The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap: A Memoir of Friendship, Community, and the Uncommon Pleasure of a Good Book

by Wendy Welch

  WOMAN: [Pause] Hey, it’s me. Guess what, there’s a bookstore in town. [Pause] No, our town. [Pause] Yes there is, I’m standing in it. [Pause] Dunno. [To Jack] How long ya been here?

  JACK: Not long.

  WOMAN [into phone]: Not long. And it’s great! There’s lotsa Dean Koontzes. They have [reels off several titles]. Say again? [picks up three books]. Okay, got those. [Pause] I dunno. [To Jack] How much are these?

  JACK [points to sign: PRICES ARE MARKED IN PENCIL ON FIRST PAGE OF BOOK.]

  WOMAN [looks in books, incredulous]: Cheap! [Pause] Yeah, sure. [Pulls more titles from shelf] You oughta come down here. They got lotsa stuff. [Pause] Okay, bye. [Disconnects, smiles at us] I’m gonna get these for her. That was my son’s parole officer. She’s great. I hope he marries her.

  Reader, did she marry him?

  Perfectly capable of recognizing a good thing once it fell into our lap, we never did make that sign. Buzz about our shop flew along cordless lines, while the noise level we’d feared never materialized. Shoppers rang friends, family, and coworkers from the bookstore floor to tell them where they were and what great deals we had. Many people bought books for whomever they were talking to. Often, when the person on the other end showed up, they mentioned being referred by a friend.

  Resuscitated by all that mouth to mouth, we nosed around for more free advertising opportunities. Our town boasted a popular diner-cum-pharmacy, the Mutual (made famous by Adriana Trigiani’s novels). In the real-life diner, eating plays second fiddle to social interaction, but the cast of characters is extensive and eclectic. Most of them don’t frequent the bookstore but become stalwart supporters of our being in town, all the same. We ate there once a week for at least a year before being “accepted” as one of the regulars. Other regulars include Bo and Jack, retired mining brothers with wicked senses of humor; Eulis the Korean War veteran, his wife, Annie, and their son, both men long-haul truck drivers; the Gathering of Women Who Lunch, which meets in the corner at the only table large enough to hold six people—and woe betide anyone who stakes a claim before the ladies arrive; plus town councilor Cotton, town maintenance men Donnie and Smokey, about-town handyman and grass mower David; Bill-I-Used-to-Drive-the-School-Bus; and the rest. We meet them there most mornings and gather the day’s news, plus a weekly supply of opinions.

  Bill-the-Bus uttered my favorite Big Stone Gap quote of all time. The day after the nation elected its first African-American president, as the rest of the men sat and pontificated on the state and future trajectory of the union, Bill gripped the tray guard on the luncheon counter and cleared his throat. Since he was the oldest person in the shop, ninety-three at the time, everyone else stopped to listen to what he had to say.

  In a loud voice, he intoned, “Lord, the world is changin’ more ever’ day. Little Debbies used to be $1.39. Now they’re $1.59 [shakes head]. I don’t know what’s gonna happen to us all.”

  Jack and I enjoy being Mutual regulars when scheduling permits. Once we reappeared after a two-week hiatus due to busy-life syndrome. Annie, eyeing us as we passed her booth, grinned. “Go away. I’m ’feart of strangers.” When I went to an out-of-town conference without Jack, they teased me that he’d been breakfasting in the company of a young blonde. And when he came back from his second trip to Scotland, they informed him I’d been seeing the short-order cook.

  There’s nothing quite like that special sense of belonging evidenced by your friends teasing the living daylights out of you.

  Napkin dispensers sit near the wall at each Mutual booth, and one morning after thinking it over, I hunted down Pat Bean. Miss Bean is a town legend, the octogenarian diner manager, a dear friend, and a bastion of good sense in a world of absurdity. When she broke her arm after tripping on a nearby city’s sidewalk, Jack asked if she planned to sue. “Good grief,” she snapped. “If I can’t walk straight, is that the city’s fault?” That’s our Miss Bean.

