A Short History of a Small Place Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Daddy

  Momma

  Junious

  Mayor

  Sister

  Me

  FOR THE BEST IN PAPERBACKS, LOOK FOR THE

  Praise for T. R. Pearson’s A Short History of a Small Place

  “Neely is a speck on the map in North Carolina, and the narrator is Louis Benfield, a youth not a wry as Holden Caufield, but certainly as observant, and with a bigger, even sadder heart ... a remarkably funny book ... more than an impressive debut; it is an accomplishment.”

  —The New York Times

  “T. R. Pearson’s charming, undauntable first novel is about human decency: the unrecognized variety that cures insomnia and occasionally insures a ticket to heaven.... There’s an archaic heartfelt element to A Short Hutory-disarmingly kind and unabashedly funny—that rings of the essence of the Southern tradition of literature.... But then the people of the town don’t die, they ‘succumb’; they have relations instead of sex; and they ’hold silent counsel’ when a less complicated soul would just sit and think a spell. It is this charming deference to language—to regional homilies and, consequently, to truth—that gives the novel its freedom and compassion: the sense of lying on a hot porch in the afternoon and listening to someone special and very, very wise. There are less levelheaded educations to be had in the world than sitting captive at this father’s Knee.”

  -The Boston Globe

  “Pearson’s is a different and distinctive voice and a most welcome one. In this novel his talent shows sparks of genius.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “T. R. Pearson has a perfectly pitched comic voice that transforms the humblest daily activities into the zaniest and most significant events.”

  -Newsday

  “There are several enchanting characters: Benfield’s mother washes dishes whenever she is upset and gets so depressed in February that her husband has to take her out to dinner at the Holiday Inn. The first loud belly laugh hits on page 18, and funny stuff comes with great regularity after that.”

  — People

  “Like an inspired organist barreling through the point and counterpoint of a baroque fugue, T R. Pearson of North Carolina pulls out the stops on this, his exuberant first novel. Looking for humor? Lordy, does he give you humor, the kind you want to read aloud to somebody. Interested in irony and a deft handling of regional vernacular? He gives you that also in satisfying proportion. ... So do yourself a favor and pack this one into your vacation bag.”

  —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “Begs to be read aloud. It has that oral quality and ballad rhythm that winds and repeats refrains and rolls out like old hymns in a country church with a pump organ background.... It’s fun and funny and you’ll laugh aloud a lot. ... Pearson obviously is one of those writers on whom nothing is ever lost.”

  —The Columbra State (South Carolina)

  “Pull up a chair, pour yourself a tall drink, and take the phone off the hook—T. R. Pearson’s remarkable first novel will take you hostage for a day.... A triumph. Pearson takes the ordinary and makes it extraordinary, and in so doing establishes himself as a major new Southern novelist.”

  —The Rrchmond News Leader (Virginia)

  “As a Tarheel myself, I take warm, proud, and chuckling pleasure in welcoming Tom Pearson into the rambunctious mead hall of North Carolina writers. He is a young novelist of capacious gifts—a good ear, a large heart, and a tireless imagination. Like Lee Smith, he’s stepping into the venerable line of the best tall tale tellers of Southern oral history. A Short History of a Small Place is both outrageously funny and touching, as it reminds us, yes, you can go home again, and Lord, what a wonderfully peculiar place home is.”

  —Michael Malone

  “T. R. Pearson writes laugh-out-loud comedy with a poet’s touch. He is a master of the rhythms of Southern speech.... May well become one of this century’s superstars of fiction.”—Olive Ann Burns

  “I adored A Short History of a Small Place and I am sure it will have a long history in a lot of places. Rich in character and strong of plot, Tom Pearson’s first novel is a glorious accomplishment. Even better, it’s fun to read.”

