The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap (24 page)

As Quakers, Jack and I believe in Jesus as God’s resurrected sin offering. Beyond that, we’re not big on theology. Yet negotiating even such limited boundaries in the shop proved tricky. Our part of Appalachian America has a reputation for … shall we say, seeing things one way only, and we wanted neither to offend those with narrow views nor become part of their team.

The 1800s German poet and journalist Heinrich Heine correctly predicted that “Where one burns books, one will eventually burn people.” I’m not going there with my life or my shop, so in addition to Bibles, we sell the Koran, assorted Jewish texts, the Book of Mormon, and tarot cards. The shop opened with two shelves for Christian titles, later joined by a comparative religion shelf. (We thought “comparative religion” sounded encompassing yet noncombative in a predominantly Christian region.) At some point a really nice set of scholarly books on Jewish holy days and rituals came in: Pesach, Seder, Yom Kippur. We shelved these expensive and esoteric volumes in comparative religion, where a browsing woman spotted the handsome blue and brown volumes one day. Her nose wrinkled as she came to me, holding at arm’s length an open book showing side-by-side Hebrew and English.

“Why are you selling occult books?” she demanded.

I was speechless. Jack came to my rescue, explaining in his beautiful, get-away-with-murder Scottish accent that the pages taught about rituals found in the Old Testament. The woman, clearly having a hard time understanding Jack’s accent, sniffed. He repeated himself, more slowly, until she appeared mollified. Closing the book, she laid it on a shelf.

“Well, I thought that writing was something else. I believe in the New Testament.” She had the grace to sound embarrassed. It turned out she thought the writing was Arabic. (Don’t ask me about the mental processes that took her from “Arabic” to “occult.”)

Quick confession: raised in a religious tradition that perhaps emphasized fear over love, I have worked very hard to kick the apple as far as possible from the tree without undermining the bare essentials. Keith, a college pal who is also a lay pastor, once summed up my theological standpoint as “Jesus is Lord; now let’s have tea and cookies.” He wasn’t being flip, just descriptive.

Quakers tend to be pretty relaxed about theology, believing people who disagree shouldn’t be considered evil on that basis alone. Just try talking first, get to know each other, and if you still want to declare the other person Satan incarnate after supper, that option remains open to you. Jack and I keep this as our baseline when dealing with people and books, although I do pray over tarot cards before setting them out. (It seems like a gentle way of quashing any negative influence they might have without pawing the ground, snorting and angling for a chance to lock horns.)

Back when I was a full-time storyteller, the tourism officer from Wigtown—Scotland’s town made up of bookshops, like the famous Hay-on-Wye in Wales—hired me to tell stories at a festival. My hubby planned to travel along so we could enjoy some serious browse time prior to the performance, but two weeks before the festival, Jack’s ninety-one-year-old mum began failing fast. Jack said not to cancel, but he clearly wouldn’t be going with me. The night I left for the gig, Mum went into the hospital, not expected to come out again. I took the scenic route to Wigtown, through a secluded nature preserve, driving along the windy forest road trying to de-stress and not feel guilty. Jack really wanted me to go, but it felt wrong. Suddenly, knowledge hit. She was gone. I glanced at the clock: 7:20
P.M.

On the call home after arriving at the bed and breakfast, Jack told me his mum had died at 7:20 and he didn’t want me to come back tonight. The funeral would be as soon as I returned two days hence, the arrangements made long before by Mum herself. Everything should stay as normal as possible. He needed that. We said good night and I hung up the phone, pushed through the fog of unreality to my room, and cried myself to sleep.

Next morning I wandered the village, lost and alone. Each bookstore has a theme in Wigtown, but I wove in and out of the shops indiscriminately. I wound up in Ceridwen’s Cauldron, a store carrying Wiccan and alternative healing items. Ceridwen is the Celtic Lady of Inspiration, patron of poets and those seeking wisdom. Willingness to listen to other viewpoints or not, I never would have walked randomly into a Wiccan store had it been a normal day.

It wasn’t a normal day, not by a far cry. My mother-in-law, a lovely woman with considerable strength of character, who had held my hand two days before in her hospital room and said, “I’m glad he’s got you,” was dead. And Jack sat home alone. Nope, not a normal day, not normal at all.

