Between Wrecks (6 page)

When I took over Carolina Rocks we already had about two hundred tons of beautiful black one- to three-inch skippers dug out of the river stockpiled. I probably scooped out another few hundred tons over the next eight years. But with land developers razing both sides of the border for gated mountain golf course communities, in need of something other than mulch, there was no way I could keep up. A ton of rocks isn't the size of half a French car. Sooner or later, too, I predicted, the geniuses at the EPA would figure out that haphazardly digging out riverbeds and shorelines wouldn't be beneficial downstream. Off in other corners of our land we had giant piles of round rocks, pebbles, chunks, flagstones, and chips used for walkways, driveways, walls, and artificial spring houses. Until my thirty-third birthday, when I would make that final decision to enroll in a low-residency master's program in Southern culture studies, I would sell off what rocks we had quarried, graded, and—according to my mood—either divided into color, shape, or size.

I never really felt that the Loopers' ways of going about the river rock and field stone business incorporated what our competitors might've known in regards to supply and demand, or using time wisely.

“Can we go back to trying our chosen field?” Abby asked. She wore a pair of gray sweatpants and a Moonpie T-shirt. Both of us wore paper birthday cones on our heads. “Please say that we can send out our resumes to TV stations around the country. Hell, I'd give the news in Mississippi if it got my foot in the door.”

She pronounced it “Mishishippi.” She wasn't drunk. One of our professors should've taken her aside right about Journalism 101 and told her to find a new field of study, or concentrate in print media. I didn't have it in me to tell Abby that my grandfather's mule enunciated better than she did. When she wasn't helping out with the Carolina Rocks bookkeeping chores, she drove down to Greenville and led aerobics classes. I never saw her conducting a class in person, but I imagined her saying
“Shtep, shtep, shtep,”
over and over.

“It's funny that you should mention Mississippi,” I said. I thought of the term “segue,” from when I underwent communications studies classes as an undergraduate, usually seated right next to Abby. “I'm going to go ahead and enroll in that Southern studies program. It'll all be done by email and telephone, pretty much, and then I have to go to Mississippi for ten days in the summer and winter. Then, in a couple years, maybe I can go teach college somewhere. We can sell off this land and move to an actual city. It'll be easier for you to maybe find a job that you're interested in.”

I loved my wife more than I loved finding and digging up a truckload of schist. Abby got up from the table, smiled, walked into the den and picked up a gift-wrapped box. She said, “You cannot believe how afraid I was you'd change your mind. Open it up.”

I kind of hoped it was a big bottle of bourbon so we could celebrate there at the kitchen table as the sun rose. I shook it. I said, “It's as heavy as a prize-winning geode,” for I compared everything to rocks. When it hailed, those ice crystals hitting the ground were either pea gravel or riprap, never golf balls like the meteorologists said.

“I'm hoping this will help you in the future. In
our
future.” Abby leaned back and put her palms on the floor like some kind of contortionist. “I don't mind teaching aerobics, but I can't do that when I'm sixty. I can still report the news when I'm sixty.”

Sixschtee
.

I opened the box to uncover volumes one, two, and three of
The South: What Happened, How, When, and Why
. Abby said, “I don't know what else you're going to learn in a graduate course that's not already in here, but maybe it'll give you ideas.”

I might've actually felt tears well up. I opened the first chapter of the third volume to find the heading “BBQ, Ticks, Cotton-mouths, and Moonshine.” I said, “You might be right. What's left to learn?”

I'm not sure how other low-residency programs in Southern culture studies work, but immediately after I sent off the online application—which only included names of references, not actual letters of recommendation—I got accepted. An hour later I paid for the first half-year with a credit card. I emailed the “registrar” asking if I needed to send copies of my undergraduate transcripts and she said that they were a trusting lot at the University of Mississippi-Taylor. She wrote back that she and the professors all believed in a person's word being his bond, and so on, and that the program probably wouldn't work out for me if I was the sort who needed everything in writing.

