The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap (32 page)

Let me reiterate: one reader’s life-altering, truth-revealing milestone-marking classic is another reader’s forced term paper. Live and let live. If you come to my establishment and ask for a copy of
A Prayer for Owen Meany,
I’m not going to refuse to sell it to you. (But I might also suggest you try a Rosina Lippi.)

C
HAPTER 26

Citizen Jack

“A good man is a nobler object of contemplation than a great author.”

—Ross Perot

F
IVE YEARS AFTER WE OPENED
our shop, Jack came in from collecting the mail one afternoon and said, “I think I’ll become an American citizen.” Then he began opening the day’s book packages.

I can’t say that I was gobsmacked, but it was a bit startling. “Why do you want to be a citizen?” I asked as he scrunched up the advertising circulars and tossed them into the bin.

Jack paused, then said, “I guess I didn’t tell you this before, but last year, when I came back here from my Scottish tour, it was the first time it felt like coming home instead of just returning to our home.”

As I mentioned before, Jack leads annual tours to Scotland and Ireland for no more than a dozen people, taking them to folklore and heritage sites and generally showing them a good time on the traditional music and general tourism scenes. The tour he was talking about would have been his fourth, in our sixth year of living in the States.

The tours were something he enjoyed doing, a way for him to stay connected with his friends on the music circuit back in the Old World. Secretly I’d always thought it a nice way for him to excise the homesickness that builds up when you live long-term outside your homeland.

“No, you didn’t mention that before, but, really, wow, that’s great if it’s what you want to do. Become an American?”

Jack laughed. “Become an American citizen, anyway, someone who has a vote and a say in what happens next over here. And…” He paused, then sat down at the front room table. “You know how you and I often talk about the community that’s gathered around the shop, the friends and the regular customers, and the way we’ve grown into the town. People come in and say how wonderful it is, all we do here, that we’re a community center, a hub for activity.

“And I always say how grateful I am to have been made so welcome. Not in a smarmy, lovefest way, but just that people have made space for us. And the truth is—” He laughed. “The truth is, that’s true. I think people believe it’s Southern politeness, just something to say. But I want to give back. By being a citizen, I can take a more active role in helping out about the town, stand for council someday, perhaps, but meantime just…” His hands lifted, then fell back to his lap. “Be a part of it all.”

I kissed my husband’s bald spot. “Okay. Let’s start doing the paperwork.”

Paperwork followed on paperwork—each piece accompanied by an application fee. We sent four hundred dollars, two hundred dollars, one hundred dollars, waited for phone calls, returned forms, waited, returned, waited, got notarized signatures, waited, waited, waited …

And one day a package came in the mail containing a glossy, thin booklet of one hundred questions, with accompanying CD. These were the quiz items from which Jack would have to answer ten, six of them correctly, before he could become a citizen. His written examination was scheduled for six weeks hence in Fairfax, Virginia.

I grilled Jack on the questions that night. He got ninety-six correct. I got ninety-one.

The night before the interview, Jack and I drove to a cut-rate hotel a few miles from the designated municipal building. Though we had tried hard to avoid it, we arrived at rush hour. We’d been country mice too long and I’d lost my driving nerve; we pulled into a restaurant and waited until the stream of steel faded into occasional headlights as the sun set, then got back into the car and found our hotel.

The next day, I braved the morning commuter rush to drop Jack for his interview, and waited four hours at the hotel for him to call. Since the letter informing him of his schedule had suggested he would need only two hours, I was panicking by the time he rang.

“Everything okay?” I blurted into the phone.

“Tell you all about it when you get here,” he said, and I threw the last of our things into the case and raced to fetch him. Was he being deported? Had he failed the exam? Aced it and been asked to perform special duties? What?

“They forgot me,” he said as soon as he slid into the car, all smiles.

“They
what
?”

