This Rock (24 page)

“That's not even enough to pay what I owe you,” I said. “Ain't got but five dollars to my name.” I took out the five-dollar bill.

U. G. looked at the furs and he looked at the bill.

“Wish I could pay you off,” I said.

U. G. stared at me so the electric light reflected off his glasses. “You look like a store clerk to me,” he said. “You can count and you're honest. You can work off your debt, dollar a day.”

It was the last thing I expected. I never had seen myself clerking in a store. But I seen working was better than owing money to U. G. And it was better than staying home and fussing all the time with Moody. Abraham Lincoln had started out as a store clerk. And if I saved my money I could buy a ticket to get away from Green River again for good, if I wanted to.

“Here, let me get you an apron,” U. G. said.

“Are you going to play checkers or not?” Hicks hollered from the stove.

“Do I have to wear an apron?” I said.

“Apron'll save your good clothes,” U. G. said. “Besides, an apron will make people trust you. Trick of the trade.”

S
ATURDAYS WAS ALWAYS
the busiest days at U. G.'s store. Beginning at seven o'clock in the morning people from all over the valley and ridges up the river started stopping by in wagons and
buggies, on foot, and some in cars. They brought baskets of eggs and cakes of butter wrapped in waxed paper. Sometimes they brought crates of young fryers, or old hens that had stopped laying, to trade for bolts of cloth or flour and coffee. Most people with their own cars and trucks drove on to town where their eggs and produce brought a better price and the goods they bought was a little cheaper.

As I stood behind the counter I dreaded for Annie to come into the store and see me working there. And I dreaded to see Moody too, for I didn't want him to bother me and rile me while I was working in public.

U. G. trusted me to do everything except weigh up ginseng. He weighed ginseng hisself on his delicate little scales. “Wild sang is worth twice what cultivated sang is,” he said.

“How can you tell the difference?” I said.

“
You
don't need to,” U. G. said.

“What'll I do if somebody brings some in?” I said.

“Tell them to wait for me,” U. G. said. “Dug ginseng is hard and firm when it dries, and smooth as a seed. But sang growed in a patch dries faster and wrinkles more. Don't have the potency of the wild.”

While U. G. played checkers, and when the store was quiet, I took a pencil and drawed on a sheet of brown wrapping paper. I drawed houses and castles and churches. I drawed steeples five and six stories high. I drawed stone walls and pointed windows.

“What are you scribbling there, Muir?” Blaine said.

“Drawing me a map to Canada,” I said.

“Thought you'd already been up north,” Blaine said.

“Might go again,” I said, “when I have the money.”

U. G.
LET ME
take care of about everything besides ginseng. I sold pocketknives and penknives and hunting knives out of a case in front of the counter. I sold candy bars and chewing gum to boys and girls that come in with pennies and nickels. Because he was down on the highway U. G. had electricity, and I sold cups of ice cream out of the freezer. I sold dripping Co-Colas from the cooler in the corner. There was cookies in the big clear jar on the counter, and strings of licorice, and pickles in a crock of brine.

I sold sausages too, and boiled eggs from a jar. But most of the sausage I sold was the little cans of Vienna sausage on the shelf beside the sardines. I sold soda crackers and wedges of cheese off the wheel. I sold canned salmon and sometimes canned beef. I sold taters out of bushel baskets, both sweet and Irish.

From kegs in the back of the store I scooped up nails of all pennies and weighed them. I sold hammers and hoes and shovels, picks and mattocks, scythes and swing blades. I sold pliers and wire cutters, hedge clippers and carpenter levels and saws. In the dark space in the back of the store there was sacks of dairy feed and laying mash, shorts for hogs and cottonseed meal. I liked the smell of molasses in dairy feed. I sold bags of crushed oyster shells for chickens and scratch feed for little chicks. There was oats for horses and mixes of sweet feed.

It was early spring, and U. G. had brought in a supply of seeds and fertilizer. I sold bags of guano and ammonium nitrate and nitrate of soda, 5-10-10 and 10-10-10. There was bags of bean seed and corn seed, sweet corn and field corn, pole beans and bunch beans. There was tobacco seed and squash seed, pumpkin seed and seed potatoes. There was flower seeds in little envelopes with pictures painted on them, and bulbs for dahlias and glads.

