Free Dimestore by Lee Smith

fiction, all the books that came to our house from the Book of the Month Club. Finally at St. Catherine’s School in Richmond, during my last two years of high school, I was gently but firmly guided into the classics, though my own fiction remained relentlessly sensational.
    At Hollins College, I wrote about stewardesses living in Hawaii (where I had never been), about orphans, evil twins, fashion models, and alternative universes, receiving Bs and Cs and cryptic little comments from my professors Lex Allen and Richard Dillard that said, basically, “Write what you know.” I thought this was terrible advice. I didn’t know what they meant. I didn’t know what I knew. All I knew was that I was not going to write anything about Grundy, Virginia, ever, that was for sure. My last glimpse of home had been my mother and two of her friends sitting on the porch drinking iced tea and talking (endlessly) about whether one of them ought to have a hysterectomy or not. Well! I was outta there!
    But I was still drunk on words and books, just as I had been as a child, when I used to read under the covers with a flashlight all night long. My favorite professor at Hollins was Louis D. Rubin, Jr., who introduced us to Southern literature; I hadn’t even known it existed when we started out. I had already gotten drunk on Faulkner a couple of times, then had to go to the infirmary for a whole day when we read William Styron’s
Lie Down in Darkness
—I got too “wrought up,” as my mother used to say. The nurse gave me a tranquilizer, and made me lie down.
    Even so, I considered cutting class on the day that this woman with a funny name, from Mississippi, was coming to visit us. She was on campus, I believe, to receive the Hollins Medal, an honor undoubtedly engineered by Mr. Rubin, one of her earliest and greatest champions. But I had never heard of her, and it was so pretty outside, a great day to cut class and go up to Carvins Cove and drink some beer or just stomp moodily around campus smoking cigarettes and acting like a writer. This was my plan until I ran into Mr. Rubin in the campus post office, and then I had to go to class.
    There were a lot more people in that old high-ceilinged classroom than we had ever had before, and some of them were male, a rarity at Hollins in those days. The seats in the back of the room were filling up fast with faculty from our own college and from other area colleges, too, (beards, leather patches on the elbows of their ratty sports jackets: not your dad) as well as graduate students from UVA and W&L. The graduate students needed haircuts, and looked intense. In fact they looked exactly like the fabled sixties, reputed to be happening somewhere outside our fairytale Blue Ridge campus at that very time.
    A ripple of anticipation ran through the crowd. Mr. Rubin was ushering Eudora Welty into the room.
    I was deeply disappointed. Why, she certainly didn’t look like a writer! She didn’t have a cape, or boots, or anything. What she wore was one of those nice-lady linen dresses that buttoned up the front, just like all the other nice ladies I had known in my life, just like my mother and all her friends. In fact, she looked a little bit like Miss Nellie Hart, my eighth-grade English teacher. (My favorite English teacher ever, but still . . .) I lost interest immediately.
    I can’t remember what Mr. Rubin said when he introduced her; I was probably too busy stealing glances at the back of the room while appearing not to.
    Then Eudora Welty began to read “A Worn Path” out loud in her fast light voice that seemed to sing along with the words of the story. And I was suddenly right there—in Mississippi with Phoenix Jackson as she sets out to get the medicine for her grandson, encountering the thorny bush, the scarecrow, and the black dog, the young hunter and the lady along the way. I could see that “pearly cloud of mistletoe” near the