SOUVENIR FROM PARADISE

As everyone knows, the best gifts are those that are unexpected.  And the best unexpected gift is the gift that meets a need one isn't aware of having. 

Arriving home at 9:30 one night after a marathon day of teaching, I pulled into my drive and stepped on to the porch, laden down with books and thoughts of the hours of work that still lay between me and sleep.  Under the porch-light I stopped and set down my books, because something was out of place.  Or, more accurately, something was in place that should not have been there.  Shining daffodils, gathered into a cup, turned their faces up to me from the small table by the door. I saw daffodils with long yellow cups and flaring petals, reddish-orange cups and smooth white perianths, crimped cups, blush petals, pheasant’s eyes, mop heads.  They smelled like Paradise. 

It was a message from the world, saying “You’ve been away too long.  Come back to us!  Come back!”

My kind-hearted neighbor Stephen S. left them there for my husband and me.  He works long hours in his own right; nevertheless, he took time out from his busy life to gather the blooms in his garden and share the bounty.  Barrett Browning. Fortissimo.  Mount Hood.  Ice Follies.  Lent Lily.  Butter and Eggs.

The poet wrote, “What a fleeting glance of the everlasting/Daffodils are.”  I don’t know how Steve knew it, but I needed a glance of the everlasting that night, served up in a styrofoam cup.

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Hughes, Ted.  “Daffodils.” Birthday Letters. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.  127.  Print.

OF BOGS, BEARDLESS IRIS, AND THE BOYDS OF KILMARNOCK

March was soggy and cold, a grey month punctuated by short-lived wrenchings of the jet stream that forced the temperature up randomly but which seemed out of tune with the backdrop of naked trees and dun lawns.  The rain filled Brawley’s* Lagoon, the small lake that forms in our backyard whenever we have persistent precipitation.  We named it, affectionately, for our contractor Joe Brawley*, who built the retaining wall that straddles what was originally a steeply sloping back lot.  Joe graded and filled the area behind the wall, following my plan for a small central lawn bordered on all sides by raised beds, evergreen screens and a potting shed meant to imitate a weathered but not-too-shabby Carolina outbuilding.  A towering pecan shades the northeast corner, while the exposed beds to the southeast are haven to heirloom roses, bearded iris, peonies and herbs.  To the southwest, lightly shaded by an existing dogwood and a couple of native hardwoods, I am growing hydrangea, Japanese maple, camellia and deciduous magnolia. 

On the northwest quadrant of the ‘New Garden,’ as I call it, some original plans had to be revised after it became clear, almost as soon as the grading and wall construction were finished, that the leveled garden was draining more slowly than the original slope.  Joe and I had prepared for this inevitability, we thought.  He had filled the concrete block walls with gravel and had channeled plastic pipe under the lowest and highest wall on the pecan’s end.  Run-off flows harmlessly out the pipe there and down the lower half of our lawn on its way to the ditch and eventually to Doolittle Creek.  But because of the way the hill is contoured on the lots above us, the infill behind the western side of the wall collects more water in heavy rains and leaches it out much more slowly.         

Joe dug out a drain at the lowest part of the lawn here (and it's a good thing he didn't mind being closely supervised by a cat).  This eased the problem slightly, but I realized that I would have to modify my plans for this area and convert it into a Rain Garden.  Luckily, I know what plants do well in wet areas, having previously landscaped a garden devised to slow and retain storm-water runoff from two drainpipes.  But in that garden I was working with mostly shady conditions.  This bed is exposed to full sun for twenty-four hours a day, twelve months out of the year.

I planted the obvious choices first: bee balm and coneflower.  A passalong division of ‘Goldsturm’ rudbeckia went in there too – black-eyed Susan is so unfussy it will tolerate damp soil or dry.  On a trip to Roses Unlimited in Laurens two springs past I picked up a 1-gallon swamp rose, Rosa palustris scandens, the only rose I know of that likes wet feet.  At maturity this American native can be quite large (and this specimen has already quadrupled in size), its arching canes spreading out about ten feet.  Like most species-roses it only blooms once, in April, but if happy, the shrub will be smothered in single pink flowers for two to three weeks. 