The shop owner chatted to me, asking where I came from, was my trip business or holiday.
Whoosh,
out came the story as guilt and confusion drilled a hole through self-control. Only pride kept me from bursting into tears. At one point I actually heard myself saying, “And I shouldn’t even have come in here because I know it’s a shop that sells bad things but I wasn’t paying attention.”

You can only kick that apple so far.…

The owner, a round-faced woman with curly black hair, acted as though she dealt with hysterical, grieving bigots every day. She rose, said “Just a minute,” and went through a low door in the back wall. She returned a few moments later with a laden tea tray. “Come into the garden.” She led me through and indicated a small wooden table in her courtyard. “Sit down and take your time,” she said, laying out cup, saucer, milk jug, sugar bowl, and biscuits. “No one comes back here. There are books in the shed if you want something to look at.” Exit the owner of Ceridwen’s Cauldron, closing the courtyard door behind her.

I waited until the door closed to start sobbing. That’s when the extent of her kindness became clear: a box of tissues waited beside the teapot.

That day in Ceridwen’s Cauldron reminds me again and again that a little kindness travels a long, long way, while meanness never taught anyone much of anything except how to reciprocate with more meanness. Quakers believe people should be allowed to walk the path toward truth without others setting themselves up as traffic police. If, as the book of Ecclesiastes says, eternity has been placed in the hearts of humans by God, maybe we have to find it for ourselves for it to mean something.

Jack and I have seen firsthand the gracious goodness that comes from people of dissimilar views remembering that we love and are loved by God. Tony who pastors the Presbyterian church just a block down the street came to us with a plan; he wanted to host a monthly gathering called Let’s Talk, and thought Tales would be an ideal location. “The bookstore, with so many viewpoints side by side on the shelf, is the perfect venue for bringing people with different ideas together,” he said.

The group that formed has few ground rules, the two most important being mutual respect and one-word topics; discussions have covered suffering, happiness, citizenship, and evil. I thought of the Wigtown shop owner—who never told me her name; in my mind she is Ceridwen—often during Let’s Talk, but particularly on the night when a grinning man asserted that the Holocaust was God’s judgment on the Jewish nation for rejecting Jesus as the Messiah. In the moment that followed, our friend Witold, Polish by birth and tolerant by nature, blinked once. A man whose father was a concentration camp survivor half rose from his seat. The silence lasted only a split second, but tension crackled and the very air seemed to be pushing on us—until Tony asked, in a mild tone, “That viewpoint is difficult for me to understand. Why do you think this?”

The man lost his grin and dissembled a moment before mumbling that he didn’t really think that, he’d just wondered if we’d heard the idea before. It turned out that he’d thrown his verbal grenade not as a discussion point, but in hopes of getting a rise out of the assembly. What he got instead was a gentle voice making just enough space for him to set things right. Which he did.

Why do people like to fight about the worst possible angles of theological reasoning and argue minutiae into the ground? Isn’t it better to give each other what Ceridwen gave me—a little space and a lot of kindness?

A couple of years ago, Jack and I started attending that nearby Presbyterian church. I’d been helping with their food bank and lunch delivery program, and liked the women I met there: Virginia Meador and Norma Siemens, matriarchs who kept half the town’s social programs functioning with their volunteer hours, and Grace of the perfect trouser pleats and bad mummy jokes. They often invited us to attend, and eventually we did. The nearest Society of Friends (as Quakers are officially known) was a two-hour drive, so our second year in Big Stone, we began hosting a monthly Meeting in the bookstore. Of course, this being a small town, “They’ve even started their own church!” came rippling back via grass roots anonymity, but we didn’t mind. It was kind of cute—and a Quaker group isn’t called a church.

The people at our Quaker gathering bring food to share together after each meeting. The meeting before Christmas, Tony suggested we walk down to the fellowship hall with our lunch and share the holiday repast prepared by their congregation. So the Presbyterians, in sweater sets and suit-and-tie, dished up couscous next to the baked ham and declared it good. The Quakers, in denim overalls and swooshy skirts, ate most of the banana pudding, and thanked its makers. The two groups talked pacifism, social justice, and favorite fishing holes. And there was Peace on Earth, Goodwill to People.

