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

by Wendy Welch

  The No Cash Crew, as Jack calls them, haul in copious amounts of books for trade credit, but when the credit runs out won’t pay cash for anything. We keep an eye on what they bring, and once explained to a customer that we knew her books had come from the library’s castoffs trolley for fifty cents, so couldn’t credit them at half the retail price of twelve dollars as she was asking, although we still liked her and found her a worthwhile person. Losing a few pro bargainers over the years has not hurt us. We try to be nice, but some people define nice only as your doing what they want.

  Again, exceptions abound. Barbara, one of our earliest customers, was a professional garage saler, but asked us straight-out what we wanted, then brought us Westerns, older science fiction, and certain children’s authors based on a list of “can’t keep ’em in stock” titles we gave her. Barbara proved a pleasure to work with. We called her “our outsource buyer.” And about four years into the relationship, she gave us a sweet smile and announced her plan to open a used book store forty miles away. We wished her well and offered her some overstock. When we’re down that way, we pop in on our “godchild,” and Barbara still comes to see us when she’s in the area.

  Barbara works a day job as a prison guard, and remains one of the few people we met who already knew the role that bookshops play in the lives of families with incarcerated members. The first time a woman appeared in Tales of the Lonesome Pine clutching titles she’d purchased elsewhere, asking if we would mail them to her inmate son, we were so perplexed that she had to explain what she wanted twice, slowly. Until that moment, we had no idea that prisons don’t allow inmates paperbacks unless they’re mailed from a bookstore. (And they can’t have hardbacks.)

  We do now. Once a package came from a prison with a form letter stating the books we had sent couldn’t be given to the requested inmate, having been deemed inappropriate by the warden. Inside lay two titles we’d never seen before, both new, both on U.S. army intelligence interrogation techniques. To this day, we have no idea who mailed them.

  A jolly man of about six foot five comes in quarterly, bearing sudoku puzzle books. He gives us postage money plus “a little extra,” as he puts it, to mail them to his incarcerated brother. After a few visits we told him we didn’t need the tip if he would just cover the postage.

  He smiled. “That’s nice of you, but I don’t want you to get sick of me askin’.”

  Jack waved his hand in a “pshaw, neighbor” kind of way. “It’s okay, really. How long does your brother have left on his sentence?”

  “Forty years.” The man grinned and put a fiver on the counter. “See y’all next time.”

  Perhaps most proprietors opened with a more fulsome awareness of what hidden tasks lurk behind a bookshop’s doors. Jack and I didn’t have a clue—just desire, which with the naive sincerity of high school sweethearts we figured would cover everything. Doesn’t love conquer all?

  I’ll be honest with you; it helps, but working sunup to sundown factors in as well. That “follow your bliss” saying actually has an undercurrent; if you follow your bliss, you’ll work hard to get it right. When the occasional customer tells us his or her dream of running a bookstore someday, we recognize our own naïveté in that enthusiasm. They may have some inkling about long hours and low pay, but rarely do they know about the fires, the guerrilla bargainers, the bereavements, or the prisons. Neither did we—then. But we sure do now. In all honesty, the scariest, hardest, saddest, most important stories found in a bookshop aren’t in the books; they’re in the customers.

  CHAPTER 14

  Yarn Goddesses

  Methinks it is a token of healthy and gentle characteristics, when women of high thoughts and accomplishments love to sew; especially as they are never more at home with their own hearts than while so occupied.

  —Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun

  BARBARA AND FIONA WEREN’T THE only regulars who helped shape the bookstore’s stock and personality. A few months after we opened, Isabel (she of the curling toes) ended her long reign as director of a preschool and donated all her children’s books and shelving to us. We still sometimes call the children’s area “Isabel’s Den.”

  Although Isabel is a charming and fun person in and of herself, many people keep on her good side because of her years directing the preschool. Sometimes at a Tuesday night needlework session, as seven or eight women sit about the table knitting or crocheting, the Post will be lying open to a photo of—for instance—a former Big Stone Gapper, now a famous cardiovascular surgeon living in New York City, winning some national research award at the American Medical Association’s annual meeting. Isabel will glance at the photo and say, “Oh, I remember little Jimmy! He used to pick his nose and eat it. A doctor now? My goodness.”

