“Well, they’re both vacant now,” the deputy grumbled.
“I intend to open a store in that smaller building, Lord willing.”
The deputy nodded and remarked, “Well, somebody oughtta get a store going again here or there’ll be folk starving.” After a beat he added, “It takes a lots of guts to open a business in times like these. You just keep yourself safe. You have any trouble, just ask for me, Deputy Dustin Hodges, okay?”
Sheila nodded and smiled.
Deputy Hodges gave a sweep of his hand and said, “God bless you, ma’am.”
As they proceeded to slowly drive through the remainder of the roadblock’s sharp S-turns, Emily quoted one of her favorite sayings, from the play A Streetcar Named Desire: “ ‘I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.’”
The old store building was on the main street running through Bradfordsville. It was sandwiched between the defunct Superior Foods and a gas station, also closed. At the gas station, a large hand-painted sign across the boarded front door proclaimed: “NO GAS.”
Sheila got out and examined the building. It was of the old false-front style and looked to have been built in the 1920s or even earlier. Peering through the dusty windows, Sheila could see a small sales floor ringed by a semicircle of glass cabinets. Behind was a doorway leading to a back room. There appeared to be an apartment upstairs.
A small hand-penned sign taped inside the window read: “For Sale or Lease, Contact Hollan Combs,” and gave an area code 270 phone number.
Sheila pulled out her notepad. On the inside of the front cover she saw something that her late mother had penned the year before she died of uterine cancer:
“A prudent man foreseeth the evil, and hideth himself: but the simple pass on, and are punished.”
Sheila jotted down the name and phone number on a blank page.
She told Emily and Tyree to wait in the car. Then she strode toward the pay phone booth at the gas station.
Tyree protested: “Mom, the phones aren’t workin’. Not even the cell phone.”
“I know, I know.”
Thankfully, the plastic phone book holder still held a local phone book. Listed under C she found: “Combs H, 200 S. 6th Street, Brdfsvl.”
The house was just two blocks away. Again leaving her son and grandmother in the car, Sheila knocked on the door of a 1960s-style house. A weathered sign read: “Combs Soils Lab.”
The man who answered the door was in his seventies, gaunt, with thick black plastic-framed glasses. He carried a stubby Dan Wesson .357 revolver in an inside-the-waistband holster. He asked, “Can I hep you?”
“My name is Sheila Randall. I would like to lease that store building and apartment above it-next to the gas station. You own it, right?”
Combs seemed hesitant, “Well, there is water working here in town-it’s all gravity from a big spring up by the Taylor County line-but no power, and I don’t even know what to charge in rent these days.”
“I propose five dollars a month.”
The old man laughed and slapped the side of his thigh. “You gotta be joking. Five dollars won’t even buy you a piece of penny candy.”
“I mean five dollars in silver coin.”
Hollan Combs jerked his chin back and said, “Oh, well, that’s different.” After pondering for a moment, he said, “I’ll need you to pay two months in advance, but you can lease it from month to month after that. I’ll also need a signed statement from you that you’re getting it as is, with no guarantee that the power will ever come back on. If and when it does, the power bill will be separate.”
Just a few minutes later Combs unlocked the store’s front door and ushered in Sheila, Tyree, and Emily.
“My last tenants here were brothers. They had a unique combination gun, cigar, and liquor store. They called it ‘Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms’ and they even answered the phone that way. That was good for a laugh. But the recession just went on and on-double-dip and then triple-dip, you know. They folded a year ago. I heard they moved back to Tennessee.”
Sheila examined the glass display cases as Combs went on, “The roof was redone just three years ago. The apartment ain’t much, but it’s been repainted since the ‘ATF’ guys moved out. I had a man clean the chimney, and he put a new elbow on the back of the wood stove, since the old one had rusted out. The place was clean, but I’m afraid the mice have made a mess up there.”
Sheila was pleased to see that the store building had plenty of windows that provided light to conduct business in the absence of grid power. Traces of the building’s former use lingered. The back room was still cluttered with empty gun and whiskey boxes, and one of the glass display cabinets still had a distinct tobacco smell. There was an empty twenty-rifle rack on the north wall of the store, behind the counter. The only entrance to the apartment was via an inside staircase that led up from the store’s small windowless back room. The stairs creaked as they walked up. The apartment had two bedrooms, a gas cooking range, a small Jotul wood/coal stove, an electric refrigerator (propped open with a stick of firewood), and a small bathroom with a toilet and a tub-shower.
“Bring me the lease papers. I’ll take it,” Sheila said.
Less than an hour later they had unpacked the car and moved in. Sheila’s packets of seeds filled two of the glass display cases, in neat rows. They put a few other items suitable for trading in another case.
“Not a lot to start with,” Emily remarked.
“Trust in the Lord, Gran, we trust in the Lord.”
Emily warned, “And you know the ten dollars in silver that you gave Mr. Combs was almost all the coins we had. I gots just three silver quarters and one dime left.”
“Trust in the Lord, Gran, trust in the Lord.”
Sheila dug out her tempera paints and soon started painting signs on the inside of the front windows. The signs read: “The Seed Lady,” “Sundry Merchandise,” “Buy-Sell-Trade,” and “Open 8 to 8. Closed Sundays.” She had her first customer walk in even before the paint had dried. He traded a box of 12-gauge shotgun shells for three packets of seeds. In the next few days a steady stream of customers began to arrive, all eager to trade. Eventually, some came from as far as the towns of Lebanon and Campbellsville. Sheila soon developed a reputation as a savvy yet fair storekeeper.
People brought Sheila all sort of things to trade for seeds, or at least to try to trade for them. Most of what they offered was junk, and Sheila got in the habit of saying politely yet forcefully, “Pass.” But she did trade for hard items, like tools, cans of WD-40, batteries, rolls of duct tape, ammunition, and hardware like nails and nuts and bolts. She made it her habit to reject any appliance that required electricity, since the grid power was down, and batteries were in short supply.
Late on the afternoon of the sixth day after they arrived, a slightly drunk man brought in an old Pilot brand vacuum tube table radio that had a wooden case. It had both AM and shortwave bands, and according to the man it worked well, back when utility power was available. He also said that his grandfather put all new capacitors in it, to replace the older, paper-wrapped ones. Sheila was about to reject it when her mother asked: “Look in the back. Has it got a transformer? And how many tubes does it have?”
Puzzled, Sheila did as she was told, which was easy, since the radio’s original back cover was missing: “It’s got no transformer, and it has five tubes.”
“Go ahead and trade for that.”
“But, Gran, it takes AC power. We don’t have a generator.”