Winn-Dixie
by Tom Wade
We rented a ten-foot U-Haul and, with the help of several friends, loaded it with our shabby, secondhand furniture, boxes of clothes, assorted odds and ends, and a refrigerator. I drove the truck, and my wife followed in one of our VW Beetles to a green frame house in Alto, a hamlet of under five hundred in North Georgia, noted for a nearby prison for inmates twenty-five or younger. We unloaded the boxes and furniture, but the refrigerator stymied us. Even with the aid of a hand truck, it was too big and heavy for us to lift or scoot out. We came to a hard stop. Sweaty and tired, I hovered on the cusp of giving up. Though we didn’t know anyone in town, my wife said we would have to ask a neighbor for help. I could not see an option, but she would have to do the talking.
We trudged across the street to a beaten-down house behind rusty cars. Two young guys sat on the front porch on straight-back chairs. Approaching the house, I felt feeble and exposed, asking myself: What if they refuse? Inside, a lady with slate-gray hair pulled back into a chignon sat on a couch amidst a clutch of family members. My wife explained our predicament and asked if someone could assist us. The old lady nodded at one of the young men, telling him to go with us and see what he could do. Lowering his gaze, he followed us to the truck. Wordless, he helped us get the icebox in the house in less than five minutes. We gushed and thanked him. But we were strapped without jobs and had paid off an unexpected vet bill before the move. I don’t recall if we offered him a dollar or two, but I doubt we did. He left as he came—mopey and mute.
That evening, lamenting the difficulties with the move, my wife said, “If a marriage can withstand this sort of hardship, it’s a good sign.” I didn’t respond. I didn’t want to appear maudlin, and I thought her assertion seemed too simple, a hopeful bromide. Recent months had deflated my optimism, though a sliver of hope survived.
About six weeks before, we had looked into renting a cabin owned by a retired physician and widower in White County. I remember it had a small porch facing a good-sized lake that reflected undulating mountains. We and the owner hit it off. After checking out the place and discussing the rent, we left, assuming we all but had a deal and would hear back on his final decision in a few days. Giddy, we couldn’t believe our luck.
Yet after a couple of weeks, he hadn’t contacted us. We hesitated to bother the kind doctor, guessing that he had become distracted by other matters, but with less than a month on our lease in Athens, we needed to confirm we had a house. We called him. After apologizing for not following up, he said his kids didn’t want him to rent out the cabin. Getting turned down shook us. Our upset stemmed from more than losing a picturesque house in an idyllic locale. While the previous eighteen months weren’t easy—we were full-time college students working part-time—we had confidence we could surmount the stresses—broken-down car, sick pet—that arose. However, this unforeseen news introduced doubts about our expectations and choices. We had to hustle to find the little green place in the prison town.
2
I found solace in a lead on a job. A friend put me in contact with a lawyer at an agency providing legal assistance to low-income persons. The agency had established a paralegal position to support her, serving elderly clients. Since I had been playing with the notion of going to law school, I thought direct involvement with an attorney and the court system would give me an insider’s understanding of lawyering. Also, I’d been a poverty volunteer for eighteen months, and while I found it frustrating, serving the dispossessed still struck a chord.
Unsure of my chances, I showed up at the attorney’s office in an apprehensive humor. But we had a productive exchange. She asked me to accompany her to a courtroom session with a client two or three blocks away, which I saw was a positive development. Walking to the Hall County courthouse with her, I became engrossed in our conversation. My eyes fixed on the ground, I bumped my head on a traffic sign bordering the sidewalk. Rattled, I glanced at her. Her wincing expression made me feel clumsy and foolish.
Notwithstanding the sign incident, she indicated she wanted to hire me but couldn’t commit without approval from the state director, who required me to meet with him at his office in Atlanta. He was a young guy, around thirty, casually dressed and informal, resting his feet on a desk in the outer office where he questioned me. I recollect he had come from Seattle not long before. The interview was more like a cordial discussion than the grilling I had dreaded. I departed in a buoyant mood.
By this point, we had been living off our meager savings for almost two months and were down to the last twenty dollars. Late one morning, my wife returned from a shopping trip. She reported, in the tenor she used when she had figured out a problem, a help-wanted ad at the Winn-Dixie in Cornelia, a town of about three thousand people five miles from Alto. While I preferred to wait to hear about the paralegal slot, our precarity didn’t leave me a choice. I applied, my embarrassment mitigated by the presumption that I would soon have a better offer. A day or two later, I put on a stained, white apron and started my duties as a grocery store clerk.
