A Short History of a Small Place (8 page)

Daddy called it outright gawking. He said the mere sight of Miss Pettigrew on the street blasted folks into a kind of instant idiocy and faces fell slack and people went silent wherever she passed. Mr. Britches didn’t get the least little attention, not even when he climbed up atop a parking meter and relieved himself onto the curbing out front of the Guilford Dairy Bar. Daddy said you’d have thought the gutters of Neely were intended to run with monkey urine. Nobody greeted Miss Pettigrew, he said, and nobody was greeted by her, though she looked pleasant enough and did not seem to be in any sort of hurry. And the only people who showed any noticeable signs of consciousness in the presence of her and her monkey were two salesmen in the doorway of the Ford dealership. One of them howled and pounded the jamb with his fist while the other just leered at him; he was dressed for all the world exactly like Mr. Britches except for the sneakers.

Miss Pettigrew and her monkey walked all the way from the Pettigrew house at municipal square, through town, past the cotton mill, and didn’t stop until they arrived at what is known as Southend, where people who can’t afford to live anywhere else live. Southenders are generally not exceptionally trashy, just poor. According to Daddy they are fairly proud, reasonably well-scrubbed people, and when Miss Pettigrew showed up in their part of town, everybody who knew what a Miss Pettigrew was (which was almost everybody) took her visit to be proof that Southend had finally arrived. Housewives mostly eased themselves out onto their front porches and then down to the street, where they collected in spirited little bands along the sidewalk and studied Miss Pettigrew’s progress, which was fairly steady and unswerving and took her dead towards Southend’s only park, a small plot of land that dwindles to a point where the boulevard and the Burlington highway run up on each other from more or less the same direction.

There isn’t much in the way of recreation in the Southend park since the center of the property is occupied by a concrete slab that supports the Neely water tower. Daddy has always said that the Neely tower is a gem of its breed since it is not of the usual variety with legs and a basin atop but is instead a steel cylinder which rises about one hundred and fifty feet into the air and, according to Daddy, can be seen by motorists a good mile or mile and a half outside of town. The outer shell fairly much bristles with rivets, and at regular five-year intervals the city council comes to terms with the most daring paint crew it can run up on and the exterior gets silvered over afresh. Nobody remembers precisely how but somehow two faithful reproductions of the Lucky Strike emblem found their way onto the upper quarter of what are more or less the east and west faces. It is the general consensus that the American Tobacco Company, which lies midway between Neely and Danville, paid for the privilege of permanent advertisement by funding the construction of the tower, and only old Mr. Nettles ever objected to the theory: before he passed on he swore up and down that the likeness of a jar of brilliantine had once been located partway up the Burlington side. But then Mr. Nettles didn’t ever recollect his dead wife’s name the same way twice, so it was probably the case that the Lucky Strike emblems had always been where they were and would still be there when the steel finally gave way and the water ran out on the ground.

Mr. Raymond Small told Sheriff Burton he was weighing a woman’s apples by the fruit bin out front of his grocery when he noticed Miss Pettigrew in the park across the street. He said he didn’t know her right off, since it would have been twenty-seven years in August that he had last seen her, but the monkey gave her away. He reported how he asked the woman beside him, “Isn’t that Miss Pettigrew there?” and he said she recognized the monkey too. Then all the women in the market came outside and Mr. Small said there were about a half dozen of them altogether and they watched Miss Pettigrew and Mr. Britches go in among the shrubbery at the base of the water tower.

The Ladies Garden Society of Neely had seen to the planting of several rosebushes around the concrete slab and had supplied a few sections of splitrail fence for them to cling to, but they had never flourished and taken hold like the ones along the borders of the sewage plant, which were said to have produced some truly incredible blossoms, so Miss Pettigrew had to poke around for awhile before she came up with any rose worth having. Mr. Small said she finally decided on two, a red one and a white one, and she broke them off from the vines and put them into her purse. Then she pulled a bread sack out from her jacket pocket, he said, and dropped her purse into that before leading Mr. Britches around to the access ladder and sending him up it ahead of her.

