As I took in that declaration, the waitress came to refill my strong coffee and deliver a new glass of ice. I like iced coffee.
"You OK, Honey?" she asked too cheerily.
"Yes, ma'am, doing fine," I smiled in response.
"You a writer or something?" she asked, as she surveyed my folders and writing pad. My Mr. Jones just sat there as if he weren't there; actually he wasn't there to anyone but me. He tilted his head to chest and gave me a look across the table. The look communicated humor and the smugness of one who knows an inside joke. I suppose he did-he was over a century dead, yet visiting with me in a public place filled with people, the smells of burned grease, various frying pork meats, cigarette smoke, coffee and now the out of place scents of cedar, boxwood, and honeysuckle.
The last three fragrances always spoke to me of the old, the nostalgic, and the past. Those blended smells communicated a mystical other-world quality. They must have accompanied him. I became familiar with that incense during a visit to the Hermitage of Andrew Jackson near Nashville, Tennessee, when I was a teen-ager. It's also present at Pond Spring, in Fightin' Joe Wheeler's home near Decatur, Alabama, where I'd stopped on my drive to Fayetteville.
"Yes. Keeps me out of the brothels and sinful bars," I answered deadpan, catching Mr. Jones eyes. My crude humor, as Mr. Jones categorized it, hit the mark. It usually does. The sexual innuendo hit dead center and the female target blushed, smiled and turned towards the bar. The sexual energy between man and woman is an ever-present reality.
She stopped and turned to look back at me. "Well, honey," she said, "some think this is a bar." She'd found a retort.
"Ma'am, I said sinful bars."
She smiled broadly at that, the energy exposed, and slowly resumed her return to behind the counter. It seemed she squared her shoulders a little and then let her pace be a little languid, or was it sultry?
"In my day you'd be considered a brazen philanderer, sir, much like 'Old' Clay, that Whig potentate and scoundrel from Kentucky." Mr. Jones' judgment was delivered with bite, but his face showed good humor. He continued, "If you're through with your roguish flirtation let's proceed."
Precede he did. "Let's see, all stories need beginnings and, since you classify this 'a biographical novel,' shall we begin at my beginnings?" asked my companion and, in so doing, instructed me, the struggling writer, on the fundamentals of writing-beginnings. He added, "Oh, I've read over your shoulder most of the time over the last six months. I find your creative process, your thinking quite interesting. Writing a 'biographical novel' allows you ample room to deal with facts in a story form rather than as a sterile listing of activities. Yes, sir, that is a most intriguing approach. It will be most interesting to see if you…" He paused in mid-sentence, then continued, "if we, can make it work, yes, most interesting." There was again that smile of knowing.