C
HAPTER 22

The Way We Buy Now (with Apologies to Trollope)

Tough choices face the biblioholic at every step of the way—like choosing between reading and eating, between buying new clothes and buying books, between a reasonable lifestyle and one of penurious but masochistic happiness lived out in the wallow of excess.

—Tom Raabe,
Biblioholism: The Literary Addiction

T
HE FACT THAT MY HUSBAND
is a Scotsman often causes people to joke about frugality. The truth is, Jack is not an avid penny-pincher; I am the queen of thrift stores and garage sales. My husband enjoys a good flea-market ramble as much as I do, but he will buy an item new if needed, or sometimes just because he desires it. Me, my hands shake when I try to pay retail.

Fortunately, what used to be considered parsimony has now become known as the Green Movement. Previously unthinkable as it may have been to recycle envelopes in professional offices, one can observe them in the twenty-first century issuing from New York high-rises, bearing stickers that proudly proclaim their green credentials. The same goes for biking, walking, or busing to work; what used to be weird is now in vogue.

Jack and I don’t shop thrift stores because we want to save money—although that’s never been something we scorned. It’s more that we figure since the item is already made, the resources for it extracted and expended, then if the bowl/purse/belt/record player/silly little decorative statue is still in good nick, why not use it up instead of starting over? We’d never get a puppy from a pet store or a breeder when so many strays need good homes; why buy a new Crock-Pot if we spot one in a secondhand store? About the only manufactured items Jack and I insist on getting new are big appliances and handmade items.

I recently picked up a hot-air popper at a thrift store for a dollar, after discovering that microwave popcorn—that delicacy so touted and prized back in the 1980s—is pretty bad for you, while your basic corn kernel blown up by heated air scores high in nutrition, low in calories and additives. (It pays to have friends in public health who can interpret nutrition labels.) Most of my clothing comes from garage sales and thrift stores, as does much of Jack’s. It’s not hard to find things that still look new, have no stains, fit well, and are flattering. Tested those last two criteria in a department store lately?

And of course we bought reading material secondhand long before we started our own shop. Back in Scotland, a little tearoom lined with shelves in the tiny town of Milnathort served as a treat on rainy Saturdays. We’d browse the used books, donate some of our own, have a cuppa, and meander home to sit at the dining room table, reading the afternoon away until it was time to make evening tea.

I can’t tell you the number of earrings Jack has bought me at festivals where we were performing, or about the photography, objets d’art, and sometimes even clothing we’ve purchased at these venues, for ourselves or as gifts. Ambling along the booths between sets, we’d do our yearly birthday and Christmas shopping, confident yuppies seeking out unusual things our family and friends wouldn’t have seen (and thus had the chance to buy for themselves) in the box stores and franchised boutiques of America.

We also went in with neighbors and bought a cow (slaughtered and divvied up into one- or two-pound plastic bags, thank you), which soon filled the garage deep-freeze. A friend and I purchased milk goats and pasteurized our own dairy products. I get eggs from a place at the edge of town, where I can see the producers clucking in the yard when I drive by. And during the summer, we load up on veggies at the farmers’ markets, one just a block from our house on Saturdays, one Tuesday evenings near the college where I teach. Five fruit trees in our back garden—pear, heirloom apple, and peach—round out the diet nicely. (Those trees give for the nation; the summer we moved in, time that could have been spent getting the bookstore ready to open disappeared into jars of fruit butter and stuffing the freezer with apple bites. We even gave about twenty-five pounds of fresh fruit to the food bank.)

Between the cow, the goat, the chickens, the farmers’ market, and our own fruit trees, we source a lot of local food in the summer; visits to the grocery store drop to filling in staples like sugar and whiskey. One day our friend Marcia joined us for dinner, and as we sat down to vegetarian pizza with goat cheese, we realized that we knew the names of those who had produced everything on the table, except the flour in the crust. Even the bottle of wine Marcia brought came from Mountain Rose, the local winery.