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LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 5.16 57 "My grandfather had a country store — it was like Carriss's," Paw-Paw said. "It was during the Depression. Everybody was coming in all day to get something." "I didn't know that," I said. "Where was it?" "Greenwood, Kentucky — you're almost to the Tennessee line," she said. "My grandfather had a telephone in the store, and people would come in there if there was an emergency or if someone would die. And if they didn't have the money, they didn't have to pay. Because, see, times were hard then. I remember people as hungry as Te Grapes of Wrath." I was in Paw-Paw's living room waiting for my uncle Matt to pick me up to have lunch at Carriss's in Southville, a hamlet eight miles south of Shelbyville. My grandma's name is Pauline Walters, but we call her "Paw-Paw." She was sitting in a scallop-back chair with a blanket piled atop her, holding a cup of cofee on her knee. Behind her, fog breathed on the windows, speckled with rain. "You know, now everyone wants to eat organic," Paw-Paw said. "But in the country you ate out of your garden, or what animals you killed, and you canned meat and put it in the cellar, and you dried everything. You dried green beans, and they were called 'shuck beans' around this part. I remember Grandma had raspberries, and we'd walk back to the pond and there'd be persimmons ready to eat when they fall down to the ground, and they're so good when they're ripe—" Te door behind me crashed open and cold air swept down my back. Matt said: "C'mon, Carlos!" He's called me "Carlos" ever since I worked for a landscaping business in Middletown 10 years ago, the only gringo in a crew that was otherwise all Guatemalan men. "Pauline, you want to go?" Paw-Paw cradled the cup below her nose. "I would go, but when you get to be my age, and you wake up of a morning, and it's cold as can be, and gloomy as can be, and your old bones are telling you, buddy, you better not go outside—" "All right, Mustang Sally! I'm gonna cut your water of right there!" Matt said, turning outside, the screen door banging behind him. "Let's go, Carlos!" "Well, my Lord," Paw-Paw said. "He's four or fve fellas, rolled into one." "Other day, I called Pauline, man. I said" — Matt raised his voice — "'I'm just seeing if you're alive!' Ten I hung up." Matt's wife Sharon, who was driving, said, "Matthew, don't be like that." Teir 18-year-old daughter, Madison, and I were in the backseat. "You be good to her. Lord, she's your mother." "Good?" Matt said. "Hell, I'm the best thing ever happened to her. Fixing me lunch is the high point of her day!" "Ten how come she broke your plate?" Madison said, looking at her phone. I leaned forward. "What does that mean?" "You know he used to go over to Paw- Paw's every day on his lunch break and she'd fx him a meal? Well, it got to be too much for her, and that's what she calls it — breaking his plate," Sharon said. "And I think that's fne. Lord, she's 88 years old, Matthew." "Man…." Matt's voice was solemn. "Man, that broke my damn heart." We left Shelbyville, heading south on Interstate 55, passing a Shuck Fence, a Wafe House and the Ken-Tex BBQ. I read the sign of the Wesleyan Baptist Church: "God Doesn't Believe in Atheists." Ten the country broadened out, and we rode by the jigsaw of stone fencing in houses perched atop hills that rose and dipped and rose again. I said, "I was hanging out with a friend last night who'd heard of Carriss's." "Really? In Louisville?" Matt said. "What's his name?" "Hunter Greene. He went to Shelby High. Said he used to go deer hunting near Carriss's every day after school." PLANTED IN SHELBY COUNTY Tobacco farming may be fading into folks' memories, but Carriss's Grocery is still very much alive. By Charles Wolford / Photos by Mickie Winters Opposite page: Vivian and June Lisby, proprietors of shades-of-yesteryear Carriss's Grocery near Shelbyville.