But the beauty vanishes when you walk onto the main street. The stores and offices have a sterile, crabbed look about them. The courthouse, a wooden, churchlike structure, is the hub of the municipality. It sits, a sullen hulk, atop a glassy rise of lawn, failing to look either proud or dignified. Its wooden planking is old, brittle, stained orange where the nails have bled; the whitewash is a delight to children, who sneak up at night and run their fingers along the wood and feel the paint flake away and fall, silent as snow, to the ground. The courthouse is, in fact, the ugliest building in Caxton: but it is the hub. The center. From its squat steeple a rusted bell tolls out the hours, reminding the people, in unsonorous tones, that they are a little closer to night, a little closer to morning, a little closer to death.

The main street, George Street, is curiously devoid of trees and grass. Like an approach to any city subsection, the places of business join one another endlessly: grocery store to tailor shop to children’s wear to cleaner’s to drugstore to dress shop; no inch of space is wasted. And this solemn gray front seems to lack the conviviality common to small Southern towns, but it is a wrong impression. The tradesmen within smile often.

The Caxton Theatre, once a popular and thriving motion picture auditorium, sits empty and silent in the middle of the town, like an abandoned circus. If there ever was gaiety inside, or laughter, or tears, you could not guess it from the façade. Rotted boards cover it. Black sockets stare blindly from the foyer. And dirt has caked into its open veins.

But this is not all of Caxton. At the bottom of George Street, if you turn right, you will see the green of growing things again, and the bright new bricks of the library and post office. Both are handsome buildings, clean and fresh, blending with the summer smell of oaks and shrubs. Dappled shade gives them a picture-book appearance. Beyond, if you keep walking, you will find the elementary school, an old, dark structure, and the high school.

The high school is centered in the middle of a lawn, and though there is no cement walkway to the front doors, the lawn has the smooth, soft quality of an expensive rug. The school, like the post office and library, is a study in red and white. New bricks flank the main office. Over to the right stands a gymnasium, not yet completed, also in red brick, trimmed with white.

These grounds possess a tranquillity, a quiescence, which is oddly missing in the downtown area. Tradition is here, for all the bright newness. And age. It is all like the campus of a small New England college.

But there is still more of Caxton.