The Crossroads Cafe

by Deborah Smith

  The Hummer’s bright-yellow emergency gas can bounced from my left shoulder. I’d fashioned a carrying strap for it from a ball of twine I found in my grandmother’s attic. The useless cell phone bounced in my back pack. From my coat pocket I pulled the wrinkled satellite photos I’d printed out when I was still in California. Okay. Here was the creek, and there was the Cove. And here was the intersection of the Trace and the creek trail. And if I headed to the southeast right now, that would be a left turn off the trail at this point, I could cut the corner and reach the café sometime before my toes turned black from frostbite.

  I stuffed the maps back in my pocket, took a deep breath, and climbed down a steep hillside toward the creek. Ah hah. A little known fact: Creeks have water in them. I found a shallow eddy with a sandy bottom, waded through ankle-deep water fringed with ice ledges, and hoped my high-tech, waterproof hiking boots actually were.

  They weren’t.

  As cold water squished through my heavy socks and puddled between my toes, I climbed the hill on the creek’s far side and went doggedly southeast.

  I distracted myself by practicing my speech to Delta.

  Hi, cousin, nice to meet you. Yes, I realize it appears that I’m an idiot who ran out of gas without ever driving anywhere and who let the cell phone discharge without ever placing a call for help. But things were going so well for me until then.

  Prior to my emergency hike to the Cove I’d spent the week happily playing house at Wild Woman Ridge and exploring my land. The glory of being alone, unseen and unsee-able, gave me exactly what I’d hoped to find at Granny’s secluded home—freedom and security. First, I prowled the forest of young pine trees beyond the back yard and found my grandmother’s orchard—gnarled apple trees, fig trees, a half-dozen stately pecans, and a fringe of tall blueberry shrubs desperately reaching through the evergreens toward sunlight. I made notes to myself. Clear pines from orchard. Get book on fruit and nut trees. Learn how to make pecan pies.

  I found a concrete pad where the well house used to be. Have new well dug. Have two or three new wells dug. Need lots of water. Irrigation, fire protection. Sprinklers! I had already decided to install a sophisticated sprinkler system throughout the house. Thomas, I’m sorry, you can tell me how to hide the heads so they don’t disrupt the architectural purity, but I am going to have sprinklers. And all the wood paneling had to come off the walls so fire-retardant siding could be installed behind it. I wasn’t going to live in a wooden house without safeguards. One of the first things I did was unpack a box full of fire extinguishers. There was now one in every room, including the closets.

  I scrutinized forlorn spaces in the small, sunny kitchen, where Granny had reveled in her refrigerator, an ancient model that ran on kerosene, and a slightly more modern stove that ran off propane. Daddy had sold the stove and the amazing fridge along with everything else of value. Install electric fridge, I wrote in my notes, and microwave. I wasn’t sure my nerves were up to a conventional stove and oven, even a non-flaming electric model. But I could stand a microwave.

  I loved the kitchen, where a window over the sink looked out on the side pasture and barn. Tall white cabinets rose to the ceiling, and the countertops were covered in finely fitted ceramic tiles painted in bright splashes of color. Granny made these. She’d had them fired at a kiln in Asheville. As a boy, Delta’s brother, Bubba, had helped Granny cement the tiles in place. Granny had inspired him to learn pottery-making.

  The kitchen floor was done in large, red-clay tiles embedded with flat white stones. As a child, the stones had looked like random specks to me, but now, with no table and chairs to break the effect, I realized in astonishment that each tile displayed a constellation. All twelve signs of the zodiac were there, and the Ursas, major and minor, and Orion and Andromeda, and others.

  I took off my shoes and walked the sky in my sock feet.

  Note regarding kitchen floor: clean it and re-seal it, buy a glass-topped table so you can see through, no rugs to hide the universe!

  I hauled several dozen boxes down from the attic and unpacked a treasure trove of Granny’s belongings. My favorites were her dish cloths and tablecloths, hand-embroidered with all sorts of whimsical homages to famous painters—Picasso and Van Gogh, Georgia O’Keefe and Frida Kahlo. The Kahlo—Frida’s colorful self-portrait, oh, boy, could that woman have used a little wax job between those eyebrows—included a quote.

