Meeting Uncle Byron

(Please read in your best East Texas accent!)

The inevitable contagion started just past the dubious porch floorboards, at the front door, where a rusty jingle announced a potential sale, joke, source of hooch, or new friend.  My wildly gregarious Uncle Byron insured none of those possibilities exited without, at the very least, transferring a howdy.  He'd welcome each prospect into Pine Tree Dry Goods with a smile as big as a bright pink Texas sunset, already knowing they were all in on the same joke. 

Apart from the few loaves of bread he brought in three times a week—from the baker, on a trade, because Aunt Grace insisted—not a person in town held a hope to purchase anything else edible.  They all knew whatever might have been potentially comestible once, like a box of cereal or a brown bag of flour, was, by any dust-laden measure, desiccated beyond the point of consumption.  And though this was a time decades before food expiration dates suggested regular purging might be a good idea, no member of Uncle Byron’s clientele was ever tempted to linger by the canned goods in the sunny front of the dilapidated emporium.  It was the back of the store that snapped each one of them into place, like a magnet.  Because that is where the wet goods unpretentiously lodged in the darker corners, not so sedimented as their front-of-store neighbors, due to their more regular restocking. 

Nor did anyone waste a moment of their time pretending to buy non-food “dry goods” at the only store in town still labeled as such.  Not a bar of soap.  No buttons.  Not an inch of fabric.  What the townspeople in the dry and professedly pious county of Nacogdoches, Texas wanted from Uncle Byron came in pure liquid form.  And that he had aplenty.  Every thirsty soul in town knew that Pine Tree Dry Goods was where you went to wet your whistle.

I suspect the high popularity ratings of both Uncle By and Pine Tree Dry Goods is why Sheriff Mescugan sustained such a considerable blind spot on weekdays.  And he made darn certain never to have business or visiting near Uncle Byron’s store on the Lord’s Day.  Oddly, for a town so Sunday-devout, the day of rest was always Pine Tree Dry Goods’ busiest and most successful, from the back door, that is.  Maybe it was the Sunday thrill of having to enter clandestinely.  Maybe folks got spirit and spiritual confused.  Or maybe it was the collective dread by the timber workers, attempting to steel themselves for the physical tree trunk travail they knew the week was sure to bring.