  “Would you care if I put a list of upcoming bookshop events behind these?” I showed her the napkin dispenser space. Miss Bean didn’t mind so long as we laminated them first, and within a month every tourism stop in town followed this example. For about twenty dollars a year, we put our quarterly events calendar in the paths of some five hundred people a week.

  Bookmarks, Stephen-Saved-Our-Bacon-Day, special events galore, napkin dispensers, endorsement from the Mutual crowd and the rest of it all meshed into something that worked just like “real” advertising. Sans money, we still had time, unlimited photocopies, and personal energy. That proved enough to accomplish more than one might have thought. We had a first-anniversary party for the shop and limped more or less confidently in the direction of our dream: a peaceful and fun life full of books in a community that we appreciated, and that appreciated us.

  And one April night, some eighteen months after that long-ago Grand Opening, Jack stood up from doing our quarterly taxes, stretched like a cat in the sun, and said, “Let’s go to Little Mexico.”

  Any day without cooking is a good one for me, but we’d been careful about unnecessary spending for so long, it had become second nature. As he folded up the accounts, I asked, “Eating out? What are we celebrating?”

  My husband gave a beatific smile and began ticking off fingers. “We have enough money to buy what we need to eat; we have paid-up phone, light, and heat bills.” He dropped finger-counting and spread his arms wide as if to embrace the shelf-lined walls. “We are filling this house with the accumulated wisdom of humanity; people are bringing in books; people are buying books; and we have made a bunch of kooky, adorable friends.” He wrapped his arms around me and nibbled my ear. “We’re celebrating happiness.” Then he kissed me.

  So we went (a bit later) to Little Mexico, bowed our heads over chips with salsa to thank God for so many blessings, and smiled at each other as we clinked sangria glasses. Solvency is good. Fried salt is great. Ear nibbles are wonderful.

  CHAPTER 11

  A Book’s Value Versus Its Price

  Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts.

  —Albert Einstein, chalked on the blackboard in his office at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton

  SO WE WERE MAKING IT! We had reached the point where the bookstore kept the lights burning and food on the table. Our meager earnings didn’t stretch to health insurance and other luxuries, so I eventually accepted a staff position at a nearby college, basically working for benefits. With coverage from this, and the cash flow from the shop, we were solvent. Careful rather than comfortable, but solvent.

  People were bringing books to trade by the carton—which scored me significant points with Linda, my college department’s secretary. Social sciences was scheduled to move en masse one summer, and Linda bemoaned her hard lot at having to find enough boxes for twelve professors. I started bringing her carloads from the store. Within a week we had filled a twenty-by-twenty room with cardboard—and now I never have trouble getting photocopies on short notice.

  Yet the boxes of books people brought in occasionally had a dark side. Jack and I had been blissfully ignorant about how often bookstores intersected with bereaved humans, but as business accelerated, books from a death or divorce scenario appeared at least once a month.

  Families experiencing loss have a lot of mental and physical baggage to deal with. It is humbling to unpack someone else’s life history from a box at the best of times, but people moving, or clearing a departed loved one’s bookshelf, are rarely having the best of times. And their boxes were so very revealing. Bookshelf anthropology is easy; if you want to know who someone is, investigate their home library. Correlating a person’s books to his or her journey from cradle to grave requires little imagination, yet feels almost as invasive as brain surgery. You don’t want to know this much about strangers.

  One morning two men dropped off eight sacks of books because their mom had moved to the nursing home. “We’re not much on reading but didn’t wanna sling �
�em in the Dumpster,” said one. “Thought you could use ’em.”

  The bags gave evidence of a sweet, full life: a bunch of books on cooking with herbs and organic gardening. Several bread-making collections. A worn hardback on home decorating on a budget, margins full of handwritten notes. A James Dobson title on raising godly boys. Two erotic novels—not Harlequins; we are talking Fanny Hill here. A whole row of Little Golden Books, and a 1955 set of Childcraft encyclopedias, worn to bits. (However they turned out on reading, Mama raised the boys with good books around!) Arthritis and Folk Medicine. How to Eat Away Arthritis. Coping with Arthritis. Funny Christian pocket books about aging. Four books, hardly touched at all, on occupational therapy activities for the elderly to do at home. And a paperback on Alzheimer’s, still in shrink wrap.

