a moment, then sputtered, “Her what? She’s
married, Doc.”
“So?”
“Whatever you’re thinking, Doc, I don’t wanna know it.” Carl sucked his
cigarette thoughtfully, then said, “Now that you mention it, there’s a lot of
tipping going on in this town. Especially on the Hill. Could be.”
Doc’s face reddened. These kinds of conversations made him
uncomfortable. He felt like a fool. He didn’t know why he’d even brought it
up.
“I’ve never seen the kid, to be honest,” Carl said. “But from what I
heard, he’s a pure colored nigger. No father. His mother died not too long
ago.”
“From what?”
“You’re the doc,” Carl said. “All’s I know is the kid’s hiding at the store
someplace behind the Jewess and her husband, the All-American Dance
Hall and Theater guy. The husband finances the whole racket. I can have
the cops go up there with you if you want.”
“Let them do it and keep me out of it.”
Carl frowned. “It’s not smart to rile up those Chicken Hill niggers. She
got a lot of sway with ’em. She was nearly dead this time last year, sick
from something or other, and the coloreds got stirred up about it. She’s the
one who wrote the letter about our parade, remember?”