Linville Price

Abstract

FICTION Linville Price Gurney Norman THERE USED TO BE THIS OLD BOY ON OUR CREEK named Linville Price, who was known for his eccentric and sometimes shady dealings with people. He wasn't dishonest exactly, but Linville didn't always tell the truth either. One time during one of his stints as operator of a roadside country grocery store he pointed to a chocolate cake that had been sitting on his bread shelf for a couple of days and told me my grandmother had ordered that cake especially and that it would be a favor to him and her both if I'd carry it home to Grandma. We agreed it made sense for me to go ahead and pay Linville the three dollars right then, and that Grandma would reimburse me. When I got home I quickly learned that Grandma had certainly not ordered any cake from Linville Price. But she didn't make me take it back. It was too dry to eat so she just threw it in the slop bucket, gave me three dollars and said she'd deal with Linville later on. I'm pretty sure she never mentioned it to him. Like a lot of people, Grandma had a soft spot in her heart for ol' Linville. He was well into his middle age but there was something boyish about him. He was charming the way certain good traders are charming, yet pitiful, too, as if he needed protection from the rougher edges of life. In addition to his little grocery stores, none of which ever lasted more than a year, Linville's entrepreneurial spirit occasionally inspired him to open his own auto repair shop. Linville's Garage, he always called it. He was a fair jackleg automobile mechanic when he set his mind to it, and every time he'd go back in the car repair business people always brought their cards to him. Linville's garages always came to the same end as his grocery stores, but usually not in time to save me from yet another strange and costly encounter with him. One time when I'd just come back from one of my trips to Chicago, Linville told me he thought he heard a knocking in the motor of my Ford. Seemed like I needed a valvejob. Take him two days, three at most, to get it done. I was on the road quite a bit that year and needed a reliable car so I said okay. Linville took the head off the engine that very first day, but the next day he had to go to Hazard to help his cousin Roger put underpinning around his ex-wife Jewel Dean's trailer and didn't get back for three 66 days. Another hour under the hood of my car revealed that my motor needed parts Linville didn'thave and that he'd have to call a parts store in Lexington and have what we needed sent up on the Greyhound bus. Well, as I should have expected, ten days went by and my Ford's engine remained in scattered pieces amid the general clutter of Linville's garage floor. When Linville got arrested for hauling liquor across a county line, I wound up having to hire Roger to come over from Perry County and finish the valve job on my Ford. Everybody knew part of what Linville did for a living but nobody knew everything he did, or understood how whatever it was he did do added up to a livelihood. Sometimes you'd see Linville working with a carpenter crew aroundthe county for a few weeks, helping somebody build a barn or a house or overhaul a store-front, but then for a month you wouldn't see him at all. Occasionally on Saturdays you could find him at the Whitaker StockSale, peddling some item or other or perhaps helping a friend or relative operate their booth at the flea market. One time at one of the sales I came across Linville standing next to a pickup truck loaded down with used automobile tires. This was in the late 1960s and I was driving my new Volkswagenby then...