“I was sitting in the waiting room, and they called everyone who came in with me, and another group of people had started showing up, so I went up and asked at the desk, and she rooted around and looked concerned, then looked behind a desk and came up with a piece of paper from the floor. ‘Mr. Beck? Your file fell. I’m so sorry. We’ll do you next.’”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “Only you, dear. Only you!”

Jack received a letter; he passed his oral and written examination, and it was now just a matter of waiting for notification of when the naturalization ceremony would take place. The government would be in touch.

We took the list of one hundred questions across to the Mutual and passed it around among Bo, David, Cotton, and the gang. Bo looked at the booklet suspiciously, flipping its pages.

“Are these the laws that govern us inside the mountains, or those people on the other side?” he asked, and the men eating around us grinned.

Five years ago, that question would have flummoxed Jack, but now he knew not only what they were saying, but what they weren’t.

“Ah, Bo,” Jack said with a laugh. “You and I know the government has never understood how to run the Coalfields, and we like it best when they stay on their side and let us get on with things.”

The boys gave appreciative grins and Bo slapped Jack on the back with the booklet. “I don’t believe I could answer a one of these”—his voice boomed through the diner—“but I’m glad you did! Welcome, brother! But,” he added, dropping his tone confidentially so that only the six nearest tables could hear, “you were already our brother, weren’tcha?”

Back when we started the bookstore, the gates of central Appalachia’s Coalfields had seemed as tightly shut as the vaults of Fort Knox. It was hard to remember those days, that morning in the Mutual.

The phone rang and caller ID listed it as coming from 000-000-0000.

“It’s for you,” I said, handing the unanswered receiver to Jack. “’Cause that has to be a government agency.”

It was—homeland security. A background check to ensure Jack wasn’t a member of the Communist Party or a terrorist cell. Neither of these is big in Big Stone.

The awaited letter arrived; the naturalization ceremony would be three weeks hence, in the federal courthouse in Abingdon. Since about our second year in operation, we’d been sending e-mail notices to customers who signed up for them, letting people know of upcoming events. On our next round, Jack included his citizenship status update. He got more than one hundred e-mails congratulating him, and several requests to know when and where the ceremony would take place, if guests could attend, and would there be a “Citizen Jack” party at the bookstore.

On the day of Jack’s ceremony, a crowd carpooled to Abingdon: Erin (who organizes some of our special events and attends Needlework Nights); Becky and Tony; Virginia, one of our staunchest supporters, a county board of supervisors member, the organist at the Presbyterian church, and a past murder victim; guitarist Grace and her husband Bill, who had rounded up financial support for the Celtic Day that Jack started in the town three years before; Elissa, our friend and photographer; a friend from my college days, Abingdon’s storyteller-in-residence Donnamarie; Fiona; Isabel; and our
Grapes of Wrath
music fellow traveler Gary and his wife, Millie.

It pleased us, as it also pleased the person in question, that one of these friends had been among those rejecting Jack for membership in the Kiwanis Club all those years ago. Times change, and people are basically good at heart; enough said.

As Jack—resplendent in kilt and sporran—accepted his certificate, the gang burst into cheers, waving American flags and clapping wildly. The judge conducting the ceremony looked up and smiled before reading the other fourteen names on his list.

Afterward, we went together for that most American of celebratory dinners: pizza. Around the table, Jack raised his glass of cola and thanked our friends for coming. “You made me a part of this community long before I joined it formally, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

People in the restaurant began to figure out what the unruly bunch with the American flags and red, white, and blue stuffed sequined eagle sitting on the table were celebrating (aided, no doubt, by our singing, “Happy Citizenship, Dear Jack, Happy Citizenship to you” when the pizzas arrived). Patrons started getting up and coming over to shake Jack’s hand and wish him well.

Back at the bookstore, we held our monthly Let’s Talk on citizenship. Tony summed up for all of us when he said, “Fitting in is one thing. Belonging is another. And then there’s contributing. I think Jack and Wendy have done all three.”

In short, it was a day for knowing that some things are better when done within the gracious bounds of community and camaraderie. And it was, as much as any ceremony ever could be, the culmination of years of working to be a contributing part of our town.
Our
town.