  Singer Nanci Griffith is right: everybody does die famous in a small town.

  Isabel had the idea for a Needlework Night at our bookstore. “It will offer women with like interests the chance to get together and talk, relax, enjoy each other’s company,” she suggested. We were all for it, and Needlework Nights started monthly, but proved so popular they went weekly in their second year, Isabel at the helm sending newsletters chock-full of patterns, yarn management tips, and related activities. (She also ensures a steady supply of dark chocolate at the gatherings.)

  Needlework Nights are akin to having car tires aligned, sans testosterone; they keep us running right as we check attitudes and adjust balances amid the quasi-spiritual atmosphere of feminine companionship. Regulars ebb and flow, but in addition to our fearless leader, Isabel, the group includes: Fiona, who has mastered every step in crafting a sweater from birthing the lamb to casting off the cuffs (and she once copped to knowing how to artificially inseminate ewes); Elizabeth, forbidden to tell any more stories about women in the ER with needles through their sternums because they knitted in a moving car; and Becky, our first barrel-full-of-laughs professional cleaning lady and world’s sweetest soul. After we hired her and raved about her phenomenal cleaning, several other Needleworkers and townswomen vied for her services—and she became so overworked, she recruited Heather to clean for us.

  Along with these stalwarts of the bookstore’s inception, Needlework Night attracted Lynne, a lifelong Big Stone Gap resident who now winters in Florida and summers at the old homestead. Lynne, in her eighties and a cancer survivor, showed up at one of our Dulcimer Sundays (a jam session for mountain dulcimer players) and inspired us all; she became such a regular at the shop that she sometimes staffs it when Jack and I go on short holidays.

  Needlework Night enjoys a cast of sporadic attenders, too—women like Sarah, the doctoral student in medical anthropology who spent a year in town doing fieldwork and pleased us all immensely by giving birth to a girl so we could make tiny pink hats and booties with pom-poms; Marnie, self-appointed rescuer of every stray dog for forty miles; Mary Ann, jewelry maker extraordinaire; Erin, able to recite the plot of every play published since 1630; Kathy, the loud and amiable town socialite married to Garth; Joan, just at the cusp of launching two teenage children into the wide world; Witold’s wife Ashia; and scattered others.

  Part of the fun is never knowing what dynamic will be operating on any given night. For instance, if Joan and Ashia attend, we all try to behave ourselves because they are such dignified ladies, but the problem is that Isabel and I together really don’t retain dignity; it slides right through our “not in public” filters and runs out our sensible low-heeled pumps. Once we get started, well, it is an all-female group, so an hour rarely passes without someone uttering the word “penis.” Or calling down curses not normally heard from the mouths of steel magnolias of the mountain variety—at least, not in public.

  And while we never outright told men they couldn’t be part of Needlework Nights, when a husband pulled his chair up to the table one evening, the girls, without a word or look passing between us, began telling childbearing stories. As Elizabeth launched into a detailed and vivid description of her daughter’s bre
ach birth, Garth grew so pale that Jack appeared with a bottle of Scotch and hauled him upstairs. At the end of the night Kathy yelled, “Okay, y’all can come down now.” The boys returned with a rosy glow over their earlier pallor. Garth often came back to “keep Jack company” after that, but he never bellied up to the yarn bar again.

  Some of the yarn goddesses ply their trades in our shop: Fiona’s pottery, Isabel’s quirky dishcloths (her specialty remains one with the state of Virginia outlined in raised stitches, but she also knits a mean pine tree), and my crocheted novelties grace the shelf set aside for local handicrafts. Our shop’s welcome mat and kitchen privacy curtain are crocheted from “plarn,” aka plastic bags cut into strips; people think these two items are cute, so we never say we were trying, in our early years, to save the thirty dollars a curtain and mat would have cost us. Once, when Fiona exchanged a lovely oval mat she’d woven for another friend’s quilted placements, Isabel joked that they had traded their ply.

