Dimestore (3 page)

Still, Mama and my Aunt Lois often brought me and my cousins Randy and Melissa over there in the summertime: in my memory, the mothers are always sitting on the porch sewing or stringing beans, watching to see who'll come up the road or stop in for a glass of iced tea. We loved the big swing and the comfortable wicker furniture. The whole family came over on Sunday afternoons. Most of the men were in politics, yellow-dog Democrats always running somebody for office or politicking and agitating about something. They were all big talkers. They'd drink some whiskey out behind the house and after a while they would bet good money on just about anything, even which bird would fly first off the telephone wire, and then everybody would stay out on the porch talking and telling stories until it got dark and we could all see the fairy lights of the Morgan Theater's marquee over in town. I usually fell asleep on somebody's lap, looking at those lights and hearing those stories, told by somebody that loved me, so that my sense of a story is still very personal. Even today, when I'm writing, stories usually come to me in a human voice; often it is the voice of a character, but sometimes it is the voice of the story itself.

My sweet granddaddy, a kind man with a Humpty Dumpty figure in later years, always wore a suit and a hat to town. He loved children, often serving as ringmaster for our circuses in the yard. He also loved the Cincinnati Reds, listening avidly to their games on his giant Philco radio upstairs in the bedroom by the side window.

Grandmother, too, spent many hours before her own side window right below, sitting on the blue tufted sofa with all those little covered buttons. The view from their respective windows symbolized the changes that were taking place in Grundy: originally, my grandparents looked out upon their own vegetable garden, the barn and various outbuildings, the chickens and the cow, the woods and the mountains. Later they could see the narrow-gauge railroad headed for West Virginia, and the growing town just down at the mouth of Slate. In their final years, this view was cut off by the first modern supermarket in Grundy, Jack Smith's Piggly Wiggly, which he built right next to my grandparents' house on the biggest piece of unoccupied flat land in the downtown area, where land was suddenly at a premium. “Progress” triumphs over nature every time, and Grundy was no exception. The late sixties and early seventies were boom times for coal and expansion years for business in Grundy. In those years, of course, nobody even considered the effects of unregulated growth upon the environment.

I went to school right on the other side of my grandparents' house, in the stately old school building that is now the Appalachian School of Law. Here I encountered the terrifying Miss Nellie Hart, with her bright white hair, foghorn voice, and beautiful skin, who could diagram any sentence, even sentences so complex that their diagrams on the board looked like blueprints for a cathedral. It was an ability I aspired to. I loved English, flunked math, and admired my gorgeous and sophisticated French teacher, Anita Cummings, who wore her hair appropriately in a French twist, and gave us quiche lorraine to eat in class. Astonishingly, she was married to the football coach. I liked funny Mrs. Garber, in whose class I made a spectacularly ugly yellow blouse with darts that went the wrong way. I approached my job as football cheerleader with utmost seriousness, practicing endlessly at home, though I never knew the first thing about the game. I could do a cartwheel and land in a split, however. I remember the yellow-tiled cafeteria where I surreptitiously picked up all the Peppermint Pattie wrappers ever touched by the football player I had a crush on, then saved them at home in little silver stacks in my dresser drawer. My girlfriends and I decorated that cafeteria with endless rolls of crepe paper for dances where I slow-danced with the Peppermint Pattie boy to “The Twelfth of Never,” our song.

I remember the auditorium where study hall was held and where to everyone's shock I was once crowned Miss Grundy High in spite of my amazingly awful outfit: a red velvet ribbon tied around my neck like a noose; a white strapless dress with about two hundred rows of tacky little net ruffles marching all the way down its ballerina-length hoop skirt to my red high heels. This outfit was my own concept entirely. I won a rhinestone tiara, a glittery banner proclaiming
MISS GRUNDY HIGH
, an armful of real red roses, a steam iron, and a set of white Samsonite luggage, which my cousins had to lug home because my date wouldn't give me a ride. Now, he said, I'd “get too stuck up.” I cried all the way home. My parents were out playing bridge with the Beinhorns, and missed the whole thing. “A nice girl should not win a beauty contest” was my mother's opinion.

