Harvestman Lodge (5 page)

A roadside sign told him he was seven miles from Tylerville, the county seat; his watch put the time at 8:38. He was running early.

Early was good, and for Eli, atypical. Now he had time to find the offices of the
Tylerville Daily Clarion
, get the lay of the land, scout out a good parking place. Maybe grab some breakfast. No fast food, nothing served beneath fiberglass arches. He’d find a café or diner with a local atmosphere. Have eggs and bacon and a look at the people of this town. See some faces he might come to know in coming days, if all went well in the job interview.

He found the newspaper office by accident. An exit off the four-lane highway led onto a two-laner that made a straight shot into the western side of Tylerville. He passed a tire and alignment shop, a convenience store, a handful of modest houses, a decrepit baseball field. The road tipped and curved to the right before straightening again. Beside the straightaway was a fire hall with a city public works gas pump out front where a young policeman was fueling his squad car. Eli waved. His late father had been a policeman in Knoxville for thirty-five years; Eli seldom let an officer go ungreeted.

A couple of blocks of small, old houses, an AME Zion church on the left, and Eli passed under a concrete-and-steel railroad bridge to enter Tylerville proper. A humble shopping center with a discount grocery was on the right, a post office and branch bank on the left. He drove under a traffic light, and before him, up a slight hill, saw the brick-fronted offices of the
Tylerville Clarion
to the right. He’d reached his destination.

But nearly an hour too early, so he drove to the next intersection, made a left, and began to explore the downtown, looking for anything that might prod up a memory from one of his childhood visits. So far, nothing.

He was on Center Street, the main thoroughfare in the downtown district. It was a pretty avenue, shaded on one side by ornamental pear trees and lined on both sides with storefront shops selling antiques, second-hand furniture, jewelry and books. An old, classic-looking movie theater sported a large marquee that extended over the sidewalk. There was a collection of professional offices (mostly lawyers, a couple of insurance agents, and one father-son surveyor firm), then the white-walled four-story headquarters of Kincheloe County Bank, near the county courthouse. A typical East Tennessee small town, but prettier than some Eli had seen where downtown areas had become decrepit and decayed.

A block later he turned left onto Railroad Street, passed more lawyers’ offices, a barber shop, and a shoe store, and pulled into a parking spot directly across the street from Harley’s Café. The narrow little diner looked like it had probably been there for decades. Eli locked his car, wondering if such precaution was even necessary in a town this small, and walked across to the café. There was no traffic to dodge. He entered the diner through a plate-glass door festooned with credit card stickers.

A row of narrow tables, each barely big enough to accommodate two facing diners, lined the left-hand wall front to back. Three of these were taken by blue-collared men dining alone, backs toward the door. Another half-dozen customers were perched on round stools at the long counter to Eli’s right, facing their own reflections in a mirror covering the wall behind the counter.

The grill, big, black and greasy, stood near the cash register at the front end of the café, its back to the wall and its right side nearly butting the plate-glass front window. A man in his upper fifties, with hair almost as greasy as his cooktop and combed in the same sweeping way he’d worn it since 1956, was flipping sausages, turning bacon, and keeping tabs on three frying eggs. He glanced up and grunted a wordless hello as Eli placed himself atop the stool nearest the cash register. In Tylerville and Harley’s, there were no strangers. Everybody got a greeting.

A smiling woman in her fifties, her dark-dyed coiffure trapped in place under a black hairnet, positioned herself in front of Eli and asked him what he’d have. He ordered coffee, fried eggs, link sausages, biscuits. Eli was trimly built and health-conscious, but this was a small-town diner, and healthy eating was not a relevant consideration here.

He watched the man at the grill fry up his order and wondered how many Kincheloe Countians were in early graves because of too many Harley’s Café breakfasts like the one he’d just ordered. The grim thought did nothing to diminish his pleasure when the loaded plate was placed before him. He set in.

“How is it, hon?” the woman asked when he was halfway through.

“Very fine,” Eli replied between bites. “These eggs are just right. And the biscuits, wow! Did you make them?”