  —Rita Mae Brown

  “Tom Pearson has dealt a magnificent literary full house. What a voice! What a view! The whole book is a sort of austere riot. I loved it!”—Barry Hannah

  “T. R. Pearson’s well-paced novel is a readable, off-hand, informal, unpretentious story of a likeable small town Southern family ingeniously told with keen insight and uncontrived humor. Good reading!”—Erskine Caldwell

  “A Short History of a Small Place is a rare reading experience—emotion and humor are stirred on almost every page. As long as T. R. Pearson is writing and I predict he will write and write, the fine art of Southern storytelling cannot die.”—Eugenia Price

  “A Short History of a Small Place is Tristram Shandy rediscovered In North Carolina, still chatting like Scheherazade. T. R. Pearson has built a machine of original sounds that is driven by passion and secrets.”

  —John Calvin Batchelor

  “T. R. Pearson spent time toiling as a house painter while working at his craft. On the evidence of his first novel, let me suggest that those who once hired him to paint their walls beseech him to hurry back and sign them.”

  —Gordon Lish

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  A SHORT HISTORY OF A SMALL PLACE

  T. R. Pearson’s eight widely acclaimed novels include Cry Me a River, Blue Ridge, and Polar. He lives in Virginia.

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  ,Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in the United States of America by Linden Press/Simon & Schuster, 1985

  Published in Penguin Books 2003

  Copyright © T.R. Pearson, 1985

  All rights reserved

  A portion of this book appeared previously in The Virginia Quarterly Review

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED A PREVIOUS EDITION AS FOLLOWS: Pearson, T. R.

  A short history of a small place : a novel / by T. R. Pearson.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-12693-6

  1. City and town life—North Carolina—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3566.E235S-44264

  813’.54—dc20

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  For

  Momma and Daddy

  and

  Beezy Boo

  This edition is dedicated

  to the memory of

  Chris Cox

  Daddy

  DADDY SAID it was a bedsheet, a fitted bedsheet, and he said she was wearing it up on her shoulders like a cape with two of the corners knotted around her neck. She was standing barefoot on an oak stump, he said, standing on the one nearest the front walk where there was ordinarily a clay pot of geraniums, and he said her hair was mostly braided and bunned up in the back but for some few squirrel-colored strands of it that had worked their way loose and hung kind of wild and scraggly down across her forehead and almost to her nose. She was talking, he said. Then he stopped himself and creased the newspaper twice and put it in his lap, and he changed it to ranting, full-fledged bad-planking-in-the-attic ranting. It was something about Creon, he said, something about Creon and the stink of corpses.

  Momma came from out of the kitchen and stood there in the doorway of what Daddy called the sitting room where he had his chair, his magazine hamper and his RCA television, and where Momma kept her drop-leaf maple table which none of us had ever eaten from, not even at Christmas, and which was cluttered up with three shoe boxes, Grandma Yount’s crystal punch bowl, an assortment of odd-sized fliers from the A&P and the Big Apple, and a set of decorative scales that had mysteriously struck a balance between the one pan full of rubber grapes and waxed bananas and the other containing a forty-watt light bulb, eight cents in pennies, and three unrelated buttons. Momma crossed her arms over her apron bib and worked the small of her back against the edge of the doorframe. Daddy drew a Tareyton out of the pack in his shirtpocket and looked straight at me and talked straight at Momma and said, “Madness.”

  Daddy was afflicted by what Momma called an involvement with tobacco, which seemed to mean that he was always either smoking, had just smoked, or was preparing to smoke a Tareyton. Momma considered smoking to be a grave liability and she tried to purge Daddy of the habit along with the rest of his vices, and even though she was greatly successful in preventing him from saying “goddam” on Sunday, the best she could do with his passion for Tareytons was to negotiate an agreement which prevented Daddy from carrying any means of making fire. So as he lay the filter end of the cigarette on his bottom lip with one hand, he searched between the arm and the cushion of his chair with two fingers of the other and shortly brought out a perfectly good pack of safety matches. Momma just kept scratching her back on the doorframe and didn’t even bother to sour up her face. Sheer and uncompromising necessity had made Daddy a wizard of a sort and she had seen him produce books and boxes of matches from most every seam and niche not just in our house but all over town, and more than once I myself had watched him turn over a rock at Tadlock’s pond and pluck a full, unweathered matchbox out from among the ants and the night-crawlers. As a courtesy to Momma, Daddy blew the smoke mostly across his chin and onto his shirtfront. He dropped the spent match into his cigarette pack.

  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.