This short scene study, dated 7 July 2014, is from Patrick’s West Virginia Stories folder. It describes a sleepy town and looks like a setup for a longer story that I’ve not located, in the style of “Old men watch as a stranger arrives and heads to the bar.”
Until you climb up Pea Ridge and enter Oak Hill from that side, you might have thought that there was no longer any such thing as a sleepy town.
Then you pass the Baptist Church, a brick temple, locked tight as a drum until the next Sunday, and enter Man Street. The service station is the first one you have seen in years that is totally deserted. The door to the office is open, and loud country music issues into the open air, undiluted by traffic noise. Yours is the only car in sight with a driver at the wheel. Then there is the hospital, as tranquil as a college campus during Easter vacation. Another gas station, this one totally automatic. Probably no one shows up more than once a week to check the computerized accounts and empty the cash box.
In the center of town, the Post Office looks like an illustration cover for The Saturday Evening Post, one lone citizen striding through the same wood framed glass doors into the U.S. Post Office that you used to push 40 years ago, check your private box for a Green Lantern magic ring. Which, when it finally showed up was a poor imitation of the product advertised in the back pages of Marvel Comics.
Two or three old men sit in front of the Greyhound station. The high point of village life can be gauged by the activities of retirees, men who have nothing to do and enjoy the free time necessary to find out that the lady semi driver from Beckley, a foulmouthed, leggy bitch who always sank a couple of Red Top Ales at the roadhouse in East End. The Q-stick, as this bar was called, stood up on six cinder block pillars set into concrete. Steps made of two by eights led you into a dark room, one door, no windows, a bar along the wall on your right, five tables with three chairs at each spread along the other wall. A neon blinking jukebox stood at the far end of the room, by the entrance to the toilets: Hillbilly and Hillbitch. On a screened in porch at the back there stood a magnificent pool table with leather braid pockets and four fingers of slate. The legs could have come from a Steinway, handsome thick curves ending in a dainty wheel.
Another high spot in the day – once in the morning, once in the late afternoon – was the arrival and departure of the Greyhound bus. Some dude in uniform gets off and heads straight for the Q-stick. A stranger shows up, a man in dungarees and a white dress shirt with the sleeves folded up to his biceps. He carries a canvas bag, and in ten minutes he is heading for the Q-stick.
Patrick Meadows 1934 – 2017.
It’s always heartwarming to read these “shavings from the master’s workshop” because Patrick’s voice comes through just as clearly as it does in long-form pieces, and it’s so lovely to hear it again.
We live in a small village in Southern California. Yes, I know those are very hard to find in SoCal. It is desert, so right now the Snow Birds are gone. But wait, who are all the people waiting to pick up packages at the Post Office? They are city people attracted to the low prices of our housing. They will probably sell after one summer of scorching hot weather and ultra high electrical rates. No big loss, let us desert rats have our town back again. We are not big enough for a Greyhound bus stop. I don’t think even the County runs a bus out here anymore. I’ve thought about riding on that just for kicks. Normally it is Irene that catches it at Christmas Circle. Maybe I can sit near her in this little Van/Bus and hear why she lives out here. I’ll never do this trip because it drops riders off at Parkway Plaza in El Cajon. Everyone knows that shopping centers are dying. Probably most of the stores are closed. But still, I could probably find a seat near a Millers Outpost and check out the young girls.
This bus trip has always intrigued me. I picture the poor Hispanics with all their children and maybe some chickens and pigs loading up in this van. Now that a chain store “gasp” has built in our town the Hispanics can shop at Dollar General for all their needs. That is good because all their men are very hard workers and nobody has a license, or insurance. Their children are being raised as both Mexican and American and are learning the American way. The parents are very proud of them. And, they will move out of our community for work or college.
So, my little town is poor Hispanics or very well off multi home owning Snow Birds from the snow parts of the West.
BTW, we do have benches under some native trees that I could sit at and watch the world go by.
Bill, you summed up your little burg perfectly.