The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap (21 page)

Despite temptation, I learned not to make too much fun of Westerns after a customer and his daughter showed me what they could mean to another person’s spirit.

A diffident, slight man with the improbable nickname of “Wee Willie” shopped regularly with us. His nickname alone should have been enough to arouse sympathy, but Wee Willie could talk the hind leg off a donkey, a pair of horses, and an entire herd of antelope. The guy never stopped. From the moment he entered the shop with his customary “Hey, y’all! How’s life?” until he backed out the door with a week’s supply of reading material, Willie talked.

“I got me a new computer, gotta figure out how to start it up and then I’m in business! Not business, I mean, not like y’all, but I mean my own business, not a home business, but the stuff I gotta take care of at home, you know, paperwork and all that, gotta get that done. My daughter’s helping me get it set up, the computer. She’s got her own business, she’s a veterinarian. When she was little I’d allus say, ‘Now you be gentle with animals, honey. Never trust anyone’s not good to an animal.’ Boy, I like dogs. Why I’d as soon kick my own mother as kick a dog. Had me a little dog, last year, she died from cancer. I didn’t know dogs got cancer ’til my daughter said. Boy, I was tore up. Not like I cried or nothing but it sure did hurt me. Not hurt like physical, I mean, I was in the war, I got shot and that hurt, but you know what I mean.”

I’d learned some time ago to let him flow while giving polite, smiling, monosyllabic answers that didn’t offer any foothold into a new subject. The thing that kept his listeners from pushing Wee Willie off a cliff was his good-natured soul. Willie’s innate kindness radiated to everything and everyone around him. Willie always patted our two dogs over the fence before coming into the shop, stroked Beulah and called her a beautiful girl, thanked us for opening the first bookstore ever in his hometown. He just couldn’t talk about one subject for more than a minute, or stop talking longer than ten seconds.

“I like books, boy, I like books, and I can afford to buy ’em, you know what I mean, I ain’t bragging or nothing but I had me a good job and now I’m retired and I can buy the books I want, you know. I got the money, not like you, ma’am, with your good education an’ all, but I done all right. Worked forty-two years as a maintenance man and I done all right.”

Always clean and happy, Wee Willie sported in summer a sleeveless undershirt and a baseball cap with Bermuda shorts. In winter his long gray overcoat never revealed its secrets. An infectious smile remained his biggest accessory. He could grin to rival the moon’s rays.

If only he would grin without talking,
I thought, absolving myself with the Southern get-out-of-jail-free card for uncharitable speech by adding,
Bless his heart.

We planned a party to celebrate the shop’s five-year anniversary, and began inviting favorite customers. Wee Willie never signed up for our e-mail list, so Jack gave him the flyer reserved for those we felt should be honored with attending this special occasion.

Willie looked at the birthday cake on the invitation. “Whose birthday?” he asked. “Oh gee, never mind, I’ll just read it, silly me, it’ll be great, I’ll see you on the day. I love parties, I’ll make sure to bring the doggies some treats and thanks again for inviting me. I been to lots of parties, of course, but they’re allus fun. It’s so fun to come here. Y’all are some of my favorite people and I ain’t just saying that, I mean it, y’all are so nice and I just love coming here. Well now, I better get on down the road. See you then!” He waved the flyer and backed out the door, talking.

About a month later, in the season between Thanksgiving and Christmas, a tall woman with black hair to her waist walked into the shop and asked if we took books as donations. I said of course, but we would give book credit if she preferred.

She shook her head. “The books aren’t mine and I live in Charlottesville,” she said. “My dad didn’t have many books, but there’s maybe two boxes. I don’t know if you can use them or not. They’re old, but hardly touched at all.”

I recognized a death-in-the-family scenario as I helped her bring in the small stash.

“There’s not much to Dad’s collection, nothing sentimental or that I’d care to read myself, but I hated to just throw them away, and the VA already got the rest.”

“Your dad was a veteran,” I remarked, setting down a box and digging inside: a pristine set of Shakespeare’s works, hardbound in cheap red covers. We saw a lot of these; somebody must have been door-to-door selling in the seventies. A King James Bible, a copy of
War and Peace,
Owen Wister’s
The Virginian
. An encyclopedia set circa 1960.

