A Short History of a Small Place Read online

  Daddy said little Evelyn Maynard was coming up on two months when the package arrived from New Jersey and sat unclaimed in the post office for the better part of a week before Poppa managed to get himself upright long enough to go down and claim it. Of course, Daddy said, once it had lingered with the mailmen for a day or two there wasn’t anybody in town who didn’t know where it was from and who it was to and who would not have attempted anything short of opening to find out just exactly what it was. So the traffic was extraordinarily heavy in front of the Throckmorton house on the afternoon Poppa picked up his package, and Daddy said he took it on into the hammock with him and opened it there. According to Daddy, most folks were a little disappointed and the rest were surely puzzled by what Poppa drew out of the box, which Daddy said was nothing but a stereoscope and a parcel of picture cards both of which entirely delighted Poppa who did not unwrap the cards right away but put the stereoscope eyepiece up to his face and looked out into the front yard. Daddy said he did not suppose Poppa’s package contained more than a dozen picture cards altogether, and he said when Poppa finally unwrapped them he stuck the first one into the clip and studied it for a full quarter-hour, all the while sliding it up and down the focusing arm and talking to himself underneath the eyepiece. Daddy said he could only speculate as to what Poppa might have been seeing since he had not been exposed to any great variety of stereoscopes himself but had only looked through Great-grandmomma Benfield’s on several occasions and had once made use of our neighbor Mr. Phillip J. King’s model at the fullblown insistence of Mr. King himself, Daddy said, who had received in the mail from his cousin in Baltimore a stereoscopic picture of the frontside of a naked woman which Daddy said went a ways towards pointing out the virtues of the contraption. But Daddy didn’t imagine Poppa Throckmorton had come into the possession of even a single picture of the frontside or backside of anything naked since he would look at each one himself for a few minutes before calling out, “Momma,” and thereby bringing the former Miss Fuller out the side door and onto the porch where she would grab up the stereoscope herself, adjust it as she saw fit, and look through it for maybe ten seconds before pulling it away from her face and saying, “It does look real, Braxton,” to which Poppa would reply, “Don’t it though,” and take the thing back from her. Daddy said it was probably a few landscapes and most likely a dead-on look into the breech of a rifle or a view of the bottoms of some old bugger’s feet poking out from under the bedclothes, which were a couple of big sellers for the stereoscope people. Daddy supposed Poppa might have gotten hold of a few theatrical shots as well, maybe one or two like the one Great-grandmomma Benfield had of a sour-looking woman pointing a dagger and entitled “Lady Macbeth as portrayed by Mrs. Veronica Beech-Whitham of the London Stage.”

  So folks simply thought that Poppa had bought himself a stereoscope and they didn’t discover until the business column came out in Saturday’s Chronicle that Poppa had not bought himself a stereoscope exactly but had instead bought himself a sizeable portion of a stereoscope manufacturing firm, namely Riddle and Schneider, Inc. of Woodbridge, New Jersey. As it turned out Poppa had taken what dividends and benefits and cotton mill stock he had left and manipulated it somehow into cash money which he immediately turned around and reinvested by mail in Riddle and Schneider, Inc. who had taken out an ad in Harper’s Magazine that Poppa had seen and been struck with. Of course his daddy’s former associates at the cotton mill advised him against it and Mrs. Throckmorton was herself a little leery of the undertaking, but Daddy said Poppa stood firm and unswayable where his investment was concerned and in answer to his detractors could often be heard to say there was no future in cotton, but the stereoscope, now that was something else entirely. Unfortunately for Poppa, however, Daddy said the market for stereoscopes was not particularly bullish at the time what with the radio and, in Neely anyway, the promise of a moving-picture house where the negro grocery store had been, and Daddy said if he was any judge of trends, the heyday of stereoscopes had probably come and gone a full decade or so before Poppa ever thought to pack his money off to New Jersey. Certainly Mr. Riddle and Mr. Schneider knew what was what in the stereoscope business since, as it came out later, they were already sitting on several hundred crates of the things in a dockside warehouse in Perth Amboy, and according to Mrs. Riddle, who turned out to be the only source of reliable information once Mr. Riddle and Mr. Schneider were gone, the gentlemen had abandoned all hopes of remaining solvent but had concluded that a call for investors in Harper’s might attract anyway at least a half a handful of people foolhardy enough to fling their money towards New Jersey, which Daddy said was just the sort of recklessness and bravado that was right in Poppa Throckmorton’s line.

