by Wendy Welch
Bob must have been coming to the shop the better part of a year when he brought us four titles he had “picked up working on a house.” Among them rested an old Agatha Christie, spine broken almost in half. Jack was away, so we sat on the porch, Bob chain-smoking and taking nips from his flask while I drank a cup of tea.
“I’m having a hard time making ends meet.” Bob eyed the smoke ring he’d just made. “The jobs are scattered and my classes are dull, plus I miss a lot while I’m working.” Retraining at the community college to enhance his handyman-ing, he’d complained before that he couldn’t do both work and school with any modicum of success. “I’m thinking of heading back home, but…” He shrugged.
He’d been talking like this a while. I smiled and said he should do what seemed best for him. He read me his latest poem—about Queen Mab’s broken dream of love—and we parted.
Months passed and Bob did not reappear, so we figured he went back to his home state to start over. Of course he left no means to get in touch with him. I hadn’t even gotten the name or branch of the librarian. His Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, sat around a while. He’d always say, “These are gifts for you and Jack, not for the shop,” so we usually took his stuff upstairs. I’d put his Three Musketeers in the guest room because it was so pretty.
Kinda bored one day—not that this happens a lot in the bookstore—I priced some of Bob’s gifts on AbeBooks and Styles came up $175. When they showed in that price range, especially with a broken spine, usually something had been entered wrong. Double-checking the publisher date and location, sure enough, I’d pulled up a New York 1927 version from Dodd, Mead and Company. The one Bob gave us came from the Bodley Head, London, 1921. My mistake. I corrected it.
The lowest price for Bob’s gift of a first edition of Agatha Christie’s first novel came up $6,500. Even grubby and with a busted spine, it was listed at $6,500.
The Christie still sits upstairs on a shelf in the corner, waiting for him to stick his head in the door and ply me with roses. We can’t sell it. First of all, it’s not really ours. (Although we know what Bob would say: “I gave it to you, didn’t I?” in that fake Irish brogue.) Second, nobody in our realm of sales wants a beat-up mystery novel worth more than their car. And third, we have this Russian folktale motif idea that as long as his book sits safe and dry and warm in our shop, Bob is somewhere feeling the same. Maybe someday it will glow red to warn us he’s in danger. We hope not.
CHAPTER 6
Creating, and Being Created by, Community
What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?
—George Eliot, Middlemarch
“LEARN TO ADVERTISE” WASN’T JUST a rule we discovered early on, but a steep learning curve that came back again and again as we sought ways to increase our clientele. My dear friend JoAnne Jones, a mentor to many in public relations and fund-raising, taught me a simple message when we worked together on a Red Cross campaign. She always says there’s no need for frippery and fancy plans to attract supporters; just be good at what you do, and people will want to support your doings. JoAnne’s mantra translated well into our preloved retail world—no point in telling people about ourselves unless we could wow them once they showed up.
We’d stapled flyers onto just about anything that didn’t run from us, and pressed them into the hands of customers who probably wished they could run. What else would entice people who didn’t already like bookstores—or who liked books but were buying them on the Net—to visit us?
Humans have a natural proclivity to not step outside our comfort zones. Big Stone Gap had never had a bookstore before, let alone a used one; hence people not escorted in by our increasing team of regulars were naturally wary about walking through the door. After all, we were in what looked like a private house, albeit one with a USED BOOKS banner across the ornamental iron fence in the front yard. Despite the huge OPEN sign hanging from our front door’s grille—Jack painted the sign onto scrap wood and hung it with two curtain hooks—in our first months a lot of customers still rang the doorbell. Several even asked, “So it’s like a library, but you rent the books?” Or, “Once I buy them, can I bring them back?” We needed to get people in the door just to meet us, so they could get comfortable with how the shop worked.
To entice people to drop in, we devised special events featuring music, stories, or crafts. These would play to our natural strengths. As past director of an arts organization back in Scotland, I’m used to making things go, while Jack spent the last forty years playing gigs at festivals, clubs, and coffeehouses. A wide range of interests made creating special events in our own space tantamount to giving unlimited funding to the waif at a candy store. Being slightly less stupid about marketing than when we started, we also looked for ways to hook programs toward selling particular genres of books while enticing new clientele from specific groups of people—senior citizens, young moms, et al.
We wanted to offer outings people would like, but they also needed to be a wee bit different—events that would please local tastes yet not compete with other area programs. Easier said than done, that balancing act between “not the same old, yet not different enough to be threatening,” but we figured the Scots-Irish roots of so many in the region would draw participants to a St. Patrick’s Day ceilidh.
A ceilidh is a group dance for all ages, with halftime entertainment provided by the participants themselves. We found a team of Scottish social dancers in Northeast Tennessee and contacted their leader, Cynthia West. Her team agreed to teach the steps just for the love of dancing, plus promises of Jack’s homemade shortbread.
