There I stood, not long ago, at the local big-box retailer. Bovine in circumstance, if not appearance, I waited in the chute with a cheap window fan under my arm for my turn with the glassy-eyed clerk.

There’s not much lower than an empty transaction like that, except the thought of the vast parking lot afterwards, so instead I let my mind wander to simple exchanges that were, in every respect, full.

The fan is on the blink now, but the memory is still clear: I thought about Bud Carswell.

It’s been a couple of years since they laid Mr. Carswell to rest.

His death is still a knock to me, despite the elapsed time, and even accepting the fact that funerals get tougher as ours get closer. Like most real friendships, the terms were simple: in his case, he became part of the pattern of my life because I bought things from him.

It doesn’t seem so long since Mr. Carswell fell from his roof, cleaning gutters. I remember a nice service up at the Baptist Church, and I watched as his Sunday school classmates carried him to the waiting hearse. He was buried at Garrett-Hillcrest, at the end of another in a string of parched June days.

Almost exactly 55 years before, he’d waded onto the beach at Normandy as a 27-year-old infantryman and helped the Allies begin a long, bloody push across France. He liked to recall his deceptively tranquil landing at D-Day minus two. His unit, the 30th Infantry, “Old Hickory,” came in well after the initial assault. “We had one man go down in the landing,” Mr. Carswell would say, “and he had appendicitis.”

Mr. Carswell was retired, but he occupied himself with a night shift at the Open Air Curb Market in downtown Waynesville. The curb market is an oasis, a florescent pool of delight in the late night and a shady retreat at midday. It’s where you’ll find stacks of newspapers, Coke in glass bottles, fresh tomatoes and glossy magazines. Smokes, seeds and chocolate.

Like the curb market, Mr. Carswell was unique; a small, thin man with white hair and a big smile. I’d find him propped against the oil heater, pulp fiction in hand. He wore his britches up high. Some nights he worked with another man, but they didn’t get along, so they stayed at opposite ends of the business - no small feat when you work in a newsstand.

Other nights he worked with Connie Maney, a happy young woman he teased relentlessly. She says she misses him still.

Each time I made a purchase, Mr. Carswell would offer me a “poke,” though he knew I’d never take it. It was our ritual; he’d lick a finger and snag a brown paper bag with a flourish, then, just before he popped it open, he’d pause.

The pause was exaggerated for effect, and it was my cue. That was when I’d explain that my loaf of bread already had a poke built around it, or that a gallon of milk was custom-made to move around poke-less, or that it was only a can of tuna after all.

Nodding gravely, he’d carefully put the bag away, then we’d poke around for a topic.

What tales he’d tell.

We might start with head-shakes about local football misfortunes, but soon we were in an old, one-room schoolhouse, its double-hung windows streaming light and the iron bell turning class out for the day.
Not enough students for two teams of eleven, even if you played co-ed.

Foreign policy was never its sad self for long, because soon it was 1944 and we’d taste salt spray on the swells of the stormy North Atlantic clinging to the rails of a troop transport, wet boots on slippery steel. The ship’s belly was full of seasick, homesick men, some of whom had never been out of the hills, nor seen anything like a rolling mountain of water.

On other nights we’d inch across green, shattered France, one hedgerow at a time. He told me about two men in his unit — best buddies. One night, as one stood guard for the unit, the other stole away through the woods for a drink or two. When he stumbled back much later, his friend hailed the shadowy figure, got no response, and shot him down.

A transfer truck might ease by, and its rattle would prompt stories about Mr. Carswell’s days as a truck driver in these mountains in the thirties, forties and fifties. He’d tell tales of his route through the rugged Canada section of Jackson County, where a wrecked rig could be mysteriously picked clean by morning, and where questions shouted at the door of a cabin brought the polite nose of a shotgun.

One cool, fall night, as the blue lights from televisions flickered down on us from upstairs windows along Main Street, he told me he’d once driven his truck from Franklin to Waynesville — across the Cowee and the Balsam ranges on two-lane roads — in less than an hour. I accused him of jerkin’ my chain, and he sent me on my way — albeit with a smile — and offered me a bag for my M&M’s as I went.

Another time, I told him about a theory I’d read, that many of the men of the World War II generation descended into boredom and alcoholism in later life because they had such grand experiences early on. Anything that came later, the theory went, was anticlimactic. He gave me a truly blank look, and told me to be more selective in my reading material.

Adventure, Bud Carswell figured, is all around, and experience is what you make of it each time you say hello to a stranger, or choose a place to spend an idle sliver of your short life.

(Bill Graham lives in Sylva.)

 

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