She lowered her volume and her eyes flitted from side to side as if looking for eavesdroppers. “Well, love, I put them in the oven, but the fact is we buy ’em frozen. They make frozen biscuits now that you can’t hardly tell from homemade, and it saves a lot of preparation and cleanup not to have to mix them up in bowls, you know.”

Eli nodded as he lifted the thick, white coffee mug to his lips.

“Coffee’s best in a heavy mug like that one,” the woman said, glad to shift the subject away from her not-so-homemade biscuits. “You ever noticed that?”

“You know, I think I have. But I never put the thought into words.”

“I know just what you mean, honey. I’m that way with a lot of things: think it but don’t say it.”

“Don’t you believe it, son!” the man at the grill said. “Ain’t much that goes through her mind that don’t come out her mouth. Yammer yammer yammer! All day long!”

“Honey, don’t you pay Junior a bit of mind. He goes on at me all the time.”

Honey,
she’d called Eli. He hardly noticed. He had grown up in the community of Strawberry Plains, just outside of Knoxville, and was accustomed to the casual endearments that were the mainstays of women young and old in southern life. From boyhood up he and every other male in his world had been called “honey,” “sweetheart,” “sweety” and “darling” by big-haired bank tellers, store clerks, receptionists, secretaries, even metermaids with ticket pads in hand.

“Let me get you more coffee, hon.”

“Thank you.”

Betty warmed up Eli’s cup and headed down the line to provide other customers with coffee and biscuits and blandishments. Two minutes later she was back, smiling and pouring his cup full again while Eli downed his last bite of biscuit.

“I don’t believe I know you, sweety,” she said. “New to town?”

“Not entirely. But I haven’t visited Tylerville since I was little. Name’s Eli Scudder.”

“Welcome back, then. I’m Betty Harley. Call me Betty. Me and Junior there at the grill own this place. Junior’s my husband.”

Junior Harley glanced over and grunted just like he’d done when Eli walked in. Eli muttered a hello and nodded his head, but Junior’s attention was already back on the sizzling foodstuffs on his broad black grill.

“So whatcha doing here?” The question came not from Betty but from a big man seated at Eli’s left, one stool down. He’d been listening, unnoticed by Eli.

Eli was unoffended by the nosiness, sensing no maliciousness in it. The man stuck out a beefy hand, shook Eli’s, and smilingly said, “Buford Fellers. Call me Bufe.”

“Good to meet you, Bufe. I’m Eli Scudder, here for a job interview up at the
Clarion
.”

“Well!” Betty exclaimed. “You going to write stories, take pictures, run the press, or what?”

“Mostly write stories. And some photography, yes. And page design. All of that, of course, assuming they actually hire me. But I have work I do on my own that I’d still be doing on my own time, regardless. I write novels, commercial category fiction. I sold my first one about two years ago to a paperback publisher up in New York. I’m going to keep on doing that, seeing what kind of career I can build writing fiction, whether I get this job or not.”

“I’ve never knowed a book writer before!” Betty said. “You hear that, Junior? This fellow wrote a book! Got it published out of New York, no less!”

Junior asked, “What kind of book?”

“A historical frontier story about the Revolutionary War in this part of the country. A good deal of it is set in what’s now Kincheloe County. It even had old Colonel Kincheloe in it. You know, the man the county is named for.”

“Yeah. I’ve heard Hadley King mention the name, and there’s a historical marker at the county line. Hadley King is kind of the local historian. Tylerville paid to publish a history of Kincheloe County back in 1976 that Hadley wrote.”

“I’ve read it. I found a copy in the university library and used it in researching for my novel.”

“Got any dirty parts in it?” Bufe asked. “I like books with dirty parts.”

“No dirty parts, sorry,” Eli said. “It’s dedicated to my late mother, and it wouldn’t have seemed right to dedicate it to her if it had dirty parts. It does have some romance, though. For the female readers.”

