The Drip, a novel by Michael Gullo
“Emma, get the dust pan.”
“Behind you.”
“Don’t know how this get so dusty, nobody ever come.”
“Comes in through the walls, but not for long. Next month will be Spring fresh painted; won’t be no need at all run them bristles ragged with your worry sweep.”
“S’not worry, Emma. Keep it up, it last forever.”
“March second’s the day.”
“Who you git?”
“All the usuals, their kids and grandkids. I could use one or two more.”
“How about Stefanie? You can tell she was raised right.”
“That’s a fact, but I think it’s too soon ask…”
“Mama?”
“Yes, Bernie.”
“This search gives me brain damage.”
“Do you wanna quit?”
“No, Ma’am. It just doesn’t make sense. It’s 2024, and there’s a Raccoon with his own cult following at this point, millions of views, national news channels. This community center, it has been here since at least 1907. It was a real school until 1970, and every search net I cast for just one picture of the front of this building with its original doors comes up void – not empty, void of a photo. There are people in this valley graduated from this school, not near as old as Mamaw Mernie. There’s color photography in 1970 when it closed for goodness sake. It’s not possible that this building survived unphotographed – Mama, stand in front.”
“Bernice, there’s no call… Well, let me see it.”
“There. Now there’s a photo of this place, and I’m posting it on Instagram right now.”
“Don’t you post that picture.”
“Tiktok, Snapchat. It’s not possible this building is not on the internet. Impossible. I can’t even get a straight answer on the address. It’s 1711, 1720. The firehouse is 1718, that’s for sure. But this little Dupont Community Center, Pickens School House, this thing is an enigma.”
“Well, little Bernie. Thas just the way they is, the old models, we ain’t pin down to no fixed thing or place. We cross the time.”
“Mamaw, there’s people all over this valley went to that school, graduated from it. There’s famous people. Reagan surfaced. Reagan Circle, right here. Look at the street sign. Ray Reagan, the county judge, born right here in Dupont in nineteen twenty-one, first of ten children, first of his whole line to finish high school.”
“I know Ray. He was my dear friend. Cancer took him in 1978. I remember it like it was yesterday. Emma, he died the day you was born.”
“Well, before Ray died, he went off to the war and flew for the Army Air Forces — a mechanic and a pilot both, a man who could fix the machine and fly it — and when it was over he came home to Dupont and never left it again. He married an Ogle girl, Louise.”
“I was at that wedding. Louise was the loveliest lady this valley ever knew. Never put a hand down didn’t meet a need or a care or a love.”
“A pair then. Ray drove to a factory in Knoxville and back every day until the county made him a justice of the peace in 1956.”
“He marry up more love in this valley – Louise do the matchmakin and Ray do the hitchin.”
“Then they made him a judge in 1958, and then would not let him quit for twenty years, straight through to the cancer that took him in 1978, just like Mamaw said. Still in office.”
“He’s no prisoner. Ray wouldn’t have it no other way.”
“He built the industrial park. He built the hospital. He built the airport between the Forge and Gatlinburg. There is a bridge over the French Broad with his name bolted to it. This county celebrates its history, but not Pickens Schoolhouse. This county ran its whole judging through a man who came out of a two-door schoolhouse in a valley that cannot afford one photograph of itself. And the whole time he sat that bench, Mama, he never moved away. Never topped out. The judge of the entire county, and he drove home to Dupont every night of his life. He voted here. I vote here. We all vote here.”
“I have the self same problem, Bernice. I been to Williams Library, The Heritage Museum, I had lunch with Anna Garber and Steve Petty, they’re kitchen table historians. I’ve been to the Boyd’s Creek book crew. I’ve asked every soul I stumbled upon looking for just one pic of this building with the original doors.”
“Everyone has a lead, but no picture has materialized.”
“Exactly, baby. So if you want to give up, I found a lot of old time buildings and old time doors, and I can even get a few of them purdy cheap, and I can dress this place up like it wants to dress.”
“I’ve followed every lead, and if there’s a picture of this building out there, I don’t see it.”
“I remember the doors, Emma. Like I say, I don’t have a picture, but I remember them. They was glass panes from top to bottom. They was heavy, so heavy. When you come out a windy day, that wind catch them doors, and it’s all I can do to hold on the handle.”
“Mamaw, If I could just transcribe your mind onto Bernie’s internet. No telling what we’d see.”
“Well, I see more about that old holler than I see about this historical building. Trail Holler, though you’re right, the internet don’t call it that. I see that before Stefanie bought it, it was owned by Charlie and Bobbie Lovell, and that they bought it at a tax forfeiture auction in 1989. I see that it was a pig farm for many years. I even see that a huge dam up there let go in a storm, and it wiped out the house where your friend Betty lives. Them steps to nowhere that head up the hillside in front of her house, they used to lead to a house wiped out by the flood when the dam let go. I can see all that.”
“I see that too, Bernie. A terrible rain come, not days long, but days worth in one fell storm. That rain took out the old pig farm dam, they’d built it up on top of that dam’s up thar now. Five times the size it is now, and it come down that holler in a piece, more like an avalanche than a flood. It wipe out the trees, cut loose the very earth from the land itself. Them people lef off atter that. Nothin’ left to pack. They just left one day soon after, and nobody ever heard from them again.”
“I bet the internet could find them, Bernie.”
“Not today it can’t. I’ve already been all the way to the end of the internet and back. I started right here in Sevier County with exact searches for Dupont Community Center, Pickens Schoolhouse, Dupont School, and I ended up in Pickens, West Virginia. Turns out there are three counties with the same name as our schoolhouse, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. There’s four Duponts: The chemical company in Wilmington Delaware, Old Hickory, Nashville, Dupont, Washington, and Dupont City, West Virginia. There’s a Seymour, Indiana – John Mellencamp lives there, a Seymour, Texas, a Seymour, Connecticut. There’s even a Seymour in Wisconsin.”
“You been all them places today, Bernie?”
“Mamaw, I been to servers all over the world. I searched sibling schoolhouses, I searched genealogy databases. I searched social media. I searched historical websites. Ironically, I found a picture of our little schoolhouse in a place called Letsbeblount, but it was an oblique angle and no view of the front doors. Irony being that a Blount County tourism website recognized this building’s significance and tried to steal it for their own history. I’ve been to the Library of Congress, and it was wallpapered with Greenbrier Schoolhouse in Metcalf Bottoms. I searched every website on the internet, and I came up empty handed. And every time I thought I was onto something, I met a rock wall.”
“So it can’t be done?”
“I tried the firehouse. I found roll call lists of every person that ever worked there, thinking maybe one of their social media pages had a pic in the parking lot. I searched Sevier County Schools to ear-popping depths in hope of a class picture or a graduation photo. I blew right past every polite door mat captcha I came across, every members only, every glass wall on an Instagram post, every place on the internet, and if there’s a picture of this building with the original doors, I can’t find it. Every tease met a wall. All rock.”