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LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 5.16 59 hundred-pound sacks of dairy feed," June said. "Used to be a blacksmith, a livery stable and a holding pen next to the store. Tat was back when there was old dirt roads." I asked if they ever considered selling it. "Not unless we win the lottery," June said. "No, we don't want to sell," Vivian said. "I'm my own boss." "Amen to that." Vivian said, "I tell him, 'I'm the CEO, June.'" June looked at me. "And I'm the common laborer." "We set up cradles, bassinets, beds in here, and our kids were raised here," Vivian said. "And they all had the black- foot syndrome." I blinked. "You know — when you run around barefoot so much your feet turn black." "Time fies," June said. "Tis has been a store, I believe, since before 1900." Still looking at her phone, Madison said, "You been working here that long, June?" Everyone laughed. When I asked Vivian how much a meal cost, she said, "$6.99 for a plate lunch — you get meat and two veggies. Cheeseburger's $2.99, and it comes with pickles, onions, anything you want on it." "And the hospitality's free," June said, walking by, carrying a sack of feed. "Carlos, man," Matt said, "there ain't no telling how many cattle deals and tobacco deals was done between these tables. You know that?" Vivian said, "Nobody has tobacco now. Used to be a lot more small farms." "Lot more dairies around, too," June said from another part of the store. Matt said, "I bet there aren't 20 dairies in Shelby County no more." "I think Alan told me there ain't but 13 left," June shouted. "Feed's a lot higher. Fuel's a lot higher," Matt said. "Used to be, you could pay of a year's farm payment just on your tobacco crop. Only thing that made more money than a crop of tobacco was a crop of marijuana. And Mom, she was talking about somebody the other day, she said, 'He ought to be in jail! He never worked; he just raised an acre of marijuana!' I said, 'You've obviously never raised any marijuana in your life — that's tough work!' You know that?" June sat at the table again and slid over a big paperback book, brown as a crinkled tobacco leaf, titled Shelby County Tobacco Farmers: A Pictorial History. One of the front pages was a map of "Shelby County and Vicinity" that showed a star labeled "Shelbyville" in the center, amid a constellation of outlying towns — Bagdad, Mount Eden, Eminence, Bethlehem. Most of the pictures chronicled the cycle of a tobacco season: greenhouses flled with rows of trays, the outside tarpaulin covered in snow like an Arctic bunker; men standing amid tobacco plants grown to full height, squinting at the camera as if from within jungle undergrowth; a father and a son, each holding one end of a tobacco stick, the bundle of veined leafs hanging down like Florida marlin; and the harvest of newly cut sticks staked in the felds like a forest of tidy wigwams. I said, "I guess tobacco was a big thing around here?" For a moment, nobody said anything. Ten they laughed. "Time fies," June said again. "As a guy said the other day, 'Used to be, the old men would sit outside. Now we're the old men.'" I went out to meet those men on the front porch. Teir names were Duvall Burke and Ralph Pulliam. I asked them how Shelby County had changed in their lifetimes. "Well, back then, we all ate out of a garden," Duvall said. "We killed four, fve hogs a year. My mother used to can sausage. No one has the wanna to learn how to do that now. You run to town and buy everything. We didn't go to town but once every two weeks. We would catch a Greyhound bus to Louisville." "It's a diferent world now," Ralph said. "Now, thinking about it, I realize our tobacco brought a lot more money than today," Duvall said. "Most of 'em have quitted. Everybody used to grow a little patch of tobacco. But the old farmer died of, and the newer generation couldn't make it." "Ain't none of them here now," Ralph said. "Walmart and the Tractor Supply's taken over. But that's progress, I reckon," Duvall said. He looked out at the crossroads. "Or is it? I don't know." After a pause, he said, "Well, Ralph can tell you all about that — he's been around even longer than I have!" He said so long, and Ralph tucked his hands deeper into the front of his coat. "It's both good and bad," he said. "People talk about the good old days, but one thing about that was, you were young in the good old days. You didn't know no diferent. "It's hard to compare the times when I grew up. Nobody had much money. Now people have more money than they know what to do with. People were more neighborly then. Before TV, people would visit more in the late afternoon, I can remember. Everybody's got too much to do now." A truck pulled onto the gravel shoulder, and a man got out and climbed the steps to the porch. "What're you going to do today, Ralph?" he said. "Probably what I did yesterday," Ralph said. "Not much." On the way back to Shelbyville, Matt peered into the trees fashing in his window like black spears. Ten he said: "One night, I was deer hunting by the woods over there, and it was getting dark, and I shot a doe. So I went down there and checked on it, and about 20 paces away was another doe, lying dead. I thought, Dead Eye Dick, boy! I'm gonna be the talk of the damn town, 'cause I killed two deer with one shot! Used to be, you had to go check your deer in at a check station, and Carriss's was a check station. So the next morning, I come in there. I saw Mrs. Bessie. I said, 'Mrs. Bessie, I was hunting last night. I "Walmart and the Tractor Supply's taken over. But that's progress, I reckon," Duvall said. He looked out at the crossroads. "Or is it? I don't know." "People talk about the good old days," Ralph added, "but one thing about that was, you were young in the good old days. You didn't know no different."