by Wendy Welch
Jack said, “Community center. There you go. I believe we might just be in with the bricks.”
Terribly British, really. At the moment when I most felt like jumping up and down screaming, “We did it! We’re in, we’re in!” my husband squeezed my hand and said, “Good for us.”
Good for us? Indeed. Keep calm and carry on.
So we went back to thinking up crazy stunts—er, special events—to hold at the bookstore. We celebrated Old World holidays as they appeared on the calendar: Burns Night, St. Andrew’s Night, Celtic Christmas. I’d always wanted to run a murder mystery, so we started hosting them twice a year, featuring a recurring character: book-slinger John Bach, who with each subsequent murder becomes more nervous as people keep dying in his place of business. My husband dislikes acting despite his innate talent for it, so he really hams it up; I think repressed distaste at having to play the role fuels his growing despair as Bach.
Murders we have held include “Oh Dear oh Deer” featuring Dirk Deerslayer, a ladykiller and deer hunter who finally got his comeuppance surrounded by the beauty queens he’d spurned in years past; “Death Among the Cookbooks,” the tale of two offed spinster sister authors and “a list of suspects longer than a lasagna noodle”; and “Books Run Amok,” in which Jane Eyre stabbed Hester Prynne in a case of mistaken identity after Anna Karenina and Rhett Butler had a tryst in the mystery room, Long John Silver and Rip Van Winkle proved unreliable witnesses due to intoxication, and Miss Marple ran off with Jay Gatsby. Members of the writing group usually sculpt the plots, although Grace, Jack’s guitar student; Jodi, a former local reporter who took a city government job and knows where all the bodies are buried (literally and figuratively); and Elissa, my photographer friend, have each created one as well. Murders involving town officials proved to be especially popular (no comment). All our victims have been great sports about being bludgeoned, poisoned, shot, or otherwise done in. As one recent murderee commented, “Honey, it beats election night.”
Surrounded by these and other silly activities, we went whistling forward, advancing confidently in the direction of our dreams. Up to our ears in special events and paperbacks, we were meeting interesting new customers every day, gaining friends, establishing our reputation as a community center where people wanted to be. We thought we were “in.” And we were, once again, blissfully ignorant. We had no idea how easily we could lose that goodwill, reputation, and customer base in one fell swoop.
CHAPTER 7
God Bless You for Trying, Losers
Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn. My God, do you learn.
—C. S. Lewis, from one of his popular lecture topics
MURDER TURNED TO CHARACTER ASSASSINATION just a few weeks later, when we fell afoul of a town clique. My day job’s boss held a long-standing position in an intricate network of Old Families and locals; when that job fell apart, so did the shop’s navigation system through those mazes of interrelations.
Why I’d left one government agency for the same bureaucracy in another state remains a mystery filed under Sudden Flight from Common Sense, but I did. One day my boss helped me understand that my job was on the line unless I changed my thinking on a couple of key issues. For me, those issues represented the very core of what I considered integrity, and I lost it.
A part of me constantly regretted not standing my ground in the Snake Pit; I’d made a decision not to get embroiled further and fled, but with hindsight, that move felt less like taking the moral high ground, and more like getting the hell out of Dodge. Now here I stood with a second chance at speaking up for truth, justice, and social equity. (Cue the orchestra’s string section.)
I said what I thought, got fired, and walked home rejoicing to be a member of the “went down with integrity” club at last. Yes, that’s called a martyr complex, and it’s neither logical nor clever, but oh, it felt so good when all that bottled-up compliance exploded into one loud (and fairly self-righteous) “NO!”
Those of you who have lived in a small town will know that a firing is almost as good as a car wreck for the topic of lunch conversations. In the immediate aftermath, the local business association’s head refused to display our flyers in her shop window; our friend and town councilor Garth asked another councilor if she’d ever visited the bookstore, and she replied, “I hadn’t thought about it”; and we got “inadvertently left off” a list of businesses eligible for a community award. You have offended one of our own; have the good sense to go quietly, the unspoken message came via not-entirely-subtle channels—even as our customer pool grew.
If we’d had any sense, there wouldn’t have been a bookstore in the first place. Sweet irony: looking back, we now realize that at the moment when it would have made the most sense to pack up, the possibility had disappeared from our minds. In choosing not to—actually, not so much choosing as forgetting we had the option—we weren’t being thrawn (that’s Scottish for stubborn); it’s just that we had a dream going, and Jack had promised no more drifting, no living on other people’s agendas. Our bookstore, do or die. All for one, and buy one, get one free.
As each day went by, we wanted more and more to stay in Big Stone. Every Thursday, my hubby would pull open the weekly paper and read aloud the news columns from various contributors—about grandchildren coming to visit, families who went out to eat, opinions on the color someone had painted her house: sweet news from genuine people living a quiet life well.
We really, really wanted a piece of that non-action.
