IN MY SHORT LIFETIME, T. J. Heath's General Merchandise Emporium was one of the first stores in Paisley to give up the ghost.
Mr. Heath sold everything. Hardware. Clothes. Lip gloss. Jams and jellies. Livestock water troughs. Skunk repellent. Deer jerky. Udder balm.
Everybody went to Mr. Heath's store because Mr. Heath had something for everybody. But one day, a couple of months after the Paisley plastics plant closed and the Wal-Mart Supercenter over in Coy opened up with a ribbon-cutting ceremony presided over by the lieutenant governor and his pretty third wife, Mr. Heath spent an entire day without a single customer.
Disgusted, he went out back to his little lumberyard and got some boards and nailed up all the doors and windows, never to return. The stuff that was on the shelves he just left there, where, over time, the once valuable inventory was inherited by moths and mice and rust, and, of course, the ever-present spiders.
I peeked through gaps in the boards. A foul scent of rodent droppings, decay, and mildew wafted through the cracks. Inside were bags of seed and cornstarch and flour that had rotted apart or been torn open by vermin, the contents scattered like muddy puppy paws across Mr. Heath's once spotless, highly polished hardwood floors.
Clothes that had been hung neatly on plastic hangers now dangled precariously from the remnants of rotted seams. Bottles of soda and syrup and cooking oil had fallen to the floor and broken, combining to form a tiny tar pit in which a thousand flies had lost their troubled lives.
Labels had disappeared from cans. Small appliances, such as toasters and waffle irons, had succumbed to tarnish and rust; home electronics, once the latest thing, had passed into obsolescence.
The scene before me might have been a museum, a snapshot in time, a three-dimensional picture of Paisley's past, except that in its present condition it more closely resembled a shipwreck, as I would imagine the interior of the doomed Titanic at the bottom of the sea.
A shopwreck with no survivors.
I positioned my lens between two hammered-up boards, carefully sighted through the viewfinder, made note of the sunlight streaming through a hole in the roof, adjusted my exposure accordingly, set my legs apart to form a human bipod, and snapped the shutter.
Some, who live in cities, with vast forces of police, and homes and businesses protected by alarm systems, and surveillance cameras, and guard dogs, may wonder why no one has ever broken in to Mr. Heath's abandoned store.
The answer is uniquely Paisley. First, it was because the people who lived here, all of whom knew one another by sight, were basically honest. After that, it was because no one lived here at all.
Can a thief break in if there are no thieves around?
Before Kansas was Kansas, there were no towns, but there were plenty of people. Today these people are called Native Americans and few of them are left.
Before I began being homeschooled—that is, left to figure out things for myself—I learned from my teachers that during the days of the European settlement of America these people were called Indians.
Indians were largely treated as inconvenient savages whose presence impeded progress.
European settlers brought with them the idea that land was something a person could own. This was contrary to the Indians' point of view. They believed that the land, like the air and the rain and the sun and the stars, belonged to everybody.
With the notion of ownership of land came the idea of towns, each staked out into adjacent rectangles with "lots" for sale or for claim to those who would "improve" them by building structures—houses, businesses, and factories.
Encouraged by the United States government, people came from all over the eastern United States, and parts of western Europe, Scandinavia, and even eastern Europe to "tame" the Kansas territory.
Many people became rich convincing others who were less informed to come to Kansas to settle a town. Many other people died broke and brokenhearted trying to do just that.
Consequently, in the nineteenth century, hundreds of towns in Kansas came and went.
Today there are places that are simply ruts in a pasture that once were home to hundreds, even thousands, of optimistic Scandinavians and Germans.
Two of the most influential factors in determining whether a town would prosper or wither were the owners of the railroads and the politicians who determined the locations of the county seats, the various headquarters for local government.
Corruption among these people was rife.
Heck, they didn't even consider their underhanded shenanigans to be corrupt. They saw themselves as being savvy enough to outsmart the next guy, a desirable American trait.
In the D. Potts pamphlet about Paisley, the author rages about these dishonest practices, terming them "unchecked hucksterism."
I just call it human nature.