The shopkeeper wears an old-fashioned costume, because it is Founder's Day week, the town is two hundred seventy years old, and my interest in American history often brings me into proximity with characters such as the shopkeeper, who revere the past or want to simulate it in ways I don't. On this spot, she attests, and we both look down at the unswept floorboards, the town's founders decided there must be a library, and it is one of the towns in America that first had free, public schools and a free, public library, and in her shop, many yellow-paged books describe the town's illustrious past, along with outdated manuals and instruction leaflets, whose pages fall out when opened, on knitting and the other homely arts, as well as on languages, which contain a type of history, at least one of endeavor and of trial and error. The Polish woman might vacation in a picturesque town like this, with her mother or girlfriends, visit the abandoned mills, historic inns, or churches where Jonathan Edwards damned congregations, or go skiing, ski comes from the Scandinavian languages, also, and she might spend a long, active weekend exerting herself until a film of sweat dampened her skin, since, never liking to be idle, when the devil does his work, she's told me, she enjoys walking, volleyball, and most forms of exercise, especially going on outings and strenuous hikes. I don't go on outings or never call them that, though my trips to town might indeed be outings.
The owner of the store has hung photographs of her dog on the wall behind her, a large, black and brown mutt, a mixed breed, like most people, indistinguishable from many others, but I know, because of the way I feel about my animals, that for her there is no other dog like it. My slightly wild cat is black and unmarked, and, he would, if he were lost, be hard to trace, because, unless you loved him, as I do, you wouldn't notice his endearing characteristics, which make him unusual and appealing, since he is not just a black cat, though he is that, too, and only that to others who don't love him. The Polish woman has never mentioned cats or dogs, she might not like animals, or she might like them but not want them to ruin her furniture, a reservation I don't appreciate, because it betrays a respect or reverence for the material world or a materialism I don't admire, though I love chairs and textiles, and would not want either ruined by my cat, but people in this town revere their pets, people everywhere love their animals, and, on the picture-perfect streets here, hulking, aged Labradors creep after adoring masters, and in the town's two cafes and one diner, small dogs sleep on human laps, since dogs are allowed in the bookstore, antique store, drugstore, and health food store, and no one complains about allergies to dog or cat hair, though some people must be allergic to dander and own special vacuum cleaners to facilitate its elimination, in order not to have to expel their beloved animals. My dog was given away by my parents, who pretended to love her but must not have, or if they did, it's a mystery how they could have abandoned the beloved, innocent animal to a shelter and had it killed. Both the family cat and dog disappeared, taken by night or day, left somewhere or given away. The cat supposedly ran from the shelter, jumped out of its cage, and I have many times conjured the scene in the animal shelter, when the cage opened, and someone was about to feed her, and she, wily and desperate, took her opportunity and raced out, far away, kept running until she reached a highway, followed it, and tried to find her way back to the people who supposedly loved her, but then she was hit by a car and maybe killed, or she spent months on the road, wounded, and winter came and killed her, though she had been exceptionally sturdy and resourceful. When my family bought our comfortable house, which was built to my parents' and the architect's specifications, my mother decided that our cat, who was then very young, but very different from my cat now, should live near the house while it was under construction, and that we should visit her every week since we came anyway to see the house's progress. There were woods all around at that time, the area was forested and swampy, not a yawning suburb, which it would eventually become, and back then the cat was left there in the woods, to scavenge and hunt, and every weekend we visited the house and her. My mother, to whom the cat was devoted, because she delivered the cat's first litter, which included a breech birth, whistled sharply, two fingers tucked in the corners of her mouth, and from a distance we could all hear the excited scramble of a four-legged creature racing happily, even madly, through the leaves to her and us. The cat always came.
The shopkeeper's dress is wool cambray, coarse and brown, a simple design with no excess, no flounces or decoration, a studiously severe outfit like that which might have been worn by a Puritan prison guard, and she also wears a stiff bonnet tied under her chin with a gray grosgrain ribbon, whose serrated edges sink into her fleshy neck, reddening her olive skin at those points. In this town and the environs, the textile industry flourished from the beginning of the 19th century, when the region was home to many mills, as well as ball-bearing factories, and none of this is now evident except as historical lore on plaques. The town and state has many rivers and streams, great water power for running mills, and Eli Whitney may have passed through; his cotton gin is mentioned in the town's brochures, though it wasn't invented here. Rows of warping machines dwarfed child workers, whose fingers and hands must have bled from cuts, their soft skin hardened and scarred over time from the process of carting, spinning and sorting the rough raw materials, cotton and wool, into threads, yarns, and finally fabrics, while the multitude of spindles revolving in spinning rooms whirred and cranked noisily during the ten- to twelve-hour workdays. In 1860, not far from here, in Lowell, Massachusetts, there were more cotton spindles than in all the eleven states that combined would eventually make up the Confederacy, so the North had an industrial advantage, though both white Northerners and Southerners mostly disdained skins darker than theirs. In America the Industrial Revolution proceeded with strength only after the Civil War ended, and the first textile factory workers were like indentured servants. Max Weber theorized it was slavery that brought about the end of the Roman Empire, as Rome's troops were complemented by their slaves who needed to be fed and housed when they advanced, so they weren't productive labor, they didn't fight, but instead slowed the Roman army and cost it dearly, and slavery might have similarly ruined the American economy as it industrialized, since slavery was part of an agrarian society. In the postcard tray I search for something I might send the Polish woman, who wouldn't expect attention or remembrance from me, since she never thinks of me, and I sometimes believe she doesn't know my name, but because of that I'd like to mail her a pleasant card, since I do think of her. Choosing it prolongs my stay in the shop, and while I ramble about, the kitchen helper has probably left the cafe, as the shopkeeper tugs at her uncomfortable dress, looking at me with suppressed impatience, and at last I settle on a postcard with a pastoral scene that might be appropriate to the taste of the Polish aesthetician. The shopkeeper smiles now, relieved, and soon she'll ask me to return, which I will, but on a long-ago visit to a similar shop in the South near a similar town, where fate was summoned when I rejected a man's advances, I'd accompanied a widow whose husband had been a renowned scientist, who herself had written essays on science, popularizing the subject for the lay reader, as she put it, and after he died, she often spent time away from what had been their home, but then relief was not the outcome of our visit to this shop. The widow was ordinarily restrained, yet in the store marveled broadly and audibly about an object concocted by one of the town's craftspeople, of wood and paper, which, when she picked it up to see it better, crumbled in her hands and fell to the floor, ruined. The shopkeeper demanded she pay for it, and my friend, the widow, refused, at first calmly, since she had not misused it, she declared, or hurt it in any way, but then neither character relented, and when the irate shopkeeper reached for the telephone to call the police, the circumspect widow, who was then my friend, and I walked quickly to her car at whose door she wept from humiliation, collapsing in my arms, because standing up for herself had drained her of life. I never went back there, to the store or the town, though I think of it, because the woman was shattered by the experience, which reiterated earlier ones, and, shortly after our disastrous outing to the store, she returned to the place where she was lonely without her husband, who, she also confessed in her car, had drunk to insensibility most of his life, was cruel and violent, and where she once was the subject of an investigation, based on circumstantial evidence, when coincidentally she fled from her husband's drunkenness on the same night a robbery occurred in the town where she lived with him, relative newcomers, and she happened to be noticed in the middle of the night, wandering upset and aimlessly in the small town, and became a suspect, though she was merely in the wrong place at the wrong time, but circumstantial evidence stained her present with an enduring blot.