Free Cruel Doubt by Joe McGinniss Page B

America. If you wanted to go anyplace from Welcome, it would most likely not be Winston-Salem (unless you worked there), but Lexington, a town of fifteen thousand, which was five miles farther down the road.
    There may have been about three thousand people in Welcome, or maybe even four thousand. No one was quite sure, since the town was unincorporated. It was the kind of town where the gas stations advertised “Clean Restrooms and Ice Water,” and where, if you stopped by Elwood Blackmon’s barbershop (Elwood, as a matter of fact, had been in Bonnie’s high school class), you could actually hear someone say, “Welcome is so small, it’s just a wide place in the road.”
    Most of the barbershop talk tended to be more specific: whose road just got tarred, how long it took, whose tractor wasn’t working, or where the newest patch of dewberries—a cross between raspberries and blackberries—had been found.
    There wouldn’t be a whole lot of political talk, since almost everyone already felt the same way: Davidson County, of which Welcome was a small part, was more than three-quarters Democratic, and the Republicans, even when in need of a haircut, had the good sense to stick to tractors and dewberries when they spoke.
    There were only two ways into town, and either way, you’d pass a sign that said, “Welcome to Welcome.” Otherwise, there were no street signs because it was presumed that if you were there, you already knew where you were going. If the Mayberry of television’s old “The Andy Griffith Show” wasn’t really based on Welcome, it might as well have been.
    The townspeople had always been known for three traits: being hardworking, friendly, and religious (as well as for voting Democratic, which was not so much a trait as a reflex).
    It was the friendliness that gave the town its name. Back at the turn of the century, the settlement was called Hinklesville, because so many people named Hinkle lived there.
    But in 1910, when the Southland Railroad proposed to run its first train through the community and a station was built to receive passengers, the townspeople decided that enough among them were
not
named Hinkle that the town should have a new name. Thinking that the first word a stranger would like to see when disembarking from a train would be “Welcome,” they decided to call it that.
    Trains still passed through Welcome—one in the daytime, and two at night—but they had long ago stopped carrying passengers, hauled only freight, and no longer stopped. The farmers got up early, raised their corn and wheat for grain, which the flour mill ground for horse feed and glue, and also grew soybeans, tobacco, and fruit. You could also find a lot of livestock in Welcome, mostly cattle, chicken, and pigs.
    There was no police department. On the rare occasions when law enforcement was required, the Davidson County Sheriff’s Department would do the job. If you were looking for the center of town, the post office would probably be the place to go.
    Welcome always had two restaurants—both of them featuring traditional North Carolina barbecue (smoky and vinegary shreds of pork, not to be confused with the gluey, tomatoey concoction consumed in Texas). First, there were Pope’s and Dan’s; later, Andy’s and Kerley’s. The Bateses always favored Kerley’s.
    Only eight hundred feet above sea level, surrounded by low, rolling hills and lots of streams, and a tough, five-and-a-half-hour drive from the beach, Welcome had never fancied itself a tourist attraction. Like Little Washington—though much more of a classic rural, small town—Welcome was not a place in which you’d be likely to find yourself unless you already had relatives living there.
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    There had been Bateses in Welcome as long as there had been a town, most of them living along Hoover Road, which you got to by turning off Center