The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap: A Memoir of Friendship, Community, and the Uncommon Pleasure of a Good Book

by Wendy Welch

  That about sums it up.

  The five-bedroom 1903 Edwardian sat near two intersections, and edged a neighborhood of sturdy brick homes and leafy bungalows. Parking spaces dotted the front curb. The place felt snug and cozy the moment we walked in, despite its voluminous size.

  “Squeaky floors,” my husband said with a frown, rubbing one rubber sole across the scarred hardwood.

  “The pocket doors stick,” Debbie observed, sneezing as she wrestled oak panels from their hiding places amid a shower of dust.

  “That’s a lot of windows for somebody to wash.” I pointed at the floor-to-ceiling panes adorning three open-plan rooms, stretched across the southern-facing house front.

  Rickety wooden fans hung from high ceilings, wires exposed. The second-floor parlor, with its peeling wallpaper, overlooked the town’s tree-lined ancillary street one block from where it intersected the main road. The ghost of cat pee wafted from the oak staircase, which boasted exquisite copper corner pieces dulled by neglect. My husband and I stared at each other with lust in our eyes, thanked Debbie-the-Realtor for the impromptu visit, and left her making notes of things to fix before the house could be put on the market.

  From the Edwardian mansion, Jack and I headed to Little Mexico, a signature Big Stone Gap restaurant. Little Mexico sits at the top of a hill next to Walmart, and the parking lot offers magnificent views of the surrounding mountains. The season’s flowering power—rhododendron pink, mountain laurel white, cornflower purple—displayed its full glory in the midday sun. Inside, we dipped tortilla chips into fiery salsa and eyed each other through sangria glasses.

  We had no money. We’d bought a house in the Snake Pit with cash when we first came over from Scotland, but the economy had just tanked while the housing market crashed amid escalating horror stories; no way would we be able to sell that house quickly. Thus we couldn’t afford to buy without getting a mortgage, and given the nose-diving economy and the limited appeal my esoteric PhD in ethnography had in the job market, that didn’t seem wise. We needed to just park ourselves quietly for a year and regroup. It was madness to even think along unicorn-in-the-garden lines. No, the word “bookstore” would not come out of my mouth.

  Jack crunched a corn chip. “That big white house would have made a perfect bookstore, had it been in a bigger town.”

  I knew it! “Oh, did you think so?”

  My husband of ten years smiled. “I knew that’s what you were thinking. Debbie said the population is 5,400. That’s not enough people to support a bookstore, and anyway we won’t be here that long.”

  “Yep,” I agreed. “Stupid to get entangled in something like that now, when we’re so tired and, you know, off balance.”

  “Aye. Not to mention, we don’t have enough money.”

  “Or energy. Pity to see something so nice and not be able to take advantage of it, but the timing is so wrong. We need a sure thing. I’ll handle this job for a year or two, and you can find some relaxing retirement project.”

  Jack waited a beat, then said thoughtfully, “But if we were to stay a wee while longer, there is a college nearby where you might teach … well, not that we’re thinking of long-term plans now.”

  My heartbeat accelerated. “No, not that we’re thinking long-term.”

  “We’ll set up a bookstore someday.”

  “Mhmm. Someday.”

  We crunched in silence, and then Jack drew his sword and slew the dragon. “What if someday is today?”

  Not even a gentle pop resounded as the cork flew from our bottled-up lives. But the waitstaff seemed startled when I leaned across the table, stomach grazing the chip basket, and kissed my best friend long and hard on the lips.

  CHAPTER 2

  No Longer Renting the Space Inside My Skin

  Oh the water is wide, I can’t cross o’er.

  Neither have I wings to fly.

  Build me a boat that will carry two,

  And both shall row, my love and I.

  —Scottish folk song

  THE INK WASN’T DRY ON my signature before I regretted the impulsive, made-with-the-heart-not-the-head decision to buy that house at the side of the road. Sure, we’ve all heard the Dr. Phil chatter: follow your bliss and the money will follow.