I called the phone number at the bottom of the pseudo letterhead but hung up when someone answered with “Taylor Grocery and Catfish.” I had only wanted to say that I too ran my river rock and field stone business on promised payments, that my father and grandfather operated thusly even though the mule warned to trust nothing on two legs. And I didn't want to admit to myself or Abby that, perhaps, my low-residency degree would be on par with something like that art institute that accepts boys and girls who can draw fake pirates and cartoon deer.

A day later I received my first assignment from my lead mentor, one Dr. Theron Crowther. He asked that I buy one of his books, read the chapter on “Revising History,” then set about finding people who might've remembered things differently as opposed to how the media reported the incident. He said to stick to southern themes: the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, for example; the sit-in at Woolworth's in Greensboro; unsuccessful and fatal attempts of unionizing cotton mills; Ole Miss's upset of Alabama. I said to Abby, “I might should stick to pulling rocks out of the river and selling them to people who like to make puzzles out of their yard. I have no clue what this guy means for me to do.”

Abby looked over the email. I was to write a ten page paper and send it back within two weeks. “First off, read that chapter. It should give you some clues. That's what happened to me when I wasn't sure about a paper I wrote once on How to Interview the Criminally Insane back in college. You remember that paper? You pussied out and wrote one on How to Interview the Deaf.”

I'd gotten an A on that one: I merely wrote, “To interview a deaf person, find a sign language interpreter.” That was it.

Abby said, “There's this scrapbooking place next door to Feline Fitness. Come on in to work with me and I'll take you over there. Those people will have some stories to tell, I bet. Every time I go past it, these women sit around talking.”

We sat on our front porch, overlooking the last three tons of river rock I'd scooped out, piled neatly as washer-dryer combos, if it matters. Below the rocks, the river surged onward, rising from thunderstorms up near Asheville. I said, “What are you talking?” I'd not heard of the new sport of scrapbooking.

“These people get together just like a quilting club, I guess. They go in the store and buy new scrapbooks, then sit there and shove pictures and mementos between the plastic pages. And they brag, from what I understand. The reason I know so much about it is, I got a couple women in my noon aerobics class who showed up early one day and went over to check out the scrapbook place. They came back saying there was a Junior Leaguer ex-Miss South Carolina in there with flipbooks of her child growing up, you know. She took a picture of her kid two or three times a day, so you can flip the pictures and see the girl grow up in about five minutes.”

I got up, walked off the porch, crawled beneath the house a few feet, and pulled out a bottle of bourbon I kept there hidden away for times when I needed to think—which wasn't often in the river rock business. When I rejoined my wife she'd already gotten two jelly jars out of the cupboard. “There's a whole damn business in scrapbooks? Who thought that up? America,” I said. “Forget the South being fucked up. America.”

“You can buy cloth-covered ones, and puffy-covered ones, and ones with your favorite team's mascot on the cover. There are black ones for funeral pictures, and white ones for weddings. There are ones that are shaped like Santa Claus, the Easter bunny, dogs, cats, cars, and Jesus. They've even got scented scrapbooks.” Abby slugged down a good shot of Jim Beam and tilted her glass my way for more. “Not that I've been in Scraphappy! very often, but they've got one that looks like skin with tattoos and everything, shaped like an hourglass, little tiny blond hairs coming off of it. It's for guys to put their bachelor party pictures inside.”

I didn't ask her if it smelled like anything. I said, “I wonder if they have any bullet-riddled gray flannel scrapbooks for pictures of dead Confederate relatives.” I tried to imagine other scrap-books, but couldn't think of any. “When's your next class?”

We drove down the mountain on the next morning, a Wednesday, so Abby could lead a beginner aerobics class. Wednesdays might as well be called “little Sunday” on a Southern calendar, for smalltown banks and businesses close at noon in order for employees to ready themselves for Wednesday night church services. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, little Sunday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday—like that. My common-law wife took me into Scraphappy!, looked at a wall of stickers, then said, “I'll be back a little after noon, unless someone needs personal training.” She didn't kiss me on the cheek. She looked over at six women sitting in a circle, all of whom I estimated to be in their mid to late thirties.