In the lowest and wettest part of the bed, where the drain forms a shallow seam under the soil, I planted several varieties of my favorite perennial, the iris.  While bearded iris require dry, alkaline soil (that’s why my bearded varieties ‘Afternoon Delight’, ‘Gypsy Romance’ and ‘Lemon-Lime’ are all planted in the high gravel garden in the southeast bed, among the chives and rosemary), beardless iris, including Siberian (I. siberica), Japanese (I. ensata), Louisiana and species types, tolerate a great deal of moisture and heavier soil.  In fact, Louisiana iris and Iris virginica, the Southern blue flag, will thrive in standing water so long as they have sunlight, so clumps of these were tucked into the wet clay. 

BEFORE: the New Garden

AFTER: The New Garden 5 mos. later (L to R: ginger lily, Black-eyed Susan, Salix caprea 'Kilmarnock,' bee balm)

Many of my irises are gifts or swaps from gardening friends I made through my years as a member of the Charlotte Iris Society, and it’s a bonus of gardening that you are reminded of these people every time you tend the plant that passed from their hands to yours.  I obtained the Louisiana iris ‘Red Dazzler’ this way, from Pat. R., as well as the elegant Iris versicolor selection, christened ‘Swords of Murex’ by iris fancier and hybridizer, Barbara A.  This plant’s parent was found growing beside the Santee River, and belongs to a group of water-loving iris known for the brilliant purple coloring at the base of their fans.  Its navy-blue flowers are poised on purple stalks.

Louisiana iris 'Red Dazzler' with Loropetalum chinense 'Ever Red'

In this wettest part of the garden I also planted clumps of the southern favorite, ginger lily, which doesn’t seem to get growing until summer rains have fed its foliage, and makes us wait until September for the deeply fragrant flowers.  The white-flowered species, Hedychium coronarium, is the hardiest, but just for contrast I planted it beside ‘Pink Flame,’ a hybrid ginger that boasts sunset-toned blossoms dripping with a scent like fresh grapefruit.

Ginger lily, Hedychium coronarium, in bloom

What this bed truly needed as an anchor, however, was a tree.  A large tree would have been out of scale, but it needed to be sizable enough to make a focal point that could be appreciated from the kitchen, where I spend hours standing at the sink looking up the slope at that part of the garden.  It didn’t take me long to settle on a willow, Salix caprea ‘Kilmarnock,’ to be exact.  It stays small, unlike its giant weeping cousin, and before the leaves emerge its branches sport woolly catkins dusted with yellow anthers that offer visual interest when it is most welcome.  I ordered this one from Kline’s, the very good nursery outside Shelby, NC, and it has thrived in its damp, sunny bed, striking a Dr. Seuss-ish note of whimsicality in that corner.  If I could just prevent our adopted dog Alice from tearing off its pliant branches and Miss Billie the cat from sharpening her claws on its tender trunk, it may yet survive.

I often wonder about the names growers bestow on their introductions.  I remember asking Barbara A. how she came up with the name ‘Swords of Murex’ for her iris, not having grasped the Biblical allusion.  She explained that it’s a nod to the blue dye extracted from murex shells found in the seas that lapped ancient Tyre (from Ezekiel 27:7, “…blue and purple from the isles of Elishah was that which covered thee”). A name isn’t everything, of course, but the right one can enhance the fortunes of a plant, or a child, while a poor choice can be hard to overcome.  In the garden a badly named plant isn’t snubbed by its fellows nor by good fortune, but it does give less pleasure, somehow. I was glad when the arborvitae ‘Smargd’ was re-named ‘Emerald,’ for instance, because I grew weary of repeating the German name (and mangling it badly) whenever garden visitors asked me what the vigorous green shrub was called.

Iris ensata (species type) 'Emotion' in Rain Garden

I especially like literary names in the garden, because they’re easy for me to remember and they evoke my second favorite pastime after gardening.  For my birthday last year my husband ordered me one of the David Austin roses (which I’d sworn off as being unfit for southern climes, and which I’m constantly being lured back to by catalog promises of blowsy cabbage roses and ethereal fragrance).  ‘Jude the Obscure’ has an angular habit and a stiffly self-conscious presence, much like what I imagine Hardy’s tragic protagonist possessed.  And with apologies to Shakespeare, I believe that the rich citrus fragrance of Jude’s apricot blossoms is sweeter in my nose because of the rose’s name. 

