A Short History of a Small Place (2 page)

He said Everet Little, the jailor’s boy, was riding the iron gate in and out of the yard and half the town was standing up snug against the fence watching her jig on the lawn and cut capers on the oak stump where the geraniums should have been. Aunt Willa Bristow was up on the porch, he said, but she never came down to retrieve her, never even came out from the shadows hard up against the house, and he said she danced as tireless and light as a child all across the yard and up onto the stump and off again, and she brought the hem of the bedsheet up under her nose and played out what Daddy called the siege of Thebes, taking all of the voices herself and making the likes of a swordfight by beating together a hickory branch and a piece of a staub. Folks were quiet, he said, and polite and they leaned up easy against the fence with their forearms through the palings and their faces drained of most every expression except for an unexcited and slightly critical strain of curiosity like they were seeing something they’d expected, maybe even paid for.

He said every so often she’d break off whatever she was in the middle of, be it swordplay or some puffed up oration on the agony of kingliness, and she’d work her arms up and down, quivering them in the air, and say, “Putrefaction, putrefaction, sniff it on the breeze, ripeness and death,” and Daddy said her voice was all shaky and inhuman. It sounded ghostly, he said, and a little ominous too, so people obliged her by sniffing and snorting and got for their trouble the stink of the Dan River Paper Mill, which Daddy said was slightly more potent than a pile of carcasses.

He stopped himself short, got up and loosened the window screen, and launched his cigarette butt into the sideyard; Momma did not allow them to linger in the house. And before he could come away from the window and sit back down, she grabbed up the one ashtray we owned—an oversized scallop shell with “Graveyard of the Atlantic” painted across the bowl of it in bold black letters—and took it off to the kitchen where she rinsed it out and washed the ashes down the drain. Daddy had to fetch it back himself, part of Momma’s unspoken and utterly unsuccessful policy. We heard him snatch it out from the dish drainer and he began to whistle the first few phrases of “Mona Lisa” as he toweled it off. Momma just stiffened some and Daddy wasn’t hardly back down in the chairseat before he started fumbling at his shirtpocket and scratching around beneath the cushion.

He said that animal of hers was pawing at the screen door to get out and setting up a fierce racket with all of his screeching and chattering, and he said Aunt Willa would give the siding by the doorframe a ferocious wallop with the heel of her shoe and that would shut him up for minutes at a time, but then he would set in to slapping at the screen again and hooting worse than ever. Daddy didn’t know when Aunt Willa first started talking. He said he just picked her voice out from the general uproar behind the screen door and on the stump, and he said it wasn’t much more than a voice since Aunt Willa, who is an inky color anyway, stayed lost in the shadows underneath the porch awning.

“Come on h‘yer, Miss Pettigrew,” she said. “Come on back to the house.” And Daddy said it was altogether the most weary and bloodless tone he’d ever heard from a human. He said that animal chattered and slapped at the screen and Miss Pettigrew wailed and fluttered on the lawn and Aunt Willa just talked in a Hat, dogged, openly hopeless voice. “Come on h’yer, Miss Pettigrew,” she said. “Come on back to the house.” And Daddy said all the folks along the fence picked up their faces and tried to find Aunt Willa in the shadows on the porch and Everet Little dragged his foot and stopped the gate to look and that creature beat the screen door with all ten knuckles but Miss Pettigrew just flapped her bedsheet and kept on ranting, he called it.

Daddy said he didn’t imagine anybody sent after Sheriff Burton but that he had probably seen the crowd from his courthouse window and had come nosing in on his own. He was a man who was fond of paraphernalia, Daddy said, and as he edged his way toward the gate he used his arms to clear out a berth for his pistol butt and the shaft of his nightstick. He had a badge on his hat and a badge on his shirtpocket and a badge in a wallet on his left hip, and Daddy said he, was dripping with bullets, festooned with them, he said.

