Project Dateline

Photos By David Stephenson

DSTEPHENSON@HERALD-LEADER.COM

Story By Amy Wilson

AWILSON1@HERALD-LEADER.COM

BLACKGNAT –

Paul Benskin was driving home from his lawyer’s office, and he was furious. The guy had just told Paul he had no legal footing in a case against Batesville Casket Co., where, while working just months before, he’d nearly lost two fingers on his right hand, he says. Sliced him clean to the bone. They were hanging by a thread. At the time he went to the lawyer, Paul’s hand “was as ice cold as the cement I’m standing on,” he says. But the money he’d already accepted with workers’ compensation voided his right to ask for more.

That didn’t seem at all right, he thought, as he drove home on the old U.S. 68, the main drag from Campbellsville. Traffic slowed by a house up for auction. Benskin looked and promptly took his $39,000 in settlement money and bought nine acres of woods, orchards and ponds and the four-bedroom house on the property. He — not yet 30 years old, with three kids and a mangled hand –walked in the first time, owning the place.

“I literally gave my right hand for all this,” he says.

Today, he’s 60 days from being 50. He dang near owns one end of Black Gnat and plans someday to own the old water tower, which the Green-Taylor Water Co. is soon set to abandon. Benskin thinks it would make a great revolving restaurant or a nice 360-degree-view apartment house or a giganto waterslide.

Big things can happen in Black Gnat. Benskin believes that. He is proof of it. He started in this little community having packed up his 1980 Chevette and headed east out of Iowa. He slept his first week in his grandfather’s World War I tent; he likes to say, “I started in Black Gnat from the ground up.”

It’s a ground-up kind of place, the kind that’s managed to hold it together despite outward signs of imminent rupture. The latest blow came seven years ago, when the new U.S. 68 sliced right through Bobby and Peggy Gilpin’s land and split Black Gnat in half. The two churches and the two closed grocery stores perch on one side, and the bulk of the nice houses and the Charlois and Holstein cows and quarter horses are on the other.

But that is not the first division here.

The one great Black Gnat boulevard that runs perpendicular to the highway is Miller Road. It is also the county line, putting those who pay Taylor County taxes on one side of the road and those who pay Green County taxes on the other. Time was, the Hogard Chapel United Methodists had to have one telephone prefix and service for their parsonage and a second phone prefix and service for the chapel, which was on the same acre lot.

But that wasn’t the end of the cleaving. The county line also has served to separate those on slow (Central) time from those on fast (Eastern) time. Now, most of Black Gnat runs on fast time, says Peggy Gilpin. But when the whole time thing first brought itself to bear, people had to ask of any appointment, picnic or church meeting, is that “on slow time or fast time?” Bobby Gilpin says sometimes people would show up an hour early or an hour late, but now most folks work off fast time.

There is little question that time matters a great deal in Black Gnat, a town named after folks who took an evening white-washing a schoolhouse and woke up the next morning to find a shellacking of black gnats thereon. That was before Peggy, she reminds.

In the Gilpin household, there are 12 clocks in ready view in the living room. All the chiming — or chirping — at the quarter after, half-hour and quarter-till tells Peggy, who can’t see without her glasses anymore, what time it is when she wakes up in the middle of the night. “I just lay and listen; eventually it will strike a time, and I know,” she says.

The ticking is constant, rhythmic but restful, a rhapsody of seconds. The accompanying presence of two calendars in the room suggests that time passes all too quickly but with much to look forward to.

Bobby is looking forward to tasting some of the many quarts of beets Peggy is putting up this morning. Frazzled that she has not yet combed her hair and is wearing “clothes that can get beet juice and not mind,” Peggy, 74, nonetheless stops what she’s doing to talk about how she grew up here on her grandfather’s land — it’s now just across the road in another time zone.

Bobby, also 74, came around to living in the area, too, working 100 acres of farmland and, for a time, at “the factory,” what everyone in the area called the Fruit of the Loom plant in Campbellsville, now long shut. Bobby did the night shift there when he was needing extra money to put his two boys through school.

The boys grew up just fine, says Peggy, “because I kept them in church when they were little. It makes a difference.”

Bobby Gilpin’s days were long, but the years have been short. He never had much time for “the boys who used to gather at the Checker Room at the store in the wintertime,” says Peggy, “because he was always working.”

Now Bobby’s days are filled with growing monster cabbage and minding his clocks.

Peggy Gilpin says she doesn’t mind the traffic on the new 68, which sits just about 200 feet from her front door, though she really thought she would. “I think I’d feel like I was in the wilderness now if I wasn’t this close,” she says.

Besides, despite the highway breach, Beech Grove Baptist Church is near enough to the Gilpins, and they do the regular janitorial work there. The seniors group they belong to eats lunch out on certain Wednesdays. Their granddaughter, Holly, 22, has gotten Peggy into scrapbooking the old pictures and into piecing together a quilt that Bobby’s grandmother gave the young couple 54 years ago on their wedding day.

As for the gnats, they exist in Black Gnat, though not in an alarming abundance. That’s because the plentiful bird population seems not to pay much attention to boundaries or old roads or county markers or time.

They just eat really well when they’re hungry.