I especially approve of my dwarf willow’s name, Salix c. ‘Kilmarnock,’ which lends the curious little tree some dignity, and what I mistakenly assumed was Hibernian provenance.  Checking the tree’s cultivation needs on the internet one day, I followed a small link and ended up spending time I could not spare descending ever deeper into the history of the Boyd family in Kilmarnock, Scotland, not Ireland. The Boyds had nothing to do with this willow, that tree having originated with a botanist named James Surra who lived early in the 19^th century at Monkswood in Ayrshire.  It was Surra who sold one of his willows to a nurseryman named Lang, and Lang got the ball rolling, horticulturally.  However, by the time I sorted this out I had already mixed up the willow’s poetically pendant habit in my mind with the tragic plight of the 4^th Earl of Kilmarnock, William Boyd. 

Boyd was beheaded in 1746 after being captured by the British at Culloden.  He had time enough to repent of his treason in supporting Bonnie Prince Charlie’s claim to the throne of George II, a lapse of judgment which was either due, depending on whose story one believes, to the influence of his wife or to “one of those generous impulses peculiar to his nature”(Buchanan 47).  This plucky Scot left behind three sons, one of whom was captured on the same battlefield as his father and who was exiled for twenty years before his eldest brother could arrange his return, as his father begged him to do.  I read of this in a letter the Earl entrusted to his factor, a Mr. Robert Paterson, on the eve of his execution. 

Mr. Boyd must have been a very decent and principled man, his treason notwithstanding, given how he fretted over the necessity of finding cash enough to pay off Scottish shoemakers who had been left holding the bag for seventy pairs of brogans issued to Jacobite troops under his command.  And his concern for his wife is achingly contemporary, considering how many years ago he begged Paterson to break the news of his execution “by degrees, and with as great tenderness as the nature of the thing will admit of…You will take all pains to comfort her, and relieve the grief I know she will be in… she is what I leave dearest in the world, and the greatest service you can do to your dead friend is to contribute as much as possible to her happiness…” (50).

However carefully Mr. Paterson may have endeavored to deliver the news, along with the letter, his efforts seem not to have softened the blow.  When the countess learned that her cheerful husband’s head had been lopped off, that her 18-year-old son was banished, and that his brothers were in peril of having their titles stripped and their ancestral home seized by the crown in forfeiture for the family’s betrayal, she went into deep mourning from which she could not be retrieved.  In a park on the former grounds of Kilmarnock House, where the family lived after Dean Castle was gutted by fire in 1735, there is apparently a trail named “Lady’s Walk.”  It honors the path Anne Boyd wore into the ground, day after day, trying to tramp out her grief (and guilt?) beneath the trees beside Kilmarnock Water.  One year after her husband’s beheading she died from a broken heart.

The Kilmarnock dwarf willow in March

I am trying hard not to let such deeply tragic associations turn me cold to the little willow, which is struggling to survive a spring that seems better suited to Glasgow than sunny South Carolina.  I have driven sharpened bamboo spikes into the earth around its tattered skirt, hoping to keep the pets at bay, but Alice chews the spikes to flakes with her piranha-sharp teeth, a blissful grin on her face.  Everything in the garden looks tattered at this time of year, so I must remind myself to see it as the tax assessor apparently did when he drove past the property last summer.  When our combined tax bill from Tomahawk County* and the town of Traveler’s Joy* arrived in September last year, we were stunned to discover that our rate had increased by 814%.  Thinking there must have been a clerical error, my husband called the tax office.  A staffer checked the records and informed us that no, there was no error.  The assessor had noted on his report that in the last year the owners had installed a ‘new wall, plantings and outbuilding’ which had increased the value of the property eight-fold. 

It pleases me on some level to have our hard work recognized.  But I hadn’t foreseen in what an unwelcome context this “appreciation” would arrive.  All my research on the Boyds of Kilmarnock has inspired me to lay down a path this summer.  It will make a complete circuit of the New Garden, leading strollers past the dusty shed and the rabbit den burrowed beneath the fire-pit, taking in the fig tree cordoned off with chicken wire from Alice’s teeth.  They will be regaled with the loud buzz of the commercial ice machine on Tomahawk Road before finally traversing a set of stepping stones that will wind around the pussy-excoriated pussy willow and pass through the dampest part of Brawley’s Lagoon.  I plan to call this trail “Tax Hike.”

