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My father failed in business in the 1950’s when Dutch Elm Disease killed the elm trees in our Kansas town. He owned a fabric store on a brick street lined on both sides by elms, the doomed trees that transformed little Midwestern towns into magical, benevolent kingdoms and sidewalks and yards into leafy bowers. The elms shaded whole houses in deep green.
My father was large in spirit and kindly, like the elms. He loved being a merchant. He must have told me a thousand times, "The customer is always right," and people smiled like they meant it when they were in his store.
He sold patterns, thread, zippers, and buttons, but he didn’t know how to sew and he was never interested in fashion, even in the little ways it trickled down to a small Kansas town.
But he loved fabric. He named his store The Fabric Center and he filled it with bolts held upright in stands, the different kinds of cloth draping over themselves like a hundred Madonnas. The effect of all of them together must have been powerful on him: yards of velvet, satin, polished cotton, and his favorite, gabardine, falling in perfect folds that barely touched each other.
I can still see my father measuring fabric. With flicks of his wrist he'd flip the bolt and count the thuds on the table, slow when the bolts were new and heavy, faster as they got lighter. When they were nearly empty he could spin them like tops.
Then the elms died. Almost overnight, it seemed, they were gone, turned into stumps, their trunks and limbs sawed into pieces and thrown into the backs of pick-up trucks. The branches swished against each other and sounded like fast breathing as they were carted off to the dump to be burned.
With no elms to break it, the wind blew harder around our town. Gutters littered, lawns browned, stores closed, the shabbiness showed through. People moved away or shopped in cities on weekends where they bought ready-to-wear clothing.
My father stayed on at his store until it was almost empty, a long and dark space without the fabric. He sold the last of his goods to a man who would sell them at auction, and my father got a job thirty miles away in a warehouse where, at 50, he moved furniture all day. Then he had a job at a fiberglass factory where his eyes were hurt and he was hospitalized for days. And ten other jobs like them until finally at 62 he retired and opened a store again.
By now he was in the South, in a city, and he found a place to rent on a noisy street in a bad part of town. The building’s floor sagged in the center like bones were broken there, and it had plate glass windows my father had to board up because people threw rocks through them repeatedly.
He built tables out of two-by-fours and plywood for the canned goods and cigarettes and carpet remnants he bought at salvage auctions. He bought fabric at the auctions too, huge bolts with soiled edges, for a few dollars. He sold everything cheap, the fabric for a few cents a yard. Or he traded with customers who brought in old furniture and lamps, books, doilies — anything they wanted to get rid of that someone else would buy. He took the boards off the windows and the plate glass was never broken again.
Regulars came there often: women tickled to get such good deals on fabric, others who traded for food or cigarettes or brought their kids in for candy, people looking for vintage treasures. Old men hung out just to talk. They’d leave politely when I came by which wasn’t often because I lived a hundred miles away. They called my father Mac, or Mr. Mac, and they talked to him like they’d known him all their lives.
He made enough money to go home to Kansas when he was old and when he died we buried him in the cemetery on the outskirts of town next to the grain elevator. It’s a peaceful place now because of the elm trees the town planted there. A different kind of elm, a different shape, and young by tree standards, but already they help to shade the graves. And the new trees are disease resistant, bred to withstand everything, even the tiny beetle that spread the fungus that brought the giants down.
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