  “I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.”

  I laid that dish cloth on a box and looked at it a long time. “Granny, were you lonely here?” I said into the absolute silence of the cold house. I didn’t want to think of my grandmother that way—I wanted to revel in her independence, I wanted to embrace the notion of being alone the rest of my life.

  Surely she approved.

  I unpacked her grand blue-and-red enamelware pans, her black iron skillets, and her crockery canisters for flour and sugar. I filled the kitchen cabinets with her vessels; I lined the counter with the crockery, with her hammered aluminum bread keeper, with a funny old cookie jar in the shape of a hula dancer. I set a wonderful kerosene lamp on the counter by the sink, though I’d never light it, and I hung a pair of her tablecloths in the window as temporary curtains.

  Facing the fireplace in the living room was a floor-to-ceiling wall of built-in cabinets. Their cherry wood was dark and a little dull from years of neglect and decades of smoky fireplace residue, but the cabinets made a grand show, regardless. I found a box full of old, framed photographs and set them on a few shelves. Mother. Grandmother. My long-dead grandfather, young and handsome and probably trouble. Relatives I didn’t recognize. Pet dogs, cats, a goat. The goat? “Bah Ba Loo,” was written on the back. The one from the cemetery? I hadn’t ventured out there yet. I made a mental note to check for a Bah Ba Loo headstone.

  But the shelves still looked bare.

  Waving a flashlight, I went downstairs. The basement was cold and tomb-like, like all dark basements, but I could picture it with the warm light of a few good fluorescent bulbs on the heavy stone walls. The walls were lined with thick plank shelves, and on those shelves was a veritable museum of old jars. Not only were there cases of canning jars, there were large, two-gallon pickle jars.

  “Granny’s milk jars,” I exclaimed. She’d had a milk cow. Twice a day she brought in a bucket of fresh-squeezed moo juice. She poured that raw, creamy fresh-milked milk into the recycled pickle jars, then covered their tops with cheesecloth. As the heavy yellow cream floated to the top she’d strain it off.

  That raw milk, and the raw cream from it, had been the most luscious-tasting treat in the world. I remembered riding down to the Cove with her in her truck. She’d sold her extra milk and eggs to the café.

  Besides the milk jars were dozens of cobalt-blue bottles—some of them soda or medicine containers, others the squat, hard-working jars that once held the most ubiquitous cure-all a cold ever met: Vicks VapoRub.

  I picked up an empty jar and tried desperately to get a whiff of mentholated memory off it, but the scent was gone. Why had she kept these? I wracked my brain. The bottle tree. She’d had a bottle tree in the front yard. It was a post she’d set in the ground, bored with holes all up and down the length of it. She whittled small, bare tree branches into odd configurations, then wedged one end into a hole and hung a blue bottle from the tip. Her bottle tree had been a glorious blue light-catcher, casting strange pieces of rainbows onto the flowers, the yard and my face.

  I toted all the jars upstairs. Milk jars, Vicks jars, soda bottles, canning jars. Jar World. As soon as I had time I’d build a bottle tree for the blueware, but in the meantime I set all the jars in front of the living room cabinets and gazed at the raw potential.

  I sat next to Martha Stewart at a dinner party once, and I asked her the secret of simple décor, and she leaned over to me and whispered profoundly, like Orson Welles in the opening of Citizen Kane, just one solemn word.

 
“Grouping.”

  I grouped.

  When I finished, my cabinets gleamed with fascinating jar themes. I brought in a few twigs, some sprigs of wild holly to adorn a jar here and yon, and voilà. A masterpiece in found glass. I set a battery-powered lantern in their midst at night in lieu of deadly candles, and shards of reflected light scattered across the living room.

  The ordinary can become extraordinary with just the smallest effort to see beyond the surface. I touched my face from time to time. Yes, it should be a lesson. Not one I was ready to believe, though.

  A marvelous built-in china cabinet filled one wall of the small dining room, too. I polished its glass windows and their stained-glass rims until they glimmered like calm water. When I found Granny’s blue willow china, I polished that, too, slaving at it over a bucket of water I hauled from the cow pond. When the china was pristine, I arranged and rearranged it in the cabinet.