The first year, the dance attracted twelve participants and was held in the long front rooms of our bookstore; the next year, twenty-four people and four more sets of bookshelves required moving the dance into the Presbyterian church a block down the street, which got Tony, the popcorn-selling pastor we met at the outdoor drama, and his wife, Becky, involved. It’s since become a favorite event for some of our favorite customers—like Heather Richards, a former Oxford scholar who weaves her own cloth and cares for her aging mother at home. Heather is a brilliant baker and a gifted fiber artist; we love to see her coming through the bookstore door because she usually brings along “a little something I whipped up this morning.” And you should see her dance; she floats on air, light as her meringues.
Heather played a key role in the third St. Pat’s ceilidh—the night we now call “Waltzing with Porcupines.” The day before the dance, Jack got a call from Mary, a customer who visited the shop sporadically.
“Is it okay if I bring some boys to the dance?” she asked.
Since we usually have a large group of stag women, he said of course. But she persisted.
“I mean younger boys. Three brothers. Their mother, my sister, died last month. I’m trying to get them out to do stuff that might be different, you know, take their mind off things.”
Dancing is fun and lively, but is it therapy? Jack nevertheless assured her they would be as welcome as spring rain, and told me about it after he hung up. Odd, we agreed, but whatever.
On dance night, three brown-headed boys in stair-step sizes arrived. The brothers, aged nine, eleven, and twelve, stood there among the adults, not taking their coats off, looking for all the world like heartbroken porcupines, spines out, smiles in, daring anyone to talk to them. Not one dance did they do in the entire first half.
Scottish ceilidhs have a traditional halftime entertainment of circling the chairs and asking each participant to tell a joke or story, sing a song, play a tune, or do a dance step. The boys sat in the circle, heads down, hands hanging between their knees, radiating boredom and gloom so palpable people kept glancing at them. But Heather knew just what to do; when it was her turn, this most ladylike and accomplished of kitchen goddesses looked away from the boys and told a farting joke, complete with sound effects.
The brothers glanced up.
My turn followed: taking a
cue from Heather, I reeled off the scariest, bloodiest, goriest ghost story I knew. The lads sat forward in the hard metal folding chairs. Next in the circle came Grace, the church committee member designated to watch the hall that night, making sure no one smoked or stole communion wafers. Grace, wife of one lawyer and mother of two, is a proper sort of woman who wears her hair short and keeps her trouser creases crisp. She visits our shop to buy British mysteries, to take guitar lessons from Jack, and to solicit for local charities. This pillar of the community hauled out every bad mummy, vampire, and ghost joke she knew, including the old favorite about a clock striking thirteen. The boys shouted the punch lines ahead of her, and Grace—a smart woman in more ways than one—hung her head in shame that she could not defeat them.
The brothers smirked.
Jack looked at Heather, raised his eyebrows in apology or solidarity, and sang,
Hark, hark, the pipes are calling
Must have been the beans I ate this morning
Go to the loo, do a [PHTHPBT] down the drain …
If you don’t know “The Heinz Baked Beans Song,” it is just one example of why British children’s rhymes are world-class subversive masterpieces. The song requires everyone to join in on the sound effects, and from Cynthia’s posh dance team to Pastor Tony, the adults PHTHPBT-ed along with gusto. So did the boys. Loudly. Very loudly. And laughing.
As Heather and I filled water pitchers at the sink a short while later, Mary (the porcupine brothers’ aunt) came up behind us and put her arms around Heather in a brief squeeze. “Thanks,” she said.
In the second half, we danced Dashing White Sergeant, requiring a man flanked by two women to face a woman flanked by two men. If you’ve never seen Dashing White Sergeant, well, the Hokey Pokey is not what it’s all about. The three couples circle left, then right, then face each other in a trio. The central person dances with each of his or her flanking “sergeants,” then leads them forward and back in a wave pattern. On the second wave, one group arches over while the other trio runs under.
It is an ideal dance for little boys leaning toward mischief.
Short on males, I hauled up two brothers by their sleeves as Jack dragged the third into his line. Having bought some credibility as not-entirely-lame adults, we intended to cash it in and force them to dance. Of course, being preteens, the lads couldn’t actually touch me, but they agreed to be my partners if I held the ends of their scarves instead of their hands.
My husband and I faced each other across the dance floor, flanked by porcupines, and telegraphed a single thought. Dance, schmance; this is therapy.
Poor Cynthia; I doubt in her entire career as a dance teacher she’d ever seen a Scotsman so incapable of performing his own native land’s steps. Jack didn’t so much execute as murder them; he bungled left, deadpan-dropped right, and spun his partners with such vehemence that they giggled protests. On my side of the line, I played crack the whip at the end of one lad’s scarf, and nearly strangled the other by using his jacket shoulders to spin him like a top.
Our sweet and spirited friends, Sigean, form the annual ceilidh’s house band (playing bagpipes to banjos) and since the dancers are learning as they go, Tom, Marianne, Frank, Jean, John, Joseph, Matt, and the other musicians who gather to play this annual gig are accustomed to strange things happening. On Waltzing with Porcupines Night, eyeglasses flew into the punchbowl, a shoe got kicked onstage—narrowly missing the uilleann piper—and three brokenhearted boys forgot about cooties or other hardships of life as they grabbed with both hands and spun very hard in hopes of making the grown-ups fall over. Most of us did, at least once.