  I joined Round the Mountain, an artisan co-op, as a chair caner. It’s a hobby that takes me into the Zen of physical crafting; when I’m done being nowhere thinking about nothing, the chair has a nice patterned seat. Photographers, potters, painters, and fiber wizards brought their wares to sell at the store. We organized a percentage split, and regional crafts became part of our tourism draw. Our selection criteria remains pretty basic: is it handmade and do we like it? Later we added: have we sold enough within a year to justify the space? Keeping it simple works well for everyone involved.

  The Yarn Goddesses have had many adventures. We used to belly dance together—but only after swearing undying secrecy about what happened in the class, so I can’t tell you any of those funny stories. When the belly-dancing instructor also became pregnant and gave birth to a girl, we were so happy to have another reason for making cute little pink layette sets that we forgave her for not starting up the class again.

  Instead, we took up water aerobics en masse and that produced a fair few funny stories as well, also verboten. (Once your friends know you’re writing a book, they can get quite persnickety about spending time with you.) But the Night Mr. Dickens Got Out trumped every other silly thing we’ve done as a group.

  Isabel has a rescued border collie. She picked up the dog while on a trip with me to Pittsburgh, helping our friend Jerry price and clear the library of his late wife after Stefni lost a dignified battle to cancer. The dog needed a home and Isabel, as she explained to her husband William on our return, needed a dog. He came with the name Charley, but was so full of himself—plus had a foster brother named Marley, already in residence—that his nickname became Mr. Dickens.

  One night as the Yarn Goddesses settled in, a frantic phone call came from William. Charley had gotten out of the yard and run—barking joyously rather than gently—into that good night. Evening traffic had started picking up and, to put it plainly, this dog’s intelligence was on a par with your average turnip truck.

  Dread seized the room. Isabel went out the door, brown hair flying, as the rest of us mobilized: Garth and Jack were shouted down from upstairs to do search-and-rescue duty in Garth’s red pickup, and Fiona and Becky stayed to work the phones while Kathy and I set out on foot to cut Charley-the-Idiot off from the main road.

  We searched and whistled and called and barked, but saw neither hide nor hair of Mr. Dickens. Twenty weary minutes later, a vehicle pulled up in front of Kathy and me, blinding us with its headlights. From inside the cab a man said, “Hey, you girls are cute. Wanna go for a ride?”

  I like to think Kathy recognized her husband’s voice, but who knows? We rounded the side of the truck and Charley stuck his needle nose out the window to give Kathy a big wet ear kiss. The boys were heroes.

  “How’d you find him so fast?” Kathy asked.

  Garth puffed out his chest. “Charley’s a guy. We thought like guys. Where does a guy go when he runs off? We found ’im across the creek, serenading a little girl Doberman.”

  Kathy fixed Charley with a stern gaze. He blinked and licked himself. Kathy swiveled her steel blue eyes to Garth, who blinked and scratched his armpit.

  We dumped Charley back inside the yard, gate firmly latched, and waved good-bye to William, who bubbled with gratitude. Back at the bookstore, Isabel had returned to pace the floor in tears. When we burst in with the good news, a bottle of wine appeared. It wasn’t ours; we don’t have a liquor license and would never serve alcohol at a bookshop function. We herded everyone upstairs to drink unencumbered in our second-floor home instead.

  As we toasted dogs we had known, a sharp “crack” sounded outside. Whatever. We opened a second bottle of wine. A few minutes later, somebody said, “What are those flashing lights?”

  Eight college-educated adults pressed their noses against the windowpane, wineglasses in hand, to behold the bookstore cordoned off by police. After one look, Garth—a volunteer firefighter and long-standing member of the local council—set his whiskey glass carefully atop a dresser and moved to the other side of the room.

  Isabel, from one of the Gap’s oldest families, marched down the stairs. A minute later she returned. “If we leave quietly, they won’t press charges.” She was kidding, but Garth still looked pale.

