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

by Wendy Welch

  I kissed my husband’s bald spot. “Okay. Let’s start doing the paperwork.”

  Paperwork followed on paperwork—each piece accompanied by an application fee. We sent four hundred dollars, two hundred dollars, one hundred dollars, waited for phone calls, returned forms, waited, returned, waited, got notarized signatures, waited, waited, waited …

  And one day a package came in the mail containing a glossy, thin booklet of one hundred questions, with accompanying CD. These were the quiz items from which Jack would have to answer ten, six of them correctly, before he could become a citizen. His written examination was scheduled for six weeks hence in Fairfax, Virginia.

  I grilled Jack on the questions that night. He got ninety-six correct. I got ninety-one.

  The night before the interview, Jack and I drove to a cut-rate hotel a few miles from the designated municipal building. Though we had tried hard to avoid it, we arrived at rush hour. We’d been country mice too long and I’d lost my driving nerve; we pulled into a restaurant and waited until the stream of steel faded into occasional headlights as the sun set, then got back into the car and found our hotel.

  The next day, I braved the morning commuter rush to drop Jack for his interview, and waited four hours at the hotel for him to call. Since the letter informing him of his schedule had suggested he would need only two hours, I was panicking by the time he rang.

  “Everything okay?” I blurted into the phone.

  “Tell you all about it when you get here,” he said, and I threw the last of our things into the case and raced to fetch him. Was he being deported? Had he failed the exam? Aced it and been asked to perform special duties? What?

  “They forgot me,” he said as soon as he slid into the car, all smiles.

  “They what?”

  “I was sitting in the waiting room, and they called everyone who came in with me, and another group of people had started showing up, so I went up and asked at the desk, and she rooted around and looked concerned, then looked behind a desk and came up with a piece of paper from the floor. ‘Mr. Beck? Your file fell. I’m so sorry. We’ll do you next.’”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. “Only you, dear. Only you!”

  Jack received a letter; he passed his oral and written examination, and it was now just a matter of waiting for notification of when the naturalization ceremony would take place. The government would be in touch.

  We took the list of one hundred questions across to the Mutual and passed it around among Bo, David, Cotton, and the gang. Bo looked at the booklet suspiciously, flipping its pages.

  “Are these the laws that govern us inside the mountains, or those people on the other side?” he asked, and the men eating around us grinned.

  Five years ago, that question would have flummoxed Jack, but now he knew not only what they were saying, but what they weren’t.

  “Ah, Bo,” Jack said with a laugh. “You and I know the government has never understood how to run the Coalfields, and we like it best when they stay on their side and let us get on with things.”

  The boys gave appreciative grins and Bo slapped Jack on the back with the booklet. “I don’t believe I could answer a one of these”—his voice boomed through the diner—“but I’m glad you did! Welcome, brother! But,” he added, dropping his tone confidentially so that only the six nearest tables could hear, “you were already our brother, weren’tcha?”

  Back when we started the bookstore, the gates of central Appalachia’s Coalfields had seemed as tightly shut as the vaults of Fort Knox. It was hard to remember those days, that morning in the Mutual.

  The phone rang and caller ID listed it as coming from 000-000-0000.

  “It’s for you,” I said, handing the unanswered receiver to Jack. “’Cause that has to be a government agency.”

  It was—homeland security. A background check to ensure Jack wasn’t a member of the Communist Party or a terrorist cell. Neither of these is big in Big Stone.

  The awaited letter arrived; the naturalization ceremony would be three weeks hence, in the federal courthouse in Abingdon. Since about our second year in operation, we’d been sending e-mail notices to customers who signed up for them, letting people know of upcoming events. On our next round, Jack included his citizenship status update. He got more than one hundred e-mails congratulating him, and several requests to know when and where the ceremony would take place, if guests could attend, and would there be a “Citizen Jack” party at the bookstore.

  On the day of Jack’s ceremony, a crowd carpooled to Abingdon: Erin (who organizes some of our special events and attends Needlework Nights); Becky and Tony; Virginia, one of our staunchest supporters, a county board of supervisors member, the organist at the Presbyterian church, and a past murder victim; guitarist Grace and her husband Bill, who had rounded up financial support for the Celtic Day that Jack started in the town three years before; Elissa, our friend and photographer; a friend from my college days, Abingdon’s storyteller-in-residence Donnamarie; Fiona; Isabel; and our Grapes of Wrath music fellow traveler Gary and his wife, Millie.

  It pleased us, as it also pleased the person in question, that one of these friends had been among those rejecting Jack for membership in the Kiwanis Club all those years ago. Times change, and people are basically good at heart; enough said.

