Nashville: The Mood (Part 7)

By Donald H. Carpenter

Is Nashville simply Music City? The capital of Tennessee? A state of mind? A sea of corruption? A world of happiness, ordinariness, hypocrisy, vicious gossip, and political skulduggery? Where politics, religion, sex, academics, and crime cross paths in such a way as to be almost indistinguishable? Enter a world of uninspiring public officials, soulful prostitutes, scheming professional classes, and tormented preachers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Donald H. Carpenter
• Release date: Jun 3, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463422243

Donald H. Carpenter

Donald H. Carpenter is a former certified public accountant who is the author of six books: Dueling Voices, I Lost It At The Beginning, 101 Reasons NOT to Murder the Entire Saudi Royal Family, He Knew Where He Was Going (?), Man of a Million Fragments: The True Story of Clay Shaw, and LANNY. He is currently working on a fictional series about Nashville.

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NASHVILLE: THE MOOD

PART 7

by Donald H. Carpenter

Copyright ©2018 by Donald H. Carpenter

Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved. This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

Cover design by Charles Hooper

Printed in the United States of America

NASHVILLE: THE MOOD

PART 7

It was a crisp, clear fall morning in Nashville. A light blue sky overhead, with one or two clouds high up and far off as if they were above the surrounding countryside tens of miles away. The temperature had dipped the night before as a new front moved in, and was now a brisk forty degrees.

Things had been steady in Nashville for well over a week. There was nothing that anyone could point to that was irregular or worth talking about. There had been a couple of shootings the night before, and a couple the night before that, but it had been a week since a homicide. The mayor had announced that he would be attending the dedication of the reopening of an old courthouse in the downtown area following a major remodeling. A state highway patrolman had been arrested by city police on charges of improperly stopping female drivers after dark. One of the top professors in Vanderbilt’s Department of Gossip Studies, on loan from the medical school and set to begin teaching, in January, about the physical ramifications of the aftereffects of gossip, resigned suddenly; citing health reasons. The world’s largest adult bookstore, located off Interstate 40, announced a fifty percent reduction on all items in stock—books, magazines, and video—in preparation for a complete revamping of its business model.

People in the downtown area saw the smoke long before anyone saw fire. A casual passerby had at first thought they were imagining things when they saw a large canvas bag, leaning against the side of a building in an alleyway opening, that seemed to have a few puffs of smoke coming from it. Several of them did double takes, and then continued walking and going about their business. Soon thereafter, the smoke grew gradually greater in volume, such that later other passersby noticed it, knew they weren’t imagining things, but thought it must be being done with someone’s knowledge, and they continued on as well. No one really noticed that the smoke, which had started out light and white in color, grew darker and heavier as the minutes passed.

Most of those who saw the bag recognized immediately that it was a bag of ultra-refined flour, manufactured by Betty’s Premier Fine Biscuits. The manufacturer was now a division of a large food company, but years earlier had started as a totally independent business catering to restaurants all over the city. The manufacturing facility was in the northern part of Nashville, not far off Dickerson Road. Those who were fans of the biscuits knew very well the sharp white color of the large bags of ultra-refined flour; many of them had purchased smaller-sized bags to use at home. The white canvas material was very sturdy, and tough to cut through, even with a very sharp knife, but it was also known for holding in its contents without any loss.

Shortly after nine o’clock, a passerby noticed small flames around the edges of the bag. By this time, the smoke had turned dark, dark grey, almost black, and the color alarmed those who saw it even more than the flames. Many had cooked with it, but none had ever seen it on fire.

Still, no one reported it. Everyone was in too much of a hurry, although the length of the pauses by each passerby had increased significantly from more than two hours earlier. Finally, someone did alert the city fire department.

Before the fire department could reach it, however, the flames began to grow out of control. The black smoke began to filter out onto the sidewalk, and then into the street, and soon the upward spiral that had begun earlier reached the top of the buildings directly above it, and began to attract attention from some who weren’t even in the downtown area. The volume of it showed no signs of subsiding.

