When the forest slopes were nothing but stumps and the timber cutters moved on, the sawmill shut down. After that, it was like the hands ran backward on the clock. The earthen dam slowly eroded on Blackburn River, and the little housing settlement that sprang up around the mill began succumbing to the gray and ceaseless weight of gravity. Though the first Fords had made occasional visits over the dusty mountain roads, mostly driven by lumber barons who wanted to check on their investments, the town's slow exodus was almost entirely via horse-and-wagon. By the Great Depression, Solom was little more than a whistle stop on the Virginia Creeper railroad line. Then came the great 1940 flood, sweeping away the station and a third of the remaining houses, killing a dozen people in the process.
Sarah's grandparents died within weeks of one another, and the three children fought over who had to stay and run the store. The short straw belonged to Sarah's father, Elisha, who promptly took on a Primitive Baptist wife, Laurel Lee, because she knew addition and subtraction and silence. Through it all the general store stood on its little rise above the river, the stock changing with the times. Chesterfield tobacco pouches and Bugler papers gave way to Marlboro tailor-mades, horehound stick candy disappeared from the shelves in favor of Baby Ruths. A Sears amp; Roebuck catalog by the register once allowed a mountain family to order practically anything a New York city slicker could buy, but that had been replaced by a computer during the Clinton era. Sarah didn't trust it, had even named it "Slick Willy" and suspected it of swallowing a dollar once in a while, and the screen stayed black unless Gretta, the thick-ankled college student who worked part-time, was on the clock.
The computer was one of the few modern touches, besides the sheer volume of cheap imported crafts designed to look folksy. The wall adornments-rusty advertising signs, farm implements, and shelves of old ripple glass bottles-furthered the illusion that the general store was lost in time, a nostalgic reminder of more carefree days. Sarah didn't buy the illusion, but she sold it. Times were better raking in leisure dollars than dunning the local folks for nickels.
Sarah had grown up in the store, dusting the shelves and tallying pickled eggs in her plain cotton shift. She remembered when the store's first indoor toilet was installed, and though as a four-year-old she'd had a great fear of the roaring flush of water, shed had an even greater fear of hanging her bare bottom over that stinky black hole in the outhouse. Even back then, she'd pushed a broom, and had asked her mother about the numerous little black needles amid the stray hair, spilled sugar, dried grass, and dirt.
"Mouse doodie," Laurel Lee had said. "A mouse goes to heaven in a country store."
Sarah had always thought of those mice as happy, blessed creatures, scurrying under the floorboards, worrying their way through sacks of feed grain, chewing into the corners of cornflake boxes. But after nearly seventy years of sweeping up their damned doodie, she was about ready to wish them to a Baptist hell.
But at least the mice gave her something to blame when strange sounds echoed through the aisles. She didn't like being in the store alone, but she could barely afford her two part-time helpers. So she'd spent the past decades running the broom, ignoring the evidence of her ears, and not thinking about the scarecrow man.
The bell over me screen door rang. It was ten minutes after seven, past closing time, but she hadn't locked the door. The porch light bathed the deck in yellow light, and Sarah squinted against it at the bulky shadow.
"Howdy," she said. It was still tourist season in the mountains, though the Floridians and New Yorkers were usually tucked away in their Titusville hotel rooms by now, afraid of getting a mosquito bite, or else squirreled away in their Happy Hollow rental cabins at $150 a night. The kayak and rafting trade from Sue Norwood's little shop had boomed a little along the river, helping me general store keep its head above water. Seemed like every time the business wanted to sink down to the sandy bottom and take a nice, long nap, some moneymaking scheme came along and dragged it back to the surface for another gasp.
The shadow stood in the door, hands in pockets, the head obscured by an outdated hat with a wide brim. All Sarah wanted was to get a little of his money and send him on his way in time for the latest rerun of Seinfeld, delivered via her little satellite dish.
"Can I get you something?" she said, glad to be shut of mouse doodie for the moment. Her voice had developed a mountain twang over the years, partly unconsciously and partly to help sell the illusion.
The figure shuffled forward. People in these parts, even the visitors, usually answered when addressed. But occasionally a creep came through looking for the best place in the neighborhood for fast money. She did a mental calculation, figured she had maybe eighty bucks in the register. Worth killing somebody over, these days.
Sarah leaned her broom against the counter, flicking her eyes toward the shotgun she kept on the second shelf beneath the register. The shotgun was well oiled but hadn't been fired in twenty years. Currently it was covered by stacks of the High Country News, a free weekly that was such wretched oatmeal she couldn't give it away. She'd hidden the newspapers, not wanting to disappoint the friendly young man with the crew cut who delivered them early Thursday mornings. She figured there were at least two months of bad copy between her and the firearm.
She'd have to talk her way out of this one. "Got a special on canned ham," she said. "Nine dollars. Let the missus take an evening off from the kitchen."
Nothing, not even a grunt. The man was three steps inside. She wished she'd left more lights on. It was the electrical cooperative's fault. In her father's day, the Blackburn dam had a generator, cranking out enough juice to light up the store and two dozen homes. Then the co-op came in and hooked five counties together, and you had to be on the grid or off, no in between. After that, the power bill had gotten higher every month.
Sarah could make out the man's form now, the collar of his coat turned up even though the fall had yet to turn chilly. The front brim of the hat was angled down, keeping the face in shadows.
The stranger stood there, his breath like the whistle of a distant train. Something creaked in the hardware section, in the back corner of the store that Sarah avoided after sundown. Things went wrong in that corner: alakaline batteries leaked boxes of nails busted open for no good reason, the fingers of work gloves somehow grew holes. Her father had sold guns, and the ammunition used to be locked away in that corner, but one afternoon some of the bullets somehow got hot and exploded, sending lead fragments whizzing over the heads of the customers. Sarah wished for a magic bullet right now, one that would knock the stranger's hat off his head.
Because the hat didn't belong.
"Your first trip to Solom?" Sarah said, keeping her voice steady. She eased toward the counter, closer to the register and the shotgun. She'd been driving some tacks into the shelf so she could hang her metal signs, the ones that said A BAD DAY OF FISHING BEATS A GOOD DAY OF WORK and I AIN'T OLD, I'M JUST EXPERIENCED. She leaned on the counter with one elbow, her other arm reaching for the hammer. It felt good in her hand.
"You staying up at the Tester B-and-B?" she asked the mute man. "Or the Happy Hollow cabins?"