Most every afternoon around 3:00pm (give or take) the train would pull out of the loading area in the Julep Industrial Park, far out in the county, full of wood chips from the lumber mill bound for the pulp mills on the coast. At 3:14pm (give or take) the train would come to an abrupt stop in the middle of the city, dropping wood chips everywhere, so that the engineers could hop off and grab a couple of pulled pork sandwiches and a bag of hush puppies from the Big Pig Grill for the long haul down to the low country. “Nobody makes a better sandwich than the Big Pig. Don’t know what they smoke that meat with but it rarely makes us sick”.
This stop was great for the hungry engineers but it was terribly frustrating to the rest of the townsfolk as it essentially put a hissing, squealing, steel wall right through he middle of the city for undetermined amount of time. One would think the engineers had a schedule but they were talkers and could be at the Big Pig for hours on end telling exaggerated stories of hobo interactions and the wild life of the rails. “We ain’t worried about time, we’ll make up for it in the land of cotton”.
When the train bisected the city there was only one way to get to the other side, a small cut through at the corner of Stafford St. and Jones Alley which was also the front yard of David “Man Hands” Vaughn. David was an enterprising character that generally had a slight smell of garlic. His day job was to deliver and install coffin vaults at Redwood Cemetery. He would drive his flatbed truck with crane apparatus around town and every time he had a vault loaded up folks would rush to check the obits to see who had recently checked out. The problem with this job was that it was sporadic. “Sometimes folks die off in big crops, other times they just go on living and I’m broke don’t got nothing to eat but garlic.”
In order to make ends meet David used his flatbed prime piece of property to his advantage. While on a run to drop off a vault at the cemetery he would take note of all the dead and fallen trees around town and when he got done would use his crane apparatus to pick them up and haul them off to his house. He would then take the trees home, chop them up by hand, and sell them by the bundle in his front yard. “Got to use these big ol’ man hands for something.” When he got tired of chopping wood he would take long walks up and down the train tracks and collect all of the wood chips that spilled from the train and sell those as smoking chips. “Makes a good Boston Butt as long as you manage to remove all the pressure treated pieces.”
Firewood was not the only commodity that was traded in David’s front yard. His wife, Yolanda “Yarn Ball” Tibbs-Vaughn, sold various handicrafts she would make in her spare time as a substitute teacher at Julep Elementary. “All I do is just sit there anyway.” Her most popular seller were angel shaped dolls she made out irregular wash clothes she bought in bulk from the textile mill, but inspirational Bible verses she painted on plywood were also hot items as were garlic cloves stuffed into panty hose for some reason. “I make the husband carry the garlic around when he’s working out there in the cemetery, never know if vampires are real but sure wouldn’t want to find out without some garlic in his big ol’ man hands.”
David “Man Hands” Vaughn was a true symbol of the delicate symbiotic ecosystem in many small towns. Incidentally, the proprietors of the Big Pig were firm believers in locally sourcing ingredients for their fine foods. The only smoking chips they had ever used to make the pulled pork sandwiches the burley railroad men so craved were from David’s front yard bodega. And the secret ingredient that made it stand out from any other run-of-the-mill barbeque sandwich ...Garlic cloves straight from Yolanda’s panty hose. “Nobody makes a better sandwich than the Big Pig. Don’t know what they smoke that meat with but it rarely makes us sick”.