In the next few minutes, the dark smoke intensified, seeming to grow darker, and greater in volume. The flames seemed to grow quickly, to those who saw them last, but they were soon obscured by the smoke, such that anyone entering that block of the street was engulfed in it. When the fire department finally arrived, its personnel could barely tell where the source of the smoke was, and had to work their way through it, asking pedestrians who had no idea. Those who escaped the ever-growing fog of smoke, once clear of it, did not stop to help.

Eventually, after an embarrassing time span, the bag was located, and water applied to it. However, the water, while reducing the flames relatively quickly, only served to intensify the smoke. It grew even darker, fouler, and seemed to issue forth in an ever-thickening consistency. To a bystander one block north or south of the location, it seemed as if a building had collapsed and the dust had engulfed the entire block.

All of those who passed through the dark cloud, however briefly, knew they had been there, for the entire day. Their clothes were sooty and smelly, with a foul odor that seemed to exceed that of any type of smoke they had ever been in contact with. Many of them hurried home at the first opportunity to shower and change clothes, some even taking the rest of the workday off. Others toughed it out as long as they could, although their co-workers and/or customers shied away from them as much as they could. It was embarrassing, but to anyone in the downtown area, it was soon understandable, simply because of the large number of people who had passed through the cloud and then filtered out to various offices in the heart of the city.

The incident was substantially over by late afternoon, but the ramifications of it continued for a few days. Once it was determined that the large canvas bag contained ultra-refined white flour, a frenzied discussion began in online chat boards, blogs, and Twitter comments about the pluses and minuses of the product. Many health advocates recommended avoiding it entirely, while fans of Betty’s Premier Fine Biscuits weighed in with vociferously favorable comments. Many of the discussions soon degenerated into name-calling, obscenities and threats. A representative of the manufacturer defended its product, hinting that the action might have been a terrorist event intended to disrupt the daily workings of the city. Congressman Joe Caldwell, scheduled to arrive in Nashville the following weekend, delayed his trip for a full week. The mayor discussed the incident philosophically, seeming to offer specific, relevant comments without really saying anything that anyone could have objected to.

The American Diabetes Association refused to comment on the ongoing health debate about the product, simply mentioning that a balanced diet was necessary for good health and diabetes prevention. The Tennessean newspaper editorialized that anything that tore at the fabric of Nashville was to be discouraged, and although it didn’t want to single out any single culprit, it did gently chastise local authorities (unnamed) for—something. At least, the editorial seemed to say something like that.

Aspects of the incident lingered, however. Primarily, it was the foul smell that everyone who had walked through the cloud of smoke remembered; those who had come in contact with them remembered it as well. Long after those individuals had bathed thoroughly that evening, washed their hands, arms, body, legs, nostrils, and so on, and long after the next day, by which time everyone had laundered his or her clothing, the odor remained strong in their minds. And, in the downtown area, sooty residue-coated buildings up and down the street like nothing anyone could remember. A handful recalled an ash cloud from an incinerator eruption forty or fifty years earlier, but even they said this incident far exceeded that one. It rained heavily the following week, and again the week after that, but by then the sooty residue seemed to have become a permanent part of the buildings it had affected.

The offices of the Tennessee Transportation Department, or TTD, were humming as usual this morning, with a few differences. A new lighting system was nearing completion on several floors of the department, and many of the employees who were benefiting from that new system were in an upbeat mood. The ancient fluorescent lighting system it had replaced had become a burden on their eyes, and their psyches, and the rate of workers’ compensation and affiliated stress-related claims had reached an all-time high. Those who had toughed it out foresaw a change for the better that could last some time. The mood in those sections was generally buoyant on this day.

On other floors, however, including both those where the new system had been in place for some time, and where the old system was still in place, the mood was altogether different. However, instead of being glum, although there was the usual amount of griping, something else was afoot. Anyone who came to work in those departments could have told the difference almost from the moment they arrived on this day. Large numbers of other employees turned to anyone who was entering the offices on those floors for the first time that morning, and there was a mass effort going on among the various employees