Authors: Howard McEwen
Later on, the boy said they first spoke of inconsequential things to take their mind off the cold and the war, but then the conversation turned to what each of them were risking by fighting. A loss meant a traitor’s death for Washington. The farm boy knew the same could go for him.
"A stew?" Washington asked.
"Only a broth, sir. I would offer you some, but I only have the one spoon."
"I have no fear of sharing spoons with my men."
The soldier handed Washington the wooden spoon that his mother had given him on his thirteenth birthday. Washington took it in his massive hands. He dipped it into the broth and brought it to his lips.
The soldier detected a brief touch of sadness on his commander’s face.
"You do well with what little I’m able to get for you, son," General Washington said.
"Thank you, sir."
"I’m doing what I can to get you more."
"You’re doing your best, General."
"Let us pray my best is good enough. If we should fail, it will not be the fault of you infantrymen."
General Washington dipped into the pot once more and dragged his wooden teeth across the wooden spoon another time. He then sat meditatively for a long moment. Finally, Washington rose and thanked the farm-boy-turned-soldier for sharing his fire, his broth, his company and bid him farewell.
As his commander’s graceful form disappeared into the night, a single, startling thought gripped the boy’s mind.
"George Washington just walked off with my damned spoon."
The boy said he had the courage to face a line of Red Coats but not to give chase to General Washington demanding his spoon back.
He went back into his tent and wedged himself between his sleeping comrades and in the morning he told his story and not a one of them believed him. Throughout the war his story was always met with jeers.
After Yorktown, he headed west looking for his fortune and repeated his story to disbelieving friends and acquaintances. He became a tanner and set up shop in the settlement of Cincinnati, where he married and had children. One day he told his story to an army captain who was passing through their growing town. Army Captain Jackson Fowler listened politely to the tanner, then dismissed him as deranged.
After serving as President, Washington’s goal o
f retiring to Mount Vernon was delayed by threatened war with France. President John Adams asked the general to once again serve his country as Senior Officer of the Army. Washington agreed. He left the day-to-day affairs of the
army to others, but he kept himself informed. So it was that one day Captain Fowler was briefing an aged Washington on his recent tour of the western fortifications. During a relaxed moment over dinner the officer told the former President the Cincinnati tanner’s tale.
Washington, still imposing in his old age, slowly stood from the table and after a short time returned. He laid before Captain Fowler a thin, worn wooden spoon.
"Captain Fowler, that night was a dark night of the soul for me," he said. "One of my darkest of the war. Not being able to sleep, I went for a walk. I didn’t know where I was going or what I was doing, but the suffering of my men had shaken my soul. I sat down with a boy and spoke with him for a few minutes. I tasted his cruel gruel. It was thin and rancid. I tasted again and my spirits fell further. How were we to defeat the British with men fed on this, I worried. I bid him thanks and farewell and walked back to my quarters. It wasn’t until daybreak that I realized I had slipped the boy’s spoon into my pocket. In my melancholy, I could not remember where he was camped and soon became entangled in my daily duties. It always disturbed me that in my thoughtlessness I had taken such a rough spoon from a half-starved man.
Captain, when you return to the west in the spring, can I entrust you to return this spoon to the tanner with his General’s sincerest apologies?"
Captain Fowler did as his General asked. And in the spirit of true republicanism, he invited the tanner and other tradesman and lawyers and territorial leaders to dine with him. Tenant farmers and blacksmiths supped with bankers and a railroad owner. That first dinner became an annual event. Those of all social stations sat equally. They traded stories and concerns. They exchanged their views and visions of their booming city. As the years passed, they built traditions, designed rituals and imposed rules. They called themselves the Brotherhood of the Spoon. The final course of each meal was a bowl of broth to remind them of their origins and the dinner was capped at twelve men.
The Brotherhood was a foundation block that the great river city of Cincinnati, the Queen of the West, was built on.
As Mr. Carmichael told the story, the years progressed and as so often happens, the lower classes were given the old heave-ho. By the time of the robber barons, the Brotherhood of the Spoon had become an elaborate hoity-toity dinner and the city’s most-exclusive club. The lower classes were allowed to serve but not to sit. Twelve of the city’s leading citizens were its members. When a member died or resigned because of infirmity, the remaining eleven nominated and elected a new twelfth.
I’m not sure if I believe it, but that’s the story that Mr. Carmichael gave me after the events of that Saturday.
So as I said, the four of us were s
tanding in that dining room, staring into a hole that once held a spoon that George Washington once wrapped his lips around.
Mr. Carmichael turned to me.
"Mr. Gibb," he said. "Investment advisors learn so much about human nature. We know just how mean, ruthless and evil people can be. They tell us everything. It seems talking about their money is like the first unfastened button. Once they start they can’t keep from undressing. They talk and talk until they stand naked in front of us. But fortunately, we’re not like priests or a therapist. We’re not bound up by theology that precludes a belief in human evil or science that ignores the truth about human nature. If we commit to seeing things the way they are and not the way we want them to be, we see so much more.
"In this case of the missing spoon, we must overcome two obstacles," he said. "We must overcome the obstacle of not looking where we don’t want to look. We must also overcome the assumption that the spoon was stolen."
"What do you mean?" asked Mr. Turner. We’ve looked everywhere. If Washington’s
spoon wasn’t stolen, then where is it?"
"Mr. Turner, no orangutan climbed up this building, opened a window and stole the spoon. No snake was trained to slither its way through the vents to steal it. With apologies to Mr. Poe, nothing is ever stolen by such fantastical means. We must look to the practical and the practical points to Mr. Bloom."
"Bloom?" yelled Mr. Turner.
I looked to Mr. Bloom sitting down at the table. The man was pure Coltrane. The essence of cool. He gave only a hint of a smile.