Mr. Small said he was astounded by her agility, and as far as he was concerned that monkey had nothing on her, though Mr. Small was obliged to add that Mr. Britches was slightly handicapped by his sneakers which were giving him fits. He said she climbed steadily, nudging the monkey on ahead of her when she caught up with him, and the two of them didn’t stop until they were along about as high as the Lucky Strike emblems, not so far up as the words “Lucky Strike,” he said, but pretty much on a line with “It’s toasted.” And even then she didn’t take a breath, he said, but set in tying the neck of the breadsack to a ladder rung. And she never looked down, as far as Mr. Small could recollect, and he said she never jumped at all, just let go and fell over backwards. He said the ladies screamed and hid their faces but he just watched the hem of her skirt flap in the wind and never even blinked when she splintered a section of splitrail fence and landed in the scraggly heart of a rose bush. Mr. Small said the most miraculous part of the whole business was that her hat never came off, never even got batted askew.

Me and Momma didn’t know a thing about it, didn’t hear the sirens trailing off Southend way, didn’t get a word by phone or otherwise, just didn’t know anything at all until Daddy came home to tell us, and you’d have thought he would come sailing down the sidewalk screaming blood and murder, but it wasn’t like that, not in the least. He simply appeared, not on the walkway or the front porch, but inside the house, right there in the sitting room where I was lolling in his chair with my legs over the armrest. I never heard him coming and I don’t know how long he’d been standing beside me when I saw him, but I must have yelped like death. Anyway, Momma said that’s what brought her out of the kitchen, and she took one look at Daddy and said, “Louis?”

He didn’t have any color to speak of or much of any expression on his face, and without ever seeming to move at all he dropped his suitcoat, his satchel, his lunchbag, and his afternoon paper in a pile on the floor.

“Louis, are you alright?” Momma asked him. But Daddy just looked over her head to the far wall or maybe on into the kitchen and Momma reached out and touched his forearm with the tipends of her fingers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

DADDY SAID it was better than the madhouse. He recalled how he’d been to a madhouse once to see his mother’s brother, Uncle Warren Lanier, and he said anything at all was better than the madhouse. Daddy was twenty-five then and Uncle Warren was already an old man who had failed to marry, who had failed to settle into an occupation, and whose own mother held him directly accountable for Great-granddaddy Lanier’s untimely death at the age of fifty-seven. She said he had been galled into an early grave. However, Daddy said Great-granddaddy Lanier had died of angina complicated by regular and ungentlemanly drafts of the local mash; acute disappointment had nothing to do with it. According to Daddy that was Great-grandmomma Lanier’s affliction. She was ravenous for grandbabies, he said, and she was convinced that Uncle Warren’s bachelorhood was at the least inexcusably inconsiderate and otherwise very possibly unlawful. Daddy supposed Great-grandmomma Lanier would have taken Uncle Warren into litigation if she’d thought she could get a favorable judgement by it. But since there were no laws on the books specifically against bachelorhood or celibacy, Daddy called it, she vented herself by raging at Uncle Warren when he was at hand and just generally despising him in his absence. Daddy said she talked about him like maybe he’d helped the Romans crucify Christ, like maybe she thought he’d driven a nail or two. Yes, Daddy said, Uncle Warren was the one that was committed.

Daddy did not hold Great-grandmomma Lanier exclusively responsible for Uncle Warren’s deterioration; he imagined she merely contributed to it and hurried it along some. It seems Uncle Warren had always been a solitary individual who sought out no one’s company and was never sought out himself. He lived in a room over a signpainter’s shop and worked as a paper carrier for the Greensboro
Daily News,
an occupation which took him out into the world only two times a day and one of them before dawn. Daddy said the nature of Uncle Warren’s employment probably afforded him the great leisure insanity requires and he imagined Uncle Warren had spent the better part of his life losing his mind. He never went violently or dangerously crazy, Daddy said, just noticeably so, but according to Daddy there was no reason to suppose that Uncle Warren would have ever been committed if not for the combination of his particular brand of madness with Great-grandmomma Lanier’s affliction. They simply did not mix.

