Still Life in Townsend

Abstract

Still Life in Townsend Melanie K. Hutsell (bio) 1 Stevie Gibson never did like the picture, but she never did take it down. A dead pheasant still fully feathered, a bowl of oranges, a green glass goblet of wine, and an hourglass were arranged upon a pale tablecloth of folds and wrinkles, all against a shadowed background. She saw that picture every [End Page 44] day that she sat behind the computer at her father’s heavy oak desk and typed figures for Gibson’s Motor Lodge into the Excel spreadsheets. The dark painting had not given her nightmares as a girl but still had pressed against her restless soul whenever she wandered into her father’s office. Now the picture was like the wall or the telephone, no different from the hook where she hung her coat or sweater half the year. It came with the job. Luman Gibson still owned every nail in the building, though he lived twenty miles away in an old folks’ home in Maryville and did not remember her face or her name. She would not mind to change things around, maybe, but that cost money and took time she did not have. And the things were not hers to change. 2 The motorcycle couple wore red bandanas on their heads and American flags on their T-shirts and jackets. Stevie manned the front desk of the family business in Townsend, Tennessee. She shared the no-excuses way the motorcycle couple wore their clothes. At thirty-nine, she appeared not much different from the girl who had first been kissed in Tuckaleechee Caverns, who carried big, wide, deep-living dreams when she left Townsend at eighteen. She still wore unforgiving jeans and daredevil necklines. But crow’s feet now printed themselves on her face, and grey strands threaded through her spiked blonde hair. Stevie took the key from the hand of the bearded, booted fellow, as she had from thousands of other hands, and told the man and the woman to enjoy their trip. Several weeks ago, the Wears Valley forest fires all over the national news might have seemed to menace the couple’s bike trip down from Michigan. But those fires had burned on the Sevier County side, closer to Pigeon Forge and fought by firefighters from three counties. [End Page 45] The forest fires were out now. Outside and where she could not see, trees had turned to ashes, and the mountain slopes stood charred. Behind the front desk, Stevie watched the motorcycle man and woman push the glass door and walk on through. They were able to do that, to step into the sunshine and push on up the road. 3 Stevie Gibson had never not known this house on the hillside. She had known it before its dishwasher, before the bathroom downstairs. Luman placed window units in four rooms when Stevie was in high school. Before that, they turned lights off, opened windows, and sat outside on the porch. Her father had made the clothesline for her mother, sawing wood and pouring concrete so clothes could dry crisp and sweet, keeping the house cooler. A row of white pines at the edge of the yard was not there once. As a girl, Stevie dug holes for the roots though she did not dream to linger in Townsend with them. In the last of the summer heat, tourists meandered biking paths on either side of the highway below the house. Around them towered mighty folds of the Smoky Mountains, draped in foliage lush and miraculous with sunshine. Nearly all who came to Townsend believed that they looked upon an ancient wilderness. But over a hundred years before, Stevie knew now, the mountains had been logged until they stood naked as the moon. All those great trees now rooted on the slopes and stretching for the sky—the trees that, growing up, she had thought as permanent as the earth—were nothing but new growth, a moment in the life of a mountain. [End Page 46] 4 Plenty of pictures in the Gibson photo album featured Stevie and her best friend, Misty. In Kodak snapshots, the two girls theatrically posed on...