A Short History of a Small Place (41 page)

Usually the candles went up first, one on each end of the portico. They were about three feet high apiece from the base all the way up to the tip of the yellow plastic flame, and each candle required a pair of firefighters to secure it: one to hold it upright and another to bolt it to the coping. During the candle installation the remainder of squad usually engaged itself in unpacking reindeer from the cardboard boxes. They came two to a box already harnessed abreast and entirely put together otherwise except for their heads which had to be snapped into place. If things were proceeding on schedule, the reindeer unit would be fishing out Donner and Blitzen, who were numbers five and six, by the time the candle detachments converged on the center of the portico roof and commenced to unpack Santa’s sleigh from its crate. The sleigh came separate from the runners and separate from the bag of toys and goodies that went in the backseat and separate of course from Santa Claus himself who was made out of a single piece of molded plastic and who always got wedged and stuck back in the most unimaginable places from year to year and so generally had to be hunted up. Consequently, the candle detachments, which had united to become the sleigh detachment, rarely had Santa situated by the time the reindeer were all regimented by pairs and set to be hooked into the singletree, so everybody, no matter what squad, unit, or detachment joined the hunt for Santa Claus except for Lieutenant Holland who moonlighted as an electrician and so was traditionally appointed to plug in all the plugs and splice in all the wires. And Santa Claus usually turned up along about when Mr. Holland was getting done with everything he had to do, and when he did in fact get finished with the plugging and the splicing and taping he would signal to whoever might be closest to the cornice who would lean out over the street and holler, “Now!” to Mr. Pipkin who would in turn holler, “Now!” to Mr. Bridger who would throw a switch inside the courthouse door and thereby cause the lightbulbs in the candles and the lightbulbs in the stomachs of the reindeer and the lightbulbs in the sleigh and in the bag of toys and goodies and the lightbulb inside of Santa’s head to all come on at once. Then Mr. Pipkin would shout, “Time!” and Sheriff Burton would shout, “Time!” and Coach Littlehohn would shake his stopwatch in front of his face and announce the results. Anything under fifteen minutes was respectable, anything under fourteen minutes was exceptional, and anything approaching twelve minutes and thirty-seven seconds was historical since that was the record established in 1965 with the aid of a terrific tailwind down the boulevard and with the invaluable assistance of the late Mr. Robert W. Harwood who by all accounts had an extraordinary way with a ratchet wrench. Mostly it was fourteen to fifteen to fifteen and a half minutes from then on except in 1974 when a member of the sleigh detachment mishandled Santa Claus and dropped him into the street.

Otherwise Neely did not have much call for a hook and ladder and so did not have much call for a driver of the backside or the frontside either. As a result, Mr. Derwood Bridger mostly held a hose, or anyway held a hose whenever he was battling a blaze, which was something the Neely fire department did not do much of, so in actuality Mr. Derwood Bridger only annually drove the backend of the hook and ladder, rarely held a hose, and mostly played canasta in the firehouse game room. That was when he was working, but on his off days when he wasn’t working he painted houses which was near about the only thing Mr. Bridger did that seemed the least bit like labor. And most everybody said he was as capable a house painter as there was roundabout, and some people even judged him to be without peer when it came to cutting in conflicting colors or trimming out window mullions. They figured him for a regular DaVinci with a two-inch sash brush. Consequently, Mr. Bridger was ever up on a ladder in between canasta tournaments and he kept fairly much booked up solid from one year on into the next.

