July 1991
The Wrinkled Egg
Flat Rock

Virginia sat alone in the quiet of a late afternoon in Flat Rock. Her store, The Wrinkled Egg, was empty after a busy day and now the only sound was the soft rhythmic click of the clock hanging on the wall behind the cash register. The ticking of the clock echoed through the space and collected in an audible pool of time. Another day in Flat Rock had come and gone.

For over eighty years, the building that now housed The Wrinkled Egg had been known to locals as Peace’s Grocery until the last in a long line of Peace family members who had operated the small grocery, died in 1984.  Afterward, the iconic building sat empty until Virginia renovated the space and moved in with her garden and gift store in 1990.

Closing up shop for the day, Virginia switched off the lights and began rummaging through her purse looking for car keys. Suddenly, the heavy wooden doors at the front of the store began to swing open and the ancient black metal hinges creaked under the weight of the thick oak panels.  When the hinges stopped squeaking and the doors stood completely open, the store fell silent again. The late afternoon sun poured through the open doorway and splashed across the worn wooden floors where generations of villagers had traipsed in search of food and sundries. Oddly, however, there was no one in the doorway and no sign of anyone under the portico in front of the store. Virginia was still alone.

Virginia smiled. “Hello, Clarence,” she said brightly. Her voice merged with the sound of the ticking clock and echoed softly through the empty store.

January 1983
Peace’s Grocery
Flat Rock

The cold gray January day matched Clarence Peace’s mood. Without summer tourists and with locals reluctant to venture into a winter rain, it had been a slow day at the store. Of course, most days were slow days anymore. The arrival of the A&P in nearby Hendersonville had lured away many of his regular Flat Rock customers. They marveled at the supermarket’s variety and bright clean aisles. Locals still came by the store for one or two items or to pick up a quick snack. But on winter days there wasn’t a rush of customers looking for a cold drink and an ice cream bar.

Peace’s Grocery was a drab white wooden building located at the corner of Greenville Highway and the old Depot Road in Flat Rock, North Carolina. The village, nestled in the foothills of western North Carolina took its name from the large expanse of exposed granite that once served as a navigation guide for the Cherokee people and early European settlers. Clarence’s store stood just a few hundred yards south of the great flat rock. There had been a time when that rock and Peace’s Grocery had been the literal bedrock of the village.

The store was built at the turn of the 20th century and had first been operated by Clarence’s uncles, Luther and Milton Peace.  In 1904, Greenville Highway was still a dirt road and customers arrived by foot or horse-drawn carriages. When the brothers became too old to run the store, they passed it on to their younger half-brother and Clarence's father, Rufus Peace. After Rufus and his wife Helen passed away in the 1960s, Clarence Peace became the sole – and reluctant – proprietor of Peace’s Grocery.

The store was a simple affair with a large rectangular space crammed to overflowing with staples like flour, sugar, grits, milk, and eggs. It was also a place where locals could find household necessities such as fuses, light bulbs, and basic pharmacy items. All of it was wrapped in the smell of smoke leaking from an old pot-bellied wood stove, coffee that had been on the burner for too long, and decades of decay and dust.

The store was arranged in a hodgepodge of shelves, tables, and coolers that appeared to have been randomly scattered by a small earthquake. Food items were displayed in no discernable order, so most customers entered the store and told Clarence what they wanted. He would move slowly, collecting the requested items, and return to the wooden counter at the front of the store to total up the bill. More often than not, no money was exchanged, and the customer would simply say, “Put it on my bill, Clarence.” 

Never one for change, Clarence – and indeed his parents and uncles before him – had allowed the store to become frozen in time. The old iron hinges squeaked in protest every time the front door opened. The wooden floors sagged noticeably under the weight of the drink coolers and refrigeration cases. The floorboards creaked loudly with every step and were pockmarked with small black craters where decades of unattended embers had fallen from the wood stove. The shelves that ran the length of the store undulated on the walls and canned goods seemed to be riding up and down on wooden waves.

The room was dark – particularly on a cloudy winter day with just the two front windows and four overhead hanging lamps with bare incandescent bulbs providing light. Customers routinely had to walk their selections to the front windows to read the labels on cans and packaging.  The plaster ceiling sagged and was discolored by dozens of yellow-brown water stains where the roof had leaked through the years.

The décor of Peace’s Grocery could be best described as institutional decay. Everything was painted the drab and unpleasant green so common for hospitals and sanitoriums during the first half of the 20th century. The wood shelves, the windows, the ceiling, and the door were the same green. Even Clarence Peace’s pale skin reflected a tinge of green as he stood at the cash register totaling up a customer’s order.

Time, in many ways, had moved on and left Clarence and Peace’s Grocery firmly rooted in the past.