When I think of Mama, she is always at home, holding forth in her kitchen, and somebody is always there visiting. Most often it's Ava McClanahan, who helped her for years, or one of her many friends or neighbors: Stella Burke, Margaret Pritchard, June Bevins, or Dot Trivett, for instance. The kitchen is filled with cigarette smoke, the smell of coffee perking, and whatever's baking in the oven; often it is Mama's famous loaf bread. The women lean forward, over their coffee cups, and lower their voices. Writing or drawing at my own little table in the corner, I perk right up. Now they are going to
really
talk, about somebody who “has just never been quite right, bless her heart,” or somebody who is “kindly nervous,” or somebody else who's “been having trouble down there.”
Down there
is a secret place, a foreign country, like Mexico or Nicaragua. I keep on drawing, and don't miss a word. Mama takes the loaf bread out of the oven and gives us all a piece, crusty on the outside and soft on the inside, with butter melting into it. It is the best thing in the world. Country music plays softly on the countertop radio, tuned to our brand-new station, WNRG; in my mind it's always Johnny Cash, singing “Ring of Fire.” The Levisa River flows out back, with the railroad on the other side, carrying Norfolk & Western trains loaded with coal.

How I loved the mournful whistle of those trains as they roared past several times a day! Often I ran out and stood there on the riverbank watching them pass, wondering where they were going. On the edge of the riverbank sat the little “writing house” that my daddy built for me and then had to build back again after every flood.

My mother had been raised at Chincoteague Island, on Virginia's far Eastern Shore; she had just graduated from Madison State Teachers College when she met my father at a family wedding; her older sister, Marion, married his uncle John Dennis, creating some kind of complicated cousins I never could figure out. As a girl, Mama was beautiful and light-hearted—silly, even. She loved to dance. Daddy fell hard. With both the time and the inclination for courting, he would not be put off, arriving in Chincoteague ten days later, only to learn that she had to leave immediately for Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, her first teaching job. She'd scarcely been there a week when—to her surprise—Ernest Smith showed up. He took a room at a local boardinghouse near her own rented quarters, then appeared bright and early each morning to drive her to school, and at the end of every school day, he'd be waiting by the gate with a bunch of roadside flowers and a big grin on his face. This went on for months. The whole town took a fancy to it. By Thanksgiving, he had worn her down; at Christmas vacation, they eloped.

Thus Mama came to Grundy, where she taught home economics, quitting after many years to “raise me.” When I was little, she read aloud to me constantly; I believe it is for this reason that I came to love reading so much, for I always heard her voice in my head as I read the words on the page. She never got used to the lack of a horizontal horizon or the fact that the sun couldn't reach our yard before 11 a.m., not enough sun to really grow roses, though her roses looked okay to me. Still, she loved Grundy almost as much as Daddy did, despite the floods that twice destroyed her house and yard. They built it all back each time. My mother loved that house, as she loved her roses and her crafts. My own North Carolina home today is filled with quilts and afghans she made, furniture she refinished, and pictures she decoupaged. ”Hell, Gig will decoupage anything—she'll decoupage a chair while you're sitting on it!” neighbor Dr. Burkes was heard to say.

COWTOWN WAS A WONDERFUL
NEIGHBORHOOD
to grow up in, roaming from house to house with our gang of neighborhood kids—my best friend Martha Sue Owens, Melissa and Randy and other visiting cousins, Rowena and Bill Yates, Cathy and Russ Belcher, Jimmy Bevins and little Terry Trivett, the Boxley boys who came to stay with their grandmother in the summertime. I ate supper at all their houses. Gaynor Owens made the best cream gravy and cornbread, but the Trivetts ate the most exotic things, even foreign things, such as lasagna and chop suey. I learned to swim in their backyard pool.

Martha Sue and I started a neighborhood newspaper named
The Small Review
, which we wrote out laboriously by hand and sold door to door for a nickel. I got in lots of trouble for my editorials, such as “George McGuire Is Too Grumpy,” or my opinion that “Mrs. Ruth Boyd is a mean music teacher. She hits your fingers with a pencil and her house smells like meat loaf all the time.” We also wrote news items such as the following: “Miss Lee Smith and Miss Martha Sue Owens were taken by car to Bristol, Virginia, to buy school shoes. They got to look at their feet in a machine at Buster Brown and guess what. Their bones are LONG AND GREEN.”