  Then I took one coffee cup and saucer, and one small plate, and I formed some empty boxes into a kind of table, with a folding camp chair beside it. I put the earless Van Gogh tablecloth over the boxes, filled my cup with bottled water, neatly dumped cold, vacuum-sealed chicken alfredo onto the plate and, using a plastic fork from my camping supplies, I dined.

  Best of all were my grandmother’s quilts, stored carefully with paper tucked between the folds. There were only four, all double-bed size. I remembered her having many more. These were all that had escaped Daddy’s cold-blooded dispersement of her belongings. I shook my head over them, hugged them to my chest.

  I put one of the quilts over my sleeping bag and used the other three as drapes for the living room windows. The old curtainrod holders were still in place. I brought in several interesting tree limbs from the forest floor, perched them on the old holders, draped the quilts just so, and I had colorful curtains instead of wool blankets.

  My house. My house. It was still a dark, barren enclave in so many ways; it still had no furniture, but now it had memories on the shelves and at the windows. I had put a touch of makeup on it, just enough to bring out the light in its eyes.

  Such musings and decoratings kept me busy for an entire week. But eventually I sat on my cot in the corner next to the boarded-up fireplace at night, tired and chilly and bundled in an increasingly grungy set of clothing, wondering what I should do next. I went out one morning and circled the Hummer with its keys in my hand, as if I’d cornered it in the wild and didn’t want to spook it. Somehow, some way I had to shore up my courage enough to drive again. I had not driven a car since the accident. Even the thought of driving made me queasy. My heart raced, my hands shook. I looked at the Hummer and saw the Trans Am. I dropped the keys, picked them up, hurried back inside. Shame filled me. It was bad enough to be a maimed misfit, but to be held hostage by these fears was the ultimate humiliation. I paced the living room, hands on hips.

  My plan had been to call Delta eventually, tell her I was here, swear her to secrecy, invite her to visit, then beg her to be my liaison with the real world. I’d give her money and lists, and she’d send supplies. I’d also tell her what kind of furniture I wanted, and she could buy it for me. But who would deliver it? Who would tote and fetch and unload in perfect, trustworthy secrecy?

  Thomas would. But only if I promise not to alter so much as an antique nail in this entire house.

  Damn.

  While I tried to come up with a way to be a totally self-sufficient hermit yet also go shopping, I fell in the cow pond. It was late afternoon on the sixth day. I had issues with the pond because its smooth, silver water reflected my face, thus I refused to look directly at the water while scooping my bucket into it. The ground around the pond was frozen hard, and a rim of thin ice covered most of the water, making it difficult to tell exactly where the pond ended and the shore began. I was bent over, scooping water at a hole I’d knocked in the ice, while looking at a hawk perched in the bony fingertip of a tall poplar tree, when I stepped on ice instead of earth.

  The ice collapsed, and I went into the frigid water headfirst. Sputtering and flailing, weighted by a heavy coat and hiking boots, I crawled out like a soggy teddy bear. By the time I reached the house, I was shivering so hard I could barely shuck my clothes. I dried off with a wool blanket and swaddled myself in a dry outfit but still couldn’t get warm. Night was falling, and a little thermometer I’d set on the porch rail said the temperature was only heading south.

  If I can just warm up I’ll be fine. I just need to re-start my personal thermostat. I looked out the window at the Hummer. I had the ovaries to sit in it with the heater running, at least.

  As a cold, golden sunset faded over Hog Back, I climbed into the Hummer carrying blankets, bottled water, and several protein bars. I cranked the engine and turned the heater on low. Just for a few minutes, I thought, as the seductive heat surrounded me with blissful comfort I hadn’t known for days. I tried the radio and found WTUR-AM, the Voice of Turtleville Since 1928. Somewhere in outer space, WTUR’s earliest farm reports and gospel singings were well on their way toward the universes next door.

  Porter Wagoner serenaded me. “It’s good to touch the green, green grass of home.” A song about a man dreaming of the old homeplace on the eve of his execution. My kind of music. I made a mental note to climb in the Hummer the next night, Saturday, and listen to the Grand Ol’ Opry live from Nashville.