Now, there was a case behind the counter where U. G. kept medicines for sale: bottles of castor oil, Doan's kidney pills, Black Draught laxative. There was medicines for worms, bottles of cough syrup and soothing syrups, boric acid for sore eyes, and peroxide for cuts, along with Mercurochrome and bismuth of violet for dressing cuts. U. G. sold rubbing alcohol and camphor, iodine and mineral oil, witch hazel and wart medicine. There was oil of cloves for toothache and ointments for piles and aching muscles.

But the things I enjoyed selling most was fishhooks and trout flies, fishing lines and coils of gut leader. U. G. sold little tin boxes of sinkers and corks for lake fishing. And there was also boxes of red and green shotgun shells, 12, 16, and 20 gauge. There was boxes of rifle cartridges, rimfire and center-fire. I sold ammo for .32-, .38-, and .45-caliber pistols.

Locked in a special case was rifles and shotguns and pistols, some
new and some traded. U. G. served as a kind of pawnbroker for the valley, taking rifles and shotguns for groceries, sometimes loaning money outright on the security of a watch or a pistol.

U. G. sold watches too, both men's and women's, as well as alarm clocks. He sold steel traps and coils of barbed wire, clotheslines and binder's twine. He sold tater diggers and pitchforks, turning plows and cultivators. He even had in stock a hillside plow that could be turned either right or left. He sold horse collars and trace chains, singletrees and leather harness. He sold bridles and plowlines and halters for bulls.

There was bottles of bluing and a dozen kinds of soap and washing powders on the shelves. There was bleach and lye and disinfectant. There was sewing machine oil and neat's-foot oil, cottonseed oil and coal oil in a barrel out back. We sold scissors and thread and needles, thimbles and crochet hooks. We sold pinking shears and cloth off big rolls.

But the strangest thing I sold in U. G.'s store was kept in a chest of drawers in the back of the building. There was boxes wrapped in tissue paper where the shiny fittings for coffins was packed. If somebody making a coffin needed brass handles and hinges and corners, they come to the store. We sold shiny brass screws also, and nameplates for nailing onto the lid. In the attic of the shed behind the store U. G. even had a few factory-made coffins, but I didn't find out about them until Aunt Alice Herrin died on the mountain and they wanted to bury her in a hurry because the weather was hot and she had gangrene.

U. G.
LET ME
play the radio in the afternoons if there wasn't too many customers. When I was unpacking boxes or counting eggs into paper cartons for shipping, I wasn't supposed to listen to the radio. “You'll lose count if you're tapping your toe to a banjo,” U. G. said.

But in fact the radio stayed on most of the time. I think some customers come to the store just to hear the radio. They wanted to gather by the stove and listen to country music and to gospel music. They wanted to listen to news about baseball, about Babe Ruth. I liked to listen to reports from London and from the Philippines. I even listened to sermons some afternoons and sometimes to a symphony orchestra.

I was listening to organ music on the radio one day and dusting the shelves with a feather duster when somebody walked into the store. I looked up and seen Annie and her mama. The spit caught in my throat and I had to swallow.

“Howdy, Mrs. Richards,” I said. Mrs. Richards had light brown hair that was dusted with gray. And she still had fair skin. You could tell how pretty she was when she was younger. But she had big rough hands that showed how much work she had done.

“I brung you some butter and eggs,” Mrs. Richards said.

I glanced at Annie, but she was looking at the candy bars inside the glass case. Her mama placed two baskets on the counter. One was filled with brown eggs and the other with butter wrapped in waxed paper.

I hadn't tried to go with Annie since she rode back to the house with Moody that day. She had done it just to spite me, because she hadn't gone with Moody since. If she had I would have heard about it. Moody would have told me.

I got an egg crate from behind the counter and begun counting the eggs into its cups. Mrs. Richards usually brought about ten dozen at a time.

“How you doing?” Annie said. She leaned against the counter in front of me. “We missed you at prayer meeting,” she said.

“Had to work late,” I said.

