Pepper’s Junk Store

Old lawn mowers crowded the porch, and rusty bikes leaned against the columns. Inside, it was dim and dingy; an overhead fluorescent sputtered in the very back, where the tools were stacked, but if there were any other lights in the place, I don’t remember them ever being turned on. Once our eyes adjusted, we could make out the narrow path that led from the door to the place where Mr. Pepper sat in state behind the jewelry counter, watching Clemson football on a grainy black-and-white television. If he’d heard us come in, he greeted us. If not, we made enough noise for him to know we were there, over the sports announcer’s lonesome rattle. Mr. Pepper was a thin man with a high forehead, tallish and fragile, well into his eighties. His voice always surprised me: depth, splinters. He didn’t seem to mind if we stayed all afternoon, and many times we did; often we had the place to ourselves.

At Pepper’s store, browsing was spelunking. I had read about Aladdin’s cave of wonders, and to me, seven years old, that place was it. The place was full of palpable magic from all the totems collected there. National Geographics in slippery spires. An old highboy whose contents I coveted for years: heavy turquoise jewelry, chokers and bracelets, nugget rings. Once, for my mother’s birthday, I bought a pointed silver spoon, iridescent with tarnish, from Lebanon. Once, I bought a geode half, hollow as an Easter egg, its inside lined with dusty crystals I cleaned with an old toothbrush. Shark teeth and arrowheads, a quarter apiece, in Kerr jars. Tin brooch shaped like a pink chrysanthemum; human skull (was it real?); woolen uniform from Nazi Germany; manual typewriters with round, satisfying letter keys; a dull trombone, its slide frozen in place, nested in velvet.

Every time we went, I steeled myself to go farther. I was small and could wind through the narrow aisles between magazine cairns, bookshelves, and office tables bowed with boxes and crates. A sheaf of yardsticks; a silk flower floating inside a perfume bottle, a silvery bubble of air at the top. Dad spent hours going through bins of nails and bolts, bundles of twine, copper wire, narrow-gauge chain. He used a bundle of Pepper’s cord to make a clothesline for my mother, and stashed bolts away in coffee cans, to wait decades for a use.

What I couldn’t see I imagined: pale fish living in the store’s dark corners, eyespots shrunk to pinpricks from generations of disuse; white spiders with elongated, whiplike legs sensitive to movement, not light. Certainly there were silverfish, swelled with gorging on softening newspapers and encyclopedia; certainly rodents of many kinds, nesting behind piles of pitchforks and axe handles, lining their beds with shreds of insulation from coils of ancient electrical cord.

We knew that Mr. Pepper liked us, and that made a difference. We had seen him refuse to sell to someone he disliked or didn’t know, or charge a ridiculously high price. One man bought a barber chair, a big, heavy thing with aqua vinyl pads and a chrome footrest. He paid a lot for it. Mr. Pepper despised him; we could tell by the way he watched the man wrestle the chair out the door. But he showed us, once, his secret stash of Native artifacts, which he kept in a locked safe behind his counter. A tomahawk with a leather grip, painted pottery bowls, strings of trade beads. He asked us not to tell anyone about these things; he showed them only to dealers, he said. We could respect that. It was his safety in question. He was, by that time, an old man.

After leaving Pepper’s, everything in the outside world looked different: less crowded, better lit, cleaner. Wash your hands, my mother ordered, and leave those shoes at the door. You smell like that place. But I liked to lift things carefully and peer at them, to wonder where they came from and what their story was. After leaving, my eyes ached with the strain of taking it all in.

Years later, after Mr. Pepper died, his relatives—he had no children—held an auction to empty the store. It took the auctioneers six months to arrange things in lots, and the auction lasted four weekends, one of the defining events of that summer. I was home from college and went myself. The old trade beads I had seen years earlier sold for better than four hundred dollars, as did an original broadside advertisement for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. I bid on, and won, an American flag with moth holes and forty-eight stars, as well as a brown concertina that now sits on my mantel, better than a thousand miles away from that old store next to the railroad. My parents bought the auction’s biggest white elephant: two rooms stacked to the rafters with furniture and metal parts. They had a week to salvage what they could—a carved settee with horsehair stuffing coming out of the cushions, rusty Leaf-Lard cans, a rare straight-eight aluminum head for a certain kind of Buick. They had to pitch most of the stuff, but I still have a few things. A custard cup hangs in my kitchen; an awl, shorter than my little finger, with a brass knob like a pea and a sharp steel point, lies on my desk.

Pepper’s store was the first museum I knew. The hoarder-king ruled over it all, and passed some of his habits to me; I breathed them in with the rich and dusty air. I find myself stooping on sidewalks, picking up nails and pocketing them. An old Noxzema jar fills with them, one by one. And at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, in the Africa room, a wooden figure bristles with pins and barbs, each nail representing a conflict spoken and resolved, an episode in the life of the town. What in it thrills me with recognition? These symbols of shared history, in what would look, to others, like refuse.