by Wendy Welch
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?”
“Hey, this letter, did you really get rejected by the Kiwanis club here??!! That’s a hoot! We have one in Norton [the next town over]. Wanna join?”
Seventy lovely people flowed through our doors that Sunday summer afternoon. I made four pitchers of iced tea. Our photocopier godparents took me to Little Mexico that night in celebration. (Jack left the day after the interview to lead his annual Scotland and Ireland tour; he got to read the article online from abroad, while yours truly had to cope with the tea. Not that I’m complaining, mind.) Business in the months that followed picked up considerably. Our regulars congratulated us; new friends came to visit, and a few of the old ones we’d lost came back as though nothing had ever happened.
We e-mailed Stephen that we’d name our next cat after him. And some—not all, but most—rifts healed. We weren’t going anywhere now, and everyone knew it; equally important, people understood that we didn’t want to fight. A bookshop run on imagination and love of
life, yes, and thank you; fighting and rivalry, not so much. A lot of people in the region wanted a bookstore, and we wanted to live in Big Stone Gap.
So time worked its magic. Right after Stephen’s article, a couple of civic functions asked for some upscale books as door prizes, we donated several boxes to the hospital, and I started helping a church we didn’t attend cook lunches for unemployed people. At the request of a mother whose library program had fallen through the night before, Jack read Scottish poems to the local kindergarteners in full kilt and regalia; shortly thereafter we got asked to do a “celebrity reading” for Dr. Seuss’s birthday at the local elementary, and then the music department at the high school called about a program of Scottish songs, and a new customer wanted to know if I would make balloon animals for her child’s birthday party.…
Thus the ill wind blew itself out. The Kiwanis letter still hangs in our shop, but its poison leached out the bottom, dried up, and flaked away long ago. Now it’s a reminder not to take ourselves or others so seriously; that this, too, shall pass. Local power players bring in out-of-town friends or family and point it out with a belly laugh: “That’s the letter I was telling you about. Isn’t that just typical small-town crap?” Browsers relate eye-rolling stories of their own clashes with cliques. Most humans are blessed with the natural ability to laugh at ourselves, and time—coupled with a good sense of humor and refusing to play “an eye for an eye” games—heals most wounds.
CHAPTER 9
Catty Behavior, or How Beulah Taught Us to Stand Tall, Quit Whining, and Have Fun
There were cats, cats, sitting on the mats,
At the (book)store, at the (book)store.
There were cats, cats, sitting on the mats
At the Quartermaster’s (book)store.
—British children’s folk song (the Jack and Wendy version)
THE PHOTO STEPHEN TOOK FOR the Times article showed my husband leaning on the back of a waist-high sleepbuilt. Looming large at shelf front, eyes looking into the souls of her readers, our younger cat Beulah (Customer Relations Specialist) reclined on the cushion kept there for her comfort and convenience.
We are convinced Stephen’s lovely article—charming though it was about our zest for life, Scottish shortbread giveaways, and beautiful woodwork—would never have made the Sunday paper’s front page without Beulah’s cool stare. The picture exuded charm, and people inundated the shop for weeks afterward, demanding to meet Miss Beulah. They bought books while waiting their turn for her attentions. She became known as Beuls to her familiars.
Beulah is an unusually pretty cat of distinctive coloring. Soft hues of gray, pink, and peach blend within her fur. Some cat-savvy patrons call her a dilute tortoiseshell; others say she is peaches and cream. With a pale fawn tuxedo bib and Hemingway thumbs, Beulah is what Scots term a stotar, or in plain English, a good-looking female.
All of this annoys our older cat, Val-Kyttie, to no end. Val-Kyttie is Scottish, has thick black fur tinged with reddish-brown, and is green-eyed—in both senses of the word. That cat is jealous all over. (She also has one white toe ring and a white bikini on her stomach. A word of warning: if you ever come to visit our shop, do not make the mistake of believing Val-Kyttie is friendly, and try to see the bikini. We can’t pay for your stitches.)
Val-Kyttie and Beulah have the relationship of teen sisters forced to share a room: adversarial. Named for the famous Wagnerian ride of the Val-Kytties, the elder of this pair came to us tiny and fearless at four weeks of age, from a home for distressed gentlecats in Edinburgh. In later years she flew the Atlantic to become yet another expatriate Scot. When we adopted the American Beulah at just ten months of age, Val-Kyttie was six. Forever after, she would refer to her little sister only as “that girl the church sent over.”
For her part, Beulah tried to act as acolyte to Val-Kyttie’s high priesthood. She kept away, rolled over, left food, anything to avoid a fight, but it remained clear that Val-Kyttie had it in for Beuls from the moment we brought her in off the street. The daily tension between them would blossom into overt aggression if the humans went away overnight. On our return Beulah could be found crying in the basement, while Val-Kyttie licked her tail in feigned innocence. Her posture said, “What, down there yowling again? Hmmph, these young cats have no dignity. She should move on.”