---

Clarence Peace spent most of his day sitting on a stool behind a long wooden counter on the left as you entered his store. Not a particularly effusive personality, he would greet customers as they came in and was content to leave them alone – and to be left alone - as they wandered through the store.

Clarence was 61 years old, sagging through the middle like the shelves and plaster ceiling of his store. His hair was gray and thinning but not threatening to retreat into baldness. His face was framed by a large pair of jet-black glasses. The collar of his white shirt was slightly yellowed and frayed by the stubble of a beard that he infrequently bothered to shave. His belt strained under a growing paunch and his dark eyes sat in watery pools of jaundiced yellow. When he stood up to help customers locate a particular item, he walked with a slight limp caused by an injury during basic training in 1944.

Clarence, like his store, was showing the effects of time.

Most of his day was spent sitting behind the counter which was cluttered with newspapers for sale, a coffee pot that hadn’t been properly washed in months, and a microwave for reheating refrigerated items from the coolers at the back of the store. All of the counter clutter was anchored by an enormous cash register that had been the store’s centerpiece for over sixty years. The register was also the repository for all the unpaid account balances that Clarence dutifully recorded but seldom, if ever, tried to collect.  

More often than not, Peace’s Grocery was empty except for Clarence and those times when Squirt the cat would stop by to see if there was any food to be shared. Man and cat would sit in silence with only the sounds of a fire crackling in the wood stove, windows that rattled a bit on windy days, and the rumble of the very occasional car that passed by on Greenville Highway. The store was Clarence Peace’s domain – as it had been since he was old enough to push a broom across its wooden floors and stack cans on its shelves.

---

The quiet winter afternoon was interrupted by the arrival of two regular customers, Wick and Albert.  The two gray-haired men greeted Clarence, poured themselves cups of coffee, and proceeded to plant themselves in the chairs by the stove. They passed the slow leak of a lazy afternoon by regaling one another with well-worn tales that both raconteur and listener knew by heart.  They particularly enjoyed seeing “what the cat drug in” when one of their Flat Rock neighbors walked in to pick up a quick snack or something needed to prepare the evening’s dinner.

Wick and Albert had been meeting a Peace’s for years – since the days when Clarence’s parents had been alive. These days, they’d sip their free coffee and comment on how awful it was. Clarence would ritually bark back, “If you don’t like it, don’t drink it.” They’d chat for a bit and then sit in the contented silence of two old friends with no need to fill the space between with unnecessary chatter. 

Mostly, the two friends came to Flat Rock’s general store to catch up with the other locals who shopped with Clarence. Sitting next to the warm wood stove at Peace’s was the best – and quickest – way to find out who was ill, who was seen in downtown Hendersonville with someone not their spouse, to hear how the apples were doing after that late spring freeze, and to reminisce about days before carpetbaggers discovered the charms of the small mountain village.

As they bantered back and forth, the front door swung open, and in walked a distinguished woman who carried herself with a decidedly regal bearing. She nodded curtly at Clarence as she entered the store. “Hello, Ms. Bailey,” Clarence said. “Can I help you find anything?”  

She smiled and replied, “Just came by for a quart of milk and some butter, Clarence.”

“Howdy there, Louise,” called out Wick. “I was just thinking about that story you told us last week over at the Whaley place.

“Which story,” Louise replied without looking up from the cooler where she considered her options for milk. “I know a lot of stories.”

“That you do. And the best stories at that.” Wick jumped up and grabbed a chair from the back of the store. “Here you go. Draw up a chair ...  and tell Albert and Clarence that story.”

Louise sighed and slowly walked over to sit in the proffered seat. “Which story is it you want to hear?” 

“The one about Doc and Widow Johnstone up on Pinnacle Mountain. With the college boys.”

Albert's eyes lit up and he leaned in towards Louise. “Now that sounds like a good one.”

Louise smoothed out the gray fabric of her dress in her lap and began.  “Well, as you know, Daddy would make house calls to check on the well-being of some of the mountain folk. One Sunday afternoon he drove up Pinnacle Mountain to check in on the widow Mrs. Johnstone. I suppose she must have been in her eighties at the time. Little woman. Wrinkled as a raisin. Never smiled because she didn’t like people to see she only had 3 or 4 teeth left. Dipped snuff and could swear to make a sailor blush. Daddy called her a tough old biddy.

“Well, Widow Johnstone lived at the very end of Pinnacle Mountain Road.  Just before you get to the Mt. Olivet cemetery where all her kinfolk were buried. When Daddy got there, she was standin’ out on the creaky wooden porch of her rundown log cabin holding a shotgun and scowling at the sky. She was a tiny thing, so that gun was ‘bout near her size.

“Daddy got out of his car and tipped his hat. ‘Ms. Johnstone. Is everything all right?’ The widow pointed the shotgun towards her garden and said, ‘Damn crows are eatin’ at mah corn a-gin. I’m a-waitin’ here for them to come back so I can see how they like the taste of buckshot.’ 

