Duffy, Tennessee, Population 311

Duffy is on State Route 13, nine miles north of Linden, on the stretch where the road quits the Buffalo River and climbs into the ridges. If you are watching the water you will drive past it.

The sign on the south approach says DUFFY, POP. 311. Under that somebody hand-lettered HOME OF THE 1978 DISTRICT CHAMPS in white house paint. The paint is newer than the sign.

Two businesses are open on the main stretch. Purvis Farm and Hardware sells feed, bar oil, nails by the pound out of a bin, and a spinning rack of work gloves that has not spun in a while. Dale Purvis runs it. His father bought the place off a man named Cobb, which Purvis puts at 1961 or 1962, depending on which of two stories about a flood you believe. The Hillside Grill is across the road in what used to be a bank. Ellen Boyd runs it with a young woman named Katie. Coffee is a dollar and a quarter with refills. Chess pie is three and a quarter, served warm, and the crust holds up under a fork, which is more than I can say for most of this route.

What closed: the sawmill, in 2003, under its second owner. The school consolidated into the county system in 1991. The building is still standing and the Ruritan club uses the gym. There is a turkey shoot in the parking lot in November and the backstop is up already.

Who left: most of the Ledbetters, to Jackson and to Huntsville. Purvis named six families and then stopped naming them, which in my experience means the list keeps going.

It rained off and on. Thirty-nine degrees at ten in the morning, fifty by two, fog sitting in the low ground along the river all day without burning off.

Purvis talked for the better part of an hour. His knee. The price of pelletized lime. A man named Fowler who runs cattle up on the ridge and has not come down since his wife died in the spring. The bridge on the county road, which the state looked at in March and has said nothing about since. He says the deer are thicker than they used to be and he blames the coyotes, and when I asked him how coyotes make more deer he said they just do.

The state route log for SR 13 lists Linden, Lobelville, and an unincorporated place called Beardstown. It does not list Duffy. The county does not have a Duffy. I pulled the 2020 place tables and then the 2010 tables, which I expected to come up empty since Duffy is not incorporated, and then I pulled the unincorporated lists too, and it is not in those either.

I bought a postcard at Purvis's for a quarter, a photograph of the river in fall color, and mailed it to my own address from the box outside the store. It arrived five days later, postmarked Linden. The postmark is what you would expect. I put it in the glove box with the others.

Ellen Boyd says the grill has been in her family since her mother's time and that the bank fixtures came with the building. The vault door is still set in the back wall behind the pie case, painted over twice, and she hangs the day's specials off the handle on a piece of baling wire. Thursday was meatloaf. She said Thursday is usually meatloaf.

The gas station at the north end of town has the pumps but no canopy and the tanks were pulled years ago. Purvis said a man from Hohenwald comes through Tuesdays with fuel oil if you get on his list.

I was there about five hours. Two log trucks came through southbound and one of them was hauling empty. A woman I did not get the name of walked a beagle past the grill twice in the same direction.

I filled up in Linden on the way out. Gas was nine cents cheaper there.