Since we didn’t have a telephone, we used a phone booth in front of the prison. I tried to check in with the lawyer in Gainesville multiple times but missed her, which didn’t bother me until the third or fourth attempt. At this juncture, her annoyed secretary gave me a specific time to call back, mollifying my unease. I got to the pay phone ten minutes early, but a skinny guy was on it. A minute before my appointment, he appeared engrossed in his conversation. Though he didn’t look in my direction, I glared at him, hoping he would notice my anguish. The designated time came, and I watched him gesturing in the act of arguing with or imploring the person on the other end. I sensed my face turning red, and my breathing quickened. The minutes crept by, and I sat frozen between wanting to approach him and assuming he would hang up momentarily. In my ire, I imagined the attorney, chafing and irritated as she waited for my call.
I dialed her number twenty minutes late. The two-story brown brick structure looming fifty yards behind a mesh fence topped with razor wire held my gaze as I spoke to the admin and then transferred my weight from one foot to the other for a minute until the lawyer came on. Without preliminaries, she said the state director wanted an elder for the post. I swallowed, forcing myself to control the emerging tremor in my voice. I couldn’t understand how I had misread her easygoing boss. Mumbling a thank you, I hung up.
She had abandoned me. While mad at the state director, I was angry at the attorney for her elusiveness and for not making my case with the director. Disoriented and on the verge of tears, I got in my VW. During the five-minute trip home, my diffuse ordeals began to meld. Losing the cabin, begging for help during the move, running out of money, bagging groceries, and being too young for the paralegal opening spun me like a top. Each turn drilled me further into a bog.
3
While my stock clerk income provided for our food and shelter, we lived a meager existence. Anticipating a short-term stay, I put in for part-time work—on the clock for less than forty hours a week. There were three or four other part-timers, all high school students. I had earned a bachelor’s degree four months previously, which I noted on my application but never spoke of. As far as I knew, the store manager—a former teacher—and I were the sole college graduates employed at that store.
My primary responsibility—bagging groceries and sometimes bringing them to a customer’s car—occupied my Friday evenings and weekends. Every Monday afternoon and evening, we part-timers, supervised by the assistant manager, unloaded a trailer filled with replenished items left by a semi-truck. Off-loading the truck, the most physical of my functions, involved tackling boxes ranging from oversized cartons of paper towels to forty-pound cases of tomato sauce. At the end of the shift, I was fatigued, my lower back tight and aching. As I rushed with the high school kids to the parking lot, discomfort enveloped me. More than the bodily stress, I battled the numbing sensibility of being a washout.
I also stocked shelves, a full-timer duty, when needed on Tuesdays and sometimes Wednesdays. The labor taxed me almost as much as unloading the trailer. I had to handle and open heavy boxes before beginning the repetitious chore of putting cans, bottles, and packages on the shelves. Since the aisles I worked on varied, I often wasted time searching for the locations of the low-volume products that might have a foot or so of space on a bottom or top rack. This routine elicited memories of hauling hay as a teenager, lifting thirty-to-forty-pound (occasionally heavier) bales in the sun, dust from the hay sticking to my clammy arms and brow. While I shelved groceries under fluorescent lighting in an air-conditioned building, after an hour or so, my shoulders became weary and my shirt sweaty as I plodded under the eyes of passing shoppers, making it worse than the dirtier but less restive-inducing hay fields. Restocking drained me, and lagging behind the other guys made me feel like the slow kid.
After a couple of weeks, a cashier trained me to run a cash register. Not infrequently, cashiers had to explain and ensure compliance with the specials. I remember one family of out-of-towners (they stuck out in their shorts, flip-flops, and loud t-shirts) who wanted to buy more than one item that was limited to one per customer. I explained they couldn’t get more than one. The middle-aged man I spoke to (I presumed the father) briefly protested before he handed the restricted items to three family members, compelling me to ring them up separately. They smirked as I entered their purchases and, with a shaking hand, gave each one a receipt, unable to make eye contact.
4
The other employees hailed from within fifty miles of Cornelia. I considered them country people but of a different sort than the folks I grew up around. Reared in the Midwest, I lived and toiled on farms with hundreds of acres planted in corn, wheat, hay, and soybeans and most bred herds of beef or dairy cattle or hogs. Rural inhabitants in North Georgia lived on modest to meager acreages, mainly subsistence holdings amid pine forests or up “hollers” in the mountains. We Midwesterners drove tractors, whereas they tilled the fields with mules. We cooked our meals on propane gas or electric stoves, and gas space heaters or furnaces heated our houses. They used wood stoves for cooking and heating. Almost all of my kin and acquaintances had indoor bathrooms. A large portion of households in lower Appalachia relied on outhouses.
