The Coca-Cola Man

Normandy was a virtuous little town. There were no street lights, no locked doors, no policemen and no curfew. By ten o’clock all its citizens were asleep.

The town did have one night sentinel, the telephone operators. These were the Broyles sisters, one a widow and the other unmarried. The younger unmarried sister was pale and slightly stooped with rats in her thinning hair. They slept with the earphones on their ears, alternating night duty. Their switchboard was over Brandon’s hardware store which had the largest plate glass window in town.

Nothing more exciting than an occasional hobo at the door or a derailed freight car disturbed the ebb and flow of living in Normandy. The sun rose and set, clean clothes flapped on the line, a few funerals and the arrival of a new baby—these were the joys of small town life.

At big farm dinners where everything was made deliciously from scratch, where milk came from cows, where water was pumped by hand from a near-by well, a strange new drink was introduced –the Coca-Cola. It was viewed suspiciously at first and no store in town sold the drink. However a case of Coca-Cola arrived fortnightly by train addressed to Mr. Jenkins, the only man in town who imbibed.

Recently there had been a ripple of back fence gossip about this new dark, bottled drink called Coca-Cola and about Mr. Jenkins who owned the Produce House.

The sinful consequence of drinking Coca-Cola was cinched when the town’s druggist poured a bottle of the offending drink over a pound of fresh slaughtered beefsteak. The next morning the startled townsfolk saw shrunken, discolored meat displayed at his store.

“Think what it would do to your liver!” the druggist said.

This experiment didn’t faze Mr. Jenkins who continued the drinking of two bottles of Coca-Cola daily.

His status as a citizen of Normandy would never have been elevated had it not been for the midnight episode.

First there was the sound of shattering glass and then screams—high, hysterical—a woman’s scream. These screams were heard by every man in town, but not one dared to venture forth Not one except Mr. Jenkins who, with a lighted lantern in one hand and a bottle of Coca-Cola in the other, arrived on the scene.

To his amazement he saw blood pouring from Brandon’s plate glass window and heard low moans. There, lying in the show window was a wall-eyed sorrel filly, her throat slashed and her legs broken. The filly had escaped from the livery stable. Being a country horse the roar of the midnight train had frightened her and she ran blindly into the plate glass window.

Going upstairs Mr. Jenkins found Miss Broyles still at her post with her rats out and earphones on, in a state of frozen fright.

He immediately revived her with a swig of Coca-Cola, went calmly down the stairs, took a pistol from his pocket and shot the filly.

From that day on Mr. Jenkins, the produce man, became Normandy’s hero and Coca-Cola became an accepted drink in the town.