I figured if I was just polite with Annie, that was the thing to do. I'd show her I was too growed-up to be mad. She liked to flirt with everybody and tease everybody. It was just her way. But I was determined I wasn't going to be fooled by her again.

After I counted out eleven dozen eggs and wrote the number on a sheet of brown wrapping paper, I got out U. G.'s little scales and weighed the butter. Mrs. Richards always packed her mold extra full, so each cake weighed more than a pound.

“That's almost seven pounds of butter,” I said. I figured with a pencil on the sheet of brown paper. “That comes to four dollars and seventy-five cents,” I said.

“I need sugar and coffee and baking soda,” Mrs. Richards said. “And some raisins and a new sifter.”

“I want a Hershey's bar,” Annie said.

“Might make you fat,” I said. I knowed Annie was awful proud of being slim. She was slimmer than any girl in the valley.

“Do I look fat?” Annie said. She turned sideways so I could see how slim she was and how her sweater come down over her hips. She was slender as a flute and she had the prettiest figure I'd ever seen.

I measured out the coffee and sugar into bags and tied them up. And I got a can of baking soda and a box of raisins.

“Ain't seen you driving your car lately,” Annie said.

“What else can I get for you?” I said to Mrs. Richards.

“Hank wants some shaving soap,” Mrs. Richards said.

I looked on the shelf near the front of the store where the soaps and toilet articles was. Annie followed me on the other side of the counter. “The circus is coming to town two weeks from Wednesday,” she said. She leaned on the counter and watched me sort among the soaps and tooth powders, jars of face cream and bottles of shampoo and lotion. I didn't look back at her, but I could feel my face getting hot. I found the shaving soap and turned around.

“I have to work at the store,” I said.

“It only comes once a year,” Annie said.

“I might be able to get the car,” I said. It just come out. I didn't mean to say it. I put the shaving soap in the basket and added up Mrs. Richards's purchases on the sheet of brown paper.

“I owe you a dollar and twenty-one cents,” I said.

“And give Annie a candy bar,” Mrs. Richards said.

I reached into the case for a Hershey's bar.

“I don't want no candy,” Annie said. “I want a Co-Cola.”

I give Mrs. Richards a dollar and sixteen cents from the register. Annie took a bottle from the cooler and opened it and followed her mama to the door. Just before she went out she turned back to me. “I hope you can go to the circus,” she said.

Ginny

I
HAD KEPT
Moody's letter in a drawer of the bureau for years. I took it out again to read it.

July 17, 1918

Dear Mama
,

I take up pensil in hand to right you a letter on the fine tablet I paid the guard a nickel for. Somebody has likely told you already where I am. But I figured you would never know the truth unless I rote you
.

I cutt one of the Willards in a fight at Chestnut Springs. He needed to be cut is all I cann say and I done it. It's simple as that. Reckon I sliced his guts deeper than I meant to was all
.

You can tell fokes I've gone off on a vacashun if you want to. You can tell them I've gone tramping in the woods and camping like Muir does. You can tell them I'm gone out west to dig for gold. I don't care
.

But the upshot of it was that after I fit with Sandy Willard and cut him the deputies arrested me and took me heer to the Greenville jale. They couldn't have arrested me. They wouldn't
even have knowed about the fight unless Peg Early or one of hers had told them
.

Sometimes I think Peg Early and the Willards are in cahoots against me. That's what I think
.

But the upshot was that cause Sandy was so bad cut and had to be sewed up by the doctor in Traveler's Rest, they give me thirty days in jail heer. That was Peg Early's doing, if I don't miss my guess
.

The Greenville County jale is not hell. These July days it's worser than hell and hotter. It's so hot you have to lay still on a bunk just to keep your hed from swimming. I reckon if you moved around you'd just lose your breth
.

Ain't complaing about my commodations. But whatever anybody done they don't deserve the Greenville County jale. Rations is some stale bread and watery otemeal that tastes like rotten newspapers. And for dinner they give you pinto beans that are half raw and a cup of stumpwater for coffee
.

I won't tell you about the smell heer, with all us men inside and the sweat and no water to wash with. The place smells like pee and puke when they bring a drunk in and he throws up his guts. The stink of this place would make you sick, even if you was well, which I ain't
.