The Burning Fork General Store and Post Office

Heirloom Memories The Burning Fork General Store and Post Office Mary Lou Brown Byrd Lizzie's General Store, also housing the Burning Fork Post Office, was a weathered frame, settling comfortably with the years, blending unobtrusively into the low, green hills surrounding it. A tacky coal house, unplanned and out of plumb, protruded from one end of the building. Extra bedrooms, apparently as hastily conceived as the owner's numerous tow-headed progeny, straggled in an uneven line from the main living quarters in back of the store. Here the people gathered daily to buy eight-pound buckets of pure leaf-lard, sacks of Dixie Lily corn meal, Martha White flour, and fiftypound sacks of middlings for the hogs. At nine o'clock each morning, the mail truck rolled in, an ancient government vehicle with a canvas top that flapped in the breeze. A sign on the muddy windshield proclaimed: "U.S. Government vehicle. No passengers allowed." The driver, cheerfully unconcerned about government policy, unloaded several passengers he had picked up on his route, accepting the nickel and dime fares offered, and plucked from the store porch two more waiting fares needing a ride into the county seat. He left a skimpy sack of mail that Lizzie distributed into the various cubicles bearing names of regular patrons. "Howdy do, howdy do. Hit's as cold as fluegins, hain't it?" "Shore is. Ain't that the truth!" Was the hearty rejoinder. The words bore traces of Elizabethan English brought by ancestors from the old country when they climbed the high Cumberland plateau and found the "Gap" to settle the valleys of the Big Sandy and the Licking. In winter, when the creek iced over and cold winds blew up from the flat bottom lands on the Licking River, the dozen-odd nail kegs, milk cans, and split hickory bottomed chairs were throughout the day occupied, then vacated—a constant flux and flow like a game ofmusicalchairs . A youngster might claim a seat for a moment, but a rigid pecking Mary Lou Brown Byrd has writtenfrequently on mountain life as she knew itgrowing up. She has been published in the Courier-Journal Magazine and haswrittenfor theSalyersville Independent and theJessamine Journal. 52 order mandated that a child should immediately relinquish his seat when an older person entered the store. Older habitués then sat for hours, sometimes snoozing by the fire until awakened by a new arrival. When a customer lifted the curlicued latch at the door, his nose wrinkled at the pervasive odor ofsliced bologna, unwashed bodies, wet dogs, pipe tobacco, and green oak firewood that mingled with the stench of cow dung and scorched rubber arising from rubber boots held too near the hot stove. The raw aroma of moonshine from an uncorked bottle being passed surreptitiously from one man's hand to another made noses tingle and eyes (and some mouths) water. Lizzie didn't allow hard liquor in the store—if she knew about it. A brass spittoon squatted near the pot-bellied stove to accommodate those who bit offa chew from a homemade plug or from a twist of"Day's Work," a convenience often overlooked in the heat of a rousing political argument when Democrats were damned to hell and Republicans roasted on a spit. The glowing stove sizzled with the many dribbles and stains of poor marksmanship. In early spring, when blooming dogwoods and redbuds painted the greening hills with splotches of creamy-white and rose-red, seats were dragged to the front porch that extended the length ofthe rustic building. Although customers came and went all day, litde hard cash changed hands. Groceries were let out on credit until a calf, a hog, or a brace of scaly-legged winter hens went to market. More often, payment was deferred until just before Christmas when tobacco, sorghum, and corn crops were sold and traded. When Jake Day ran out ofshelled corn, he bought scratch feed for his chickens at the store. Luke Cole brought his blue-bottle jug in for two gallons of lamp oil and a dime's worth of gumdrops for his feeble-minded mother. Lily Day traded a dozen eggs for a...