“I’ll have to read your book sometime,” said Betty, smiling. Eli nodded. It was the first thing everyone always said upon discovering he had a published work to his credit. Betty went on, “I’ve always wanted to write a book myself, but I never would have the patience to sit down and do it.” That was the second thing everyone always said. “Did you study book-writing in college?”

“By education I’m more a graphic designer than a writer, even though the writing is what I enjoy most,” Eli said. “I graduated UT Knoxville about a year ago. Double major in graphic design and journalism, focus on print journalism. Minor in history. I did some work on the side as a historical researcher for a couple of professors who were writing some scholarly works. It taught me a lot about the process of digging out facts, so it fit well with my journalism focus.”

“So what would you do at the
Clarion
?”

“You know about next year being the Kincheloe County and Tylerville bicentennial, I suppose.”

“Oh, sure.”

“Well, the
Clarion
is going to publish something special for a bicentennial keepsake. It’ll be a big, slick magazine, to come out in July of ‘86. That’s three months ahead of the actual bicentennial date, but that’s by design. The hope is that having an interesting look at our local heritage in the public’s hands well in advance of the actual celebration day will make the official ceremonies and parade and all more meaningful. And they’re looking to me to be the one to head up the project. That is, assuming I make it through the interview this morning. Don’t want to be counting my chickens before they’re – “

“I wish you luck, darling,” Betty said.

“I don’t know if I do or not,” Bufe muttered, drawing a sharp look of surprise from Betty.

“Why would you say such a thing, Bufe?” she asked.

The man chuckled. “Because this young man seems like a nice fellow, and I hate to see anybody decent get tied in with such a bunch of crooked old tomcats as them Brechts.”

“Now, just because they got money don’t mean they’re crooked,” Betty said.

“I ain’t saying they’re crooked ’cause they got money, Betty,” Bufe replied. “I’m saying they’re crooked ’cause … well, they’re crooked.”

“Don’t pay him mind, hon,” said Betty to Eli. “Bufe talks big but he don’t know squat … and as much as he might talk down the Brecht name, he’s as good a friend with Mr. Carl Brecht, the publisher, as anybody you’ll find in this town. There’s a lot of good and honest folks working for the Brecht family, some of them the kind who wouldn’t linger around if they saw anything crooked going on. My sister Eva, for one. Eva used to sell want ads for the paper before she died a couple of years back …”

“And after that them heartless Brechts made her quit, just like it was her fault she couldn’t circulate her blood no more,” Bufe said, firing a quick wink at Eli via the mirror facing them from behind the stainless steel food prep counter. “I can see that might have been a problem if she worked in the circulation department, but hell, she was selling want ads.”

“Bufe, you shut up now!” Betty said. “Just shut up and quit saying hurtful things about my poor departed sister!”

“Sorry, Betty,” Bufe said. “I oughta be hauled out and whupped.” But over at the grill, Junior, who had not liked the late Eva nearly as well as Betty had, was chuckling quietly while he broke and scrambled eggs.

The café’s lone female customer came to the cash register with cash in hand, and Betty broke off from conversation to ring her up and ask how her dear old mother was getting along with her chemo treatments because she remembered how hard it was for her own poor Aunt Rose when she was going through that same thing and some days Rose just couldn’t even hardly get out of bed in the morning and was off her food for days, lord lord! When finally Betty completed her ponderous question and drew an overdue breath, the answer came back that dear old mother was handling the chemo quite well, thank you for asking, and did Betty plan to take part in the Lord’s Acre sale up at Caney Field United Methodist next Saturday? Betty did.

Bufe, meanwhile, was saying to Eli, “Don’t mind me about them Brechts. I admit it: I like to say stuff just to stir people up. I won’t lie to you: I do think they’ve got a crooked streak running through them, even though I am a good friend with Carl, the daddy of the bunch. But hell, lots of people ’round here besides me think the Brechts will do whatever it takes to find the shortest path to the nearest dollar. Betty can say what she wants, but fact is that there ain’t many folk who get rich without forgetting a few Sunday school lessons along the way. Brechts included.”