Not only were the people genuine and fun—albeit since I got fired some no longer held the same opinion of us—but the physical town of Big Stone Gap is truly, madly, amazingly beautiful. A bowl of mountains alternates between surreal morning fogs, snowy slopes, summer flowers, and the splendor of autumn’s leaves. The Gap dazzles the eye in every season. Even the downtown buildings, shabby from years of economic downturn, show the most interesting span of twentieth-century architecture one could find in a single location.
In short, Big Stone looked like a great place to spend the rest of our lives. I don’t remember a moment when we looked at each other and said, “We’re not leaving, are we?” but Jack and I both knew we weren’t going anywhere if we could help it. We’d fallen in love, and that meant settling in for the long haul.
So instead of packing up in the face of adversity, we dug into our extra energy reserves, prepared to eat air, and with increased free time and desperation, delivered flyers advertising our special events to a widening circle of banks and clinics and hairdressers, chatting to potential customers all the way. Lots of new people did come to see us as a result of our efforts, while a few of our regulars stopped—not very many, just a couple. A friend from my former job had amassed quite a healthy credit in our blue ledger of trade swaps; the afternoon of my firing, she arrived with her adult daughter in tow, wiped out the balance with four armloads of paperbacks, and disappeared. We never saw her or her children again.
That kind of thing let us know how the back-alley gossip hummed; we figured we could beat it over time, but it’s no fun when people are suspicious of you. The “you aren’t from here” snake, which everyone who moves into a small community deals with at some point, became a hydra rearing its ugly “you aren’t one of us, you won’t ever understand us, you’re trying to change us, you’re the outsiders who will never be accepted” heads—and in an extra ironic twist, that suspicion appeared because of losing my job, an act I believed had returned my integrity. Won’t be a snake in the pit? Okay, how about a shut-out failure instead?
Most of us have figured out by now that those aren’t the only two choices life offers. It bothered me that people thought ill of us, but it didn’t define me. Or Jack. Or the bookstore. We were more concerned about the effect it might have on our customer pool, which slumped in the weeks after I got sent home in disgrace.
Soon after I got fired, Garth popped in for coffee and asked how we were doing. I spent the next ten minutes ranting and raving in full
-blown Pity Party mode. How we had people we didn’t even know calling us “uppity incomers,” and—even worse—people we barely knew running in to gleefully tell us that we were getting called that. How the other chamber-of-commerce types wouldn’t come near the shop.
When I finally exhausted myself and sat down at my antique kitchen table—sacrificed to hosting the store’s coffee service where we offered free coffee, so why weren’t people taking us up on it?!—my wise friend said, “Honey, this ain’t got as much to do with you gettin’ fired as people wonderin’ if you’re gonna stay. I know you and Jack are good people, but you look like every other City Sophisticate Discovering Rural Paradise. They set up a business, it makes money or doesn’t, they fold up and get a tax write-off, or they take off with the loot back to the city. Ain’t nobody thinks you’re really gonna stay very long. You’ve got no ties to the community, so why should they bother to make friends? It’s like fosterin’ a puppy; sure, it’s sweet, but don’t get attached ’cause you’ll just get your heart broke when it goes.”
“Ties to the community?” I shot back. “You mean like having a real job in town, not just a bookstore we didn’t ask anyone’s permission to start but that just might make it despite the in-club not shopping here, because a bunch of other really nice people are?”
Garth rocked back in his chair and lifted the brim of his cap—and beamed at me. “Well, sweetheart, you do have a bit of spark left in you. Good. I was afraid the last little while mighta burned you out.”
I hate it when men who are neither my husband nor my uncle call me sweetheart, but it also seemed like a good moment to keep my mouth shut and let him talk. Garth returned the chair’s front two legs to the ground with a thud, leaned forward, and crossed his arms on the table, locking eyes with me. “Yeah, honey, that’s what they mean. You got no reason to stay now, have you?”
“I’ve got about 5,200 reasons,” I replied, waving my hand at the bookshelves, “and that doesn’t count the friends we’ve made, like Mike and Heather and Teri and…” I stopped as Garth smiled again.
“So you think you belong here now, got a good life goin’? Fine. Prove you’re someone who belongs here. ’Cause you been sayin’ all along, right from the day you opened, that you an’ Jack were ‘just tryin’ out this bookstore thing, gonna see if it could work.’ So make it work.”
In Scotland, that’s called getting hoisted by your own petard, when something you say comes back to haunt you. But I wasn’t ready to admit culpability yet.
“At our opening day, they talked about how great it was to see economic development, new entrepreneurs, all that, and now they don’t shop here just because one of their friends is mad at me.” I all but sniffed, wiping an imaginary spill from the coffee counter.
Garth snorted. “Cut the princess crap, sister. You and I both know small towns are all about who’s friends with who. You pissed off somebody’s friend; give it time and it’ll blow over—assumin’ you’re comittin’ for the long haul. Why should anyone commit to you if you’re just playin’ around? You got to be around a while, show a little respect and humility for our way of life here in town, before anyone’ll take you seriously. Suspicion’s always earned, just not necessarily by the people it falls on. Haven’t you ever dated somebody on the rebound? This whole town is on the rebound.”
“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 v
alue 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.
CHAPTER 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
MY 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.”