A rumor in this county is not a fact that got loose. It is a recipe, and Miss Odessa Pruitt is its finest baker. I once watched a simple truth — that the hardware store was closing early on Wednesdays — leave her kitchen and arrive, four days later, at the feed store as the news that the hardware man was leaving his wife to open a distillery in Asheville.

The remarkable thing is not the distortion. The remarkable thing is the craftsmanship. Each person who passes a rumor along adds exactly one layer — a plausible motive, a supporting detail, a second cousin who "saw it with her own eyes" — and removes nothing. By the ninth telling you have a cake so tall and so rich that the original fact, the plain closing-early fact, sits at the very bottom like a cracker nobody remembers putting there.

City people think gossip is idle. It is the opposite of idle. It is the hardest continuous work this county does, a collective novel composed in real time by a committee that never meets and never stops. Miss Odessa does not spread rumors. She edits them. And she is, I will say it plainly, the best prose stylist in Chatham County, present company humbly included.