A Tourist in Mayberry

2/7) Frequent Visitor at Riverview: Sheriff Gus Nichols

"Things are not always what they seem; the first appearance deceives many; the intelligence of a few perceives what has been carefully hidden." Phaedrus

As I mentioned earlier, many people watched over William in our small community, most notably Sheriff Gus Nichols. The sheriff was there from the beginning of William's madness and considered it something that should have not happened on his watch.

Sheriff Nichols was already a frequent visitor to Riverview because he was a part of a continuously running poker game. This made it easy for him to check on William when he wasn't dealing cards, or telling stories, or talking shop with the other card players he called the Wild Bunch.

Sheriff Nichols is more than the Sheriff in our town. He came from a long line of storytellers. He grew up at the feet of his Mama Nichols, who could spin a tale of the bogeyman and how she threw him in the river, so the sheriff knew how to tell a story.

Gus Nichols was born and raised on Hamburg Street right above the bridge where, once you crossed it, you were out of the city limits and in what was referred to at the time by the locals as "Little Chicago". That area was home to several beer joints where a card game could go wrong quickly and result in more than one stab victim being thrown out of the car at the doors to the ER of Northern Hospital. In all, over 20 documented men and a handful of women were killed or disappeared in the area before 1947 when the beer joints were shut down and turned into, appropriately enough, a livestock slaughterhouse.

Sheriff Nichols is a local historian who loves the history of Surry County. He is a member of the Surry County Historical Society. He is underappreciated by most of today's youth who are used to getting their information in short bursts of technology. Older people, especially old enough to remember listening by the radio at night or watching "their story" (otherwise known as a soap opera), appreciate his specific details and elaborations and exaggerations and enunciations.

The Sheriff can tell you all about the low-water bridge in the former county seat of Rockford and how many vehicles over the years ended up in the Yadkin River. The Sheriff knows the history of the largest open-faced granite quarry in the world where veins of granite run under the entire city of Mount Airy. If you ride around town with Sheriff Nichols, he can point out the intricately carved pieces of granite created by skilled laborers imported from Italy to work at the quarry. He will show you the granite houses they lived in. He will tell you that even an underpaid, skilled worker appreciated the beauty of their own craft, and the Italians adorned their yards with immovable, thousands-of-pounds sculptures. Sheriff Nichols knows where each birdbath and planter are located and the biography of the artist who carved it.

Sheriff Nichols knows about the other famous residents of Mount Airy besides Andy Griffith. There is Donna Fargo who held the number one country hit in the nation with "Happiest Girl in the Whole USA." Who doesn't love a lyric with a phrase about a skippity doo da day? Even Walt Disney would love those lyrics.

Sheriff Nichols knows about the original Siamese Twins, Eng and Chang Bunker, who traveled the world as oddities in the PT Barnum Circus and settled in Surry County, outside Mt. Airy. They married two sisters, kept two separate homes, and fathered 21 children. Their 1500 plus descendants hold a reunion every year. There is an historical marker in White Plains near the White Plains Church proclaiming:

""Eng and Chang, the Siamese Twins born in 1811, in Siam. Settled as farmers in this neighborhood. Died 1874. Grave 100 yards west."

Sheriff Nichols can tell you the ghost stories around town, including the haunted area across the bridge where he grew up. The city middle school was built atop the old slaughterhouse once called Little Chicago. Since the school was built, several people died on the grounds including a car crash victim, two shootout victims from a criminal deal gone bad in the parking lot one Saturday night, and a popular coach who tripped and fell down an embankment after football practice and broke his neck.

The school sits atop a hill overlooking the next county and if you squint, on a clear day you can see the edge of a pond where four cousins under the age of 14 drowned one winter when the frozen pond they were playing on collapsed. Though no one would ever know the truth, locals speculated one or two of them fell through, and the others drowned trying to rescue them. "Family always helps family, no matter what," says the Sheriff in his retelling.

Sheriff Nichols can tell you about the other county school in Flat Rock, a mile from the new city middle school. The school burned to the ground one school day in the 1950's and killed a teacher and a student. The school is haunted. Janitors get phone calls from no one on the inside phone lines in the middle of the night. Computer technicians from the county school system captured pictures of a dancing orb in a widely circulated video. Sometimes moans are heard or the long dead former principal is spotted wandering the halls. "The principal is friendly," says the Sheriff in his telling, "He's still just doing his job and looking after his kids".

Mount Airy is like the small town in Maine in a Steven King novel where unexplainable tragedies happen often enough, yet residents seem not to connect them at all.

All these tragedies and stories that show human nature at its best and worst are collected by the Sheriff who can tell them to you, if you ask, or if you don't.

Sheriff Nichols will tell all but one story. It is his story, and he keeps it close.

Author's Notes: There is a lot of true history in this part of the story, but I'll tell you about two I have personal knowledge about. The first kind of shows how an author uses personal experience to liven up a story: My mom grew up on Hamburg Street, and when I was a child, my siblings and I world run like we were on fire when it was dark from my grandparents home to the next house over where my great-grandparents lived in. I think most of the fear was based on the tall hedges between the homes, and the fear that someone was hiding behind them. Our fears were not dampened even when my Mama Snow would say she had caught the boogey man and thrown him in the river .

The second true history note: I worked at Flat Rock Elementary, and often when I was there by myself, the inside phones would ring, though I was the only one in the building. I always answered, but no one was on the line. There were other incidents, but I never felt afraid. It almost felt like a former principal was watching over the place.