A Short History of a Small Place Read online

  Momma said some one of the ushers finally showed the great good sense to turn the sanctuary lights up and everybody along the left aisle leapt bolt upright to see if that was indeed Miss Pettigrew in the company of Aunt Willa in the front row, and when they found out that yes, it was, they told the people beside them who told the people beside them who told the people beside them and the news shot through the sanctuary like electricity. Momma said nobody seemed to care that the reverend’s Christmas pageant had nearly burned the church down or that the reverend himself had fallen into a faint behind the pulpit or that the angel of the Lord had commenced to wail and sob and say how doctors would have to cut his legs off with a handsaw if somebody didn’t draw him into the choir loft straightaway. She said all people wanted to do was look at Miss Pettigrew since they’d been without the chance to in nearly a decade and didn’t know when the opportunity might present itself again. So everybody stood up, she said, and looked. Aunt Willa helped Miss Pettigrew off the pew, and Momma said she tried to lead her on out of the sanctuary but Miss Pettigrew held up and faced the congregation, not seeming at all mysterious or tainted or stern, but just a little wilted and sheepish and fairly human.

  Momma said Aunt Willa’s cheeks were all puffy and swollen and her gums obviously gave her some pain when she snatched at Miss Pettigrew’s elbow and said, “Come on h’yer,” but Miss Pettigrew just stood where she was and worked her lips as if she might say something, as if she might say hello. Momma said folks looked at each other and looked at Miss Pettigrew and looked at each other again until Miss Pettigrew finally opened her mouth and said nothing whatsoever.

  Then Aunt Willa took her by the elbow. “Come on h‘yer Miss Pettigrew,” she said. “Come on h’yer to home.” And Momma said this time Miss Pettigrew let Aunt Willa have her way and everybody watched them down the aisle, watched them into the narthex, watched them even after the angel of the Lord unhooked himself from the rope and fell through the stable roof.

  iv

  Miss Bambi Kinch of Action News Five put Mr. Small on television, and as Mr. Small had never been on television before and did not consider himself dressed for it, Miss Kinch allowed him to dash over to his store and fetch his seersucker jacket. She had arrived in a white van in the company of a cameraman named Larry and Bub, his assistant, who helped Larry get the camera out of the back and then sat sideways in the driver’s seat and ate shelled peanuts from a sack. Miss Kinch announced to the crowd of us how she represented the Action News team out of Greensboro, and she said she’d appreciate a few words with whatever witnesses there might be, which I suppose got her anywhere from thirty-five to forty volunteers, most of them graduates of the Small school of witnessing.

  That’s when Sheriff Burton intervened with Mr. Small himself, who was in his shirtsleeves and a soiled butcher’s apron and who would not be committed to film without his seersucker jacket. So as he ran across the street to retrieve it from a peg in the back of the store, Larry and Miss Kinch attempted to set up the shot. Larry was all for having the water tower in the background, but Miss Kinch resisted the idea. She thought it was too big and shiny and might attract far too much attention. And Larry said, “It may be bigger, Bambi, but it’s not nearly as sweet,” to which Miss Kinch suggested he just point the camera and keep his goddam mouth shut. “Yes, princess,” he said, and then him and Miss Kinch snapped and swore at each other for a spell before the two of them threw in together to heap abuse on Bub who, apparently, was entirely no count.

  As it turned out Mr. Small did not get to wear his seersucker jacket because it clashed with Miss Kinch’s yellow blazer and yellow hair. She told him he had to get hold of something more subdued, and he borrowed a mud-colored sportcoat from one of his followers. But by the time Larry turned on his high-intensity lamp and cranked the camera up, Mr. Small was a defeated man. He had been deprived of his jacket and deprived of his water tower, which was not even in the picture, and every time he tried to turn and point, Miss Kinch wrenched him back around to the camera lens and poked at him with her microphone. Daddy said it was always sad and pathetic when idols tumbled.