Tiny Alice and Miss Billie watch for the tax collector

Buchanan, John.  Interesting Relics of the Last Earl of Kilmarnock: Beheaded on Tower-hill, 1746.  Glasgow: James MacNabb, 1870.  Print.

WHITEY, THE KILLER CAT

Whitey the Killer Cat came and went through the hole under the Griffith*house, located just to the left of the leaning sign

Whitey, the Killer Cat of Traveler’s Joy*, lived under the abandoned house that stood on the corner of Limestone Street and Kent.*  I first saw him on the day we bought the house across the street.  Waiting for the real estate agent to work his way through a ring of keys and unlock the front door, I stood on the porch of the blue cottage and watched as a short-legged, broken-tailed cat crawled out through a hole in the stone foundation of the old Griffith* home and made his way up the street, sticking close to the shrubbery.  Since later sightings of him nearly always occurred late at night, when I would go to close the drapes in the two front rooms and would spy him under the streetlamps making his stiff-shouldered pilgrimage up the hill towards Shagbark* Street, I wondered if he’d made an appearance that afternoon with the specific intention of letting us know he was there and was not to be intimidated or driven off if we decided to become his neighbors.

I learned something of his fearsome reputation from one of our human neighbors on Shagbark, a friendly and loquacious man who walked a giant white dog around the town.  This dog Miles* was all that remained of a sheep-ranching business that L. and his wife had operated years before. Stopping to talk one day, L. responded to my questions about Whitey (a name I gave the cat, which was likely the only repeatable name he’d ever been called) by warning me off any contact with the animal.  He told me that on one occasion the cat had attacked Miles (a dog big enough to substitute as a pub table) while they were taking a stroll on a summer’s evening, and L. had been forced to beat him off with his walking stick.  He went on to say that Whitey often hung out at an old house further up the hill where a congress of semi-feral cats had been breeding, fighting, and sunning themselves beneath the scrubby eleagnus shrubs for generations.  One of the old women who lived in the house had mistaken Whitey for one of her own and attempted to lift him into her arms.  “He slashed her in the eye and she came down with a fever," said L.  "Two weeks later she was dead from a massive infection.  That damn cat killed her!”

Whitey, in a rare daytime sighting

I never saw Whitey come into our yard, nor did he seem to bother our large, tough, tiger-striped male cat, Tobey.  He kept to the sidewalk on the far side of our street when making his nocturnal rounds, until I began to notice that I was seeing him less often, and then, not at all.  I have convinced myself that he died of some untreated disease in the home he knew under the Griffith house, and was not alive when the neighbors on our north side burned the old house to the ground.

We had heard from our neighbor Steve S. that the structure’s days were numbered, that the J. family had bought the lot and the ruined house standing on it and had plans to build a garage on the lot.  Here they planned to shift their collection of half-wrecked sedans, trucks, and one enormous pontoon boat from the limited space around their tiny house where the vehicles were currently parked to that site across the street once the Griffith house was eliminated.  Mr. J. told my husband that he had approached two salvage operators with a proposal that they strip the 125-year oak banister and newel posts from the home, detach the mantels in the parlor and take up some of the surviving flooring, in exchange for which they would tear down the remaining shell and haul the debris away.  In both cases they told him it would cost more to take the place down than the salvage was worth, and that he should take off the doors and strip what he could before lighting a match to it himself.

Shortly before Christmas that year, an excavator rolled slowly up to the property and began knocking down the walls.  It was difficult seeing the old home's innards exposed to the elements in that way -- watching the sturdy chimney resist the force of the battering bucket over and over until it finally crumpled and fell.  You ask yourself plenty of existential questions, the kind that don't have answers, while witnessing such a spectacle: what did their lives amount to, the families who lived and died in those rooms over so many years?  How can it be said that their happiness or misery, their love or fury or passion amounted to anything, when the rooms that contained them are shredded as easily as paper bags, and then the whole pile is set on fire?