  It wasn’t hard to piece together how her life had unfolded, but it was poignant.

  Another day, a man with a dolly maneuvered three boxes of books through the shop door, and we got a sharp lesson on the warning signs of a bereaved husband. Most customers didn’t come with dollies or avert their eyes when you smiled at them or look as though they hadn’t slept for days. I took a stab at what I wasn’t yet experienced enough to understand. “Clearing out a house?” He looked so awful; maybe he’d been working too hard?

  People handle loss differently. In a mixed marriage (reader married to nonreader) the nonreader quite often will bring the late spouse’s entire library to the used book store and just donate them. Sometimes grieving souls want everything finished within sight of the funeral.

  Not even glancing up, the man with the dolly shook his head as he stacked boxes in the middle of our front room. A baseball cap shadowed his face. “My wife died. Wanted someone who’d appreciate ’em to have her books.”

  Jack said, “I’ll put the kettle on.”

  A Scotsman saying he’ll put the kettle on sends a coded message. British households consider kettles symbols of friendship, sustenance, and strength. In a crisis, the first thing one does is make tea. But British men aren’t so different from others in the species. Announcing their intentions of handling the kettle divides the labor. They bring you and the person in crisis a tea tray loaded with all the needed accoutrements, and set it down gently before you. Then they bugger off as fast as they can go.

  Although I didn’t know it then, the man with the dolly was the first of many. From him I learned that the archetype of a stoic mountaineer who’s a sweetie inside relied upon a fairly accurate description of most Coalfields men.

  “She was a big reader. Spent a lot of time in stores like this’un. I musta followed her through half of Georgia, waitin’ while she looked at books.” He took a gulp from the coffee Jack had made. (Normally Jack makes tea, but husbands are often coffee drinkers; he’s learned to ask.)

  I wanted to show appreciation, so looked for clues as to her personality in the titles. “Oh, she liked Bennett Cerf! She must have been one fun lady.”

  He smiled. “Yeah. She was.” His eyes grew suspiciously red beneath his hat brim, and he cleared his throat. “Anyway, like I said, wanted somebody who’d appreciate ’em to have ’em.”

  Sometimes Jack would sit with us as the husband talked, or leave us alone if a bereaved wife or daughter sat at the table instead, clinking her teaspoon against the mug as words poured out of her. The best we could do was listen, show appreciation for the life the book titles revealed, and pretend not to notice when someone was crying. Not all the stories were sweet. Customers shedding a loved one’s books sometimes had ugly things to say, and wanted a safe space to tell how their family broke apart when Daddy died.

  The bookstore became that safe space not so much through design as by default. Neither Jack nor I have a counseling credential, but how could we ignore the red eyes under those hat brims, the verbal fishhooks people tossed out in comments like “I don’t live here anymore, just came back for a funeral.” Or “do you have a copy of Jacob Have I Loved? I’m a twin—well, was, am, I mean, my sister just died.” Or “Figured I’d bring these old books of Mom’s to you. Heh. They’re about the only thing we didn’t fight over.”

  Some terrible death stories are floating around out there: families coming apart because of small stuff, sisters at blows about Mom’s care, brothers fighting over toolboxes. We had a hard time grasping some of the scenarios—and a harder time just listening without comment, keeping the tea flowing and our mouths shut. But that creation of a safe place where people could just talk without judgment or advice coming back at them became part of the bookstore ethos.

  My maternal grandmother had a good death. She lived summers in her own little Ohio apartment and spent winters with my parents in Tennessee. Soon after Nanny turned ninety-two and had a couple of unpleasant skirmishes with her stove, Mom, a recently retired geriatric nurse, said to her, “Okay, here’s the deal: you can go to a nursing home, or you can come live with us permanently.”

  Nanny pouted, fussed, pulled out all the stops. When called upon, she could be a real drama queen. (Mom says I take after her, but I don’t see it.) But in the end she held a massive garage sale, packed suitcases full of the sentimental stuff she couldn’t bear to leave behind, and moved herself, lock, stock, and wheelchair to Mom and Dad’s suburban ranch house—where she had her own room but not nearly enough space.