Now when Mr. Zeno Stiers’s wife, Mrs. Anne Elizabeth Bailey Stiers of the northeast strain of the Swannanoa Baileys, decided that her and Mr. Stiers’s house could stand to be freshened up some, naturally she called Mr. Bridger and he came out directly to estimate the charges. That was in early September of 1975 and together Mr. Bridger and Mrs. Stiers walked around the house and Mrs. Stiers studied over a paint chart while Mr. Bridger measured and counted and ciphered and periodically pointed out patches of mildew and rotting window sills and split siding so as to impress upon Mrs. Stiers what a sorry heap she lived in. Then him and her got back around to where they’d started from and Mr. Bridger squatted on his heels and figured up the plump sum which was his standard price for rejuvenating sorry heaps and Mrs. Stiers agreed to it almost immediately, primarily out of sheer embarrassment since she did not think of herself or wish to be thought of as the sort of woman who would live in just any old ramshackle place. So they set in to arriving at a color scheme straightaway and Mrs. Stiers showed a preference for Peyton Randolph Grey with a touch of Palace Arms red here and there and some Bracken House Biscuit as a highlighter, and Mr. Bridger suggested Bafferton Blue for a base with Peyton Randolph Grey for trim and Nicholson Shop Red shutters, which Mr. Bridger said was an altogether richer and more luxurious red than the Palace Arms, and though Mrs. Stiers was all for luxuriousness in her shutters she did not much care for the blue and the grey together, so Mr. Bridger told her she might try Moir Shop Fawn on the siding and Bracken House Biscuit on the trim along with the Nicholson Shop Red shutters which proved to be a combination Mrs. Stiers was very fond of for a few minutes until she realized how her and Mr. Bridger had ignored the greens completely and so she selected Holt Storehouse Grey which happened to be a grey that was actually green and Mr. Bridger suggested Blair House Green which happened to be a green that was actually extremely green and the two of them together arrived at Bracken House Biscuit for the window sashes which of course was not the least bit green but would, according to Mr. Bridger, bring out the subtleties of the other two colors, and Mrs. Anne Elizabeth Bailey Stiers of the northeast strain of the Swannanoa Baileys was not much accustomed to subtleties in her house paint and so was temporarily taken with the novelty of it which left her incapable of objectively gauging the variation in her enthusiasm between the fawn and the biscuit and the red and the grey-green and the green-green and the biscuit, and to complicate matters further the Bafferton Blue and Peyton Randolph Grey were beginning to kick up some affection with her since they were not wholly without subtleties themselves. Consequently, Mrs. Stiers could not bring herself to decide on a paint scheme right away, so her and Mr. Bridger set in through the paint chart again and argued the virtues and detractions of most every color until finally after some considerable debate and thoroughgoing circumspection Mrs. Stiers and Mr. Bridger agreed to paint the house white, everything that is except for the shutters, which would be Bridger’s Cellar Green which was not a chart color exactly but was where the gallon of paint was that Mr. Bridger had a mind to get rid of. So him and Mrs. Stiers shook hands on the color and shook hands on the price and then Mr. Bridger told Mrs. Stiers he’d see her at the tail end of April and maybe later but certainly not before.

Naturally the months between the estimate and paint job served to dull Mrs. Stiers’s enthusiasm and somewhere between September 1975 and April of 1976 she managed to fairly thoroughly forget about Mr. Bridger, which did not matter much in her case, but Mr. Zeno Stiers forgot about him too and that proved to be of considerably more consequence on account of Mr. Stiers’s infirm and delicate condition. Mr. Zeno Stiers had loaded a shredder at the American Tobacco Company most all his working life but was forced to take an early medical retirement because of acute emphysema complicated by an artery ailment. All along Mr. Stiers’s doctor had strongly insisted on surgery for the artery trouble, but Mr. Stiers had just as strongly insisted against it and instead they settled on a potent little blue pill to be washed down every day before lunch with a glass of orange juice. The doctor said it was meant to aid the heart, but Mr. Stiers always believed it assisted the emphysema by mistake since it took his breath and sent him to bed all weak and muddle-headed until near about suppertime. So what with his medical predicament, which was none too rosy, it was understandable that Mr. Stiers did not fret away the days between September and April waiting for the painter to come whitewash his house, and though Mrs. Stiers did not forget about Mr. Bridger completely she did forget about him sufficiently to convince herself he had said July or maybe even August but certainly not before.

But he had not said July and had not said maybe even August either, and Mr. Bridger, who was by all accounts incredibly slow but exceedingly reliable, arrived as promised at the tail end of April which turned out to be fifteen minutes past 1:00 p.m. on the afternoon of Wednesday of the thirtieth of the month. Now of course Mrs. Stiers was not looking for Mr. Bridger until the tail end of July or maybe the tail end of August—she could not decide which—and consequently she had gone on about her regular tail-end-of-the-month business, which at 1:15 p.m. on the thirtieth of April 1976 put her crosslegged in the middle chair at Miss Patricia Rascoe’s “Hair by Trish: An Old World Salon” with her head almost completely covered up in slivers of foam rubber. As for Mr. Zeno Stiers, by 1:15 his emphysema and his little blue pill had already ganged up on him and sent him into a kind of snoring coma, so Mr. Bridger could not announce himself at the front door or the back door either and proceeded to remove his extension ladder from the station wagon roof and set it up against the front of the house. It was Mr. Bridger’s general policy to commence work on any sorry heap by reglazing what windows called for it, and once he had surveyed a few of the bottom ones and determined the panes were held in mostly by sheer good fortune, he armed himself with an assortment of putty knives and scrapers and a lump of glazing compound the size of a softball and climbed up the ladder towards the guest bedroom window on the far end of the front of the house.

