Wooden Benches

FICTION Wooden Benches MJ. King WHEN IT WAS ALL SAID AND DONE, Simmons Gas Station was finally torn down. Pa Beattie said there was nothing we could do about it. I cried for six days. Dad said boys didn't cry over what they couldn't fix. I couldn't imagine walking out of the holler and not seeing that rundown gas station beckoning to me like an old friend lonely and blue. Mama said I could go to the new Chittybang Gas Station. It wasn't but a few more steps down the road in the opposite direction. I just didn't see the Chittybang in the same way I saw Simmons, with its rusted white and yellow sign hanging out front exclaiming to the world that they had Co-Cola. The rest of the letters had been eaten through by rust years ago. My best friend Ray used to meet me at Simmons because he lived on the other side of the ridge. We would sit under the feet of the old men who sat on the rickety wooden benches spitting tobacco over our heads into the gravel. It never occurred to us what might be falling on our heads. We could sit in the gravel for hours playing marbles on the patch of packed mud the gravel had been cleaned off of a long time ago. There wasn't even one wooden bench in front of Chittybang. The old men who spat tobacco for hours didn't have a decent place to hang out after Simmons was closed. On hot muggy summer days before we knew Simmons was going to be torn down, we would lie awake in our makeshift tents and Ray would impersonate old Purvis, who always talked about his wife and the milkman. "Yeah, Mabel and the milkman must be at it again. I got another young'n on the way." Gypsy Holler never did have no milkman delivering anything. Purvis just wouldn't admit he was bringing another mouth to feed into his family of fifteen. He was too old to work, but he still farmed his land. Everything he needed in life could be planted, he would always say. Ray and I didn't know about that. Our dads worked at a lumber mill down by the river. We rarely ever saw them. Purvis thought it was a shame that men let other men cut their lumber. He often cussed and said people were getting lazier every day. When I would tell my dad what Purvis said, he just sadly shook his head and 58 clutched the steering wheel of his brand new red pickup truck. I knew he wanted to say something to me, but he didn't know what. My dad is a man of few words. He says I talk way too much and should stay home and keep my mama company, since we both like to talk so much. My mama always has something to say. Yet even she couldn't say a word as I stood there in front of Simmons Gas Station and cried like a baby. The old building crumbled to the ground like the last remainder of what a small community should be. Something in our community was being taken away, and I knew it as the dust settled and crowds of people walked back toward their hollers in disbelief. Then Pa Beattie, who had sat with Purvis and Willard on those wooden benches out front for thirty years, pronounced to us all what we already knew. "Times sure are changing." In Lowes For Jamie Lynn A field of green sod waits to be divided and relocated. A tractor tills the field until worms are on top. Weeds shoot out in directions and patterns like a Pollack. Shelby—my cat—eats on some animal not quick enough to escape her. A hummingbird is hung up in my screen door. The bends in the road disappear with a lowering sun. I watch this from a window that overlooks the kitchen sink and raise the inner pane to hear what I see. Benny Garrison's girls playing around the turn, Crickets rubbing their hind legs, The...