I had an uncle on my Momma’s side actually he was my Gramma’s Uncle Joe. Uncle Joe came to Alice before the town was even there. Around eighteen ninety eight or so.

He’d heard the Northern Pacific was building a line through here. In the days of steam the railroad guys would plot the right away. They wanted the towns spaced just right so the trains could take on coal and water. The story goes that Joe found out the right-of-way was gonna go through just a little ways north of what one day we would know as Alice Slough. The best place in the world for hunting geese and ducks.

Uncle Joe had always kinda wanted to own a general mercantile and he’ d been thinking about a place to build it. So he took a chance and built it there by the wagon road just a little ways north of Alice Slough. And even though the railroad guys had wanted it built six miles west, my hometown, Alice, N.D. sprang up there around that store.

Gramma’s Uncle Joe ran the ‘Alice Mercantile’ till the end of World War One. Grandpa’s brothers Ernie and Frank changed it then in nineteen twenty to ‘Kapaun Brother’s Groceries and General Mercantile’ which it remained till the end of World War Two.

In nineteen hundred and forty seven my Mom and Dad bought the place for seven thousand dollars and changed the name once more to the Alice Fairway Store. It was my families business, the store that I grew up in, for over twenty years, till my Daddy died in sixty nine. And though she closed it late that year my Momma lived in her apartment there for more than fifty years.

There’s an old coal furnace about the size of a Bessemer Converter in the basement of our store with a stoker door so doggone big it could have been a boiler door on Titanic. Three, four times a day my Daddy stoked that furnace in wintertime. Every shovel scooped and thrown by hand. Peavey coal briquettes were what we used. I always thought that we were really swell using fancy coal briquettes not the ugly lignite that other people did. There’s a colored sign on the coal-yard wall down by the N.P. tracks. A lady with a coal briquette in her white gloved hand, ‘Heat your home the modern way’ she smiles ‘Heat with P.V. Coal Briquettes’ I was proud that we were modern too .

They filled the bin with coal through a rusted metal door whose hinges squeaked and squealed and when the door clanged down it was like the slamming of a hatch on a submarine.

The latch was broke and the door held shut with a piece of baling wire. Sometimes though the wire came off, and if the wind was right the door would flop and clang something fierce through the winter night.

My Uncle Eddie had a three ton Dodge that he hired out for hauling jobs to make some extra money. Every month or so in winter time he’d bring us coal in that truck. Shovel it down the chute into the bin. He delivered coal to lots of people my Uncle Eddie, but we’re the only ones I know for sure got Peavey Coal Briquettes.

There’s a steel grate in the centre of the floor, maybe ten foot square where the heat would rise up from the furnace. That furnace didn’t have no fans or blowers the air just moving naturally with the temperature. I’d often sit at night in wintertime look at comic books tucked up against the furnace grate my butt end almost blistered my toes so cold that i could barely feel ‘em. The air above the furnace grate would shimmer in the heat and ten or twelve feet away you could almost see your breath. The only sound the prairie wind careening through the winter night and the quiet “tick”,”tick”,”tick” of the cooling furnace grate

There were three big lights in our store hanging down on cords six foot long, one up front, another near the back, and one hung over the furnace grate, the globes were glass of creamy yellow white, and you switched them on and off by pulling on a string with pasteboard cutout signs hanging from the ends, ‘Holsum Bread’,’Fairmont Milk’,and ‘Camel Cigarettes’ slowly twisting in the yellow light. On winter nights when the store was closed the light above the furnace grate was the single one, kept the dark at bay. The world without was deep in shadow and I was in the centre in that yellow light my butt against the furnace grate.

There was something almost intimate to those moments, brought a clarity to things, I sometimes feel the world has lost it’s way, that we’re kinda like those pasteboard signs anymore, slowly twisting in the air above the furnace grate.

The floor in our store is inch thick maple colored nearly black with sixty years of oil from the sweeping mix. The store has settled over time, so when you walk the floor it creaks and groans like an older man grousing of his rheumatism.

The entrance door is oak, varnished almost black and in the center there’s an oval window of beveled plate with a work boot decaled at the bottom. There’s a closer on the door, so it doesn’t slam when someone lets it go and at the top a bell that rings when a person leaves or enters. When I close my eyes I can hear that door, it’s sound a signature through the years. The clicking of the latch and swishing of the door, the ringing of the bell and liquid ssssklunk as the door swings shut once more. Often we could tell who came in, just from the sound of the door, and the creaking of the floor when they walked.

When I close my eyes, a hundred scenes play in my mind, and a lot of them aren’t sights at all, it’s scents and sounds that trigger memories that truly tantalize, I used to wonder why I felt so good with the smell of Red Oil Polish in the air. Then I recalled the oaken cabinets in our store, waxed and shining, glowing in the sun streaming through the windows of an afternoon. Or I find myself half smiling, at an open jar of German dills, vinegar curling ‘round my nose like the ones we sold from barrels long ago. And when the smell of coffee is percolating through my brain, inside my heart I see the mill that sat at counters end, ground those beans of Radiant Roast, filled the air with it’s bouquet.

I remember too my Daddy, the apron that I’m pretty sure he wore to bed. Those crinkles at the corners of his eyes. With his thinning hair parted down the centre he looked still like his graduation picture nineteen thirty seven. It’ s the little things, the things not seen at first, that bring my Daddy into view. His rapid step, that I had to run to match. The tinkling of the spoon in his coffee cup. And I see him clear, like he was standing with me now, not just a fragment of a past remembered, when I catch the scent of burning cigarette.

Closed forty years our store still stands today. Though the paint is peeling the plate glass windows still are there. Ever since that I was small I’ve had the feeling there was magic in our store. And I think it’s mostly true, cause when I look through that window glass, I can see my Daddy walking toward the door. And if I shield my eyes, I see Frank and Ernie, and Uncle Joe in there too.