One morning a week or two after the demolition, I woke up and noticed immediately that it was too bright in our north-facing bedroom for seven o’clock in the morning.  I hurried into the front rooms and saw that the light was fairly blazing through the cotton drapes.  The fire had been set before dawn and the flames were shooting into the dark sky.  Mr. J., some members of his family, and a couple of neighbors were standing at the edge of the yard, calmly watching the remains of the house go up in pillars of flame and ash.  They had set up plastic lawn chairs upwind of the smoke, and someone had brought a box of donuts which was being passed around.

Eventually, one of the fire trucks drove down from the station a block away and a couple of volunteer firemen looked in on the fire, but in the six days that followed while the Griffith place threw off flaming cinders as it burned, smoked and smoldered down to a mound of black debris, I never saw another official visitor at the site – just curious townspeople gathering to watch.  Ash seeped in through the cracks in our cottage and filtered down to us through the floorboards in the attic.  It covered our tables and our bed and made our meals taste like picnic food, gritty and slightly burnt. 

On the eighth day, Mr. J. and his kinfolk brought in a dump-truck and a front-loader and cleared away the pile of leftover pipes and foundation stones now that they were cool enough to handle.  Then they cut down two of the largest trees and left the pieces lying in boulder-sized sections at the back of the lot.  But as the weeks passed, and then the months, and as Mr. J.’s son rode his mower across the street to cut down the Johnson grass and the pecan seedlings that sprouted in the blank space where the house had stood, it became clear that whatever plans had been in place for that site had been abandoned or put on indefinite hold, and that the house had been destroyed to create an empty lot that held nothing but potential.

It’s created a tension in me whenever I drive or walk through Traveler’s Joy and pass the old houses that must have been charming or even beautiful in their prime, but which are now simply leaky liabilities for the people who hold title to them or who have been entrusted with their care while the owners languish in nursing homes and hospitals, or lie in local churchyards. I've come to think of the little Carpenter Gothic cottage I pass when I walk to the library as Miss Ivy’s Place, after a neighbor told me about the woman who lived there for years after retiring from a lifetime’s work in Charlotte.  She moved out to a skilled care facility before my husband and I arrived in town, and her cousin still hires the gardener who comes quarterly to trim the privet hedge and mow the lawn, raking the golden leaves that fall in drifts from the massive tulip poplar.  I heard that Miss Ivy died not long ago, and no one knows what the cousin will do with the house. 

Miss Ivy's Place, with tulip poplar

It’s virtually the same story at the large white house up on Vance* Street, even down to the African-American gardener who mows the lawn and sweeps the leaves off the double verandas shaded by a towering white oak that can’t be a day less than 150 years old.  A brother and sister grew old there together, the brother dying and then the sister being moved to a nursing home.  How she must have longed for that veranda with the two white rocking chairs set out, waiting for sunset, the broad front steps descending through clusters of snowbells that bloom in late winter and look like white lace edging a collar.  I heard that the sister finally passed away around Thanksgiving last year, and my heart sank driving home from work one afternoon last week when I spied unfamiliar cars parked at the house alongside a truck emblazoned with the name of a local auction house.

In the Griffith house, the last living person to have set foot indoors neglected to shut a window on the second floor, where tattered curtains flapped in all weather and the seat-back of a wooden chair was visible for years.  It looked as if someone had been sitting at the window watching the neighborhood and had gone downstairs momentarily to lift a boiling teakettle off the stove. While the house was burning, I heard stories from several Traveler’s Joy natives who had grown up around the family.  They told me that husband and wife had been hard drinkers who were famously foul-mouthed when in their cups, folks who beat on each other with anything close at hand and if there wasn't anything close they used their fists. Mrs. Griffith was rumored to give as good as she got, and someone said she knocked Mr. Griffith unconscious one summer by landing a brick in the back of his head.  Mr. G. remembers spying on one of their brawls by hiding in the boxwoods with his little brother, until a five gallon ash-pail came flying through the hedge and sent them scrambling.  It was rumored that Mr. Griffith had a secret room outfitted in his basement where the Klan met for a time, and in fact, the KKK held a parade in Traveler’s Joy back in 1968, although the locals maintain it was sparsely attended. 

