Nestled among the rolling foothills of Central Texas, the town is in the middle of nowhere but on the way to everywhere. The kindest thing anyone says about the place is that they drove through there once. It’s not in a hot and blasted desert like West Texas, or in a humid forest like East Texas, but in shallow valley ringed by hills that for a few brief weeks in Spring grow with the green of new life, but that, for the most part, looked like they just got a buzz from an errant fire. It would be beautiful if anyone ever bothered to look over their shoulder as they left.
Not that anyone ever really leaves. There are outsiders and foreigners, most of them brought by the prison or the army base. There are a few transient souls who blow in with the Summer storms but then are gone again with the Winter freeze, if they can coax their car out of the valley with highway sheathed in ice. But for the most part it’s a town of long-timers. A town of people who know the old steel bridge that you can still drive over (if you’re brave), who remember (or remember that their father remembers) when the railroad was diverted forty miles South and the town began its long, slow march to insignificance, who know that if anything interesting is happening in town, it’s at the courthouse or at the high school
But the town refuses to acknowledge its inevitable demise. The town comes alive every Friday in the Fall for the high school football team, and nightly in the Summer for baseball. On the weekends it teeters and totters awkwardly between its twin poles, the Baptist church on the North end, and the Methodist church on the South. Every year the old train depot fills to the brim with the annual food drive, the city hall fills up for the next play, and the square empties of cars for the art and handcrafts festival. For a place on death row (and without a bar), it manages to keep a lively pace.
Philadelity 