  It turned out that the ancient guide wire on a nearby streetlight, growing tauter as the pole settled over the years, had reached breaking point and snapped without warning. The fallen pole’s top end lay just a couple of feet from the store’s front walk. Since the pole had an electrical wire attached, streetlights and traffic signals were out in the neighborhood; the police had arrived to reroute vehicles and to keep people away from the downed wire.

  We traipsed downstairs and sat on the porch, toasting the Uniformed Ones with wine and whiskey glasses—except Garth, who “forgot” his upstairs. He chatted with the officers as one by one the girls sobered enough to drive home. Fiona drove over the now-dead wire when she zigzagged off in her SUV, but not because of drink. She drives like that all the time.

  CHAPTER 15

  What Happens in the Bookstore, Stays in the Bookstore

  If A equals success in life, then A equals XYZ. X is work, Y is play, and Z is keeping your mouth shut.

  —Albert Einstein, Observer, January 15, 1950

  A NICE YOUNG LAD CAME shopping for James Pattersons one spring day. Knowing “Tucker” from church, I’d assessed him as more of a classical guy. He belonged to a local book club whose members wouldn’t have been caught reading Patterson in their own bathtubs, let alone publicly. Tucker didn’t even know the title he wanted (out of the seventy-two-plus the Patterson industry has published). He just knew it was “the first one.”

  “Along Came a Spider?”

  “That sounds right,” he responded.

  “How did you get interested in this author?” I asked, suspecting his answer as I led him to the mystery-and-thrillers room.

  A sheepish expression crossed his face. “I met this girl.”

  Trying not to laugh, I handed over the paperback. Sure, I could have told him then that the relationship wouldn’t work out, but it was none of my business.

  Tucker returned for two more Pattersons before the breakup. He later married a nice woman with a taste for Lee Smith. As a wedding present, we gave them a dozen cozies with titles like Marriage Is Murder and To Love and to Perish. (In case the term is unfamiliar, the best description ever for “cozies” is “murder mysteries where no one cares who got killed because they’re all distracted by cooking new recipes or following intricate handicraft instructions.”)

  Tucker and his new wife “Vicki” shopped with us regularly until they moved away. Once I suggested Vicki try a Patterson.

  She scanned a back blurb. “Maybe. I’ve read a couple, but Tucker never has.”

  I didn’t think fast enough. “No, he bought some when…” My voice trailed off.

  Tucker’s wife looked at me, an expression that could only be described as a smiling frown on her face. Then, with an indecipherable win
k, she strode briskly into the front room where Tucker browsed classics. Ignoring the other customers, she waved the Patterson in the air and shrieked, “You liar! You said you never dated that slut!!”

  We put a sign over our computer: WHITB, SITB. (What happens in the bookstore stays in the bookstore.) The sign reminds us that shopkeeping in a small town requires a particular kind of etiquette, and a lot of keeping silent. Sure, word of mouth at the speed of cell phone helped us become a profitable business, but all that nice buzz had a sugar-crazed little sister who kicked us pretty hard in the shins: gossip.

  It’s no secret that the delights of gossip present a double-edged sword; people like to discuss events while they are half formed, each storyteller interpreting in his or her own image what might have happened and why. This makes operating any small-town business—and particularly one in which people talk as openly as a bookstore—a constant study in tact and reserve. Ask any hairdresser. Small-town business operators know too much about people, and if any of it slips out, trouble will plague our houses like a pack of tigers.

  Sending news faster than truth or accuracy, gossip is as much a staple of small-town life as the Fourth of July civic fireworks. We’d been on the receiving end of enough negative buzz to resolve that our shop would become what one customer termed “a little Switzerland,” a safe place where anyone could say anything without fear of its being repeated. (At least, not until this book came out.…) We would become a third place.

  Third places are those needed spaces, neither home nor work, where we are known by our names and valued for being whatever we decide to be—the clown, the intellectual, the quiet person. Being part of a family is a wonderful thing, and I’m all for team-building at work, but having a place where you don’t have to be anything to anyone makes a pleasant breather.