The Drip, a novel by Michael Gullo
Up the road stands a Baptist church. Across the lane, under the interlocking branches of the age-old trees stands the Community Center. The church was born in here. That’s the way with small flocks back then. They come up a young congregation meeting in the school house or some convenient place, and they grow and they get the funds together, and they build a church house. These two century-old buildings are kinfolk of sorts, one born of the other, neither forgetting their roots. In their midst, on the front porch, leaning on a Kear’s corn broom, Mernie Newell, looking every bit the part of having risen up out of the ground with the porch in 1907. Aged, weathered, her hands having worn the shellac off many a broom, not a name on a handle, a whole industry gone by with the era when making a thing was the way a whole region lived. Along with it, her youth had peeled away like the paint on the clapboard walls, still her own kind of beauty, that which exists in complementary oneness with the surroundings, the beauty not born of symmetry but the sameness of settled weights upon the earth that simultaneously raised them up and bore the load of their lives. Hunched a little, a doctor would diagnose it, for sure, but the term would do it little justice as it’s one thing that names it best. Time changes things from a life of slow and accumulated breakdowns and the accommodations made for them into the timelessness of learning the lessons.
“Who’s that, Emma?”
“Who’s what, Mamaw?”
Emma, younger. Loves her time with Mernie, perplexed at the building, tabulating in her mind the catalog of people she could call upon to volunteer a scrape-and-paint job on the Community Center clap boards just like she had done for the church last year. There’s Connie and Rose, and even old man Joad paid for the paint. She wonders if she can find someone to replace these front doors. She turns her eye from the primer painted steel door that she had been musing was so out of place.
“That’s Jed’s truck, but ain’t him driving it.”
“That’s Lonnie. Jed barried it to him when they took his license.”
“Lonnie’s okay. I don’t like that kid of his though – got a bad habit finding other people’s stuff before they even know they’s missin’.”
“I think he’s just turning around.”
“Long’s it’s not that boy.”
It’s two different doors, not from different times; both are white. Both are steel, windowless. But one came with the frame, and the other was clearly hung on the hinges already in place. They were not the same doors, and oddly they were not even in the same hole like a double door should be. These are two completely different doors in two completely different holes, side by side like they had always been, two foot clapboard between them. Yet they enter the single open room in the same place. The effort of it insists a different time. They’re the same color, but not the same state of sun fade. And they’re the same use, but have a different presence. There’s a reason. There’s always a reason. Were they hung the same day? Who did the work? Most of all, who arranged the work? That’s the real culprit here. If she had been here that day, they’d be different. They’d match for one thing. And no way would they be steel like some gas station outdoor bathroom. They don’t belong here. Maybe she could get someone to donate proper doors.
And that’s how the day went by, Mernie sweeping all about, Emma worrying over the work needs done. Mernie sweeping the inside, Emma checking off the services need donated. The shadows of the branches moved across the parking lot, once pointing here and then pointing there. The neighbors drove by out front this way and that, and the rare deer or turkey alerted or called from the back woods. The birds chirped in the canopy overhead, and a Black Bear slipped past in the side yard completely unnoticed. This is how it had been for generations. From all the way back in the day those two doors were framed up the first time. And Emma is right. There’s always a reason, and the reason for these was simple. Times were different when this building sprouted up, even the name of the town was different. It didn’t become Seymour until 1909 when they changed the name of the railway station in honor of Charles Seymour, Knoxville, Sevierville Eastern Railway Chief Engineer. Before then it was, Newell’s Station and this Community Center was, Pickens School House, and those doors were the separate boys’ and girls’ doors, and Emma sure was right, she would have been hell bent to change that if she was here when the work was done. Changes were coming. They always came. They came with the time. And the hours passed, just as they’d always passed. The building built to separate the boys and girls at the threshold is now where the whole holler files through to be counted as one.
“What’s that?” Mernie called from the porch where she was giving it a second pass. She really wanted to do the stairs.
“What’s what?” And then she heard it. The sound of heavy cart wheels rolling along the road. She turned. “It’s a truck, I guess.”
“Is it stalled?”
“I dunno.”
“I didn’t hear the engine. It just showed up there, rolling slow.”
“It does sound kinda like it’s stalled, and it moves like gravity taking it down the hill.”
“Window’s like mirrors or something. Can’t see who’s drivin’.”
And under her breath, bet he could buy a couple fit-in doors though.