C
HAPTER 27

The Last Word

To be satisfied with a little, is the greatest wisdom; and he that increaseth his riches, increaseth his cares; but a contented mind is a hidden treasure.

—Akhenaten

B
HUTAN IS AN INSIGHTFUL COUNTRY
. This nation has a Gross National Happiness index. The index is calculated using several indicators: citizens’ psychological well-being, education, and time use; the perceived value and sustainability of ecology, culture, and community vitality in the nation; public health; living standards; and whether citizens think they have good governance. This is how the Bhutanese measure the success of their collective lives.

It’s a good measurement. Jack assesses our bookstore’s performance each month, totting up Internet and shop sales. He compares these to the same time last year. Quarterly we sit down with a glass of wine and talk about what we liked, incidents remembered for good or ill, any rearranging of the stock we’d like to try, ideas for promotions or events or fixing a recurring problem.

In our first four years, sales figures climbed. During the worst of the recession, they skyrocketed as people stayed home, walked around town instead of driving, and bought cheaper methods of entertaining themselves. At the end of year four, our sales peaked. Year five, they were the same, with only a slight increase tangential to our starting to serve in-store soups and salads. We had reached a plateau, doing as well as the shop could be expected to in our region.

Year five was the moment. If we intended to expand our business, we needed to start a franchise in another county, double our Internet efforts, and/or pack up and move to a bigger location. Asheville had long been on our minds; we love nothing better than to visit North Carolina’s Paris of the South. Kingsport, Tennessee, presented another possibility; we knew lots of people in that larger population area. Plus, we had investment capital this time. Opening a second store, or closing this one and moving to a larger city, would be so different: no more scratchy thrift-store chairs and endless pots of mac and cheese; we knew how to run a bookshop now.

We sat and stared at the graph Jack had drawn. Then Jack, as he is wont to do, asked the perfect question: “What do we want?”

That didn’t take long to answer: “The way we live now.” We had what we wanted. The shop makes enough money for us to live life with frugal grace. My college work provides health insurance; Jack’s steadily growing tours cover the cost of his annual visit home and let him impart his love of Scots and Irish culture; our performing gives us busman’s holidays more interesting than what we could dream up for ourselves. Food, shelter, heat, and light, not to mention bucketloads of entertainment better than anything we could buy, were ours from selling books.

We started the bookstore to live as we saw fit, solving our own problems, scheduling our own lives, no longer living as renters inside our skins. It’s done that and more. The shop made us members of a community we entered as heartbroken, tired people. Tales of the Lonesome Pine gave us friends and fun. It offered perspective, and while we were busy trying to figure out how to run the shop, it quietly returned us to a balanced and honest way of living, neither smug nor grim.

Who could ask for more? Amid the jumble of listening to life plots and hefting boxes and stocking shelves and pricing books, underneath it all contentment flows like a little burbling mountain stream. Cat pee, guerrilla bargainers, fifty-pound boxes of Harlequin romances and all, we are having the time of our lives.

Glenn is a customer who attends several of our special events but shops with us rarely. He appeared just as we were closing one snowy December evening. Handing Jack a package, he lifted his hat to me in the twilight and marched back out with only two words flung over his shoulder: “Merry Christmas!”

Jack sat down at the table and unwrapped a bottle of exceptionally good lowland single-malt, his favorite that has to be special-ordered—and that we couldn’t afford except on rare occasions. A note accompanied the gift. “Dear Jack and Wendy, I don’t know what we did around here before you showed up! Found a treasure for one of our town’s finest treasures. Enjoy!”

We are so very, very rich.

A good book has no ending.

—R. D. Cumming

N
OTE

2. No Longer Renting the Space Inside My Skin

1.
We have two cats. Get it? Oh, never mind.

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

T
HE CUSTOMERS OF TALES OF
the Lonesome Pine, past, present, and future: You make it so much fun to be so busy. Thanks!