“Could I help you with anything?” the owner asked me. She wore a nametag that read Knox—the last name of one of the richer families in the area. In kind of a patronizing voice she said, “Did you forget to pack up your snapshots this morning?”

The other women kept turning cellophane-covered pages. One of them said, “Pretty soon I'll have to get a scrapbook dedicated to every room in the house. What a complete freak-up.”

I had kind of turned my head toward the stickers displayed on the wall—blue smiling babies, pink smiling babies, a slew of elephants, Raggedy Anns and Andys, mobiles, choo-choo trains, ponies, teddy bears, prom dresses, the president's face staring vacantly—but jerked my neck back around at hearing “freak-up.” I thought to myself, Remember that you're here to gather revisionist history. You want to impress your professor at Ole Miss-Taylor.

But then I started daydreaming about Frances Bavier, the actress who played Aunt Bee on
The Andy Griffith Show
. I said, “Oh. Oh, I didn't come here to play scrapbook. My name's Stet Looper and I'm enrolled in a Southern studies graduate program, and I came here to see if y'all wouldn't mind answering some questions about historical events that happened around here. Or around anywhere.” I cleared my throat. The women in the circle looked at me as if I walked in wearing a seersucker suit after Labor Day.

Knox the woman said, “Southern studies? My husband has this ne'er-do-well cousin who has a daughter going to one of those all-girls schools up north. Hollins, I believe. She's majoring in women's studies.” In a lower voice she said, “She appears not to like men, if you know what I mean—she snubbed us all by not coming out this last season at the Poinsett Club. Anyway, she's studying for that degree with an emphasis in women's economics, and I told her daddy that it usually didn't take four years learning how to make a proper grocery list.”

I was glad I didn't say that. I'd've been shot for saying that, I figured. The same woman who almost-cursed earlier held up a photograph to her colleagues and said, “Look at that one. He said he knew how to paint the baseboard.”

I said, “Anyway, I have a deadline, and I was wondering if I could ask if y'all could tell me about an event that occurred during your lifetime, something that made you view the world differently than how you had understood it before. Kind of like the Cuban Missile Crisis, but more local, you know.”

“Hey, Knox, could you hand me one them calligraphy stickons says ‘I Told You So'? I guess I need to find me a stamp that says ‘Loser,'” one of the women said. To me she said, “My husband always accuses me of being a germaphobe.” She held up her opened scrapbook for me to see. It looked as though she'd wiped her butt on the pages. “This is my collection of used moist tow-elettes. I put them in here to remember the nice restaurants we've gone to, and sometimes if the waitress gave me extras I put the new one in there, too. But even better, he and I one time went on a camping trip that I didn't want to go on, and as it ended up we got lost. Luckily for Wells, we only had to follow my trail of Wet-Naps back to the parking lot. I don't mind bragging that that trip was all it took for him to buy us a vacation home down on Pawleys Island.”

I wished that I'd've thought to bring a tape recorder. I said, “That's a great story,” even though I didn't ever see it as being a chapter in some kind of Southern culture textbook. I said, “Okay. Do any of y'all do aerobics? My wife's next door teaching aerobics, if y'all are interested. From what I understand, she's tough, but not too tough.” Inside my head I heard my inner voice going, Okay none of these women are interested in aerobics classes so shut up and get out of here before you say something more stupid and somehow get yourself in trouble.

I stood there like a fool for a few seconds. The woman who complained about her baseboard starting flipping through pages, saying, “Look at them. Every one of them.” Then she went on to explain to a woman who must not've been a regular, “I keep a scrapbook of every time my husband messes up. This scrapbook's the bad home repair one—he tries to fix something, then it costs us double to get a professional in to do the job. I got another book filled with bad checks got sent back, and newspaper clippings for when he got arrested and published in the police blotter. I even got ahold of some his mug shots.”

It was like standing next to a whipping post. I said, “Okay, I'm sorry to take up any of your time.” The place should've been called
Strap
happy, I thought.