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MEREDITH SUE WILLIS 615 My Boy ELROY from In the Mountains ofAmerica (1994) My grandmother's store sat at a curve in the Wise Mountain road. It was a general merchandise store and mail drop-off for all the farms and hollows and ridges and folds of the mountain community of High Gap. People used to come down near noontime and wait for the mail. The store had so much open space that they pulled the kitchen chairs, nail kegs, and wooden dynamite boxes near the iron stove, even in the hot summer weather, just to localize the conversation. When I stayed with my grandmother two summers in a row, her main stock-in-trade was Pepsi Cola, pink snowball nickel cakes, and canned lunch meat. She also sold a lot of pressed chewing tobacco: mostly Red Man and Day's Work, which looked like a yellow candy bar to me on some days, and like dried dung on others. She used to have staple goods in her store, too, bags of flour and meal, but over the years she found that the fewer large items she sold, the less she had to enter on her credit books; people tended to pay cash for Vienna sausages and Dreamsicles. The people waiting for the mail used to tell stories. I loved the slowness of the telling. I would line up coins in the coin drawer, or sit on a sack of cornmeal and look out the window, letting their voices carry me along. They took turns speaking, never interrupting each other, using short blasts ofwords: quick-speakers, not Deep South drawlers, but mountain talkers, rat-a-tat followed by a space. After a decent appreciative interval at the end of one story, someone else would start. I loved to be a part of those stories. Sometimes I wished I could be big enough to sit on a nail keg and take a turn, but mostly I was a little awed by the people, and happy to watch them from a distance. They had mouths that weren't like people's I knew; cheeks that had collapsed around toothlessness, and the men sometimes wore their bodies bare inside stiff blue jean overalls. The women sat with their knees apart and discreetly waved their dresses up and down for ventilation. So I stayed at the window, or behind the counter with my grandmother. She always kept a distance hersel£ never joining them in the circle. People called her Mrs. Morgan, even the ones she called by their first names, and no one ever came into the living quarters in the back ofthe store. When I asked why, if Mrs. Robinson was a good woman, she never came back into our kitchen, my grandmother said, "Oh, honey, you have to be real careful when people owe you money." 616 LISTEN HERE To tell the truth, looking back, I think my grandmother's pride entered into it. She had sent her children to college, and while she didn't boast, people knew my father and my Aunt Ellen were both schoolteachers. My grandmother had a very precise line in her mind between good and bad. Educating your children and paying your bills were on the good side. Politeness was good, too, and she was polite to everyone, but she told me very clearly the difference between good people like the Robinsons who would give you the shirt off their back and the other ones you couldn't turn your back on for three seconds or they'd steal the varnish off the countertop. And then there were the Possetts, who were in another category altogether . I first heard them mentioned in the course ofsomeone's story around the stove. "Worthless as a Possett," someone said. I asked my grandmother later, just what is a Possett? "Euh, euh," she said, in her special tone of humorous disgust that was supposed to make me giggle. "You stay away from those Possetts. They have cooties and they marry each other. Euh, euh." A few days later, Earl Robinson started telling a story about the Possetts, how they'd had a fire and lost a child, or maybe two. 'They never could count that good," said Earl. He paused then, and no one haw-hawed, but even I figured out the joke. "The ones that lived got burnt, too," said Earl. "All bur that big Elroy. He just hightailed it our ofthere, didn't lift a finger to help...

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