Not far from the intersection of Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina, up in the big mountains, there is a community by a river, if one can call it that, known as Shanky Bottom. There are few communities in this land bearing the name Shanky, although you will find one over in middle Tennessee by Kentucky in Clay County, but that is not our Shanky.
There is a bar in Shanky Bottom called Shanky Bar. Shanky Bar is the only bar in Shanky Bottom. Indeed it is the only commercial establishment in Shanky Bottom, although Louise Shanky Purcell's back bedroom has been called a commercial establishment from time to time, but more about that in a moment.
The bar is an establishment where the locals can procure just about anything they desire, including food, drink, financial services of sorts, and high speed Internet with downloads at 24 mbps, and uploads at 4 mbps, although in Shanky Bottom the upload capacity is seldom used. Shanky folk and their neighbors and customers tend more toward media consumption than content creation.
The community consists of eight habitations grouped within the bottom, housing forty to fifty souls, most of whom are kin within the third or fourth degrees of consanguinity, which may also be said of the general population on the surrounding mountains. There is another establishment near the houses, but technically it is not in Shanky Bottom but is rather in the woods in a draw that lies off the bottom and runs a few hundred yards into the hills. There is nothing that the taxing authorities would call a road leading to it, but the operators of this establishment have no trouble hauling grain and sugar up the draw with a mule or tractor wagon. There is a lively spring that never goes dry that flows from the hillside down into the draw, providing pure mountain water for the best whiskey made anywhere in these parts, or at least within five miles of the bottom, and this is saying much because the competition in these hills is fierce.
Some of this mountain nectar is served to the patrons of Shanky Bar upon special request, but only to those who are regulars and whom the proprietors of the bar have known for decades. These proprietors are the patriarchs and matriarchs of the bottom and the surrounding mountains, and the family extends far beyond the few souls who live in the bottom itself. The bar, and this extended family, have a wholesome relationship with the two banks in the nearby town and with the town's feed store, owned by some Shanky cousins, which sells far more corn than the local livestock, domestic and feral, could possibly consume, and which several years back added sugar to its inventory. There is a railroad spur at the feed store that offloads directly into the side of the store's warehouse, and after the rail company started delivering sugar by the carload, the feds called the sheriff and asked her what was up with all the sugar going into town. They said that the Department of Commerce had a database somewhere on the East Coast that kept track of all sugar sales in the world and that they had never seen so much sugar being sold to such a small community of people anywhere on the planet. The sheriff listened politely and then she explained that these hill people needed a lot of extra sugar to get them through the harsh winters, and also they used a lot of sugar in the cooking of their jams and preserves that they sold to the thousands of tourists who came through each fall to view the beautiful mountain color. The feds expressed some doubts about such a large number of tourists who would visit a town that didn't even appear on most maps and that their own agents had a hard time finding. They mumbled something about how there weren't enough people in the town including within fifty miles of it to consume that much sugar no matter how cold the winter was, but they left it at that, at least for awhile. From past experience they had concluded that shutting down the local manufacture of distilled spirits in these hills was impossible given the lack of assistance from the local law enforcement authorities and financial institutions. Even the local preachers kindly told the feds that they didn't see how they could help them with this problem.
Now, back to Louise's back bedroom. It is a place of comfort and rest, a place where one can find relief when it is not to be found anywhere else. Louise herself is a bit of an enigma. She graduated from grammar school in the nearby town, quite an accomplishment back in the day, and moved out of the bottom to attend high school several mountains away where her third cousin on her mama's side lived and where a room was made available to her for the four years of high school being as how she was kin. She then moved down to Chapel Hill, got herself admitted, and spent the next eight years waiting tables and grinding her way through school. She left with a bachelor of science degree and a doctorate in medicine, graduating second in her class, and headed off to Oxford, England where she had been admitted to a one-year internship in a hospital there with the prospect of an Oxon masters degree if she presented an acceptable thesis at the end of the year and successfully completed the internship with a few academic courses scattered in. Those were still the days when an intern may have slept a total of a hundred nights during the year of the internship. But she plowed through, meeting her objective; and leaving the year behind in a dim fog, and following her DNA, she left her stuff in Oxford and made her way up to Scotland to find a mountain where she could stay in a little hut and have a good, hard, three-day cry. Louise missed Shanky Bottom. She really missed Shanky Bottom. It was almost as if her soul had separated from her and was now in Shanky Bottom and she could see it there thousands of miles away and she was nothing here because her soul was there, not here. But how can you see a soul? I can see it, she told herself, that's me, that's me there, I don't have a soul here any more, my soul's in Shanky Bottom, and she cried some more.