And when they left, the brothers threw their arms around the musicians and dancers. “See you next year!” they cried.
Gas money for the band: Fifty dollars
Donation for use of the church hall: Fifty dollars
Three little lost boys laughing: Priceless
Sold on special events as a way to get locals to notice us, and encouraged by how our customers ferreted out such interesting people who enjoyed meeting like-minded others, we began asking our customers for more ideas. Lulu turned out to be a retired schoolteacher, so we cajoled her into making us a Science Day one June. She created three hours of cornstarch goop, sink the foil boat with pennies, make your own rocket, and musical instruments made from broken balloons, film canisters, and ink pens. (These sounded like farting cows with intestinal disorders. When the kids who’d descended on the event headed off to various vehicles at the end of the fun, several parents shot us dirty looks over their shoulders.)
But in those first months, when we didn’t have a lot of time, money, or leftover energy, we went with activities we knew how to plan. Drawing on Jack’s background, our first International Night provided “infotainment” about Scotland with snacks, slides, and a short talk by Jack discussing “stereotypes versus realities.” The International Night went over so well that we decided to plan them on a regular basis, and soon got help from our friend Witold Wolny, who heads the international program at a nearby college.
Witold heard about the bookshop after another professor at his college attended the Scottish Night and told him about us. One afternoon he walked down from his home a few blocks away and found Jack working on an outdoor carpentry project. Witold watched in silence for a few minutes—“with a look of increasing horror on his face,” as Jack likes to tell the story—then offered to come back with some power tools and “experience.”
“I didn’t want our first bookstore in the town to close because the owner killed himself hacking at lumber,” Witold said later. “Such technique! I had never seen it before.”
A Catholic Zen Buddhist from Poland who’d done his higher education in Spain, Witold suggested speakers for International Nights and, later, Gourmet Nights featuring cuisine from many traditions. He is an incredible cook, and we’ve enjoyed many evenings on his front porch, sipping good vintage wines and snacking on dark chocolate and strawberries while watching the sun set. He inlayed the porch’s beautiful mosaic tiles himself, and did most of the refurbishments inside his elegant home.
Anne, a Spanish professor at the college and a longtime American resident of Spain, often joins us. Anne’s house sits just a block farther from the bookstore than Witold’s, and they shared—through a series of innocent yet convoluted circumstances—custody of a plump brown dog named Josephine, now of blessed memory. Sweet Josie of the melting-chocolate eyes led many people to make erroneous assumptions about what else her human parents might have shared.
Anne, Jack, Witold, and I were sitting around his dining room table one night in January when Witold dropped our first hint that the shop might be more stable than we could see. (He also delivered just about the best backhanded compliment I’ve ever gotten.)
“Everyone comes through your store,” he said. “It is like a community center without a swimming pool. You are the most talked-about couple in Big Stone. And you analyze the people who live here so very well. What do you say when people ask about me?”
I’d never been called an elegant gossip before, but given that small towns are pretty much fueled by gossip and church suppers, likely someone had at some point called us something worse. And it was a fair cop. I do tend to overthink and underact in most situations; Jack says my solution to any problem is to analyze it into submission.
Besides, Witold was really asking a specific question. As Jane Austen noted, a man in possession of a comfortable home and good fortune must be in want of a wife. The fortysomething market of eligible bachelors tends to run low in Big Stone Gap. Our tall, gray-eyed, college professor friend, fabulous classical guitarist, cook par excellence and adept handyman, excited interest among breasted Americans—and he knew it.
What most people didn’t know, although Anne, Jack, and I did, was that Witold had for the last year been trying very hard to marry someone, a lovely woman named Ashia, waiting in Poland behind a tight net of international regulations about bringing her ch
ildren into a foreign country on a marriage visa.
Privacy is a carefully guarded commodity in modern America, so I knew Witold had subtly asked me how many people knew about his fiancée. Still, I couldn’t resist the rare opportunity to get one over on the guy.
“Well, I just tell anyone who asks that your former life partner Anne used to be a guy, but after her successful sex change it didn’t work for the two of you as a couple anymore, but you’d parted amiably, as evidenced by the sharing of Josephine, your dog.”
Witold let that sift through his English-to-Polish filter as Jack and Anne howled with laughter. Then he rose without a word, took up the plate bearing my slice of mushroom-Gruyère quiche with raspberry chutney garnish, and set it down in front of Josie.
But Witold doesn’t hold a grudge. When he and Ashia were finally able to marry a couple of years later, we hosted their wedding shower at the bookstore. Themed “Essentials for Establishing a Comfortable American Home,” among its gifts were six rolls of duct tape in assorted colors, a collection of plastic cups from fast-food establishments, a coffee can of rusty nuts and bolts, and a lifetime supply of Tupperware containers with unmatched lids. We toasted the bride and groom with wine drunk from another gift: a dozen mugs advertising tourist traps no one could remember visiting.
But going back to that night at Witold’s house, not long after our first successful ceilidh dance and an International Night debut, his casual comment about a “community center” gave us our first indication that the bookstore was making its mark. A throwaway line to him, it reverberated as we walked home.