Mr. Bridger has never been the sort of man to revel in working up a sweat and for the most part of his adult life he has managed to resist the temptation to tire himself unduly. Consequently, Mr. Bridger works at what he calls a leisurely pace which does not in fact have much pace to it but consists mostly of lingering spells of recovery interrupted by occasional spurts of earnest labor. So in his usual fashion Mr. Bridger pecked and scraped and poked at the glazing on the guest bedroom window for a furious several minutes and then gave himself near about a quarter hour off which he spent in sightseeing from the top of the ladder and which was followed by another burst of industriousness that Mr. Bridger managed to maintain just to the verge of perspiration. And after two and a half hours of working what Mr. Bridger likes to call steadily, he had partially reglazed two windows, had cracked a pane in a third one and decided to skip over it, and had set about pecking away at the fourth one which opened onto the master bedroom, where Mr. Stiers was sleeping on top of the bedspread in a sleeveless undershirt and a pair of oversized cotton briefs. According to Mrs. Stiers, her husband, Zeno, was not one of your light sleepers even in his natural and unmedicated state, so all of the scraping and the poking and the rattling around that Mr. Bridger was subjecting the window to did not cause Mr. Stiers to stir much right off and even after Mr. Bridger set in to whistling “It’s a Grand Old Flag” through his teeth Mr. Stiers only made a solitary noise in the back of his nose and then proceeded with his coma. And as Mr. Bridger figured it, when Mr. Stiers finally did wake up it was not on account of any single sharp and particular noise but was on account of the accumulation of all the scraping and the poking and the rattling around and the whistling. And as Mrs. Stiers heard it from her husband himself who was coherent throughout most of the following afternoon, he sat directly up on top of the bed and listened at the pecking and the tapping and the whistling coming from the vicinity of the windowsill and decided to himself it must be a pigeon or a redheaded woodpecker notwithstanding the fact that whatever it was was whistling “The Wichita Lineman” which would have been unusual for a woodpecker and unheard of in a pigeon, but then Mr. Stiers was not one of your more melodic souls and never watched Glenn Campbell on television.

So Mr. Stiers got up out of the bed with the intention of shooing a bird off his windowsill, but when he crept across the floor and jerked the draperies apart he did not find a pigeon or a woodpecker or even an assortment of sparrows but instead found himself face to face with Mr. Derwood Bridger, and all of Mr. Stiers’s doctors conferred together and agree the shock of a Mr. Derwood Bridger where a pigeon or a woodpecker should have been had induced in Mr. Stiers what they all called an authentic paroxysm which dropped him to the carpet straightaway. As for Mr. Bridger, he had not expected to see Mr. Stiers, especially in his undershirt and his cotton briefs and unannounced on top of it, but then Mr. Bridger is by his own account not a very excitable person and so handled the situation as best he could which Daddy has always said probably explains why he did not howl on his way into the forsythia bush where he was joined by his softball-sized lump of glazing compound and by his putty knife and his scraper and very nearly by his aluminum extension ladder which Mr. Stiers succeeded in shooing away from the window along with Mr. Bridger.

Daddy holds it was a fifteen-foot drop at the outside and Mr. Russell Newberry generally contends it was less but will allow for fifteen while Mr. Phillip J. King usually puts it at eighteen but has been known to venture into the lower twenties. On the official record duly certified by Sheriff Burton and signed by the chief eyewitness, little Buford Needham, the distance of the fall is given as “considerable” which was all little Buford would agree to since he did not come on the scene until after Mr. Bridger had already crawled out of the forsythia bush and so could not witness to any exact footage. Mr. Bridger himself holds it was at least a thirty foot fall, maybe thirty-five, and Daddy says that surely would have been a spectacular thing to see since Mr. Bridger would have had to leap twenty feet straight up into the air before he ever began to drop. And Daddy cannot bring himself to understand how a fully inflated canasta-playing fireman could fall from thirty-five feet and come away with just a fractured pelvis, but Mr. Bridger simply attributes his good fortune to the density of the forsythia bush in conjunction with his occasional attendance at the eleven o’clock Presbyterian service.