Daddy said Sheriff Burton’s first official act was to tell Everet Little gates weren’t made to be swung on, and Daddy said that cowed Everet some and he stepped down onto the sidewalk where he made out to be enchanted with the workings of the latch. Miss Pettigrew was fresh off her stump, he said, and had just recently set out on a high-stepping tour of the front lawn which Daddy imagined was meant to serve as a kind of airy distraction from the ponderous and dismal goings on at Thebes. Sheriff Burton went after her, he said, chased her down along the sideyard, across the front of the house, up the walkway, and then back along the fence where Daddy said folks watched the two of them go by with the same sort of detached and curious expressions as before except for the hint of merriment, and he said the good money was on Miss Pettigrew who was pulling away from the sheriff with her bedsheet sailing and popping behind her.

Aside from being naturally soft and mealy, Daddy said Sheriff Burton was probably a little too much encumbered with the implements of law enforcement to have the chance of being nimble. He couldn’t take half a step without the leather creaking and the metal jangling, and when he tried to run, Daddy said he was extremely musical and put himself in some peril what with all of his free-swinging attachments threatening to beat him senseless. So he drew up short alongside of the fence, Daddy said, and took hold of his knees while he waited for Miss Pettigrew to sprint back around to him. This was an unpopular tactic with the crowd who considered it shameful enough for their sheriff to have been beaten in a footrace by a woman nearly twice his age and saw no call for him to become unsporting in defeat and humiliate himself further. So when he latched onto Miss Pettigrew’s arm as she tried to dash by him, Sheriff Burton had to suffer what Daddy called public ignominy.

Daddy said he’d never seen anything wither and shrivel away like Miss Pettigrew’s spirit when she felt Sheriff Burton’s hand on her arm. Every bit of liveliness shrunk off from her, he said, and she deflated right there on the spot. He said the exhilaration had put some blush in her cheeks and her vigor had seemed to flesh her out some, but Daddy said when the sheriff touched her she became all tallowy again, and frail and slight and painfully ancient looking.

The sheriff nudged her a little and said, “Let’s you and me go to the house, Miss Pettigrew,” and Daddy said she made a feeble noise in her throat and let him take her wherever he would. He helped her up the steps and onto the porch and Daddy said when that creature saw them coming he screeched and chattered most wildly and gave the screen door a ferocious beating with the leathery sides of both hands. The sheriff didn’t offer Aunt Willa charge of Miss Pettigrew as far as Daddy could tell. He took it upon himself to see her into the house, and Daddy said when he opened the screen door, that monkey bolted for the front lawn and would have been out and gone toward Africa if Aunt Willa hadn’t cut him off at the lip of the porch and scooped him up in both arms. And that was a sight, Daddy said, to see Aunt Willa there on the edge of the sunlight in her smock and with her usual grim expression lurking underneath the brim of what used to be Mr. Bristow’s fedora and her arms full of Miss Pettigrew’s monkey who had a hat of his own, a porkpie with a chin strap, and a plaid sportcoat, and a toothy ape face that was altogether as sour and unpleasant as Aunt Willa’s.

Daddy said Sheriff Burton came out directly and as he passed Aunt Willa on his way off the porch he touched the brim of his hat and said, “Earn your money, Miss Willa,” and Daddy said Aunt Willa just looked at him with no more expression than a doorknob and that monkey lifted his porkpie a half foot straight up and then let the chin strap snap it back onto his head.

Sheriff Button drew out his nightstick, Daddy said, and opened up his arms as if to herd everybody back toward their own business, but Daddy said there were few people there with any business earnest enough to call them away, so most everybody lingered by the fence and watched Sheriff Burton try to send them home. Daddy said he waggled his nightstick under folks’ noses and said, “The show’s over. Get along home now. The show’s over.” But people just looked at the sheriff and looked at the end of his nightstick and nobody went much of anywhere. And Daddy said he stalked up and back the length of the fence, all the while slapping the shaft into his palm and saying, “Don’t you folks have homes to go to? Don’t you have something you need to be doing?” But the same forearms dangled through the palings and the same shameless faces followed the sheriff back and forth across the lawn. “Am I gonna have to run you all in?” he wanted to know. Daddy thought Sheriff Burton had been watching entirely too much
Dragnet,
and when he finally did leave he said, “Suit yourselves,” and went storming off in the direction of the courthouse, Daddy said, like maybe he was going after a firehose or a load of mace.

