J.C. Myers

author, musician, painter, and playwright; Junkyard at No Town is his first novel; winner of Independent Press Award for cover design and Independent Publishers of New England Award for best literary novel; finalist for American Book Fest award

Lutheria Tupper, having decided to stop in the village and rest awhile before riding her bicycle back up Cemetery Road, hunched on a bench on the front porch of Parkhurst’s store. She led a constant, barely audible conversation with herself, oblivious to most of the customers that wandered in and out of the store.

She spoke to a few individuals: Norbert the hired hand at Foster’s farm, one of only two dairy operations left in town, and the post mistress, Margery Davis: “Marnin’ Norbert,” “Cold ain’t it Marge?”

With the exception of the occasional deep snow or ice storm, there were only three weeks of the year when Lutheria Tupper did not ride bicycle to town: mud season, when the frost came out of the ground in April and early May, when Cemetery Road was deeply-rutted soup, as if plowed by a nearsighted farmer with drunken oxen. Most of the year you could see Lutheria in her fading plaid shirts and overalls, a thigh-length barn coat in frosty weather, with her shoulders and head just slightly stooped forward, as though she were looking for something on the ground, pedaling steadily behind the basket of her Royce Union three-speed toward the village or toward home.

Bill Tupper, also of Cemetery Road, would tell anyone who would listen about his great-aunt Lutheria: “Ain’t she something? Ruggedest old bat in Vermont. She ridin’ that bicycle to town pert near ever’y gol ‘dern day of the year, and she being eighty-two years old.” Actually, Lutheria was seventy-eight. Bill would go on in his high-pitched voice: “I seen her wobble that damn bike all the way over to Groton just to go to a yard sale… for a frinkin’ yard sale!”

from Junkyard at No Town by J.C. Myers (Rootstock Publishing)