The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap (11 page)

“How do we stick around if no one takes us seriously enough to shop here?” I whined, although his rebound analogy made me grin. It’s hard to whine and grin at the same time.

He grinned back. “That, baby girl, is the part we ain’t figured out yet. Now pull up your bootstraps and prove you can be part of this place. And, honey, don’t give anyone more power than they’ve got. There’s plenty of locals can see the good in having a new business run by nice people. People like havin’ a bookstore, I know; they tell me. And there’s plenty of ’em as like you and Jack; they like all that crazy stuff you two organize. The rest’ll come around. Give ’em time.”

Exit power-player pal, coffee refill in travel mug. He didn’t drop any change in the donation pot for it.

Garth was right; I had openly said we were “just trying out” the idea of a bookstore. We’d refused to go into debt just so we could make a clean getaway if needed; Jack called the little protected lump in our bank account “Wendy’s emergency flight fund.” Partly that caution stemmed from still feeling unsettled; letting anyone else know how important my bookshop was to me would make me vulnerable again. It had been a casual acquaintance, something we could walk away from easily. Problem was, now we were in love with Big Stone.

That “we might stay, we might not” had also been hedging our bets against straight-out failure. Like the rest of the community, we hadn’t been sure a bookstore would work, mentally or physically.

A crazy little three-part syllogism echoes like a drumbeat through the Appalachian Coalfields: people outstanding in their field can go anywhere they want; you are here; therefore, you must not be very good at what you do, because who wants to be here?

The Coalfields are emptying. If you ask someone outside Central Appalachia to name our region’s top export, they would say coal, but the more accurate answer is college students. Newly minted, educated adults make up what’s called in British Isles history “a bloody Flight of Earls.” The best and brightest of the eighteen-to-twenty-five-year-olds flee this scenic wonderland of economic stagnation with their entrepreneurial spirits, energy, ideas, and babies, headed for the cities. The county’s population drops by something like 5 percent every year, mostly young’uns crazy to hurl themselves against the walls of what they figure will be a larger life. Mountains may have formed their backbones, but dreams light their eyes.

Living in a shrinking community meant every customer had to be wooed, feted, and treated like a precious commodity. They needed to believe in us, but the very fact that we’d chosen to settle in their town negated trust in our prowess. Four book clubs within half an hour’s drive never entered the store in its first year, even though we put out the word that we did bulk orders. Without rancor, and without ever really putting it in words, their members assumed—as one told us later—that we wouldn’t be as good as someplace bigger, somewhere else, or just surfing the Net. What could a bookshop in the tiny town of Big Stone Gap offer sufficient to change established buying habits?

A woman came into our shop the day after one of Christopher Paolini’s books became available for preorder. When I explained that we didn’t have it on hand but I could order it for her, she sniffed. “I figured a place like this wouldn’t have it; I’ll get it in Kingsport.” I tried to explain that no one would have it until the preorders were released, but she walked out midword.

In Scotland, it’s known as “too wee, too poor, too stupid” when a small place (like Scotland itself) is considered ineffectual. My M.D. pal Elizabeth says she and other regional docs often hit against that unspoken assumption when traveling: “Our IQ plummets seconds after they ask where we’re from.” Yet stereotyping is not a simple art form; both Elizabeth and my photographer friend Elissa have experienced denigration of their skills within their own communities. Neighbors prefer to seek medical care or photographs from a city agency. And that’s leaving aside the allure and convenience of online services and retailers.

Elissa took me to lunch one day—I think friends and regular customers kept feeding us because they thought we would starve otherwise—and I told her about Garth’s soliloquy. Elissa, four feet eleven inches tall and not a pontificator by nature, blew a gasket.

“Americans en masse have been conditioned to think that bigger is better, box stores and online are the only places worth shopping, buy your stuff from some major brand label and don’t accept anything that looks out of the ordinary. Nothing that was made by your neighbor could be any good. Why shop local when local is so small and familiar, and online is so cheap and easy and dazzling?