A funny thing happened in the weeks after Stephen’s front-page picture of Beulah. As the waterfall from its publicity slowed to a steady current of regular customers, Beulah took up position on a table under the article, which we laminated and put on the wall. (I’m not sure why the Kiwanis rejection received an oak frame while Stephen got plastic, but there you go.) Jack swore that Beuls pointed her Hemingway thumb at the article when customers arrived, as much as to say, “See that? That’s me. I do autographs.”
Val-Kyttie was incensed by Stephen’s photo and made her opinions clear in that way only household pets can: statement poops. Val-Kyttie does not normally think outside the box, but for three days, she strategically located her excretions where they could do the most damage: at the head of the stairs; next to a bookshelf five minutes after opening. Her crowning sarcastic achievement appeared a foot outside her hooded tray, perfectly centered before its entry door.
Had she spoken aloud, Val-Kyttie’s message could not have been clearer: the photo should have been of her, the Senior Ranking Staff Animal. That cute little junior assistant in the tight miniskirt had usurped her matronly authority. After we’d spent a few days picking up statement poops while murmuring soothing endearments about understanding how she felt, Val-Kyttie, clearly fed up with our sensitive-parent routine, reverted to her trademark violence. As she’d done so often before, she stalked in a menacing manner to where Beuls sat washing her tuxedo bib. I prepared to intervene, but this time when Val-Kyttie closed in, gentle, compliant little Beulah reached out, claws extended, and swifter than a striking snake bopped her big sis a good one on the head. Then she ran like hell, but the point had been made. Val-Kyttie sat down, too stunned to pursue.
Jack is convinced that her picture in the paper empowered Beulah to stand up to Val-Kyttie. Not once since its publication have we found her crying for rescue in the basement. We didn’t spend any more time crying, either, and we knew just how Beulah felt. To everything there is a season: a time to hide in the basement, and a time to post things in prominent positions where everyone sees them; a time to get cut down, and a time to watch in astonishment as someone you don’t even know tells everyone how beautifully you’re blossoming.
Stephen gave us a hefty boost, with a ribbon tied ’round it.
For those of you feeling bad for her, Val-Kyttie did receive revenge for her stolen glory. One spring day, a customer admired Miss Beulah as Val-Kyttie lounged nearby, eavesdropping. Beulah, a skinny, slinky stray when she arrived, had filled out over the winter into a magnificent creature, very much resembling a woman at the opera in a fur coat. She sat, dignified and majestic, accepting compliments as the customer rubbed her head, prattling baby talk. “Aren’t you just the prettiest thing?! So regal, so beautiful! And when are your kittens due?”
I swear to you that Val-Kyttie guffawed as Beulah slunk away, tail dragging in humiliation.
In all the years our shop has been open, two customers have been put off by the cats—one allergic, one afraid—while a thousand or more have brought other people to meet them. Boyfriends introduced significant others to demonstrate a sensitive side, patting Beulah while sneaking “is it working” glances at their dates. Usually the girls were caught up in stroking Beuls, murmuring endearments as they fondled her cheeks and tail. The boys looked envious. Couples brought elderly parents. “This is the cat I was telling you about, Mom; isn’t she pretty?” Adults brought children. “See the kitty Mommy told you about? Pet gently, now.” Beulah, a tolerant cat by nature, rarely used the bolt-holes secreted throughout the shop, while Val-Kyttie, as shop manager, preferred not to fraternize with customers. The whole establishment catered in
design and policy to every whim of the two permanent staff cats and the myriad fosters who have found forever homes via the bookstore. (To date we count twenty-nine cats, plus seven dogs.) One shelf beneath a window sports a three-by-five card taped flat, announcing “this space reserved for feline staff.” Whoever arrives first basks there on sunny days.
One day I heard giggling and looked up to behold Beulah on one side of a shelf, pushing cookbooks with her paw toward the customer opposite. The lady caught them as they fell, pleased as punch. She even bought one. “If Beuls likes it, that’s all the recommendation I need,” she assured us as our cat sat on the mat, cleaning her push paw. The customer later brought us molasses cookies from the recipe book. Jack and I found them delicious, although Madam Customer Relations Specialist didn’t care for them.
Such is the life of a bookshop staff cat. It’s good work if you can get it.
CHAPTER 10
Saved by the Cell (and the Napkin Dispensers, and the Corkboards)
The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.
—Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
AS THE MONTHS ROLLED BY, we understood that finding ways to advertise had to remain high on our daily task list—right next to evaluating trade credit, stocking shelves, and keeping the place clean. Stephen’s article had given us a rocket-propelled boost, and the customers he’d made aware of us were bringing customers themselves. Grassroots advertising can’t be bought. It meant we ran the kind of place people wanted friends to visit—a happy thing to know.
Still, we now understood that we had to make our own way forward. Special events helped, as did the unlimited flyer-book swap with Gary and Teri, but we spent a lot of time cooking up schemes to publicize both wares and events. Also, we had intended to outlaw cell phones in the store, but never got around to making a sign saying so. This proved fortuitous, because people talking on cell phones came into our shop often. One day a woman walked in, looked around, and pulled out her phone before either of us could say hello.