Mr. G also claims to have witnessed Mr. Griffith’s death while waiting for the bus that used to run along Tomahawk* Road.  Drunk as ever, Mr. Griffith was running to catch the bus that had just pulled up at the stop in front of the police station, followed by some portion of the mongrel pack of dogs he fed and that always followed him.  A car racing to beat the light on Tomahawk swerved to avoid the dogs and struck Griffith instead, tossing him high in the air and sending him scudding a fair distance down the street, like a flat rock skipping the surface of a lake.  Mr. Griffith slid to a stop underneath a parked car and Mr. G. remembers running into the police station, screaming and screaming that he’d seen a man die.

After that Mrs. Griffith lived alone, and with no one to drink with or curse at, the air seemed to leak out of her as fast as that.  She and her husband had raised a niece named Tamara*, and when Mrs. Griffith started losing her memory and wandering, she told Tamara that she could have the house once she was gone if she would check in on her aunt and do the shopping and such.  Tamara did just that for a time, but she had a family of her own in another town and obligations that pulled on her, so her visits started to come less and less frequently.  In order to keep Mrs. Griffith safe between visits and to prevent her from wandering, Tamara took to locking her into the house until she could get back to Traveler’s Joy, which eventually came around once a week on Sunday after church.  This went on for a time with Mrs. Griffith getting weaker and thinner until one day the old woman broke out of the house in her nightdress and the postman found her face down in the front yard, stone dead. 

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People in this part of the world are not sentimental for the past.  They care about it if it will feed their families in the present.  And if their families are well-fed, then they look for these old relics to make them an honest dollar, even if that means crushing them into dust. They are surprised that anyone could begrudge them that.

I don't begrudge anyone the dollars.  What keeps me up at night is thinking about all the stories that ought to be salvaged from these places before the banisters and bricks come crashing down, the stories of so many vanished lives lived badly or well or barely at all, of the young hearts, broken spirits, long nights, blessed days, and hours spent watching at a window, waiting for the kettle to boil or hoping for a miracle.

The House with Two Verandas, empty of occupants.

CHICKEN IS THE POOR MAN'S MEAT

     Chicken is the poor man’s meat, which may explain why it is so prevalent on restaurant tables in Tomahawk County*.  When our schedules coincide, my husband and I like to meet for lunch at Brannan’s* Fish Camp, the tiny lunch shack in Traveler’s Joy* that clings to a steep canyon above a branch of Buffalo Creek.  I ordered fried chicken on my first visit there and have never ordered anything else.

The Cluck Truck, Union County, S.C.

     The first time FK introduced me to the place, having eaten there with fellow workers from his plant in the days before it closed, I was anxious that the whole place would go sliding down the cliff while we were in it.  Instead, the whole place burned to the ground shortly before Easter two years ago, the result of a grease fire, and for nearly a year fleets of Duke Energy workers, line repairmen, street pavers, surveyors and tree-cutting crews driving heavy machinery had to be turned away from the blackened ruins when they showed up there for the $7 lunch special.

     It was rebuilt at last, despite the owner’s misfortune in not having fire insurance, and while it isn’t any bigger, the dining space is lighter and cleaner, with one big room making it easier to shout across the tables at people you know instead of poking your head into dim, low-ceilinged extensions that made you feel like you were eating in someone’s crawl space.  Everyone was concerned that the food wouldn’t taste as good in the new Brannan’s, considering that it would be cooked in new pots and pans, atop shiny new appliances.  But our fears were unfounded.

Fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, slaw, green beans and hush puppies

     My husband ranges over the comfortingly limited “meat-and-three” menu, ordering dinner steak on one day and pork chops on another, but despite the fact that I am resolved to sample other entrees, in practice I am never ultimately able to bypass the fried chicken.  The chicken breasts served up are always succulently tender, with coating so crisp it snaps in your mouth.  Hush puppies are heaped on top, although sometimes the kitchen serves cornbread instead.  My husband isn’t fond of the cornbread but I think it’s just right – a little on the salty side, with a grainy texture and powerful absorption properties the better to soak up the pot likker from the beans. On Tuesdays and Thursdays pineapple-cheese casserole is offered as a side, although you have to order early if you want to be sure of getting this church-supper specialty before it’s crossed off the menu board. 