  Mom had been looking forward to it. Although a physical train wreck, Nanny could run mental circles around most people, and you didn’t want to get on the sharp side of her wit. Her fingers were still nimble, and Mom figured on five or so more good years of quilting, cooking, and catfighting. She and Nanny sparred like schoolteachers from different colleges.

  Two weeks after Nanny moved in, she began sliding downhill fast. A veteran nursing-home staffer, Mom knew what she was seeing; her mother had given up. Mom called my sister and me, sputtering, “She couldn’t stay in Ohio. She set fire to her sweater sleeve. She can’t stand up by herself. She couldn’t stay there alone.”

  Tracy and I knew guilt when we heard it and told Mom what she already knew: that she’d done the right thing. “Nanny always did it her way, and that’s what she’s doing now.” And we came to say good-bye. Everybody knew.

  Three weeks to the day that Nanny came to live in Tennessee, Mom was helping her into bed as both of them fussed at each other. Nanny yelped that Mom hurt her. Mom martyr-sighed and replied that Nanny had been startled, not hurt, and couldn’t she tell the difference? Nanny snapped, “I ain’t talkin’ to you no more,” and died of a sudden stroke.

  Telling the story to Tracy and me, Mom choked back sobs. My sister and I eyed each other sidelong, then burst into laughter. Mom gave a weak, wet grin. “It is [sniff] kinda funny [snuffle], isn’t it?”

  We still miss Nanny, but what a blessed relief guilt-free mourning brings. We loved her, valued her, and if we didn’t always do what she wanted, we did what she needed, especially Mom. Nanny died knowing it. And she certainly did it her way.

  The more our customers told us about their family tragedies, the more grateful I became for Nanny’s peaceful yet drama-queen passage. We didn’t know, back in the starry-eyed days of “we’re going to run a bookstore someday,” that an unlicensed counseling office would make up part of its operation, but we tried to do the best we could once we figured it out. Even if you don’t know the right thing to say, everyone deserves to be listened to.

  As an ethnographer, I understood that we had “stranger value” operating, when talking to someone you don’t know in a space you don’t regularly inhabit feels safer than sharing with friends or relations. Many of the people who told us tales of woe were occasional customers, people whose names we might not even have known when they started talking. That worked—for them and for us. The act of sitting across the table listening, cups of tea in hand, asking a pertinent but not-too-invasive question now and again, seemed to be enough. People wanted to be listened to, valued, validated. The kettle boiled and emptied, boiled and emptied as we measured out our lives with tea a
nd coffee spoons.

  In all honesty, the hardest part came not during their stories, but afterward, when those boxes full of artifacts representing the personalities of beloved parents, siblings, even children who had left the family one way or another, became commodities that needed a price tag before they hit our shop floor.

  It seemed such a cynical flip—like that moment in A Christmas Carol when the domestic staff sold Scrooge’s bed curtains and cuff links. Bookshop owners are meant to price and sell books, but it felt creepy, the first time a weeping woman went away and we stared at her dead daughter’s library, spread in plastic tubs across our front room floor. Is this what we’ve become, literary vultures profiting from the death of others?

  Once a young man in camouflage, sporting a buzz cut, carried in a box of books, mostly Christian and female-oriented. These have to be his wife or girlfriend’s books, I thought. Did she know he’d brought them? Where was she? Usually people bring in their own stuff, unless … she was dead?

  Something must have registered on my face as I bent over a box, turning a women’s devotional Bible—its pink hardback cover bedecked with flower sprigs—in my hands. Without a word, the guy reached past me and pulled out a book: Keeping Your Marriage Alive.

  “Didn’t work,” he said, setting it on the table and reaching down for another: 10 Rules for a Godly Marriage. “She left me. I was in Iraq, and when I got home, she’d gone off with a guy she met at work.”

  That lad saw a box full of memory grenades, not books. And he wanted to redeem them. I priced the lot—giving him a little extra for mental anguish—and entered his trade credit in our big blue ledger. He got about twenty-eight dollars, and I hope he also got a clean sweep.