I explained our free book policy and suggested that was the place for the encyclopedias. “A lot of local women like to make book angels for Christmas, so they’ll be glad to pick up hardbacks now.” I smiled with an apologetic little bookseller’s shrug, as if to say,
What else can one do with old encyclopedias?

The woman smiled back with sad eyes. “Dad used them for shelf decoration, too.”

“Computers have changed a lot of things,” I responded, checking the Shakespeare set for silverfish.

She shook her head. “He had one, but never really learned to use it. I was always going to come up one day and help him get started.” She shrugged. “Busy time. Too late.” Her voice cracked under suppressed pain.

I’ll never know if that would have been enough to make me realize who she was, because just then I flipped open the cover of the King James. Spidery script spelled out “Presented to William—.”

It hit like a Taser jolt.

My head flew up. “You’re not … is Wee Willie…?”

She smiled, regaining control. “My daddy. You remember him! He loved this place. Came down almost every week, but I guess you know that. He’d always call and tell me about how nice you two were, how pretty the cat was, Bella, is that her name? He loved visiting. Had a heart attack. Guess you didn’t hear.”

“We loved having him,” I replied, begging God to understand as I embraced Willie’s bereaved daughter. “I’m so sorry.”

She nodded, swallowing as professional women do when they don’t want to lose it, so I turned the conversation back to business. “Are there any more books to bring in? Wee—your dad bought a lot of Westerns from us over the years, and those are really popular.”

Something—pallor, shadow, a cloud of confusion—cast itself over the room. She squinted at me, eyes wrinkled in a way so similar to Willie’s that a lump rose in my throat, catching me off guard.
I should have been nicer to the little guy. What else did he have besides reading?

I babbled on. “Assuming you don’t want to keep his Westerns. Perhaps they’re sentimental. He loved them so. As I’m sure you know. Knew. Know. Sorry.”

“Daddy loved Westerns,” she said in a measured tone, as if trying to determine whether the words were true.

“Yes,” I said in assurance, but she shook her head, exasperated.

“I know he did.” Asperity tinged her voice. “He loved to watch them on TV. But I didn’t realize you didn’t know. He never would have told you. He was so proud of having friends like you. Educated. He was big on education. Look at me. He put me through college.”

Was that noise she made a laugh or a sob? “Daddy couldn’t read. He’d come here to buy books for the VA. He must have given them a couple hundred.”

My mouth opened, but my jaw worked without sound. When the power of speech returned, I heard myself say, “Bless his heart. Um, if there’s anything we can do.” The words fell, lame and pathetic, against the wall of her grief.

She reached out and squeezed my shoulder. “You did it already. You and your husband gave Daddy dignity these last years. He loved coming here. Bless
your
hearts. Bye now.”

And that was that. Wee Willie never came talking through the door again. But that Christmas we asked another customer with connections to the VA to take a box of donations there in Wee Willie’s honor. We picked out covers Wee Willie would have liked: men holding guns and snarling, yet looking nobler and gentler than one might expect, and I cried the whole time.

Maybe the best we can do for each other in our small ways is still better than the big guns ever will. Could a computer have seen in those covers what Wee Willie did? Would a box store have given him dignity?

C
HAPTER 19

Living Large in a Small-Town Bookstore

Books are delightful society. If you go into a room and find it full of books—even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome.

—William Ewart Gladstone

P
EOPLE WHO LIKE TO READ
love being in massed assemblages of books: bookstores, libraries, homes where the walls are lined with shelves and spines. Such places are magical. For me, I suppose this knowledge stems back to trips to the library as a kid, which were always celebrated events. Whether I took books home or not, I just loved the smell, the touch, the sight of all those stacks towering to the sky. (I was short.)

The library I frequented was attached to an old house used as storage and administrative space, connected to the more prosaic cinder-block-and-fluorescent-lights building via a ramp and a rather forbidding industrial door with one small window much too high for a child. From my first visit as a preschooler to my last before moving away as a college student, I wanted to make a mad dash for that ramp, ducking under grasping librarians, rushing up, away into that house where—I just knew—the Mad Hatter held his everlasting tea party, Bilbo Baggins sat in front of a glowing hearth ready to talk of adventure, and Pickles the Fire Cat waited for me to scratch his ears. I just had to get past the librarian guards—something I never managed. On some days, I still fantasize about going back to that library, explaining it all, and asking to pass through the forbidden door.