  Yeah, right. Anybody out there still unaware that life does not always resemble a Hallmark commercial? Bank accounts are amazing reality checks—no pun intended.

  The Edwardian wanted structural fixing, while our minuscule savings needed cash injections, not drainage. Buying that big white elephant would be driving on the wrong side of the money highway. A house back at the Snake Pit waited to be sold in the tanking real estate market. The word “recession” loomed in nightly news stories. The quiet little position I’d come to town for was not PhD level, and a couple of staff members already wondered openly what I was doing there. (The job was with the same type of state organization as the toxic one I’d fled had been, which those with the foresight God gave mayflies might call a dumb move. We would call it that, and many other things besides, in the coming months.) I had defended my doctoral dissertation just as the economy—along with university hiring—was drying up. The possible safety net of something opening at one of the two area colleges, should my day job go away, was not a strong bet. A safety net that lacks enough strength to catch you really isn’t much of a safety net, is it?

  Stacked against all that, we had two very important things going for us: we believed in ourselves and each other, and we were desperate. We craved returning to a sweet, happy, slow life. A lot of money wasn’t important—just enough to eat, sleep, and stay warm through the winter. All we asked was to contribute something to a community and derive pleasure from doing so—plus health insurance.

  Necessity may be the mother of invention, but desperation is her very pushy pimp. Jack and I had a long talk that afternoon as the waitstaff, convinced we were crazy and in need of gentle humoring, brought basket after basket of chips and salsa. (To this day, when gripped by intense emotions, I crave fried salt.) At one point I described living in the Snake Pit as “renting the space inside my own skin.” A phrase that had been haunting me for weeks. I’d never said it out loud before. Trapped in all those hidden agendas, putting a foot right proved impossible.

  Let two mild examples suffice. In one instance, a volunteer begged an employee organizing a very large and important event for a specific assignment, got it, and then left the task undone, while bragging to another person that he’d never intended to do the work; instead he fired off an e-mail to the organizer’s boss, telling the (notoriously uninvolved and oblivious) senior official how angry he felt that such an important task had been neglected. Another time, a supervisor told me to send a certain answer to a “concerned citizen’s” question, copied to the supervisor. When the concerned citizen e-mailed again, the supervisor e-mailed him directly that I had given incorrect information, and he would speak to me about it.

  Just another day in the Snake Pit. Watch your back, and if you have any energy left over, do your job.

  My husband looked me in the eye. “We’re not going to live like that anymore.”

  Jack does not make promises lightly; I started to feel a little safer.

  A little. It’s hard to explain, but the Pit had been my dream job until it revealed its horrors. A perceived opportunity to do positive things had ended in literal nightmares. Now here Jack and I were, just two months later, talking about another dream we’d cherished for a long time. I didn’t see how I could survive if it too went rotten.

  I said as much to Jack. He looked at me with those keen hazel eyes, and covered my hand—trembling around my glass—with both of his. “We just left a maze of moral weirdness,” he said. “It’s got you confused. Think a minute, love. How can something be rotten when it has you, me, sincerity, and books at its center?” he asked.

  Put that way …

  Passivity eddied away as we took up oars and began to row—hard. We could do this; we could open a b
ookstore inside that house, live upstairs, and just see how things went for a year, then reassess. Maybe then we would go back to doing gigs full-time, or the fairy godmother of decent, honest living would visit us some other way.

  Now might be a good time to point out that all this soul-searching took place before the Edwardian even hit the real estate market. Impatient little souls we were, but once dreaming became an option again, waiting five more minutes felt impossible. If we waited, I’d lose my nerve and go back to triple-guessing every move and how it could be perceived—a nasty habit I’d picked up in you-know-where.

  Jack, who knows me very well, took no chances. Seeking out Debbie straight from the restaurant, he explained our plan.