So Dr. Louise Purcell went back home. She joined a little clinic which served as the hospital in the town near Shanky and she treated the general population, stitching cuts, setting bones, prescribing and dispensing nose drops and cough medicine, and delivering babies. There were four beds in the clinic which was right next door to the doctor who owned it, and at the rear there was a tiny apartment intended as lodging for any staff whose overnight presence might be required. The doctor who owned the clinic offered this lodging to Louise, but she insisted on living in her old home place in Shanky Bottom, which her mother had deeded to her the day after she returned from Great Britain. Her house had four bedrooms. She and her mother occupied two of them, and her daddy stayed drunk in the third. And then there was the fourth, the back bedroom.
Of the four bedrooms, this was the only one that had a door leading out of the house. It had its own tiny porch, just big enough for two rocking chairs and a small table between them. A guest could sit there and observe the critters in the back yard and enjoy a mountain evening without being seen by travelers on the road in front of the house. And of course an occupant of this back bedroom could enter and leave the house without being seen by those in other parts of the house or out in the front yard. This room had its own plumbing, installed in what may have been a sewing room or a pantry when some of the earlier Shanky family built the house. There was a ceramic thing plumbed between the toilet and the lavatory that puzzled almost everyone who saw it. It was oblong and looked like a cross between the toilet and the sink. It had a spigot but it did not have the flushing capability of a toilet and it was too low to function as a normal sink. Because this thing was so unusual and nobody knew what to make of it, everybody in Shanky Bottom knew about it and had seen it, having by right of tribe been given a tour of the john, and most people in the nearby town and on the surrounding mountains had heard about it and had included it in their lore. One of the more affluent Shanky boys had brought it back from France for his mama, Louise's grandma, after he had spent some time studying there. Unfortunately, he left for Abilene before he could educate the locals about it, and he never came back. The only clue that he had left about the thing was that it was supposed to be called a biddit, as in what one does at an auction for an item that one wants to buy, he explained, as he attempted to teach the pronunciation of the thing, but this confused the locals even more because after the boy installed it for his mama and left Shanky Bottom, the Shankys first put it to use by designating the back bedroom as a place to gather and rinse their garden produce, in this thing, and these locals couldn't figure out what rinsing vegetables had to do with an auction. Such was the state of affairs when Louise Purcell returned from Oxford and settled back into her old home place in Shanky Bottom. One day later she owned the house and the thing, and she determined to repurpose the back bedroom.
***
Everybody needs a place to cry, Louise told herself. All of God's children cry, or at least should. Homo cries, and Homo laughs. She determined that she would offer her fourth bedroom as a place of comfort for souls who needed it, and as a place for contemplation and perhaps even isolation for souls who might need that. Her thinking came from experience.
So Dr. Lou, as she had become known in these mountains, put a simple single bed in the room. She had the furniture store bring her another chifforobe and put it in what she called the comfort room. She loved this kind of furniture; it had a tall closet-like section on the left, a little over five feet high, and a set of four drawers on the right at the top of which was a flat surface, a little over waist high, with an adjustable mirror at the back. In the closet portion on the left there was room to hang dresses, suits, or other long items, and the drawers to the right provided ample space for a visitor to store whatever might be needed for a brief sojourn. She loved the minimalism of this furniture. She completed the furnishing with a simple table and two straight-back chairs, an old roll top desk that she picked up for almost nothing, and a comfortable stuffed chair. She left the bathroom as it was, including the bidet and the clawfoot bathtub. Shanky now had a mental health facility that over the years would serve troubled souls, including the mighty and the mini — a United States senator, a governor, university presidents, a world renowned poet, painters, and many others, known and unknown, who needed a place of rest and comfort that sometimes can be found only in solitude, a place where they can cry and reflect and suffer and quietly pass through the valley of the shadow of death. This was Dr. Lou's back bedroom in Shanky Bottom.