  After Miss Kinch got done with Mr. Small she grabbed hold of Sheriff Burton’s sleeve and brought him into camera range. “Who is the victim, sheriff?” she asked him.

  “Well, Bambi,” the sheriff said and hooked his thumbs in his front beltloops, “the victim is a female caucasian, approximately sixty-five years of age.”

  “Was she a resident of Neely?”

  “Well, Bambi, yes she was an indigenous native.”

  “Do you suspect foul play, sheriff?”

  “Well, Bambi, at this point we think it’s a suicide brought on probably by general derangement.”

  “Did she have a history of this sort of thing?”

  “Well, Bambi, not that we know of. She’s never done this before.”

  “And what about the monkey, sheriff?”

  “Well, Bambi, he’s your basic chimpanzee type monkey, and we suspect we’ll have to send a man up after him.”

  “Thank you, sheriff. This is Bambi Kinch, Action News Five in Neely.” Miss Kinch grinned over top of the microphone for a half-minute and then hissed through her teeth, “Pan, Larry, pan to the dirt-bags,” and Larry swung the camera around to a crowd of people in front of the water tower who studied the lens like most folks look into a fish-tank.

  Junious

  MOMMA HAS always shown a particular fondness for the dusk of the day, and though she has never said so outright, I suspect she is especially taken with the way the world disappears at twilight. Momma naps regularly in the early evenings, or anyway she calls it napping, but I’ve never yet stuck my head through her doorway and found her asleep. ‘She is always just laying there on the bed with the covers drawn up to her chin and the lights off in the back hallway and in the bedroom itself and the front shade tight against the sill and the side shade only partway down the sash so that the blue wash from the mercury light on the street comes in once the sunset has dwindled away and falls across a quarter of Grandma Yount’s chiffonier and touches on a portion of the cedar-lined wardrobe which came to Daddy by way of his Uncle Connelly Benfield, who lived with his second wife in a farmhouse near Draper until he was sent off to the Black Mountain Sanatorium to be treated for the tuberculosis that would eventually kill him. Momma is not the sort to heave and pitch on the bed; she doesn’t even rustle the covers. And it is always Momma who sees me before I can separate her from the shadows and patches of mercury light on the bedclothes. “What is it, Louis?” she says and her voice is never rough or broken but rings like it does anywhere else and sort of lurches out from the darkness which is always enough to take my breath at first there with the lights off and house still. So I ask her whatever it is I’ve come to ask her which is usually nothing worth knowing or at least nothing worth breaking in on her to find out, and Momma tells me what I want to know in that same clear and deliberate voice that never departs entirely from the shadows along the walls and in the corners of the ceiling and is as much a part of the evening as they are.

  When me and Daddy were on our way to the tower and stopped at Mr. Gibbons’s mailbox so Daddy could use the kitchen matches Mr. Gibbons allowed him to keep there, I happened to turn back towards our house just as the porch light came on. Since it was early in the evening yet I don’t suppose that single bulb changed the look of things significantly and I probably wouldn’t have noticed it was on if I hadn’t hap- . pened to be watching the bulb itself when it went from grey to yellow. Daddy didn’t see it or anyway didn’t make like he did and I don’t know as it would have meant much at all to him if he had, but I saw it, saw it as Momma switched it on, and it struck a note with me. And I said to myself without really saying it but just knowing it right off, this is the sort of thing that sets me apart from Daddy and him from me and both of us from everybody else, not simply that I saw the porch light come on and he didn’t and nobody else would care anyway, but more that Momma could switch on a si
ngle bulb and switch on something in me with it, something of sadness and grief and shot through with the melancholy of twilight, something I could not be sure Daddy would know as I knew it, feel as I felt it. And I told myself how it was probably no more than pure chance and maybe a little grim luck that caused me to turn and look just when I turned and looked, and I said to myself, this won’t ever happen just this way again, not even having to say that either but just knowing it and concluding it right off.

