Published Tuesday, April 08, 2008 9:05 AM
Updated Tuesday, April 08, 2008 9:06 AM

 

My Hometown

Chapter 1: It ain’t much, but it’s home


The Berkeley Independent is proud to present “My Hometown,” a continuing work of fiction by Dan Brown.

The sign welcoming visitors to Teller’s Gap at the bend of Dirt Nap and Fools Gold Roads out by the town cemetery says, “Welcome To Teller’s Gap, population 529. It ain’t much, but it’s home.”

Only now, following Cyrus Ledbetter’s heart attack this morning, someone had scratched out the 9 and written an 8 above it.

Folks don’t waste time here when it comes to counting numbers.

Barely a wide spot in the road, and nestled in the bosom of the South, Tellers Gap is as Mayberry as Andy, Opie and Aunt Bea.

Baseball, moonshine and apple pie.

Biscuits and gravy, grits and sweet tea.

Tellers Gap sits above a bend in the Achewee River, a little sneeze of running water that’s not quite creek and not yet river meandering listlessly through South Carolina and Georgia with no apparent sense of direction or purpose. The Achewee is named after the lost Achewee Indian tribe, best known for a chronic hay fever condition and the inability to sneak up on their enemy in battle. They were wiped out back during the old Indian wars of the 1790’s.

Tellers Gap came to be when a bunch of procrastinating prospectors who had their sights set on heading west back in the Gold Rush of 1828, decided a day’s ride was west enough for them. Nobody seemed in any real hurry to go anywhere nor did they appear all that concerned about getting there once they started. They decided going west was too dang far if you couldn’t get there by suppertime, and this place was as good as any.

The Founding Fathers, including the town’s first mayor, Pennsylvania (Penn) N. Teller, for whom Tellers Gap is named, looked around at the expanse of mosquito infested bog and rocky outcroppings standing off the bend in the Achewee River and said, “It ain’t much but it’s home.”

Originally the town was called Teller’s Gap but back before the War of Northern Aggression not many people cared about schooling, book learning and proper grammatical use, so they dropped the apostrophe.

The town derived its name from Penn Teller’s orthodontic condition saying, “This spot in the road is about as wide as Teller’s gap.”

Legend has it that Penn Teller could eat an apple through a picket fence. It is a distinctive genealogical trait that has afflicted all Tellers since.

Patriotic Americans loyal to our God, flag and country, Tellers Gapians are good at three things: arguing, eating and church-going. We are a proud people, proud of our town and we’ll tell you just how proud we are as soon as the ball game or the race is over.

Here the stars hang so low you can actually reach up and pluck one or two if you had a mind to, and the smiling face of the full moon always shines down Main Street and the Old Courthouse Square.

We are a small town but we have two First Baptist Churches of Teller’s Gap, the First First and the Second First. We do not do our religion casually around here. This isn’t just the Bible Belt, Tellers Gap considers itself the buckle.

We are the sons and daughters of the Swamp Fox, Old Hickory and Stonewall.

We take our tea sweet and our grits slathered in butter.

We consider biscuits and gravy the fourth food group.

There is no cell phone coverage here so leave your Blue Teeth at the door.

No cable either, but folks do gather around the big screen at Nick’s Dew Drop Inn to catch the Braves, Tigers, or Gamecocks, and if Tellers Gap’s own Smilin’ Bobby Lee Renfro ever wins a NASCAR race, Nick fires up the old civil alert siren mounted atop the restaurant and gives the town a good yell.

This is a town where we teach our children to count, “One, two, Dale Earnhardt, four,” where there’s always an extra place at the table, where families can hold on to a grudge like a dog to a bone but strangers here are merely friends whose acquaintances we haven’t made yet.

We’ll sit anywhere and tell a story.

We’ll talk a yarn, shoot the breeze, pass the time, ask after your mom and them… we never met a story we didn’t like.

We love to tell stories.

Grab an empty chair at Buddy’s on Saturday mornings and catch the latest on the Great State Record Striper Bass Controversy. You can see the state record striper bass for yourself, mounted on the wall next to the air conditioner, or you can head across the square to Red’s Hardware and Sporting Goods and see Red Granger’s own claim to the state record striper bass hanging there.

You can hear Buddy say that half the lies Red tells aren’t even true, and then listen to Red talk about the real monster striper, Big Blue, lurking in the murky depths of Tellers Lake and how he nearly caught him one stormy night in July a few years back.

“Moby Dick he is,” Red will tell you with a faraway look in his eyes. “As big as a grown man and twice as mean.”

Drop by Millie’s Cut and Clip and watch as Millie puts on Buffy Heckler’s Face of the Week. Say what you want about Tammy Faye Bakker, but folks around these parts say Tammy Faye learned all she knew about expressive cosmetic design from Buffy Heckler.

That, and nobody can build a beehive bouffant like Millie. She calls Buffy’s current coif her tribute to the twin towers of Sept. 11.

Grab a plate of Nick’s own fried pickles and pig’s knuckles at the Dew Drop Inn and he’ll tell you the whole Chicken Leg Story and why Teller’s Gap has two first Baptist churches.

“It’s all about being first,” Nick says. “The First First Baptist Church chimes the six o’clock dinner hour every night. Well, the Second First Baptist Church did them one better by sounding the ‘it’s fixin’ to be dinner time at five ’til.”

So grab a seat and set a spell.

Take a load off your mind.

The tea is cold and sweet, and the grits are always hot.

You want to hear a good yarn?

Well, let me tell you about the time …

To Be Continued