Living Outside of the Story: An Excerpt from Ch. 35, "This Pretty Thing," in THE SONG POET

The former home of Joe Jackson's liquor store is still a place of business in West Greenville, SC.

“A name is just a story people tell about you,” says Teddi in The Song Poet.

By 1937, Shoeless Joe Jackson ran a liquor store on Pendleton Street in West Greenville, nearly twenty years removed from the roar of packed ballparks and the shadow of the Black Sox scandal. To most Americans, he was already becoming myth: outlaw slugger, banned natural genius, ghost of what baseball might have been.

But when Pete and Jasper walk through that door in The Song Poet, they don’t see a ghost.

Stepping into Joe Jackson’s Liquor Store on Pendleton Street, the cold February breeze deserts us and the air’s thick with the smell of cigarettes and old wood.

A solid, balding man in his late forties sits behind the counter, wearing a short-sleeve shirt with black suspenders.

“Two bottles of Old Quaker?” Shoeless Joe Jackson asks Jasper, rising. He’s a little taller than me, maybe six, six-foot-one.

“Yes sir, Mr. Jackson, thank you. You don’t forget a thing, do ya?”

Joe turns around and pulls two bottles of whiskey off the shelf.

“Katie!” he calls. “Need us some Old Quaker out here.”

A female voice comes from the back room to the left. “All right.”

He brings the bottles to the counter, pulls two paper bags from underneath, and bags the bottles with the hands that hit .408 in 1911.

“The memory ain’t gone quite yet,” he says, blue eyes twinkling. “Just the looks.”

Jasper takes out his wallet and pulls out a ten-dollar bill. “You got change, Mr. Jackson?”

He looks over. “For a ten? I think we might-could handle that.” He pops open the cash drawer and shuts it again. “Katie?”

A tiny, dark middle-aged woman with brown eyes and hair waddles out from the back bearing a case of Old Quaker.

Joe sees us looking, turns, and hurries over. “Oh good Lord, darlin’. That’ar master case is too big for you.” He takes it away and sets it down on the floor beneath the Old Quakers on the wall.

She looks over to us and smiles. “Never had no baby,” she says. “But that-ar felt like the ninth month.”

We laugh, but Joe laughs harder. “Good Lord, woman. No wonder we had no child—you acting like a child yourself, toting things twice your size.”

He turns back to us, and she steps forward and swipes him playfully on the shoulder. “Oh, I ain’t airy as short as ‘at-ar box.”

They both look at the cardboard case.

“Katy,” he says, “I could put you in that-ar box and mail you to New York City.”

“Oh…” she slaps him again.

“Only reason I don’t,” he says, turning back to us, “I might get lonesome for ya.”

He looks at us. “What do ya think, boys? Should I mail her off?”

“I’d keep her,” I say.

“A good woman’s hard to find,” says Jas.

“Well boys, you’s right about that,” he says. “And Katie here is good’s they come.”

She comes up behind him and wraps her arms around his waist, and Joe covers her forearms and hands with his own. He’s so much taller that we can only see the very top of Katie’s head over his shoulder.

He looks at us, remembers something, turns around and hugs her proper. “Can you believe it,” he says, turning back around, “This pretty thing is nineteen years old.”

Immediately, she’s swatting him again.

I smile. “You don’t say.”

“Don’t look a day over sixteen,” says Jasper.

“Don’t listen to him, boys,” she says. “I got me dresses that’s twenty.”

“Katie darlin’,” he says, turning toward the cash box again. “Darn it all!” he says, quietly. “Katie, I done forgot the same thing twice.”

Her voice becomes maternal. “What’s that, darlin’?”

“We need quarters and dimes,” he says. “I can’t even m

ake change for these fine men.”

She turns and trails fingers on his back as she passes behind him. “Back in a jif.”

She disappears in back. Joe shakes his head, grinning like a man who can’t believe his luck.

“Mr. Jackson,” Jasper says, “Pete here is from New York City.”

No ghost. Just a husband in a small Southern liquor store on a cold afternoon, flirting with the wife who chose him, and kept choosing him after the world moved on.

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