Daddy said folks watched him up the courthouse steps and out of sight and then turned back to Aunt Willa who was still standing in the band of sunlight on the edge of the porch. She had set the monkey beside her on the planking and had snatched up a handful of sportcoat collar to keep him there. Daddy said the creature curled his lips and screeched once or twice and Aunt Willa just stood for several minutes facing the fence and the people canted up against it and the people behind them but not really looking at anything or anybody. Then she plucked the monkey up into her arms and went inside, Daddy said, and shut the heavy front door behind her. And he said folks looked at the door and looked at the windows hung with chintz curtains and studied the bushes across the front of the house and considered both halves of the lawn and the sidewalk in between and pondered the stump where the geraniums should have been and then watched Everet Little climb back up onto the gate and ride it in and out of the yard.

Daddy fished a Tareyton out of his shirtpocket and Momma eased herself against the edge of the doorframe and looked up to where the wall met the ceiling.

“She was so elegant in her day,” Momma said.

Daddy grunted and brought out a matchbook from the depths of the magazine hamper.

“She was such a fine lady,” Momma said.

And Daddy cupped his hands over the lit match and told her, “Well, seems she’s gone bats.”

“Louis Benfield!” And I knew by the way Momma said it she wasn’t talking to me. She gave Daddy an icy once-over and he just shook the match out and looked right back at her with his cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth in the way Momma said made him look like a hoodlum. “That’s no way to speak of a woman of her position,” Momma told him, and when he never did say anything back, she went off shoulders first to the kitchen and left a kind of chill hanging behind her.

We could hear the water running and the sound of Momma loading the sink up with dishes, probably clean ones since she’d washed the dinner dishes already and we’d yet to have supper. But that didn’t matter to Momma; she just needed her hands in the suds. There’s a window over Momma’s sink that looks out into the spiny branches of an apricot tree and, beyond them, onto the tin roof of our carshed which is flaked with rust and shot through all over with holes, and whenever Momma washes dishes, she looks out into those limbs and onto that carshed roof like she’s never seen them before. After we buried Grandma Yount Momma came straight home to the kitchen and put an apron on over her funeral dress. She took a stack of plates out of the cabinet, ran the sink full of water, and scoured each dish until the drainer was piled high with them; then she dumped them back into the sink and started over. I remember climbing up onto the countertop and watching Momma handle those plates without ever bothering to see them and I remember watching her look out the window and I remember looking out the window myself and finding the same old apricot tree, the same weathered roofing, and just a glimpse of the sunset, a puny jagged edge of it off beyond the far wall of the carshed. And I remember drawing away from the window and saying, “What do you see, Momma?” and when she didn’t answer me I tugged on her apron and said, “What do you see, Momma?” and she dropped her plate on the linoleum, where it pretty much exploded in all directions.

I surely would have gone off the countertop backwards if Daddy hadn’t grabbed me from behind. He took me off to his and Momma’s bedroom and set me on the edge of the bed, and he said, “Louis, you can’t do that to your Momma.”

And I said, “Yes sir.”

And Daddy said, “When your Momma’s washing dishes, she’s always somewhere else.” He waited until I looked at him and he looked directly at me and said, “Do you see what I mean?”

And I said, “Yes sir.”

So Daddy uncreased his afternoon paper and I sat on the floor beside his chair and listened to the sound of Momma rattling dishes in the kitchen. Then there came a particularly long spell of silence and Daddy lit a fresh Tareyton off the butt of an old one, blew a plume of smoke straight out into the room, and winked at me over the top of it.

 

 

ii

 

 

That was the day Miss Pettigrew stopped being just peculiar. She’d been peculiar ever since I’d heard tell of her and ever since I’d known what being peculiar meant, but now when folks spoke of her they would say she was Not Right, which was an advancement of a sort. The town of Neely had seen a blue million peculiarities in its history, but those among its citizenry who were genuinely not right were rare and cherished. In my day alone I’d seen any number of oddballs but less than a handful of the truly unbalanced, and three of them were from the same family. They were the Epperson sisters, and they had distinguished themselves in the minds of the Neelyites by going from reasonably normal to unquestionably insane without ever pausing at peculiar.