Chapter 5

If I just wanted to survive, I could probably manage it on the strictly legal businesses. I decided that by thanksgiving of that fifth year. But I remembered the lessons I learned on the prison farm. Making drastic changes cause more people to end up in jail than the crimes themselves. It was really about not drawing attention to myself for any reason that I counted on to keep me out of trouble with the law.

Since I had no close neighbors, most likely no one had seen me build the chicken house/barn/home. I was sure that it hardly got noticed at all. I was still worried about humans stumbling onto my fields toward the end of growing seasons when they were most vulnerable. I tried to have the fields harvested and cleared by thanksgiving for sure. That was opening day for deer hunting season.

I didn’t need some clown stumbling onto the chain link fence, then finding some loose leaves on the ground. After the product was in the barn drying, I turned to working the soil for the next season. I did it more to hide the evidence, than to prepare for the winter months ahead.

Around Thanksgiving, I helped Trina prepare for her grand opening which was scheduled for the first week in December. On Thanksgiving day we emptied out her garage. It was the place where she had stored her chosen items during the summer’s dead season. I had been busy with the farming, so some nights I just stopped by after dark to load the trash. I would load it on the trailer, then pull it to my place. After keeping it in the barn overnight, I carried it to the dump first thing the next morning.

Now and then she had me drop off a few things at her house. The point was that we had managed to store the opening merchandise in her garage. It all had to be moved over Thanksgiving. She actually arranged to have thanksgiving dinner brought in to the empty building. It was the building where she was going to open her store to the public on or about December first.

Me and half a dozen other people, who I did not know ate lunch, then went to work moving merchandise into the space. The building had once been a hometown pharmacy, then a fly by night bicycle store. Finally it sunk to it’s lowest point. At that point it was a mattress store for a six month term, then it was just empty for a couple of years.

It was a two story building with plaster on brick walls downstairs, then upstairs it was brick walls with no coverings at all. Oh yeah there was an inch of dust everywhere. There was an outside entrance to the upstairs via a metal fire escape in the rear, and a stairway in the front of the building. That front door opened onto main street.

When I finally saw it, the upstairs was one giant room, it was a tempting storage space. I knew that it was too close to the county government offices to be used for the kind of things I might need to store.

Within the few days after Thanksgiving, Trina’s band of high school and college students finished moving the inventory from her garage and unpacked it. The downstairs was still less than half filled. Since it was meant to be a consignment shop. Trina was supposed to pick up new things as she went along.

The building’s upstairs storage area bothered me. There was no access from downstairs, and that just wasn’t right. Also there were absolutely no interior partitions at all in the space. The building had to have had a business of some kind up there at one time or another. I began to investigate, just because it was interesting to me.

To be perfectly honest, I convinced Trina to investigate it. She was about to have time on her hands, I knew that for sure. Her merchandise didn’t fit into the black Friday kind of marketing scheme, so she didn’t struggle to get open before the December deadline.

Her first chore was to research the records of the downtown buildings in Sparta. Her building was built by a man named Carson. He also owned and operated the Allegheny Star newspaper. It was easy to imagine the newspaper reporters on the ground floor. I could also imagine the printing press, and the delivery people operating from the top floor. It was a different time back then. The time was right around the turn of the century. I lusted for the historical old building, but I had no way of using it, at the moment.

I had those thoughts while I worked in the store on thanksgiving day. Then again on that black Friday which followed the holiday. I was shocked to see customers walk into the store while we finished arranging the stock.

Trina had rescued an ironing board, and steam iron from the home of an older woman. The woman had been moved into a care facility. Trina had a couple of the kids take some vintage clothing to the laundromat for their quick wash, dry, and fold treatment. Then she had to teach the college kids how to iron. When they were finished with the resurrected vintage clothing, Trina arrange them in the display window. Over the weekend before Trina opened her store, she made a couple of hundred dollars in sales.

I left Trina to her new hobby while I went home to welcome home my old friend, the famous ‘Christmas funk’. It was a tough time of the year to be alone, but I planned to get through it with the help of some really strong eggnog. My Dad had a family recipe for the stuff. I decided to bypass it for at least the last five years. For some reason, I decided it was time resurrect the tradition. At least to make my own version while in Sparta.

Even though I bought a gallon of eggnog from a grocery store, there was one part of the Christmas tradition I didn’t ignore. I mixed it with a half gallon corn liquor. It couldn’t be vodka, or bourbon, it had to be North Carolina Moonshine. The moonshine I used had been a gift from Amos. At least I presumed it was from him, since it had been placed in the dead drop along with his product.