We kids formed dozens of clubs, each with its secret handshake and code words. We ran our mountains ridge to ridge—climbing trees and cliffs, playing in caves, swinging on grapevines, catching salamanders, damming up creeks, building lean-tos and lookouts, playing Indians and settlers with our handmade slingshots or the occasional Christmas bow-and-arrow set. Every day after school we'd throw down our books and “head for the hills.” We'd stay there until they rang the bell to call us home for supper.

Back in my own yard, I spent a lot of time sitting under a giant cluster of forsythia bushes, which I called the “dogbushes” because I took an endless series of family dogs under there with me—my Pekingese, Misty, and our boxer, Queenie, come to mind—along with an entire town full of imaginary friends. My two best friends in that dogbush town were Sylvia and Vienna (who was named for my favorite food, the Vienna sausages in the nice flat little cans that I used to take under there with me to eat, along with some of those little cellophane packets of saltine crackers). My friend Vienna was very beautiful, with long, red curly hair. But my friend Sylvia could fly. I also spent hours down by the river, where I had a wading house—the understory of a willow tree—which would find its way into my first novel,
The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed
.

I wasn't allowed to play in the Levisa when it ran black with the coal they were washing upriver. But once Martha Sue and I made rafts out of boards tied on to inner tubes and floated down past the Richardson Apartments and under the Hoot Owl Bridge, around the bend at the hospital and under the depot bridge, all the way to town, where we landed in triumph behind the dimestore. Here we were greeted by a sizable crowd including my daddy, alerted by enemy spies. We were quickly returned, dripping wet, to our worried mothers for a spanking.

THE LEVISA SEEMED SO TAME
then. Impossible to imagine that this friendly stream could become a raging torrent as it had done in 1937 and then again in the great flood of 1957, when I found a huge catfish flopping down the dimestore stairs into the water-filled toy section. My little dead turtles were floating everywhere, with roses on their shells. After it flooded again in 1977, I came home to help. I remember gathering up floating pieces of the parquet floor in my mother's dining room to keep as building blocks for my little boys back in North Carolina. The muddy water had risen above the countertops in Mama's kitchen. That flood killed three people, devastated 90 percent of the downtown businesses, and caused $100 million in damage countywide. Those were the “twenty-year floods,” but there were other floods, too—Grundy had had nine major floods since 1929. Daddy never slept when it rained. He was always out back with his flashlight, “checking the river.” He had an enormous steel flood door constructed for the back of the dimestore, which was put into place each time the river started rising.

Daddy finally closed his dimestore in 1992 due to lack of business, despite everyone's pleas that he keep it open. I thought he should, too. Since my mother's death four years earlier, I couldn't imagine what he would do when the dimestore was gone. Its popular lunch counter had made it not only a store but also a gathering place, a landmark. But Daddy was too good a businessman to “run a losing proposition,” as he put it. The town population had been declining for years due to the floods and the failing coal industry. There had been 35,000 people in Buchanan County when I was growing up there; the population had fallen to around 28,000. Three thousand people had lived in Grundy alone during the coal boom days of the early 1970s; now there were fewer than a thousand. Unemployment had soared to 16 percent.

Watching my father close his dimestore after forty-seven years in business was one of the saddest things I have ever witnessed; in a way it was fitting that he died on the last day of his going-out-of-business sale. He was eighty-two.

I had been visiting him for a week. Everybody we ever knew had come by the store to pay their respects and buy something, one last thing from the dimestore. All the merchandise had been sold, and some men had come from Bluefield to take away the fixtures, which had been sold, too. They loaded their big truck and drove off. Daddy and I walked out of the store together; he turned off the light and locked the door behind us. I headed back down to my home in North Carolina, and Daddy went back to his house in Cowtown, where he ate the supper which one of the girls had sent home with him, read the paper and the mail, and at some point fell to the kitchen floor, breaking several ribs.