COME, COME AWAY TO SUMERVILLE
Come today to visit Sumerville, North Carolina. Located in the piedmont, with neither the extremes of the mountains nor the coast, it boasts a pleasant laid-back atmosphere to escape all your worries. Like you have worries. I have worries. You should get out of those cities, those urban cesspools, with their endless activities and culture.
Sumerville has plenty to do. Ride by the Durelife Textile Mill right outside town, now empty like Versailles. The place is abandoned, but unlike the French palace, Durelife has been left to rot to the ground, the carcass bloated on the lives expended there, like my mother’s. We also have the Widow Sumerville’s House, a 75-room mansion built all through the last part of the crazy woman’s life with dead-end hallways, unfinished staircases, glass rooms with no doors, and her bedroom with the names of people she felt guilty about destroying, etched into wood by her own hand. The House, though now closed to the public because of the disappearances, is still visible from the interstate off-ramp. Be sure to check out the art deco roof. Visit the world’s only pork rind museum, where the proprietor claims he has a rind in your image that will tell you how long you have to live.
Speaking of, we have a long and colorful history, starting in the days of the Revolution when Lt-Col John Eager Howard of the Battle of Cowpens stopped over in the little town. He commented on the hospitality of the denizens of Sumerville, until he realized the next morning that his horses had been killed and all his belongings stolen. He stood out in the mud road cursing the whole place. Then, during the War Between the States, a Confederate deserter came home early to kill all the women and children. Not much else happened till Widow Sumerville’s husband built the first mill that would be bought out by Durelife, after which the Widow started building onto her home in order to quiet the voices in her head. At least that’s what people suspect—that the ghosts of all the men, women, and children that died in the mill haunted her. Once it closed for good, half the population moved away, and many of those that stayed killed themselves in a rash of independent but virtually simultaneous suicides, an incident that got us written up in Psychology Today!
You’ll like it so much you’ll want to stay forever. I feel like I’ve been here forever. And with housing so available and so cheap, how could you afford not to? How am I going to make people come here? We need copy for the Web site, he said. We need to use this Internet thing to drum-up tourism, he said. Like the Web site will bring them, like rats to the cheese-slathered traps. He won’t even read this thing, leaving it to me, Chamber of Commerce drudge. I hear them talk behind my back. I hear them throw around the word “nepotism” like they know what it means. Like my uncle, staring at me in pity like it’s some reward, like him yelling at me for being ungrateful when I fail to clean the toilets. Like that’s favoritism. Like allowing me to live in his basement is sweet charity. For a shorter stay, we have the Burns Inn, built over the remains of the house Lt-Col Howard reportedly burnt down in his murderous rage, all inhabitants and nonmilitary guests nailed inside. We also have a Motel 6.
For your dining pleasure, the Slop Top Slaughterhouse Restaurant has cut out the middleman with an abattoir in the back of the establishment. I’ve gotten food poisoning there several times. He trusts too naively when he has me make his coffee, demanding so much cream and sugar it’s nearly impossible to taste anything else. Recently we’ve been excited by the rumors that a Cracker Barrel will be opening soon, right off the interstate, in sight of the House.
Sumerville, NC, is a place you’ll want to make home, a place to raise your family. When I was young, after a dinner of the usual watery stew or dumplings, I would lie under the sheet held above my bed with clothespins like mosquito netting—no air conditioning in the sapping humid night—and listen to my mother hack around her menthol, Dad dead in the suicides. I was going to get so far from this place I would forget it ever existed, forget that I had ever come from anywhere. But here I am.
My uncle complains of the lump on his neck. He doesn’t trust doctors. He thinks that I will die here like the rest of them. He is wrong. You will never forget your visit.
