Sunday, December 23, 2007

The Death of Mr. Smith

The Death of Mr. Smith

Just for the record it should be said that Mr Smith was not the warm, chatty local shopkeeper whom all the people loved. This Mr Smith was polite, but laconic; he would answer your questions in monosyllables, with typical Yankee reserve. He dressed everyday in a hound’s-tooth coat, a pressed white shirt and an out-of-fashion tie from the 1950s, and he wore steel rimmed glasses perched at the end on his thin nose.

Nor was the fare that Mr Smith sold in his little general store anything remarkable: canned food, dry cereals, milk and eggs, and candy, and in spite of the fact that the town was known for its orchards, dairy, and produce farms, not a single item that was grown locally. The shop was cool, under lit, and had dusty wooden floors worn down by a hundred years of use. Also always open. Everyday, even Christmas and Sundays, Mr Smith was there, with his minimalist greetings and his thank very much and goodbye. Try as you might, you could not get any gossip from Mr Smith.

The town in those days seemed to be characterized by eccentric shop-keepers, Across the street from Mr Smith there was a hardware store that never, at least not in the time that I lived there, opened its doors to the public. Its shelves were lined with dusty screwdrivers, saws, hammers, and various cans of motor oil, glue, and paint. And if you shaded your eyes and looked in through the plate glass window, just inside the entrance, in front of the aisles, you could see a new 1950s Pen Yan motor boat, its fresh varnish gleaming in the half light, its brass fittings polished. The story was that the store had been kept by two brothers. When one of them died, some ten years earlier, the living brother closed the shop and maintained it just as it had been when his brother died.

There was a country store in the town that still sold penny candy, and there was an ice cream stand associated with one of the dairy farms that drew people all the way from Boston, some thirty-five distant. People came to the town in summer for the ice-cream and the corn and pumpkins from the five working farm stands. They came in autumn for apples; they came in winter to ski, and in spring they came to look at the flowering orchards and watch the horses that were pastured there.

Given this diversity of foodstuffs and entertainments you would think Mr Smith would have given up years ago. But in fact children regularly stopped in to buy candy from Mr Smith, and the locals were forever stopping in to get things they had forgotten to pick up at the main grocery store in the town, which kept normal nine to five hours and closed on Sundays. Mr Smith was the only show in town after hours. ---nine in the morning to nine at night behind his counter in his hounds-tooth coat and his pressed shirt.

All this was long ago, forty years ago. Around that time a highway came through the community, and rammed through two of the best working farms and an orchard. A couple of new gas stations opened near the interchange, and then one day a sign appeared in the window of Mr Smith’s store. “Closed due to illness”.

Not long after that, either from an obituary in the local paper, or maybe just gossip, I learned that Mr Smith had died.

The shop closed permanently. The building remained empty for a year or so. Traffic increased on the highway. A chain convenience store came into the town, which stayed open from seven to eleven.. The grocery store expanded. A chain hardware store opened Two farm stands closed. Three new banks opened, one of them an international corporation. A multinational computer company constructed a plant in one of the local pear orchards, and then one day a sign for a lawyers office appeared in the window of Mr Smith ‘s former store. And nowadays, over in the burying ground on the west side of town, Mr Smith lies in his grave, still silent.

Coming in March, 2008

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