  “A bookstore!? You’re nuts!” she said, and helped us use our house in Pitsville as collateral for buying the big, beautiful, scary home five minutes after it went on the market. We moved in upstairs an hour after signing papers at the lawyer’s office. That night, even before we had bedroom furniture, Jack took two hundred dollars from savings and bought lumber, hammer, and nails. The next morning he dug through the boxes filling our front room—our front room!—to find his tools, and installed bookshelves downstairs amid the rubble and chaos. Subliminally, I think we considered filling the space with shelves symbolic. Like Dr. Seuss’s Whos in Whoville, each hammer blow shouted, “We are here, we are here, we are here!”

  Books to put on those shelves had to wait awhile, since we were flat broke and living out of cardboard-box furniture. Lacking funds to collect ours in a rental truck—we’d just shoved clothes and anything small enough to fit in boxes into our car and fled—we planned to make do for a month or so until we had a little money saved up. In fact, moving in above the shop-to-be was the only thing making the store financially possible in our present circumstances. Although I’d like to say we were clued in enough to understand the accompanying tax breaks of living where one works, we planned to live upstairs because it required no additional cash outlay and offered sufficient space for two humans, two dogs, and two cats. Living overhead kept us from having financial overhead, which was what saved us in later months. God looks after fools and little children.

  News spread quickly about the incomers who had bought the old Meade place and planned to reside above some kind of shop. The only people living above shops in Big Stone were shift workers in low-paying jobs, invisible in rented flats (apartments to you) over main-street businesses they didn’t work in or own. Now the owners of a business were going to live above it?

  A small town’s rumor mill activates quickly. In a place with perhaps six shops on its main street, where the Walmart didn’t have electric doors yet, we became the story of the week. Locals stopped by, asking if we really planned to live atop—as the story grew—a bed-and-breakfast, consignment clothing store, massage parlor, or Scientology reading room. Jack erected a USED BOOK STORE OPENING SOON sign on the lawn almost as soon as we moved into the house, as much for self-defense as information. The curious and concerned stopped on the sidewalk, pointing as they passed. Their comments pretty much boiled down to “A bookstore?! You’re nuts!”

  Yet new and interesting friends also began gathering, including several invisible shift workers who loved reading. James, a miner disabled after an accident, staffed gas pumps by day and wrote poetry by night; he would later become a founding member of the store’s writing group. Dave, fortysomething and as excited as a little boy, appeared on our porch one day, asking if we were really starting a bookstore. Newly diagnosed with epilepsy, he’d been let go from a burger place when the seizures started—no severance, no insurance, and no job prospects.

  “I love to read,” he said as his brother sat behind the wheel of a big red pickup, drumming his fingers on the dashboard and occasionally honking. “I can’t drive; they took my license away ’cause of the seizures. Bud drives me when he can, but he don’t like reading. I’ll be back after you’re open. When’d you say that’ll be? And all the books are gonna be half price?”

  The enthusiasm of Dave and James renewed our flagging energy. Soon we were even hunting for ways to join in community activities. When we could spare a minute, we looked around for places to visit, people to meet. One of the fastest ways to make friends turned out to be volunteering at the outdoor drama. Big Stone Gap has nurtured many writers, including John Fox, Jr., author of The Trail of the Lonesome Pine. In the 1970s, Fox’s novel became a musical, kind of a folk opera, staged each July and August. Barbara Polly, the original female lead, still organizes Big Stone’s annual summer run of what is now the longest-running outdoor drama in America. Jack and I did the preshow music one night, and at intermission a tall, dark-haired woman walked up to us and drawled, in a voice so Southern it fairly wafted magnolia blossom perfume, “Say somethin’ else.”

  “Excuse me?” Jack said, startled but polite, and the lady, hand to her forehead, feigned a swoon.

  “Whew!” she exclaimed, turning to me. “His accent’s makin’ my toes curl. I’m meltin’ faster than butter on hot toast.”

  That’s how we met Isabel, who became one of our staunchest friends. (And yes, she acts like that all the time. If you come to Big Stone, I’ll introduce you.)