But I’m old enough to know that the delicate porcelain figurines of imagination should not be hurled against the walls of reality. Better to keep one’s dreams intact and be happy with the memories of that long-ago real library. I still remember with a little ripple of pleasure how fascinating it was to play games in the stacks. Pick a shelf. How many books with red covers? Divide by the number of books written by women, count that number of spines over from the top left, or middle bottom, and check that book out—unless it looked horrible, in which case I would cheat and take one next to it. (What’s the point of inventing a game if you can’t break the rules?)

Such a little bookworm was I that searching for a particular book, or the place where certain subjects were corralled, felt almost as rewarding as actually checking one out. The hunt became its own thrill, regardless of whether prey actually got speared. I could read the fairy tales of every land at 398.2, and just up from there were books about exotic festivals I’d never heard of, let alone celebrated. (How did one pronounce “Eid”? my six-year-old self wondered.) Travel writers lurked around 912, but could pop up in other places as well. And in 780, I could even take out sheet music and play it on my piano at home. Plus there were the wild-card turn racks, display cases, and general fiction alphabetized by author. You could look up a favorite novelist, then investigate the people on either side just to see if they were interesting. I don’t think I have ever left a library without feeling a twinge of regret, a vague sense of panic that I’d missed something important, that stories, people, and ideas were still in there waiting for me to find them so they could tell me secrets.

I remember as a very young child being warned that libraries and bookstores were quiet places where noise wasn’t allowed. Here was yet another thing the adults had gotten wrong, for these book houses pulsed with sounds; they just weren’t noisy. The books hummed. The collective noise they made was like riding on a large boat where the motor’s steady thrum and tickle vibrated below one’s sneakers, ignorable until you listened, then omnipresent and relentless, the sound that carried you forward. Each book brimmed with noises it wanted to make inside your head the moment you opened it; only the shut covers prevented it from shouting ideas, impulses, proverbs, and plots into that sterile silence. What an enigma (a word my young self wouldn’t know for years) that such a false sense of quietude should be imposed on this obviously noisy place. It felt the same as the subversive, subliminal hush of a lunchroom where kids were plotting—just a temporary absence of noise until adult backs were turned.

Childish … and yet, have you ever stood outside on very still nights and let your ears adjust until you could hear the soft hum of overhead power lines? When I head downstairs in the morning to brew coffee, I hear that sound again—the low throbbing of the books in our shop, pulsing with energy, waiting. And the childhood sensation that they stopped talking to each other only because I came into the room returns. Perhaps that’s what makes people breathe slower in the bookstore; without knowing it, they adjust their rhythm to the gentle pulsing of the books.

Of course, if this childhood fancy were true, then some of the books in our shop would be swearing at us. Idyllic libraries with straight shelves and neat rows may have well-behaved volumes; ours look more as though they’ve been in a drunken brawl. They await us in the morning sloughed across the table, stacked alongside overflowing shelves, stuck in windowsills, hanging off the turn rack I found in a thrift store and brought home in my little Honda’s backseat. (I had to keep the windows open so the rack could stick straight out either side. Lots of honks on the highway from that escapade, but the state policeman just grinned as he passed.) Our bookshop is the Lonesome Gulch Saloon to a library’s Eastern Boarding School for Young Ladies.

At night I sometimes browse the peaceful chaos of our shelves with no intention of actually choosing something, just wanting to see what’s there, playing the old library games. I look at covers—that you can’t judge books by them is just one more lie we teach our children—and weigh pros and cons. Then I might choose a volume or, feeling luxurious, two or three. With potential gems in hand, I flip off the light and head to our wooden staircase, groping my way up by feel. The bookstore is wired so that you have to extinguish the downstairs chandelier (just four bulbs in iron hooks, but it looks very distinguished). Then you must cross in darkness to the stairs and climb them before hitting the switch for the second-story landing’s dome light.