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Wednesday, Jan. 24, 2007

HELECHAWA: Gone to Helechawa

Name sounds like 'each way' and a highway runs through it

HELECHAWA -- Since last summer, we've been visiting Kentucky towns with fascinating names. This visit is the 22nd in our series of back-road adventures.

The Crossroads Market opens at 4:30 a.m. because that's when working people need nourishment for the drive ahead, the day beyond the drive and the drive home. Tommy Lykins, the guy who is behind the counter to serve anyone at that hour, knows that the first guy in the door is going to be Scott Wilder and he's going to want things for his lunch later at the sawmill and hot coffee for the road.

The Crossroads is the kind of place where they sell A-1 steak sauce in the gallon jug, few vegetables, no end of Oreo choices and home-canning equipment.

Helechawa is the kind of town where, says native son Ben Easterling, "most of the people from here work someplace else. There's not enough country to farm and not enough people to log or mine."

Ben says the old church down the road -- the white one without any discernible denomination attached -- is the place where folks set up shop when they decide it's time for serious religion. The church, which way back when was the one-room schoolhouse, has been a Church of God, a Church of Christ, a Holiness Church and Helechawa Community Church. He's not sure if it's anything now but it could be again any time, should the spirit move.

He's been here all his life, lives now in his grandparents' house but defers on the local history lesson to one-time one-room schoolhouse teacher Cleta Gullett.

Pressed, he thinks the town got its name from an Indian princess. "It's a pretty name."

Cleta, when found, isn't talking. She might have already had enough of people from somewhere else, what with the Bert T. Combs Mountain Parkway slicing the town in two and carrying traffic over the Helechawa overpass at every imaginable hour.

Truth is, the town is so close off the parkway that you can smell the Crossroads Market's biscuits baking as you whiz by.

JoAnn Elmore has been cooking biscuits, gravy, eggs, bacon, sausage and fresh pork tenderloin since 4 a.m. "They come all the way from Floyd County asking for it," she says of the Crossroads' tenderloin, whose secret ingredient is, apparently, salt and pepper and whatever all those years of honest grilling have left flavoring the grill.

JoAnn's up at 3 to wake her 4-year-old daughter briefly for the ride to the baby sitter's ("she goes right back to sleep") before she and her sister, Linda Finch, start rolling out the 4-inch wide biscuits that will be "run through the pizza oven" to get that perfect brown finish that protects the flaky buttermilky insides. Linda slices one of those biscuits and piles a good half-pound of bacon on it before lowering the biscuit lid and wrapping it for a customer. Linda's been cooking here for 12 years and is sure, with her husband working nights and she working early days, she has the nearest thing to a perfect marriage.

"We see each other an hour each day," she says, adding that that's probably a good thing because "I smell all the time like bacon or a big cheeseburger."

Next door, Ron and Mike's Meat Processing is housed in a bleach-smelling blue building that currently is home to a wicked band saw, dozens of knives, a meat grinder, a meat slicer, a tenderizer and one dead hog. The hog is split in half and hanging in the walk-in freezer and there's a pile of fresh bandages on the desk which meat-cutter Drayton Kendrick is in general need of, he says.

He works alone in the claustrophobic, nippy room with the sharp instruments and the constant threat of mortal danger, except in the busy deer season when somebody comes in to help.

No one is ever really alone at the Parkway Express, the other major establishment in town. It's the beer store and they do not open until 8 a.m., perhaps to the dismay of some early risers. The service, walk in or drive through, is divine. The conversation inside is riveting, leaning as it is toward past sins, current sins and things that really shouldn't be sins.