My Family: Chapter 21

The Company store in Macbeth was laid out as follows: from the entrance to your right is the candy corner and beside the candy corner was the pay clerk office where you went to turn in your father scrip card and got money for food and the miners got their pay checks  Also along this wall was the furniture and toys this is where they put the toys at Christmas-time the coal company office which sat on a platform to overlook the whole store.which had a shoulder-high wall that ran a length of the store, As you came in the front door Straight-ahead was a counter where you could buy ice cream and pop, and to the left was the clothing department with the entrance to the food department. There was one way in the food area you went through a turn stall and to get out you had to go past Rita.

The store had only one clerk per department. Rita was the check out and took the money  for the food area and since the food area had books, I spent a lot of time with her. Everyone in the store knew that I used the store as a library, never buying only reading. Once when I came into the Company store with Mom, the clerk in the clothes area asked her why she didn’t take me to the library in Logan, since I like to read so much. We didn’t have a way there, much less bus fare just so I could read a few books.

The shoulder-high wall ran right pass Rita’s department, so she watched out for wayward children and keep them out of the area; away from the toys. At Christmas-time when the store would display their toys, all the kids would go in the store look and touch the toys. Rita would grab a broom and chase after us until we left the store. This one Christmas when Rita took a swipe at us with the broom she knock three dolls off of the shelf and broke them. Back then the dolls were made out of a material that if dropped they broke like glass and you could never put the doll in water, all the paint would come off their faces.  When we first moved to Macbeth, Rita’s sister Mary lived next door to us, she had two children; a boy and girl. Mom and she were talking over the fence once when she gave Lucille and me an ice cream bar. She told Mom she was sick and she died not too long after that day. Rita took in her two children, I pitied those kids (who were not much older than I was) because I knew their aunt. Just the thought of Rita taking care of me sent shivers down my spine.

There was an old man who worked the vegetable counter, who we called a hunkie (a foreigner), and his family lived across the creek from our house an area nicknamed “Hunkie Bottom”. In the summer when the fresh vegetable would come in, we would all stop by to watch him stack the corn on a cob. He would eat the silk worms to entertain us which discussed and thrilled us at the same time.