Finding Work in the Blue Ridge
Usually when Old Joe Grady needs money, he just stops wherever he is and begins sounding out job prospects. He has learned that in most communities in western Virginia and North Carolina, there is an unofficial center of information and influence. It is usually a woman in her fifties or sixties, whose husband is either dead or in other respects badly overshadowed by his spouse. If Old Joe can find that woman, it makes job hunting a lot easier.
Before he gained this insight, he would come into town and just start asking around. Somebody might suggest he go down to Shorty's garage. Then he would look around until he saw a bunch of cars parked on either side of the road and anywhere else in the vicinity you could squeeze one. Over the door of a cinder block building, there would be a faded sign saying Phil's Amoco. Inside the door would be a small room with a cluttered counter, an old cash register, and nobody in sight. Joe would step around a stack of tires into a much larger room full of used exhaust pipes, oily rags, and two or three cars with their hoods up, as if saluting the woman in a black leather bikini posted on the tool chest.
Are you Phil or Shorty? Old Joe Grady would ask a couple of legs sticking out from under one of the cars.
You must be from out of town, would come the muffled response. Phil sold out the year Orvie died To which would be added when Old Joe revealed he was looking for a job: can't hardly keep myself busy. Old Joe would wonder if Orvie were Phil's wife, mule, car or what. But he wouldn't have the chance to ask.
Instead, there would come a litany of economic hardships, health problems, marital difficulties, and speculations on the coming of the Armageddon, until Old Joe would finally just slip away. Even on those occasions when he actually saw a person to talk to, Old Joe found himself being dismissed without much of a hearing.
That is until he discovered the phenomenon of the matriarch, as he called it. He stumbled across it by keeping his ears open at the barber shop. There was one woman in town, it seems, who was related by blood or marriage to just about everybody else. It got Old Joe's curiosity up so much that he tracked her down. By way of introduction, the woman affirmed that she had been born a Foster, and that, even though she had married a Bodenheimer, she still considered herself to be a Foster. Old Joe allowed as how his mother had had a cousin who was a Foster. They then sat in the woman's parlor for over an hour talking about her aunts and uncles and stepsisters and unmannerly nephews, with the woman doing most of the talking and Old Joe just asking a question now and then to let her know that he was still interested.
When Old Joe Grady got up to leave, she insisted on helping him find work. As they walked toward Phil's Amoco, he learned that Phil hadn't owned the garage in twenty years, that the current owner was Clinton Young (better known as Shorty), and that Shorty was a passable mechanic but terrible at record keeping. Since the woman was Clinton's aunt, she didn't hesitate to grab his ankles and roll him out from under the car. And since she was used to doing the thinking for all the Youngs, she hired Old Joe on the spot even after he admitted he wouldn't know a piston ring from a head gasket. Before Shorty could muster a protest, the matriarch had Old Joe installed behind the counter organizing the accounts and dealing with customers.
Since that time, Old Joe has held countless jobs in the Blue Ridge, and he still hasn't filled out a single application.