  Daddy told me how he hadn’t even suspected Miss Pettigrew had it in her, and I said I hadn’t imagined so either, which must have come along about when Momma put out the lights in the back hallway and set herself to adjusting the shades in the bedroom. And as Daddy smoked he looked up through the limbs of a white oak tree and into the sky, and I turned back to the house one last time, which must have come along about when Momma switched off the bedside lamp and then lay back and pulled the topsheet up to her chin. I couldn’t know for certain but I imagined that when she put her head onto the pillow she got the same expression on her face she sometimes gets at the supper table after the dishes have been cleared away and me and her and Daddy sit back in our chairs feeling unnecessary. That’s usually when Daddy tells me how he was young once and how him and Momma didn’t know what they had, and Momma never talks but to add a detail here and there. Mostly she just looks off beyond Daddy towards the breakfast room window and smiles the slightest, meekest, most sorrowful smile I have ever seen.

  Daddy likes to tell how him and Momma lived in a little crackerbox house on Silver Street in Danville. That was when Daddy worked for the railroad and kept an office in the depot downtown where he was charged with timing the trains as they came through and noting on a chart whether they were early, late, or on schedule. Daddy has always said it was simply a riveting occupation. Him and Momma hadn’t been married but a little over three years when Daddy got on with the railroad. It was the first salaried job he ever held, and to take it him and Momma had to move down from Lynchburg where Daddy had worked by the hour keeping the books for a furniture dealer and where they had rented the upstairs of a house owned by the Colonel and Mrs. Coggins who slept in separate ends of the downstairs because the Colonel snored like a buzzsaw.

  Along about the time of the move Momma must have made a side-trip to Neely in order to give birth to little Margaret, though she never says as much directly and Daddy does not elaborate himself except to tell how they set off a corner of their Danville bedroom for what he sometimes calls Bumpins. Mostly Daddy talks about the root cellar which had been scooped out from the crawlspace beneath their bedroom and which he could find no use for whatsoever, primarily because every third day or so it would fill up with garden slugs, and according to Daddy they lay so thick on the dirt floor that you couldn’t take a step without dispatching a half dozen of them to wherever it is slugs go once they’ve been spread across the bottom of a shoe. Momma cannot abide a garden slug herself and I imagine she would have preferred sleeping over a nest of crocodiles since crocodiles will never ooze between your toes and are generally too large to crawl up through the ductwork into the house, which is what Momma was afraid the slugs would do. Daddy says he tried to tell her that your regular garden slug would probably not care to trade off the dirt floor of the root cellar for an aluminum heat duct, but Momma did not consider Daddy fully educated in the capabilities of slugs, and anyway she didn’t think for a moment that her cellarful was of the regular variety. Daddy says Momma convinced herself that they were a refined strain of slug with the capacity to be conniving and maybe a little vicious too.

  So Momma began to live with the idea that the slugs were not just aimlessly slithering around in the root cellar but were scheming down there, and Daddy says it got to the point where Momma would lay in bed at night waiting for the assault and occasionally Daddy would lick the end of his thumb and put it against Momma’s bare leg, and he says she would somehow manage to levitate over the mattress until she could land upright on the dresser or light atop the base of Daddy’s coatrack without ever having to touch the floor herself. Daddy says he eventually called the exterminator just this side of when Momma might have divorced him or shot him, he didn’t know which, and he says the exterminator took one look in the root cellar then sort of grinned at him and said, “I’ve got just the thing,” which turned out to be four boxes of Morton’s table salt. “Wonder of wonders,” Daddy says. So the exterminator spread the table salt over what slugs were already in the root cellar and left a healthy covering against whatever ones were on their way there, and Daddy says late that same night just after him and Momma had got in bed he heard a distant, extended moan, which he knew right off for a fire whistle, but he hissed at Momma anyway, “Listen!” And Daddy says Momma sat bolt upright in the bed and said, “What is it, Louis?” “I think it’s those slugs screaming,” he told her, and Momma says she made a swat at Daddy, not knowing exactly where she would catch him but just wanting to catch him somewhere, and she says it was simply by plain unfortunate chance that Daddy rose up just as she came around and put his nose directly in the way of her forearm, all of which Momma says was a little difficult to explain at the hospital.

