The Mercer Name
Part One: The Funeral
When my grandfather died, the first thing people in Ash Creek said wasn’t I’m sorry for your loss. It was: “What are you gonna do with that old tannery?”
They asked it the way people ask about a dead dog buried in the yard or a car rusting in a field. Not with genuine curiosity.
With the particular impatience of people who have been waiting for something to become someone else’s problem and are relieved the waiting is finally over. My grandfather, Walter Mercer, had owned Mercer Tannery on the edge of Black Run Creek for most of his adult life. Once, the place had mattered in the way certain buildings in small towns briefly matter, as anchors, as proof that the town itself is real and producing something the world can use.
Fifty years earlier, men had stood shoulder to shoulder beneath its brick smokestack before dawn, laughing through cigarette smoke, punching their time cards and stepping into the kind of labor Ash Creek had been built to perform. The tannery made harness leather, boot leather, belts, aprons, work gloves. During hunting season, every third man in town wore something cut from Mercer hide whether he knew it or not.
By the time I was born, that world was entirely gone. The smokestack was cracked. The windows were boarded.
The main processing drums had stopped turning before I started school. Kids dared each other to throw rocks through the loading bay glass, and the local real estate men had started using the phrase environmental liability the way preachers use damnation, as a warning attached to something they wanted you afraid of. My grandfather had outlived the business by nearly twenty years.
He had also outlived most of the people who would have remembered him with any genuine warmth. I stood in a borrowed black suit under the buzzing fluorescent lights of First Methodist and shook hands with people I had not seen since high school. Some offered real condolences.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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