Page from a Tennessee Journal (AmazonEncore Edition)

turned to the cook.
    “Red, you save me that there juicy thigh and I’ll give you fifty cents from tonight’s pot.” John walked through the swinging door with Big Red staring after him.
    While the cook mostly talked nonsense, the thought of the amount of cash in the holiday pot had crossed John’s mind. In early November, Zeola had moved him from holding two poker pots a week to four. Now, Monday through Thursday, John Welles was the pot man for all the early poker games at the whorehouse.
    He opened the door into a dining room in mid-Thanksgiving meal. Not wanting to disturb the diners, John nodded a slight greeting in their direction and eased himself around behind the chairs holding six of Miz Zeola’s girls. Miz Zeola sat at the head of the table with the elderly and widowed Mr. Jackson who, according to the girls, couldn’t really lay a woman—though on more than one occasion, he had just about died trying. This was the early shift. Zeola fed her girls and got them ready to take in any walk-off-the-streets. She figured that on a holiday, some lone man might hanker for female company. Zeola didn’t count on getting more than a dollar a girl for these quickies. Mr. Jackson was a charity case. He paid three dollars once a week, come summer or winter, just to spend two hours staring at one of Zeola’s buck-naked, less-than-prized girls.
    The real money didn’t usually come until after eight o’clock, when the wives of all the regulars had fallen asleep, dog-tired from their Thanksgiving efforts. Miz Zeola included a whiskey-laced pecan pie, bought her ladies new finery, and gave her regulars a dollar off the usual price, all in the spirit of the holiday. The liquor flowed free on Thanksgiving and Christmas. Zeola figured if she could just get the men to come in, relax ’em with good booze and cheap women, they would be more than happy to sit in at a high-stakes poker game.
    John just hoped her plan would work now that he was holding the pot. He’d heard tales that on some past holidays, there’d been so many players lined up that Zeola had to run three or four games instead of the usual two. It was hinted that for her best customers, Zeola even held the pot herself.
    “I hope you had a bite to eat already, John Welles.” Zeola unthreaded the watch chain from her thickly powdered bosom and pulled out the timepiece. “I got two men sittin’ in the room already and two mo’ just stepped into the house.” She tilted her head and squinted one eye to get a better look at the watch. “Them last two gonna play first and lay later.”
    Everybody at the table, including Mr. Jackson, who almost popped out his false teeth, let out a howl.
    “Big Red will be savin’ me a plate, Miz Zeola. I’m gonna see that you have a bang-up first pot to help you celebrate yo’ Thanksgivin’.” John turned down the wattage of his smile as he left the dining room and walked across the empty hall into the parlor.
    Miz Zeola’s parlor was the biggest room in the house. She’d had some colored carpenter come over and put up four floor-to-ceiling pillars, although they did no earthly good at holding up anything. In front of each one, she’d set two velvet-cushioned chairs, but what made the space special, were the tall potted plants she placed on the side opposite the chairs. She fixed them in such a way that the big leaves just about covered whoever was sitting there. With the candlelight scattered just so, and those bushy plants, Zeola hoped that nervous newcomers, and the Nashville law that sometimes sniffed around on official business, would be too busy looking to see who was hiding behind those palms to pay much notice to the two doors that looked like skinny five-foot-tall amateur painted pictures. They weren’t as well hidden as the little rooms off the dining area, but it would take somebody who’d stepped through them before to know where on the picture frame to push at the hidden handle to get them to open into the poker rooms.
    Of course, the piano man was also part of Madame Zeola’s plan. This afternoon, the parlor was empty except for A.C. playing the blues down low. Miz Zeola always patted herself on the back at her find of the piano man and paid him well to stay at her establishment. In that rough voice of his, he could sing as well as play. The only thing Zeola didn’t like about A.C.’s playing was his choice of the blues. She absolutely banished it from her parlor during business hours. She