“Here in our neck of the woods, we’ve been suckered and snowed until we don’t understand the value of supporting ourselves. We could benefit so much as a town from the talents of the people who live here, but instead we die by our own self-strangulation, because if somebody does start a service or a store, they have to run the gauntlet you’re running now, Wendy. ‘Are you one of us? Are you good enough? Do you think you’re too good? Are you trying to change us?’ Or they have to put up with that ‘Yeah, but it’s from here so it must be crap’ crap. And that’s a real pity, but that’s also how it is, and I don’t think it will ever change.”

I stared at her, and Elissa took a sip of Coke. “That’s how I feel,” she said. “You gonna eat those fries?”

A limited belief in the prowess of anything considered local, coupled with hefty suspicion of nonnatives, is a tricky hand to play. Amid the innuendoes and nuances, relationships between insiders and outsiders—and who gets called which—can be as subtle as a homemade quilt. You glance at it and see a pattern, but when you look again, you notice alignments and contrasts that change the pattern’s intent; a third look reveals tiny stitches rolling over the colored pieces in contours and swirls, holding the whole thing together. All this makes it a little tricky for well-meaning souls from outside to waltz into town and act natural.

We had been, however briefly, insiders, but now some people wanted us to be outsiders again. Time to smile, persevere, and make clear that we weren’t playing to anyone’s stereotype. What we didn’t know, within the misery of those weeks of being talked down, was how much fun getting out of the Slough of Despond and back into the Inside Track would be.

C
HAPTER 8

Stephen Saved Our Bacon Day

There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized peace.

—Woodrow Wilson, “Peace Without Victory,” Address to the U.S. Senate, January 21, 1917

M
Y HUSBAND WAS SANGUINE AS
the rumor mill continued spitting toads instead of diamonds about our little bookstore, and people we barely knew continued to enjoy telling us about it. “We’re doing fine; stop worrying; if some people choose not to shop with us, it doesn’t matter; plenty do. And you’ve got to question the motives of people who want to tell you the nasty things other people are saying.”

Still, I continued to cast about for ways of saying, “Can’t we all just get along?” in a friendly, nonchallenging way. Eventually I hit upon a cunning plan—political, but not too; clever, but not overly ambitious.

“You should join a local civic club,” I urged my homebody husband one night as we sat down to a cold plate of sliced vegetables and cheese.

He shot me the look of a raccoon in headlights, little glittering eyes holding a mute appeal against imminent death. “Why me?”

“You’re the male.” My logic was infallible. “The rumors will stop once everyone sees we don’t want to fight, and that we’re doing good things for the area. Plus, you’ll be guaranteed a square meal once a week at their meetings.” I gnawed a pepper slice. Between money and time, cooking at our house had become more fantasy than nonfiction.

Jack stared at the quartered tomato on his plate. “Hmmm,” he said.

A Kiwanis chapter boasted many of the town’s movers and shakers. Joining turned out to be expensive, but we figured our gain in goodwill would balance the cost. I asked a local pastor if he’d sponsor Jack. He appeared delighted to do so.

We didn’t know my former boss was their current president. We didn’t know some members embraced the belief that we needed to leave like good little bad guys. A letter arrived in short order, rejecting Jack’s membership and thanking us for our interest in the Kiwanis Club, a group “dedicated to making Big Stone Gap an even better place to live.”

My husband, one of the gentlest creatures God ever put on Earth, folded the letter back into its envelope with a wan smile. “Well, I guess we know when we’re not wanted.”

Truth, justice, and social equity; we’re just trying this bookstore thing out; suspicion’s earned, honey.
The voices ran like rats through my brain, vicious little claws out for blood.
The Coalfields are dying, strangled by our own hands; no one wants to be here, so why do you?

“And so will everyone else,” I snapped back at Jack, snatching up the car keys.

Accustomed to dealing with my overdeveloped sense of fair play (okay, martyr complex) Jack headed me off at the door. “Where are you going?” he sighed.

“To buy the best document frame Walmart sells,” I practically snarled. As realization dawned, he threw back his head and laughed, then went with me to pick out a nice oak frame matching the pillars in our front rooms. We spent two days’ worth of grocery money on it and hung the Kiwanis rejection letter in the shop—prominently.

