Thu, 19 May 2005

Churchtown
Pulled into Churchtown, every house a kind of temple, the crosses up by the t.v. antennas, gothic spires and eastern minarets like the thorns of some alien fauna reaching up for the sky. Back in the twenties, when auto road trips were just becoming a regular thing, mothers used to tell their unruly kids that nobody ever talked in Churchtown and so they had to be quiet. The legend caught on until the people who lived in Churchtown finally stopped talking outside of their homes and churches, the whole area scary-silent, unstill. Used to be a porcelain factory out by the tracks on the way into town, made bathtubs and sinks and the like, until the business went under when the owner’s son inherited the biz and drove it straight into the ground. They’ve got a graveyard in the middle of town, where a town square should be, where people bury the leftover tubs longways up in place of headstones, a small statue of whatever appropriate saint tucked in the white shrine, blanketed in withered flowers and letters tucked in the hollows.

Town used to be dry until that silence thing caught on and people needed to get the stress of being quiet all the time out somehow. Some guy opened a place called The Alibi, old sheet-metal machine shed on the other side of the town, a beer-and-whiskey place. Nobody thinks to card us when we come in, get three boilermakers of JD and Schlitz, quiet ‘cept for the sound of an old jukebox playing fuzzed ’45s of Buddy Holly, Hank Williams, Skip James. Guy at the end of the bar with no hair, half his left arm gone, staring at the bar like he don’t know how to do anything else. Some gossipy barber Merle shot some 9-ball with told him the guy’s a farmer, was bringing in the crops, his kids were out there building forts in the corn, run right over one of ‘em that tripped and fell while running away. Guy jumps down and swears he sees the kid reach out for him, so he reaches in. In Churchtown you shave your head when you lose someone you care about; you mourn until it grows back. Whole town has the smell of something old and dying, something you don’t want to know about. Merle asks the barber about the circus, barber says nothing, nothing at all. Nobody will talk to any of us after that. We couldn’t get out of town fast enough.
(12:06.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #