“No,” said the man, “Never.”

But never is such a soft word, much more unpredictable than concrete words like now and today. Never has a whimsical spin to it, and is as impulsive as anything.
Because of its nature, never eventually came.

“Who are you?” asked the man, moments after I had crossed the threshold into the town.

“Just a stranger passing through on my way up to North Carolina. Raleigh. I’m hitching rides up there. You know anyone on their way north?”

He thought a moment, as though he’d never thought of such a thing as travel. “No, don’t know no one on their way north.”

“Well, know anyone going to a bigger town? I’d bet I can get a ride from Atlanta.”
“No, don’t know no one.”
“Know anyone going anywhere?”
“No one goes nowhere. Everybody just stays in town.”
“Why?”
“Don’t know the outside. No one told us about it. Know in here, though.”
“Has a stranger ever passed through?”
He paused a minute. “No,” said the man, “Never.”

I stayed a total of seven days in Caldwell. That was the name of the town: Caldwell. That man and my first and only conversation taught me the most about the town, in all the time I was there. One hundred and forty people lived there; all of them farmed and sold locally, rarely straying far from their touchstone, their home. The town was awfully self-sufficient. Everyone there had lived there for all their life. No new inhabitants for as long as anyone could remember, and no one bothered to explore the rest of the world.
Not one of them had ever left the town.

Few of them were educated. Everyone, including children, pitched in farming sugar cane, and once a week a man came to take the crops to a different small town a few miles from Atlanta where they were shipped off to Tampa. Unfortunately for me, that man came the morning I arrived.

“He won’t be back for a week, you said?”
“Nope.”
“Is there anywhere I could stay until he comes back?”
“Maybe. I can ask Bertha.”

Bertha was the largest woman I had ever met. Unmarried and overworked, the impression she left on me was quite impressive. She owned a small, rundown, underused inn, inhabited only by her and a few employees. When we passed by it, I took it for abandoned, and kept walking until I realized the man was on its front porch. I thought I was its first customer in years. Needless to say, there were plenty of empty rooms for me to stay in. Bertha was pleasant enough but tough in her ways, and was not happy to care for the stranger in town. I was interrogated as soon as I settled in, asked who I was, where I was from, and all sorts of things.

“You don’t get many strangers around here, do you?”

“Naw. Don’t make no difference to me no how. Business is business.”
My God was she southern. “Doesn’t seem like you get much business. I’d be grateful for all I got.” I hinted at my treatment at the moment, but it went unnoticed.
“Yeah.”
“You run an inn in a town with no travel. Must be hard.”
“I make my way.”
I was under the impression she was wary of me, almost like I scared her. She looked at me as though I had done something horrible.

I was finally left alone, and left to float around the town with my freedom. I was a drifter, always looking for a place to stay. I decided I’d look around while I was stuck, even if I didn’t think I’d stay. Better not to waste the time I was immobile. Taking a closer look at the place, it wasn’t really so bad. No worse than other places I’d stayed, even with the friendly hosts, and by the feel of it I thought I could probably get a place pretty cheap.
The town’s layout was fairly simple. It branched out north and south from a central store and town hall and all the houses were along that one street. There were about 25-30 buildings total, a real small town, and about twenty families, I thought. I was never sure—none of them spoke to me and I rarely saw them leave their homes. The fields they cared for were all to the east, near enough to walk to in the morning to get to work and make it back, exhausted, afterwards. The buildings themselves looked uniform, made of wood, with little nuances or splashes of color to set them apart. Overall, it was decent, and I made up my mind that I wouldn’t have minded living there at all.

It was on my promenade that I met a few of the town’s children in all their glory. I watched them chase each other up and back the small block of road that halved their town. Their deep tans, burns, and freckles gave away their hours working and playing in the beating sun. They’d had more sun in their short existence than I had in my whole life. I wondered how much time they spent at school or church, because their sunburns showed they didn’t spend much time indoors.

The children soon noticed me and withdrew, giving me the signal to return to my rented room.
“Bertha, what do the children do around here?”
“Work with their folks.”
“What else?”
“Not much. Play on Sundays. Everybody works if they can.”
“What about school?”
“No school around here. Everybody works.”

On the second day, I tried approaching the children to see if they were schooled at home at all. They would not get close to me. The children, like everyone else was in that damn town, were terrified of strangers like me.
On the second day, my trip north was abandoned. The town intrigued me with all its quirks and curiosities. I wondered why the main store closed and locked its door when I passed. I was transfixed on the line of townsfolk walking east at the same time every day on the way to the communal fields to work. The town’s internal clock was incredible, never off, and it seemed as though the only part off schedule was me.

I would see this tight schedule kept in the rest of the five days I spent there.

I soon began the arduous task of finding a house for sale, having hastily decided to stay there permanently on that third day. The place looked nice enough at the time, and I thought the town needed me, a stranger, to catch them up with the rest of the world. Seemed like a good idea at the time. It was taxing, to say the least, and time consuming, as each door I knocked on to ask if they knew of an open house was locked as soon as I mounted the first porch step. This only increased my determination. Eventually I found a man who was kind enough, in his own way, to help me.

“The last house on the north side is empty. Check there.”
His door was shut and bolted again before I could thank him.

I had a plan, you see. Though not a teacher by trade, I thought I’d run a basic school from my house, teaching the children of the place simple things that they needed to know. I would take them for a few hours each day to get them out of the sun, even if for a little bit, for their rudimentary education. They worked too much, the children did, more than most adults did. I was rather excited about my plan, hopeful that as a resident I would be accepted and welcomed into the doors that were now locked. The mystery behind the shut doors drove me crazy, and the things I could discover once I was well received pushed me to work as hard as I did.

I had been in the town but four days, and on the fifth made a down payment on that house. I wired money in and got it all done in a few hours once I had the opportunity. I moved my things, what little there were, into my new home that same day.

Yes, I was moving very fast. Even after I began advertising for my “school” and searching for a permanent residence, I was still viewed as a stranger. I was done being an outsider- I just wanted to dive into the unexplored territory of the welcomed, and I wanted to dive in now.

I had planned to have my first school session on the sixth day, a Friday, that I was there, but no children came, as their parents would never leave them in the care of a stranger. I was trying so hard to be part of the town, and still they would not accept me! I was furious.

Bertha was displeased when I appeared in her inn that day. She was the only one in the whole goddamn state, it seemed, that would talk to me, and I needed to talk to someone.

“Why didn’t anyone come? They all knew about it.”
“We don’t like strangers in this town.”
“I’m not a stranger anymore! It’s humiliating. I’m just trying to help their children.”
“We try to avoid strangers, we do.”
The mail came in and Bertha, relieved, went out to get it, taking longer than she needed to trying to get away from me for a minute. There was a letter for me in the pile.
I was shocked at the letters and its contents.
“I haven’t told anyone I live here!”
“Alright.”

“I can’t believe this!” I opened and skimmed the letter, silenced by it immediately. I read it again, making sure I understood it correctly. I was speechless and still for ten minutes or so. I’m sure Bertha was overjoyed.

“It… My mother is sick.”
“No one asked you.”

The letter revealed that my mother’s sickness from a few months before, which we thought was finished, had worsened, and she was bedridden. I can’t, even now, bring myself to describe it in details—they were too terrible, and I’m afraid mentioning them would make them come true.

I arranged for my departure with the sugar collecting man who came the next day, the seventh and last day of my stay. I left with him that day, half an hour after supper.

In each of the five rides and seven hours it took to get to my mother, I was mute. I was a follower, and the letter was my prophet who, by being listened to, would tell me what I needed to do to please the heavens and make everything alright. The travel to my Mecca put me at my mother’s house in the middle of the night, and I felt bad waking her, but needed to know if she was alright.

You can only imagine my shock when my mother, fine and well, opened the door and, happily surprised, asked me if I wanted a bite to eat. I accepted, ate, and collapsed into my childhood bed, exhausted from the stress and shock.

The next morning I brought up the letter. She laughed.

“I’m not sick, hun- I’m fine! Look at me!”

“Ma, you don’t understand- I got a letter saying you were dying. I was so scared for you, and I ran right here.”
She looked at me skeptically, frightened. “Show me the letter, son.”

But I couldn’t find it. I searched my bag, my room, my pockets, but my prophet was missing. I thought I had left it in the pocket of my jeans from yesterday, but it was gone. Even now I couldn’t tell you where it went.
“Honey, do you want to lie down? You look white as a sheet.” After using her favorite expression, she stared at me with her big, worried eyes.

“No, ma, I’m fine. I must have misplaced it, that’s all.”

“Alright. Tell me if you need anything from me.” She still thinks I’m off my rocker whenever I visit her.
We made some small talk, and I hired someone to take me all the way back to Caldwell the next day.

I swear we were at the right spot. I told the man exactly where to go, and neither of us had been distracted or anything. He thinks I’m crazy, too. When the two of us arrived at Caldwell, or where it should have been, it was gone. The whole town was gone. Like it had just got up and moved; it had disappeared.

I guess those folks really did hate strangers, because they did a hell of a job hiding from this one.

I told the guy we had taken a wrong turn and to take me to Atlanta, which he did, and I paid him extra not to mention anything. He took it without saying a word.

I gave up on getting to Raleigh; travel just wasn’t meant for me. I gave up on getting back to Caldwell as soon as I realized it was gone. I live in Atlanta now. And Atlanta doesn’t have the slightest problem with strangers, thank God!

But you know what really ticks me off about the whole thing? I never did get that down payment on that house back. Stole my money and ran, that damn town did.