  Daddy says after the slugs were gone and after he got the splints off his nose, things became fairly routine in Danville. In the mornings, Momma would get up first to take care of what Daddy sometimes calls the little one, and then she would pour him a bowl of puffed rice and attempt to brew coffee in the GE percolator Miss Nancy Gant had given them at their wedding. Daddy tells how Momma would measure the coffee out with a tablespoon, toss in a little salt, fill the pot at the tap, and plug it in at the counter so it could pop and steam and spew and generally throw the sort of fit that was calculated to produce something drinkable. And Daddy says every morning he would approach the pot carrying with him what he calls fresh resolve along with his cup and he would tilt the percolator and out would come what had been just ten minutes earlier a little coffee, a dash of salt, and plain tapwater now all mixed and transformed through the miracle of electricity into a species of domesticated ditchwash. Daddy says it got so he didn’t know what to throw out, the coffee pot or Momma.

  Momma doesn’t blame the percolator herself; she simply says she didn’t know her way around a kitchen back then, probably because Grandma Yount was such a fine cook and got such pleasure from it that she never allowed Momma near the stove, so Momma went off with Daddy to Lynchburg thinking dinner was something you just sat down and ate. Even by the time they got to Danville Momma could hardly operate anything in the kitchen but a skillet and a potato masher, and whatever couldn’t be fried or somehow slipped into the mashed potatoes she considered inedible. Daddy says it was along about Danville that Momma discovered Crisco, which she used sort of like gravy and which was more or less responsible for the length of the sofa Momma and Daddy bought for the living room. Daddy insisted it be as long as he was so when he stumbled away from the table he could stretch out on it to let supper work its magic.

  Momma usually takes this sort of thing pretty well considering it is coming from a man who has to get out a cookbook to heat water, but when Daddy starts in on how miserable Momma’s lunches could be, Momma tends to become somewhat peevish, not because she imagines they were at all tasty but because up until recently Momma thought whatever Daddy had carted off in the morning he had eaten at noon, which Daddy says he could not have done with good conscience what with supper staring him in the face and it and lunch together carrying with them the probability that Momma would be widowed by nightfall. So in the mornings Momma would sack Daddy’s lunch for him, usually giving him whatever had survived the previous meal which meant some manner of potatoes and a slice or a slab or a pattie of meat or the occasional salmon cake, which Momma just had to open a can to get at, and Daddy says the sack would sort of lubricate itself there on the kitchen counter so he would have to carry it away from his clothes and ride it on the floorboard of the car to the depot where he was successful in giving it aw
ay until word spread and then he had to either leave it on the kitchen counter or, if Momma forced it on him, throw it away in the men’s room. For lunch Daddy says he would walk over to Emerson’s Fine Foods and eat several hotdogs accompanied by most anything that was not a potato.

  According to Momma, though, no matter how sorry the food got at the supper table Daddy never managed to keep his elbow from bending, and Momma says the potatoes and the vegetable oil gravy and the hotdogs at lunchtime all worked together to give Daddy what he likes to call a paunch but what Momma says was more truly just a general swelling up of most every part of Daddy that was inflatable. And Momma says she would tell him, “Louis, you’ve put on considerable weight,” or “Louis, you could stand some exercise,” and Momma says Daddy would agree with her entirely as he spooned up a mound of potatoes or cut himself a hunk of boxed cake. Momma supposed Daddy would have inflated himself right out of his wardrobe if him and Momma together hadn’t happened to go shopping for a new necktie and if Momma hadn’t told the saleslady she wanted something that would pick up the color in Daddy’s eyes, to which the saleslady adjusted her glasses and looked hard at Daddy for a half minute before turning back to Momma and saying, “What color are your husband’s eyes? I can’t see them.” Momma says that hit Daddy a broadside in his vanity, which was just what he needed.