     Not long ago FK and I attended an exhibit in the town of Gaffney, which is located a fair distance down the mountain.  The Mayor of Gaffney, Henry Jolly, Sr., is a well-known fixture in this county seat.  Few of his townsmen know that his picture appeared in the Sunday New York Times in January, 2012, nor that he was interviewed by a reporter researching manufacturing operations in the south that had been shut down by presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s private equity firm, Bain Capital.  The reporter had a hard time locating any of the 150 workers who were laid off from the scrapbook company that closed its doors in Gaffney in 1992, nor could she find any residents who remembered the plant.  (In my opinion, that’s because so many plants in the region have closed down since that time that no one can keep them straight.  I know this because I teach many of these unemployed workers. ) 

You have to get to Brannan's* early or the popular 'vegetable' sides, like banana pudding, get swiped off the menu board. ('Cal' stands for 'Calabash-style,' or deep-fried, not 'California-style.')

Mayor Jolly’s quoted remarks struck some as sounding distinctly non-aspirational.  “I don’t think we are special or any different from any other small community in the south,” he told the Times reporter, effectively negating the efforts of the Gaffney Chamber of Commerce to optimize this moment in the national spotlight and portray the town as exceptional (Severson).  To my ear, however, Jolly’s comments sounded characteristic of a generation brought up in mill communities – humble and plainspoken people – cautious not to sound like one is ‘getting above his raisin’s.’

    At this event in Gaffney, which honored figures from the region’s history as a center of the textile industry, Mayor Jolly was asked to say a few words.  He recalled for the crowd that he had grown up in a poor family and as a junior legislator just starting out (this was fifty years ago) he was still very short of cash.  At that time, a man named Riley* opened up a steakhouse on Tomahawk Road just south of Traveler’s Joy.  Riley was always trying to get Henry, whom he had nicknamed not very benignly “Chicken” Jolly, to come over and try one of his beef dinners.  He worked on him until he wore Jolly down; the young lawmaker eventually made his way up Tomahawk Road to the restaurant and ate his first steak.  It was cooked to Riley’s standard of perfection, which meant on the living and breathing side of rare, with sauces and condiments strictly forbidden.

     Eating at a dumpy Chinese restaurant in Shelby, North Carolina, one day recently, I overheard a story at the next table about Riley’s, a tale which may have been apocryphal except that it sounded about right for restaurant culture in Traveler’s Joy.  One of the four diners at that table, an enormous man with an enormous voice, described going to Riley’s years earlier and ordering a steak.  When it was brought to his table, he cut into it and saw that it was hardly cooked to ‘medium;’ more like barely cooked at all.  He called his waitress over and told her to take the bloody thing back to the kitchen and cook it longer.  She returned almost immediately, slamming the plate on the table so hard the juice splashed on his clean shirt.  She told him, “Riley says it’s cooked fine!”  

     The diner did not receive a refund for the meal and more infuriatingly, he told his dinner companions at the Chinese place, Riley’s refused to reimburse him for his laundry bill.

     My husband and I have never encountered anything but polite and welcoming manners from staff at that steakhouse and have certainly never witnessed any plate-slamming, although we have learned to order our filets a little on the ‘done’ side, in order to get them cooked through.  When we first moved to town and were working like Trojans trying to dig ourselves out from the deep hole that was the Great Recession, we told ourselves to hold off going to Riley’s until we’d reached a certain milestone in earnings.  It took us nearly two years to reach that goal, and when we finally treated ourselves to a big old steak dinner it struck us as funny that we’d waited so long, as it must have struck “Chicken” Jolly.  While the food is first-rate, the restaurant itself is far from showy.  The faux-leather chairs are patched with duct tape, the carpet is scuffed and the table linen is worn soft as bed-sheets.  Like so much in this town, that suits us.  We are more comfortable these days in surroundings where no one is working very hard to impress anyone else.