It made us feel better, and it sure made customers laugh, but staring at that document one night, I took mental stock. Operating a bookshop at starvation wages, we had taken a direct hit to our ability to improve the customer pool. And even though we were recovering, we couldn’t seem to shake the label of aggressive incomers riding the fifth horse of the Apocalypse: Change.

Again and again, my mind returned to the question of why some people talked trash about our store, going round and round like the teddy bear of British finger rhyme fame, circling a garden of dead ends. Jack, passing by the front room table as I sat trapped in my death spiral, noticed and wrapped his arms around me. “Never mind, dear. We have each other, and our health.”

But no health insurance!
We couldn’t afford it once I’d lost the day job.

I wallowed in despairing self-pity for longer than I’d care to admit, praying for deliverance but doing nothing to help myself. That’s not a healthy combination. Renting inside one’s own skin is soul-destroying.

Enter the paladin on his white horse, lance extended. In this case, the lance strongly resembled a fountain pen (and yes, it is mightier than the sword). Stephen Igo, a reporter who covered Southwest Virginia for the
Kingsport Times-News,
called about doing a feature on the shop. He and Jack spent an afternoon together, Stephen plying Jack with questions, Jack stuffing Stephen full of fresh-baked shortbread. The completed article ran above the fold with a three-column color picture on Sunday’s front page.

In short, it could not have been better.

Among the highlights, it said that “Tales of the Lonesome Pine is a not-just-a-used-book-shop (
www.scottishsongandstory.co.uk
) staffed by Beck’s genuine brogue, Wendy, two cats—Beulah and Val-Kyttie—and two dogs, Zora and Bert,” and that since opening the shop had “drawn the merely curious, the seriously artistic, and the bonkers over books.

“In their case, ‘there goes the neighborhood’ means in a wondrously delightful direction. While browsing for books, visitors are invited to sit a spell—in fact, a sign tells them to do just that—and sip a cup of coffee or tea while nibbling on homemade shortbread—Beck got the recipe from his mother—or tablet, a sort of Scottish fudge. Another sign reads, ‘if you have change to throw in the pot, great. No worries if not. We welcome browsers and hangers out.’

“Beck and Welch and their furry staff also offer a good book-swapping deal, a free books bin on the porch, arts and crafts on consignment, and a few other sideshows like, well, sideshows. There’s the writing group, needlework nights, puppet shows, house concerts, and occasional Celtic folk music and dancing. Toss in some children’s events plus a couple of fascinating chats with Beck himself, and you’ve got just an inkling of what all goes on in a bookstore operated on the principles of imagination and love of life.”

I cried the first time I read it.

In our early years, when we opened on Sunday afternoons, the hours frequently passed without customers. Stephen’s article came out on Sunday; Gary, Teri’s husband, brought us a copy of the paper with many congratulations. I sighed, smiled, and prepared to open the store. Assuming we’d have no customers as usual, I intended to spend the afternoon tidying the free books we’d recently set out there.

I stepped onto the porch,
OPEN
sign in my hand to hang on the outer door’s iron grille—and eight retirees looked up from poking amid the books, and smiled. “The British baking sounds good, but we sure hope you’ve got iced tea in there!” one said. They’d driven from Kingsport for a nice afternoon outing, spurred by the Igo article.

“It just looked so lovely in the picture.” One of the women sighed, tilting her head back to take in the oak columns and decorative scrolling inside the shop. “And now I see it in person, it’s even better. Oh! What a pretty cat!” She’d spotted Beulah, mincing about with her tail fluffed for the visitors. Her voice took on celebrity-tinged reverence as she asked, “Is she the one from the photo?!”

A lot of things changed that day. The chairwoman of the local business association appeared, all smiles. We had flyers? Why didn’t she take a couple to put in her shop window? We got congratulatory e-mails from two Kiwanians. Visitors chatted merrily as they perused the shelves:

“Heard you were here. Always meant to come in, saw that photo and said, ‘C’mon, kids, today’s the day.’”

“I didn’t know y’all were here. Wow! You take books in trade?”

“What gorgeous woodwork, and you built the shelves yourself? We’re so glad to have a bookstore in town at last. What made you settle in Big Stone?”