BIG SOUTHERN CHAPTER 60

2012

DAVID

There's a ledger in Henry's stash from the Pingree railroad depot, which brings back memories of Joe's. Not from Henry's time, but from when it was repurposed as a dingy tavern that I haunted—'Look in the Yellow Pages, you can find his number under Bar Fixtures' was the repeated joke, not wholly facetious. I open it, read the entries. It has unorthodox notes scribbled in the margins, a lot of initials. H.H., D.B.—these accompany large molasses shipments that exceed any imaginable need for the local population, then or now. Carloads. I flip through the pages, my eyes on the dates where initials are. Beginning in the 1910s and running into the early 30s. The penny drops—a side business of supplying moonshiners during Prohibition.

It seems apt, then, that the depot would became a bar in the late sixties. A little bit of irony woven into the area's historical thread. Joe's Bar, the Italian owner stricken in the fifties polio epidemic. He ran the bar first in a cement block building on the new highway, then bought the railroad depot across the tracks when it was put up for sale, moved into it. When he died in 1972 the bar closed, but his son opened it briefly shortly after. His run was short, his bartending more practiced on the receiving, rather than disbursing, side of the bar.

It sat defunct through the middle of that decade. I passed it almost every day on my way to town and back—that three year wasted time at Humpty's Dump. Joe's was a kind of beacon sitting beyond the railroad tracks, just far enough from the highway to elicit curiosity. As schoolboys, we disbelieved the rumor that prostitutes operated upstairs, though we wanted badly to know for sure. The depot's gathering entropy, barely noticed as we ourselves aged, characterized the state of the deteriorating community—as farms got bigger, farmers' offspring left, in part of necessity but in part drawn to brighter dreams.

When a light appeared one late December night, in 1977 I believe, it wasn't exactly the Bethlehem story, but I pulled into the lot on the way home, drawn to it. There was an early fifties Dodge, decrepit as the depot, parked in front and just as I drove in a short box pickup came in from the other direction. "Is it open?" I asked the other driver, both of us on our way to the door. He grinned the most twisted, wry and welcoming grin I've ever seen before saying, "Depends on what you mean by open."

The girl working inside lit up when she saw him, came out from behind the bar and hugged him. "Gary!" She didn't know me from sight but remembered me as a child, it turned out, and her story unfolded, drew us in. And we stayed.

Deon, Joe's daughter, was trying to open the bar up again. From the looks of the place, left in shambles by her brother, I didn't think it possible. I figured she was on a brief hiatus from a trip downhill that she—we— had been on for some time. The water pipes were broken, the heat was just barely noticeable, and she had no license to sell alcohol. Gary had an answer to that. "Come on," he said to me and I went along. It's what you did at the time, you smoked a joint with any stranger, picked up any hitchhiker, shared your beer with anyone—you seized any connection offered. Gary turned back to Deon and said, "We'll be back."

We drove to town, bought a case of beer, brought it back to Deon and we made fifty cent donations—not purchases, as that would be illegal—for each beer we drank. The practice continued in the coming weeks, other drinkers started filing in, and the next three years of my life centered there, right up until the Walthers ended it all. If I thought she was circling the drain, well, I was swirling around it twice as fast.

Back in the present, my body signals a need for coffee, physicality telling my distracted mind just who is boss. I return to the task at hand, Henry's papers. Canal. Canal. Canal. Receipts for gopher tails—May 1, 1947, 104; June 8 of the same year, 211. I think I can part with these. Doctor bills dating clear back to 1925. I force myself to go through them, initially paying attention to each but when their likeness blurs them together racing my pace.

It is tedious work.

© 2025 Ralph Thurston