“About then, a car comes driving down the road. Full of college boys from Greenville. They stop and roll down the window and the boy driving the car says very politely, ‘Excuse me, ma’am. We are trying to get to Brevard. Can you tell me where this road goes?” 

“Well, the widow leans over and spits tobacco juice on the dirt in her front yard. And growls, ‘Hit goes to the cemetery.’ 

“And don’t you know, just as she says that, here come those crows. Swooping in from trees on the far side of the road and just making a beeline for the widow’s garden. She swings that gun up over the car full of college boys and fires off both barrels. Blam! Blam!

“Lordy, lordy, lordy. Daddy said the eyes on those college boys got as wide as fried eggs. He said he’d never seen a car go that far and that fast in reverse. He figured they might have driven backward all the way to Greenville.” 

Having finished her story, Louise sat silently with the assured confidence of a practiced storyteller as Wick and Albert roared with laughter. “Louise, you ought to write a book with them stories,” chuckled Wick.

“Well that certainly won’t do you any good,” replied Louise without cracking a smile. “Unless you learn to read between now and then.”

Albert whooped and slapped Wick on the knee. “Sounds like Widow Johnstone is not the only tough ol’ biddy around these parts.”

---

Eventually, Wick and Albert ran out of lies to swap and wandered back to their homes. The cold dark cloak of winter fell over Flat Rock, and Clarence prepared to close his shop for the day. He turned the lock on the front door and set the deadbolt. He always thought the locks seemed pointless in a town where the worst crime he’d ever heard of was some boys who let all the air out of Reverend Roberts’ tires one Sunday before church. But he always felt like his mother was watching and she had been a stickler about locking the door.

He walked back across the store, stepped behind the counter, and looked up at his painting of Jim Markley’s blacksmith shop. The painting was one of several local landscapes he had painted years ago when he was still a young man and dreamed of being an artist, not a grocer. His mom had insisted on hanging all of them in the store and she and Clarence both secretly dreamed that someday he would be “discovered.” He never was.

Clarence glanced towards the front windows to see if anyone was walking by and then carefully lifted the painting off the wall. He flipped it around and stared at the photo he’d taped to the back of the painting decades ago. The sepia tones had deepened, and the corners yellowed slightly. But the eyes that stared back at him were still as captivating as the day the photo was taken. He touched the corner of the photo and said, “Goodnight”, before returning the painting to the nail on the wall.

He switched off the four overhead lights and the store fell into darkness except for a shaft of light from an open door at the back of the store which led to his apartment. Clarence Peace’s commute from his bed to his stool at work was less than 50 feet. But even that short commute, which took less than 20 seconds, had become interminable. He had never wanted to take over the family business.

And now the business had taken over him.

---

Just as Clarence began to close the door between his apartment and the store, a strange golden light flickered through the storefront windows. The room was filled with long shadows cast by the mysterious glow and the light reflected off the glass doors of the refrigerated cases into Clarence’s eyes. He held up a hand to shield his eyes and called out, “Who’s there?” There was no reply.  “I’m closed for the day!”  He felt something brush against his pants leg and looked down to see Squirt staring at the light and flicking his tail.

The front door, framed by the light pouring in from the windows on either side, began to shake and rattle. Clarence heard the sound of the deadbolt sliding back and the click of the latch on the doorknob. The rattling got louder, and he thought the door might be falling off its hinges. Then, all at once, the door swung open and the bright light subsided to a gentle glow.

It took Clarence’s eyes a moment to adjust to the dimmer light. When they did, there in the doorway stood a very dapper young man dressed in a charcoal-colored wool suit and a crisp white dress shirt with a high, starched collar. A gray bow tie with white polka dots rested slightly askew just below the man’s chin and the gold chain of a pocket watch dangled from his waistcoat pocket. He wore a black bowler and he was holding a sheaf of papers with a pencil sticking out of his suit pocket.

The stranger stepped forward out of the golden light and into the store.  He seemed surprised by what he was seeing. The two men considered each other in silence for a long moment.

Clarence broke the quiet. “Who are you?” he demanded. “How did you get in here? I locked that door.”

The stranger turned to examine the locks on the door then turned back to Clarence and smiled. “There was a time when I knew how to pick the locks on a boxcar. But I can assure you, I just opened the door.”

 “Who are you?” Clarence asked again, feeling increasingly agitated by the interloper’s presence.

The stranger reached up and removed his bowler, revealing hair neatly parted down the middle. He smiled again and his placid expression and calm demeanor filled the space between the two men. Despite his inclination to be annoyed by things he didn’t understand, Clarence surprisingly found himself starting to relax.

“I’m Carl,” the young man said. “Carl Sandburg.”  He paused for a moment, then added. “Paula sent me.”

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Next week:
Chapter 2, “Emergence”