"He was the man in the room when the spoon was stolen," said Mr. Carmichael. "He was the only one who had the opportunity to take it."
"But we checked each other," said Mr. Turner. "We checked the dining room and the kitchen. He didn’t steal it."
"The spoon wasn’t stolen," said Mr. Carmichael.
"Of course it was stolen. It’s not here. Matt, tell him." Mr. Bloom only sighed in answer.
"There is an alternative to the spoon having been stolen, Mr. Turner. You just won’t allow yourself to see it."
"What?"
"It has been destroyed."
"Destroyed?"
"What other explanation could there be?"
"Why would anyone destroy Washington’s spoon? It was priceless. Anyway, it couldn’t have been destroyed so quickly. What could someone do? Eat it?"
"If no one else had the opportunity then Mr. Bloom took the spoon," said Mr. Carmichael. "If the spoon hasn’t been found and it was impossible to steal then it has been destroyed. Allow yourself to see that. My best guess is that Mr. Bloom intentionally left his gloves in the dining room. Once the two of you were at the elevator, he borrowed your key to retrieve them. It took him only moments to smash the glass. Now the problem is: how could he have destroyed it so quickly? You said he called to you after a minute or two."
"Exactly," said Mr. Turner.
"So he must have destroyed it slowly," Mr. Carmichael continued.
This blew Mr. Turner’s top. He didn’t bother to pick his top up.
"But I was with him." He turned to Mr. Bloom. "Matt, aren’t you going to defend yourself?"
"You’re doing a swell job of it, Greg," he finally said.
"Again, it’s just a guess," said Mr. Carmichael. "I’d venture that he smashed the glass, took the spoon then put it in the oven. He then started the self-clean cycle. That would have sent the temperature of the oven to about one thousand degrees. Remember how the kitchen was hot several hours after the meal was done? As you two were looking for the spoon, it was slowly being turned to ash. You didn’t think to look in the oven because you wouldn’t see what you didn’t want to see. You assumed that the spoon had been stolen. That assumption blinded you. You didn’t allow yourself to see that."
"He started to look into the oven, Mr. Carmichael, but I distracted him," said Mr. Bloom, finally.
"What?" asked Mr. Turner.
"Why?" asked Mr. Carmichael. "Why destroy it?"
"I’m a revolutionary, Mr. Carmichael. This country, this society, this culture is sick. I hate it. I’m a revolutionary, but I’m no bomb thrower. If you want to destroy a culture, you don’t bomb it. You undermine it. Me and others like me have set this society on the knife’s edge. We just need to give it a few more pushes and it will topple and shatter. I fought in the business world. I destroyed companies and jobs and called it free market creative destruction and was praised. Others went after history. We denigrated people like Washington and made you embarrassed by them. Dead, white males. Others fought in the art world. They made the ugly more praiseworthy than the beautiful. Your culture now has literature without plots, poems without rhyme and music without melody. In the schools, we’re squeezing out reading, writing and arithmetic.
"And in the cities we undermine institutions. The neighborhood school? A thing of the past. Your churches? Attendance is plummeting. In politics? We’ve destroyed faith in democracy itself. How many men and women don’t vote because ‘they’re all crooks’? And the family? Well, look around. To many, ‘Dad’ is a theoretical concept.
"Institutions like The Brotherhood of the Spoon held this city together. But the brotherhood itself is held together by the thinnest of threads. When they hear that the spoon was stolen, better yet, that one of its brothers did something like what I’ve done, it will collapse. The eleven others will just surrender and walk away and the wee bit of support the Brotherhood offered this city will crumble. It’s not a large blow, I admit, but it could be the final blow. It could be the tipping point. Something as small as a missing spoon can push this society over the edge. For want of a nail...."
Mr. Turner smacked Mr. Bloom full in the face. I’m glad he did. It kept me from hurting my own hand.
"Thank you for at least giving me your reasons," said Mr. Carmichael, once Mr. Bloom had recovered himself. "I’ll leave it to Mr. Turner to decide how to handle it. It is well past time for Mr. Gibb and me to call it a night."
I followed Mr. Carmichael out of the room. It all felt a bit anticlimactic as we rode down the noisy elevator to the ground floor.
"May I ask a question, Mr. Carmichael?”
"Yes, Mr. Gibb."
"What did this have to do with servicing clients?"
"Our business is all about trust, Mr. Gibb. Mr. Turner will tell others how we helped. That will engender trust in those who hear it—those who are my clients, and those who may one day become my clients. Also, it was a bit of fence mending. They asked me to join ten years ago and I turned them down.”
"Why?"
"They kept calling it ‘Washington’s spoon.’ But it never was. It was the soldier’s spoon. They didn’t understand the point of their own Brotherhood. They’d lost their way well before tonight."
We walked out of the elevator, past the man with the Christian name of Frank onto Fourth Street. Mr. Carmichael told me good night and settled into his car. I shrugged my shoulders and walked north. Japp’s was only eight blocks away. I looked at my new Rolex. It was one in the a.m. Japp’s would be open for another hour. I moseyed over to Main Street and pointed my thirst north.
"What do you give a guy who needs a night cap?" I asked Molly when I got there.
Out came the Boston shaker. In went ice. In went the demon rum, then a blast of moo juice, then she sweetened it with some simple syrup. A dash of vanilla followed. Then the music of the shaker
.
She poured it into an Irish coffee mug and topped it with a health dose of cinnamon. I took a sip and got happy.
"You happen to see that girl I was chatting up earlier?"
"I think so. Cute nose. Big chest."
"That’s the one."
"She left with a pair of broad shoulders."
I took another sip.
"So what are you doing after closing?" I asked her.