  We also met Tony, a local pastor, and his wife, Becky. He’d been conned into selling the popcorn, and when Jack bought some, Tony said, “Hey, you’re the new couple trying to start a bookstore, right? Poor souls. Well, good luck with that. Got a church yet?”

  Word had apparently gone out that we were shopping for a church. More precisely, my Quaker husband said on our first Sunday morning in town, “Find a place we can go when we’re not at a Friends meeting, and let me know when you do.” Then he rolled over and went back to sleep. The Society of Friends, aka Quakers, met a good two-hour drive away, so we planned to attend once a month there and find a church home in Big Stone Gap the rest of the time. Off I set on this mission, wearing a skirt and a smile.

  Three churches sat just up the street from our store, and two more down. It’s a Southern small town. We have four hairdressers, three museums, two nail salons, and fifty-six churches within a two-mile radius.

  Spoiled for choice, I started with the Methodists, a mere four blocks up the road: great music, but they pledged allegiance to the American flag as part of the service. While I support both the United States and Christianity, mixing them promotes an unexamined assumption that makes Jack, a Christian who was not then American, nervous. Ixnay on the Methodists—although I met a lot of very nice individuals who shook hands and said, “So you’re half of that bookstore couple! When’s it open?” (An improvement over “You’re nuts!”) This was also my first meeting with David and Heather, a sweet couple down the street who frequented the shop once it opened. Heather later became an integral part of our pinch-hitting support staff.

  The Baptists came next. Pledge as part of service. Bless you; next.

  Another nearby church’s sermon suggested—how can I put this? that God was not only American, but male, white, and a fan of a particular football team. I really don’t consider myself picky when it comes to churches, but a few weeks later, I still hadn’t found anything plausible for Jack. Then someone at my day job suggested, “Y’all should try the one at the end of your block. It’s full of weirdos and artistic types like you.”

  Uh, thanks.

  We went, and they seemed like nice folks, so we went back, and word went ’round town that the New Couple had settled into a church. Pastors and lay ministers stopped calling.

  In the Artists and Weirdos congregation, we met Teri and Gary. Teri is the town chiropractor. She and her professional-drummer husband parent a growing menagerie of some of the smartest, best-adjusted children ever. Teri and Gary wanted the bookshop to succeed for the sake of their kids, but we had no idea when we met them how helpful they would soon become.

  Mark and Elizabeth also introduced themselves, then a moment later someone referred to her as Dr. Cooperstein.

  “Oh, you have a doctorate?�
� I asked. “Where do you teach?” She gave me an odd look and said she directed the local hospital’s emergency room. I was about to apologize when the minister’s wife said, “Hey, that’s right. You’re a doctor, too.”

  Elizabeth beamed at me. “Oh! Where do you practice? Would you like to visit the hospital?”

  By the time we’d finished sorting my “phud” degree from her “mud,” we were laughing and friends.

  “I guess we all assume other people are what we are,” Elizabeth said as her teenaged son, utterly disgusted at middle-aged women laughing and carrying on this way, edged out the door to wait on the porch.

  In retrospect, many foundations for long-term friendships were laid during that church hunt. And between the church crowds, drama night team, and book enthusiasts who stopped by to see what we were up to, the bookstore-to-be carved out what looked like an accepted space for itself, and fairly quickly. It made us feel good, that so many locals really seemed excited about a bookshop coming to town; in the history annals of Big Stone, no bookstore had been recorded since its incorporation in the late 1800s.

  For the rest of the townsfolk, seeing us gear up must have been like watching old people run a marathon—admiring their spirit while questioning their grasp on reality. Residents called us sweet, brave, and other pleasant code words for “lunatic” in an intriguing “glad you’re here, sorry you won’t be staying” sort of way.

  That “won’t be staying” remark came up pretty often, but we attributed it to a bad economy and the stereotypes people held about the education levels and reading habits of Coalfields Appalachia’s residents. We figured people were assuming Big Stone lacked the population or interest to support a store, but just look at all the people already stopping by to ask us about it and wish us well! More than a dozen! How heartening!