  As Jack—resplendent in kilt and sporran—accepted his certificate, the gang burst into cheers, waving American flags and clapping wildly. The judge conducting the ceremony looked up and smiled before reading the other fourteen names on his list.

  Afterward, we went together for that most American of celebratory dinners: pizza. Around the table, Jack raised his glass of cola and thanked our friends for coming. “You made me a part of this community long before I joined it formally, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

  People in the restaurant began to figure out what the unruly bunch with the American flags and red, white, and blue stuffed sequined eagle sitting on the table were celebrating (aided, no doubt, by our singing, “Happy Citizenship, Dear Jack, Happy Citizenship to you” when the pizzas arrived). Patrons started getting up and coming over to shake Jack’s hand and wish him well.

  Back at the bookstore, we held our monthly Let’s Talk on citizenship. Tony summed up for all of us when he said, “Fitting in is one thing. Belonging is another. And then there’s contributing. I think Jack and Wendy have done all three.”

  In short, it was a day for knowing that some things are better when done within the gracious bounds of community and camaraderie. And it was, as much as any ceremony ever could be, the culmination of years of working to be a contributing part of our town. Our town.

  CHAPTER 27

  The Last Word

  To be satisfied with a little, is the greatest wisdom; and he that increaseth his riches, increaseth his cares; but a contented mind is a hidden treasure.

  —Akhenaten

  BHUTAN IS AN INSIGHTFUL COUNTRY. This nation has a Gross National Happiness index. The index is calculated using several indicators: citizens’ psychological well-being, education, and time use; the perceived value and sustainability of ecology, culture, and community vitality in the nation; public health; living standards; and whether citizens think they have good governance. This is how the Bhutanese measure the success of their collective lives.

  It’s a good measurement. Jack assesses our bookstore’s performance each month, totting up Internet and shop sales. He compares these to the same time last year. Quarterly we sit down with a glass of wine and talk about what we liked, incidents remembered for good or ill, any rearranging of the stock we’d like to try, ideas for promotions or events or fixing a recurring problem.

  In our first four years, sales figures climbed. During the worst of the recession, they skyrocketed as people stayed home, walked around town instead of driving, and bought cheaper methods of entertaining themselves. At the end of year four, our sales peaked. Year five, they were the same, with only a slight increase tangential to
our starting to serve in-store soups and salads. We had reached a plateau, doing as well as the shop could be expected to in our region.

  Year five was the moment. If we intended to expand our business, we needed to start a franchise in another county, double our Internet efforts, and/or pack up and move to a bigger location. Asheville had long been on our minds; we love nothing better than to visit North Carolina’s Paris of the South. Kingsport, Tennessee, presented another possibility; we knew lots of people in that larger population area. Plus, we had investment capital this time. Opening a second store, or closing this one and moving to a larger city, would be so different: no more scratchy thrift-store chairs and endless pots of mac and cheese; we knew how to run a bookshop now.

  We sat and stared at the graph Jack had drawn. Then Jack, as he is wont to do, asked the perfect question: “What do we want?”

  That didn’t take long to answer: “The way we live now.” We had what we wanted. The shop makes enough money for us to live life with frugal grace. My college work provides health insurance; Jack’s steadily growing tours cover the cost of his annual visit home and let him impart his love of Scots and Irish culture; our performing gives us busman’s holidays more interesting than what we could dream up for ourselves. Food, shelter, heat, and light, not to mention bucketloads of entertainment better than anything we could buy, were ours from selling books.

  We started the bookstore to live as we saw fit, solving our own problems, scheduling our own lives, no longer living as renters inside our skins. It’s done that and more. The shop made us members of a community we entered as heartbroken, tired people. Tales of the Lonesome Pine gave us friends and fun. It offered perspective, and while we were busy trying to figure out how to run the shop, it quietly returned us to a balanced and honest way of living, neither smug nor grim.

  Who could ask for more? Amid the jumble of listening to life plots and hefting boxes and stocking shelves and pricing books, underneath it all contentment flows like a little burbling mountain stream. Cat pee, guerrilla bargainers, fifty-pound boxes of Harlequin romances and all, we are having the time of our lives.

  Glenn is a customer who attends several of our special events but shops with us rarely. He appeared just as we were closing one snowy December evening. Handing Jack a package, he lifted his hat to me in the twilight and marched back out with only two words flung over his shoulder: “Merry Christmas!”