I surmised some of my co-workers, those raised in town, benefitted from gas and electric appliances and flush toilets. I was sure most or all of them did when they reached adulthood. Even so, the far-flung, sparsely populated communities in the vicinity conveyed a homespun and less modern presence. Although I, too, came from a rural setting, I viewed my fellow laborers as rustic and insular. They sealed my impression through their speech. They spoke in a not unpleasant but distinct drawl and uttered indecorous words like “ain’t” or colloquialisms like “you’uns.”
I recall taking a break when I sat with the other guys in the storeroom as they told stories on whatever topic caught their fancy— favorite dog, camping, dealing with a broken-down car on an isolated road. Arrayed in a circle on boxes and turned-over buckets, they each took a minute or two to tell their anecdotes. While I remember none of their accounts, I can picture them doing the telling. Some let their eyes wander, checking our faces for indications of interest. Others centered on the floor as if viewing events as they rendered them.
Their sideways glances offered me a silent invitation. While they insinuated that they viewed participating as more important than any story they told, I feared boring them or looking foolish. Despite my desire to belong, I couldn’t muster the nerve to join in— beset with a tongue-tied delivery, the inability to recount or fabricate a narrative, and a puny bio. As the silent person in the circle, I sensed my associates judged me as aloof, condescending, or dull: an outsider.
5
One evening, the assistant manager and I began talking as we tidied up the storeroom, restacking boxes and breaking down the empties. Roughly my age, about six-two with short blond hair, he had a lean, athletic build and exuded a confident, smart-ass manner, like a jock. He lived in Rabun County, ten to fifteen miles north of the store, and owned a black Jeep convertible. Without prelude, he said in his mountain twang, “I didn’t go past high school, and this is the best job I’ll ever have. But you’re a college graduate. You can do better.” His interest in my prospects and knowing I had a degree startled me. Hearing him candidly assert his limitations made me self-conscious. On my guard, I nodded and maybe mumbled a response. My first thought was if employees learned about my overeducated history, they would deem me a failure. I couldn’t abide them whispering about me, their whispers laced with pity and ridicule. My gut and imagination churning, I ached to talk about something else.
We didn’t say much more, and when we finished, I filled a yellow bucket with soapy, hot water, dropped in a string mop, and went to the aisle running through produce. My self-talk became heated and harsh. Number Two was well-intentioned, but I resented his awkward counsel. My envisioned future never encompassed stocking shelves, running a cash register, and pushing a mop at 10:00 pm. The memory of the lost paralegal position cropped up, further flustering me. As I calmed down, I rewound his remarks. In the rethinking, I discerned an element in his delivery I couldn’t specify—regret, disappointment, or a mix of the two. Instead of a busybody boss, he reminded me of my grandpa, a plain-spoken Midwesterner who told me to set my sights on being “a teacher or banker or something like that,” warning me not to become like the uncle I was working for, a hardscrabble farmer.
My wife and I spent the summer in the little, green frame house, paying seventy-five dollars for monthly rent. A handful of developments stood out. Because we couldn’t afford a phone, my mother informed me in a letter my grandfather had died and noted his grandsons were the pallbearers at the funeral. Our penury embarrassed me, and I fretted over what my relatives thought of me for not attending. We planted a garden in a rocky patch of dirt by the house, using a shovel and hoe to prepare the soil, not having access to a tiller. It yielded a score of tomatoes and a paltry mess of string beans. My wife woke me one morning, saying she had been looking for our cat and found her calico body on the side of the street. I buried Jiggs in our unproductive garden. In mid-summer, a center for children with emotional disabilities hired my wife as a preschool teacher, starting in late August. When I gave him this news, our friend Harry said, “Now you can quit.” I nodded and replied, “That’s right.” My knee-jerk response unsettled me because I didn’t have another option. Yet, after a short reflection, I realized I did.
BIO: Tom Wade is a retired state government employee. He lives in the Atlanta area and volunteers with the American Civil Liberties Union. His essays have appeared in Canyon Voices, Dr. T. J. Eckleburg Review, Lunch Ticket, Inlandia, Harmony Magazine, Rivanna Review, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, 805 Lit+Art, William and Mary Review, Black Fork Review, Bookends Review, Ilford Review, ellipsis, table/FEAST Literary Magazine (Fifty & Up Writer Award) and other publications.