Well, y’all, I have observed that a piece of gossip in a small town is like a snowball rolled down a steep hill by a mischievous child. It starts small enough to fit in a man’s pocket, but by the time it reaches the bottom, it’s a fearsome steamroller, big enough to crush a barn and containing every twig, bug, and horse apple it picked up along the way.

The whole affair began with a man named Curtis Dickerson. Curtis was so quiet, his own shadow would sometimes forget to follow him. Last Tuesday, he walked into CL Morgan’s Grocery and, in a voice softer than a moth’s whisper, asked for a spool of stout black thread. Mr Morgan sold it to him, he paid with a nickel, and that, you would think, was that.

But the human animal cannot abide a simple transaction. It must be seasoned with speculation.

The first distortion was as harmless as a gnat. Mr Morgan mentioned to Myrtle MacAbee that Curtis had bought some stout black thread. “Must be fixin’ his Sunday waistcoat,” she said. “That black one.”

Now, Myrtle is a woman who hears not what you say, but what she believes you meant to say. She carried this news to the postmaster, Harold Payne. “Harold,” says she, leaning over the counter confidential-like, “Curtis Dickerson was in buying the darkest thread you ever saw. Black as a politician’s heart. Looks like his best waistcoat has come to grief.”

Harold, a man who could talk the ears off a cornfield, passed this along to the barber, J.D. “J.D.,” says he, “word is Curtis Dickerson’s best waistcoat is in a bad way. Ripped clean through, I hear. Had to get emergency thread. The poor man was mortified.”

Now, JD the barber, he’s an artist. A mere rip in a waistcoat is poor material for his craft. As he lathered up the mayor’s chin, he added a flourish. “Mayor,” he murmured, the razor hovering, “seems Curtis Dickerson had a calamity with his formal wear. Tore his best black waistcoat clear in two, like he’d been in a tussle. The man was in a state, I tell you. Bought enough thread to sew up a saddle.”

The mayor, whose mind operates chiefly in the political arena, took this and polished it like a bad penny. He told his wife over supper, “Darling, it appears there was an… altercation involving Curtis Dickerson. A physical one. They say he tore his finest black waistcoat right off his back in the heat of it. The man must be in a powerful rage about something. Financial troubles, you reckon? A disputed fence line?”

By the time this morsel reached the ears of old Miss Peabody, who runs the library and the town’s moral compass, it had grown horns, a tail, and was breathing fire. She clutched her pearls and declared to the Ladies’ Auxiliary, “It is a tragedy! A utter breakdown of decorum! Curtis Dickerson, in a fit of pique so violent it shreds the very fabric of his garments, has torn his best funeral waistcoat to ribbons! The poor man is clearly unraveling. He was seen purchasing the tools for his sartorial repair, a broken soul skulking in the shadows of Morgan’s Grocery. I fear for his sanity.”

Well, sir, the town was now in a high lather. Curtis Dickerson, once a ghost, was now a specter of drama. Men nodded gravely at him; women sighed with pitying looks. He’d gone from a man with a needle and thread to a raging, garment-rending lunatic teetering on the brink of despair.

The whole fandango came to a head when the Reverend Boone, a man with a heart of gold and a head full of feathers, decided it was his Christian duty to intervene. He marched right up to Curtis’s neat little cottage, knocked on the door, and when Curtis opened it, looking as placid as a millpond, the Reverend grasped his hand.

“Curtis, my good man,” the Reverend boomed, his voice full of unction and sympathy. “We are all praying for you. A man can only bear so much. The loss of a loved one is a terrible burden, but to be driven to such public displays of anguish… tearing your funeral clothes… We are here for you, brother!”

Curtis Dickerson, who had been quietly and methodically using that stout black thread to stitch a new leash for his German Shepherd, Richard Petty, blinked once, then twice.

“Preacher,” he said, in that quiet voice of his, “the only thing that’s torn is my patience. And the only fit I’ve had lately was trying to get Richard to stop chasing that no-account cat of yours out of my petunias.”

And that, my friend, is how a man buying a nickel’s worth of thread to mend a dog leash became a town-wide epic of madness, mourning, and mayhem. It proves the old saying: tell a man there’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and by sundown, the whole town will be trying to tax the leprechaun. The truth is a quiet fellow who minds his own business; gossip is the loudmouth in the public square selling patent medicine he don’t dare drink himself.

*****

New Yesterdays is available through the following links: Books-A-Million, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon as well as your favorite bookshops. The Audiobook is available from Libro.fm, as well as Amazon.