     Even so, we draw the line at eating in certain establishments in the county.  Sam’s All-Night Café is one such place, billed a little ostentatiously on its circulars as “The Pride of Traveler’s Joy.”  A colleague of mine whose regular turf is Greenville and Spartanburg found herself far afield in our neck of the woods one day (looking for an auto-body shop, I believe, which makes a lot of sense if you read my previous post about vehicular recklessness in these parts) and stopped at Sam’s Café’ to pick up some coffee to go.  Not only was this young woman, a habitual smoker, delighted to find a cigarette machine in the establishment, but the café itself was blue with the smoke of patrons puffing away on their tobacco products of choice.  My colleague told me she was amazed to discover a restaurant that still encouraged smoking in this day and age.  I told her she had clearly never spent much time in Traveler’s Joy, where life proceeds at least fifty years behind the rest of the planet.

     Up on Shagbark Street,* at the modest home of our neighbors, the Gordons,* the glass storm door was kicked in some months ago.  This is an all-male household, father and son being accomplished marksmen and hunters with a plentiful supply of firearms on the property, so son Mike’s* observation that it was lucky for the would-be intruders that no one was in the house at the time is not an exaggeration.  Mike Gordon surprised me by seeming completely sanguine about the incident when I asked him who could have done such a thing.  He was fairly certain that it was a case of mistaken addresses.  Living directly behind the Gordons at the time was a man who worked as a fry cook at Sam’s All Night Café and who, according to Mike, ran a lively cottage industry selling purloined prescription pills out of his rented house.  Competing dealers may have been warning him off, because the next day the cook disappeared without a trace.  The Gordons were not happy about having to replace their door, but they seemed to accept some smashed glass as a fair price to pay for being rid of an undesirable neighbor. 

     I never heard how they coped at Sam’s without their cook, but I’m guessing most of the regulars didn't notice his absence.

####

Work Cited

Severson, Kim.  “Town, Cast as Romney’s Victim, Says, ‘Huh?’” The New York Times 14 January 2012. Web.

SNOW ON THE MOUNTAIN

A recent snowfall in Traveler's Joy.  Mt. Whitman* rises in the background.

It seems as if snow falls every winter in Traveler’s Joy*.  It rarely lasts, but it’s magical when it does, because the town, which normally presents a bleak face to the world in January and February, is transformed into an enchanting vision of snowy meadows and frosted eaves, silent bowers and hushed porches. 

Even the wrecked cars crowded on the junkyards' plains glitter in frozen waves of Chevrolets and Fords, and the trash-strewn yard around the trailer on Tomahawk Road*, the one where two goats on tethers appear to be systematically devouring the ancient siding, is cleanly blanketed in white, the goats having retreated somewhere warmer.  (Into the trailer, perhaps?)

At this time of year I look forward to being reacquainted with the sloping spine of Mt. Whitman* on our north-western horizon.  This is an optical illusion of sorts, considering that the entire town of Traveler’s Joy nestles into one side of the mountain and is perched above a vast plain that spreads out to the south and west, ending, on clear days, at the distant blue spine of the Smoky Mountains.  In summer, Mt. Whitman, like the raised bed of the Norfolk Southern track that bisects the town, is hidden behind a dense green wood that marches to the summit.  As the cold sharpens and the leaves of the oaks and pecans peel away, a morning finally comes when the mountain’s shape emerges, glowing, against the rising sun.  From our vantage point it is actually two peaks, with a sway-backed valley between.  The eastern-most peak slopes gradually down to the squared-off brick sanctuary of the AME Zion church that caps the end of Limestone Street* and overlooks swampy little Doolittle Creek.  (With snow on its roof, this church closely resembles a red velvet cake.)

Our summers are as blistering as one expects them to be in South Carolina, but whenever I drive home after a sweaty day at work on the plain below, I am met with the slightest cooling as I climb 900 feet above sea level to the shear-zone formation of metavolcanic rocks interlayered with marble, quartzite, hornblende gneiss and amphibolite in which my home is cradled.  This geologic terrane is the remnant of an uplift dating from the Neoproterozoic era,  roughly 1,000 to 541 million years ago.  At that time the only animals were frond-like organisms, the super-continent Rodinia had not yet broken up, and the planet was gripped by ice ages so severe that any aliens landing at the equator would have surmised that Earth was a giant snowball.  I sometimes wonder if that geologic memory stirs the cool breeze from the west that relieves the torrid days of August and September.  It's not hard to imagine pre-Paleozoic times when the wind is hurling snow and ice against the windows, and the finches huddle in their snug house on the porch.  On the mountain it is winter.