Somehow Uncle Warren had decided he was the rightful king of Prussia, and Daddy said he was fairly modest as far as kings go. He did not demand any knee bending or ring kissing, just an occasional “your highness” or “by your leave.” And Daddy said the coronation had even brought him out some and done him a bit of good, but when Great-grandmomma Lanier heard that her Warren had made himself king of Prussia she went into absolute fits. Daddy said it was difficult enough for her to abide missing out on a regular grandbaby; she could hardly stand being denied a regal one.

So it was Great-grandmomma Lanier that had Uncle Warren packed off to the madhouse in Raleigh and he had been there nearly twelve years when Daddy visited him in the fall of 1946. A nurse let him into the ward and showed him to Uncle Warren’s bed, and Daddy said since he’d never been to a mental hospital before he half expected the patients to be swinging from the light fixtures and hanging upside down on the bedsteads. But it wasn’t like that at all, he said. Only a very few of them twitched and rolled under the bedclothes, and some one of them on the farthest side of the ward sang sweetly to himself in a high soprano voice. Daddy said all of the rest were as still as death.

Uncle Warren didn’t know him right off, leastways he didn’t let on that he did. Daddy said he just sat on the edge of the bed with his hands on his knees and looked out beyond his headboard through a window covered over with wire mesh that gave onto the corner of a little barren courtyard and the backside of an adjacent building. Uncle Warren was a huge man with big fleshy ears and rangy limbs, and Daddy said the orderlies had stuffed him into a nightdress that didn’t hardly cover him down to the thighs. He said it was awfully sad to see, awfully pathetic. When he started talking, Daddy steered clear of anything to do with Hitler and the allied effort and he said he mostly talked family to Uncle Warren and told him how folks asked after him regularly. Daddy supposed he was still chattering away when Uncle Warren finally looked at him. He was already crying, Daddy said, and the tears were rolling freely down his cheeks and some of them were running into his mouth and some of them were dripping from his chin. Daddy said he’d never seen a man cry before and didn’t know what in the world to do, so he put as much of his arm around Uncle Warren’s shoulder as he could manage and he said Uncle Warren laid his head on his chest and sobbed into his shirt.

“My kingdom,” he said. “My people.”

It seems a doctor had told him there wasn’t a Prussia anymore so there wasn’t any use for a king of Prussia anymore. He called it therapy.

Daddy always had a special attachment for Uncle Warren after that, and I remember how right after Sheriff Browner died a reporter from the Raleigh
News and Observer
showed up in Neely with the theory that something in town was driving people crazy; he suspected fluoridated water. I think he was hoping for front-page news, so he diligently scratched around in our past and dug up the Epperson sisters along with Uncle Warren. He also tried to tell us how a Mr. Harry Gunn had “desperately thrown himself in the path of the 4:15 out of Danville,” and he was convinced as well that Shep Bristow, Aunt Willa’s husband, had “sought to end his travails at the bottom of a millpond.” But that’s where his theory fell apart because Mr. Harry Gunn had never done anything desperately but drink; he had simply managed to pass out in the wrong place. And Shep Bristow discovered the pondbottom when he slipped off the end of a fishing dock and swam like granite for a quarter hour. We thought that would be the end of it, but the reporter merely lightened up his tone a little and his editors moved his story from the front page to the inside of the Sunday travel section. The Epperson sisters became “zany,” Uncle Warren got knocked down to “just another local lunatic,” and the whole of the state was warned against long stopovers in Neely since life there tended to “bore folks to distraction.” When Daddy saw the article he goddammed that reporter up one side and down the other and, Sunday afternoon or not, there wasn’t a thing Momma could do about it.