  My grandmother’s eclectic tastes had included a pure love for that show. She’d adored its bluegrass and hillbilly music, its soap-operaish country tunes and Patsy Cline ballads and even the slick, orchestrated tunes that had crept in by my childhood. When I visited, she and I listened on a battery-powered boom box in her living room. The boom box sat atop the aging wooden console of a hand-cranked radio her grandfather had ordered from Sears in the 1920’s.

  “I remember first appreciating the Grand Ol’ Opry when I was a teenager during the Depression,” she told me. “I snuck out of a church social to go to a roadhouse down on the creek. I drank homemade gin with a Jewish bootlegger from Chicago and listened to Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys on the radio. Can you imagine singing along to ‘Blue Moon Of Kentucky’ with a bootlegger who translates the lyrics into Yiddish? It was a night I never forgot.”

  She never forgot that night, and I never forgot her colorful story about it. She linked me to that time and those people as if I’d touched them myself. Yes, I would make listening to the Grand Ol’ Opry my new Saturday night hobby. Maybe Faith Hill or Garth Brooks or Travis Tritt would suddenly burst into Yiddish. You never know.

  The warmth, the music, the soft glow of the Hummer’s dashboard lulled me as night closed in. Irresistible. I snuggled down in the seat, cuddled a blanket to my breasts, and shut my eyes. Just a nap. Just a short, warming doze.

  The next thing I knew, I was blinking sleepily in the bright sunshine of morning. The Hummer had grown suspiciously cold and quiet. I lurched upright in the seat and tried to crank the engine. All I got was the sound a large cat makes when it tries to throw up a furball.

  I looked at my wristwatch. “Oh, my God.” I’d been sleeping in the Hummer, with its engine running, for more than twelve hours. The gas tank had been only a quarter full when my bodyguards and I arrived; now it was empty, and to top off the misery, the battery seemed dead. I climbed out, trying not to panic. “Okay, so it’s not like I was planning to drive anywhere soon. No problem. I’ll decide what to do about it later. I can always call for help by phone.”

  I went inside the house, ate a tasty breakfast of protein bars, brushed my teeth, spent the morning polishing the windows in the bedrooms, then sat down on the hearth to call Bonita. I checked in with her every day around noon, East Coast time. We had an agreement. If she failed to hear from me, and couldn’t get me on the phone in return, she was to alert Delta that something was wrong.

  I pulled my cell phone from a pocket and started to punch the speed-dial number for Bonita. Then I peered at the phone’s display and realized it was blank. That’s when I r
emembered I’d forgotten to plug the phone into its charger in the Hummer. Which now had a dead battery. “Oh, my God,” I said again, this time loudly.

  Bonita would call Delta and tell her I was missing. Delta would tell her sheriff-husband, Pike, and he’d organize a search team involving most of the local citizenry of greater Turtleville and maybe even the entire Jefferson County, and my fervent dreams of living here as an anonymous hermit would be finished.

  I could almost hear Anderson Cooper reporting the story on CNN: Tonight we bring you the shocking truth about Cathryn Deen’s whereabouts. We’ll tell you how the actress once called ‘the world’s most beautiful woman’ was found wandering the wilderness of North Carolina’s Appalachian mountains. We’ll tell you about her bizarre new lifestyle without heat, plumbing or furniture, her decorative jar-arranging and her mysterious references to a Jewish bootlegger who once sang, ‘Bloy Levone Iber Kentucky’ . . .

  My only hope was to hike to the Cove before that happened.

  Thomas

  Architecture is a language, an art, a method for drawing castles in the air. I believed in it passionately and understood its concepts completely. But until that Saturday afternoon at the café I’d never realized how the structure and supports of my chosen discipline could build a bridge between the small, delicate spaces that separate people, too.

  “These are your load-bearing walls,” I explained to Ivy, maneuvering small squares of cardboard on a checkered table in the café’s main dining room. “If you fold this piece of cardboard like so, atop the walls, now that, see, is called a ‘pitched’ roof.”

  “Like the roof most houses have,” she said, her chin on her folded hands as she avidly scrutinized the tiny cardboard house we were making with the help of silver duct tape and glue made with flour and egg whites.