  Jack sat down at the table and unwrapped a bottle of exceptionally good lowland single-malt, his favorite that has to be special-ordered—and that we couldn’t afford except on rare occasions. A note accompanied the gift. “Dear Jack and Wendy, I don’t know what we did around here before you showed up! Found a treasure for one of our town’s finest treasures. Enjoy!”

  We are so very, very rich.

  A good book has no ending.

  —R. D. Cumming

  NOTE

  2. No Longer Renting the Space Inside My Skin

  1. We have two cats. Get it? Oh, never mind.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THE CUSTOMERS OF TALES OF the Lonesome Pine, past, present, and future: You make it so much fun to be so busy. Thanks!

  The UVA-Wise CABs: Margie (this book’s godmother), Cyndi, Ann (the academic’s best friend and secret weapon), and Michael.

  The Grammar Guerrilla Girls: You know who you are (in every sense of those words); you know how important what you do is; and you know how much we mean to each other.

  The Needlework Night Babes: may your stitches never ravel and your needles point only to the truth.

  The Big Stone Gap Writing Group: you saw it first (and pretty much last, and at every stage in between. Are you as sick of me as I am?!).

  Pamela and Louise Malpas at Harold Ober: from the first phone call in that parking lot to the last edit, thank you! And to Michelle Montalbano: thank you for, among other things, the epigraph research and the Melville backup.

  Nichole Argyres (let’s not talk about Meany) and Laura Chasen at St. Martin’s Press: thank you for making this book better every time you touched it and every time we talked. And thank you for liking it so much. You were right, Nichole; this was fun, fun, fun (mostly because you were so much fun to work with).

  Team Emert: we see way too much of each other, but thanks for keeping the smiles going anyway.

  The people of Coalfields Appalachia: we get the hype end of the media, the short end of the funding stick, the stereotypes, the extraction without infrastructure, and the platitudes. And we still belong to ourselves and to God’s Country. The mountains hold things in, and they also keep things out. Here’s to us!

  Cassie, Kim, and the rest of the workaholics at SMP: thank you for thinking of the stuff no one else thinks of, with a style and panache that makes everyone else glad you thought of it.

  Kathy Still: I think it’s ironic that you’re behind the scenes making it all better in this book, as you do in real life for so many.

  Jessica Ketron and Elissa Powers: your combined genius crafted an author head shot I didn’t want to burn.

  Cami Ostman: all the years of “your turn/my turn” have been good. Here’s to many more!

  Carolyn Jourdan: for numerous wisdom swaps, online and off.

  Tony and Anne and the congregation of BSG Presbyterian, plus the Quakers who meet in our bookstore: y’all are bastions of sanity and good manners, no matter what.

  The booksellers we met and the friends we met up with on the “Booking Down the Road Trip”: Brave, hardworking, always quirky, and usually right; that about sums you up.

  My parents and sister: Yes, you are funny!

  The owners and operators of mom-and-pop stores everywhere: Hang in there! We are the collective reason civilization hasn’t self-destructed yet!

  PAWS, In His Hands, and the rest of the rescuers who find homes for shelter animals: You do good, and you do right. (And please, world, spay and neuter your pets!)

  The day jobbers: Diane, Keith, Gary and Millie, Susan, Norma, and Libz (and Chelsie the Twitter tutor).

  The theatricals: Jerry Lou and Jimmy, Erin, Harry, Jenny, and the gang.

  And Jack: it seems superfluous to thank you here because you were such a part of it all. Every day with you is a good one.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Wendy Welch and her husband, Scottish folksinger Jack Beck, own and operate Tales of the Lonesome Pine Used Books in Big Stone Gap, Virginia. Wendy has a Ph.D. in ethnography, fosters shelter animals, and is one of the world’s fastest crocheters. This is a good thing because it means she is able to sneak in some crafting time between teaching college courses on culture and public health, running special events at the shop, writing about stuff, and chasing kittens out of roads. Enjoy her blog at www.wendywelchbigstonegap.wordpress.com.

  THE LITTLE BOOKSTORE OF BIG STONE GAP. Copyright © 2012 by Wendy Welch All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

  Cover design by David Baldeosingh Rotstein

  Cover illustration by Kristine A. Lombardi

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Welch, Wendy.

  The little bookstore of big Stone Gap: a memoir of friendship, community, and the uncommon pleasure of a good book / Wendy Welch.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-250-01063-6 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-250-01064-3 (e-book)

  1. Bookstores—Virginia. 2. Antiquarian booksellers—Virginia. 3. Married people—Employment. 4. Book collectors. I. Title.

  Z478.3.V57.W45 2012

  381'.45002025755—dc23

  2012026578

  e-ISBN 9781250010643

  First Edition: October 2012

 

 

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