  Of course Mr. Riddle and Mr. Schneider went out of business. Poppa Throckmorton was simply devastated, at least, Daddy said, folks assumed right off he would be since they knew they would have been, and consequently most everybody tried to keep the news from him, especially Mrs. Throckmorton who intercepted the mailrnan at the front steps and daily rushed the Chronicle into the backyard where she set fire to it on the trash heap, which went unnoticed by Poppa since he was still reasonably enthralled with his stereoscope and had not as of yet figured out how to read a newspaper through it. Daddy imagined Poppa could have been kept in the dark for a couple of months anyway if the regular mail carrier, Mr. Foster, had not contracted an oriental stomach virus which caused a substitute mailman from Ruffin to be imported for the route on the day the letter arrived from the attorney’s office in Woodbridge, New Jersey, a letter which had been mailed in such a thin and insubstantial envelope, according to the substitute mailman, that it could not help but be deciphered once it happened to pass between his eyes and direct lamp-light. So the blame could not be laid on anybody from Neely, which was some sort of civic consolation, and it certainly couldn’t be laid on Mrs. Throckmorton who sprang out the front door and met the substitute carrier before he reached the steps but who could not have and did not anticipate that he would spy Poppa in his hammock and holler up to him, “Hello Poppa, sorry to hear about your business,” which is exactly what he did. Daddy said Poppa yanked the stereoscope away from his face and leapt directly up out of the hammock and onto the porch decking, a marvelous accomplishment in and of itself. Then he said, “What?” and even before he could finish saying it a picture card dropped out of the stereoscope and settled onto the plank floor at the very instant Poppa became devastated, or anyway that’s what folks said he became and that’s when folks agreed he became it.

  Daddy said all of Neely immediately feared for Poppa because devastation was widely known to be such a serious affliction, and the people who were so friendly with the former Miss Fuller as to hand her advice suggested that she stay where she could eyeball Poppa at all hours of the day and night just in case he was not courageous and level-headed enough to be devastated and survive it. So Poppa could not get away from Mrs. Throckmorton until the fourth day after the letter arrived and even then he had to tell her that the pantry was on fire and the baby was choking on a hambone before he distracted her sufficiently to slip off over the porch railing, through the hedge, and on down along the street. Daddy said as it was pieced together later from various ragtail facts and assumptions, Poppa made directly for Mrs. Ware’s back door, which was a full block down from his own, and first rapped on the glass of it with his knuckles before pounding on the panels of it with his fist and finally taking up a stick of oak kindling off the stoop and beating the doorframe with it, which eventually attracted the attention of Mrs. Ware who was partially deaf on top of being generally reluctant to open her door to anybody at any hour of the twenty-four. Daddy said she made enough space for her nose and mouth between the edge of the door and the doorframe and said, “What is it, Mr. Throckmorton?” to which Poppa had not yet exactly settled on a reply and so twiddled the stick of kindling between his hands and sucked on his teeth until he collected himself enough to say, “How are you, Mrs. Ware?” Daddy
said she pushed the door to a little more so that only the point of her nose remained outside and said back at him, “Well enough, Mr. Throckmorton. What is it you want?” which Poppa still had not exactly decided on and so closed one eye, twisted his mouth up, and looked off towards the eave of the house where he was still looking when Mrs. Ware said, “Mr. Throckmorton?” to which he replied, “Groundhogs, Mrs. Ware, I’ve got groundhogs in my crawlspace.” Daddy said Mrs. Ware neither opened nor closed the door to any degree but only gaped at Poppa and eventually said, “Oh” without ever moving her lips so that it just seemed to spill out of her mouth on its on, and Poppa put his hand on one of the window mullions, Daddy said, and pushed on into the house a little as he told her, “So I’ll be needing Buddy’s gun to run them out with,” Buddy, Daddy said, being the dead Mr. Ware and Buddy’s gun being a double-aught-six shotgun which everybody knew Mrs. Ware kept loaded under her bed so in case of a prowler or any threat of meanness in general she could fetch it out and probably destroy the inside of her house with it. As Mrs. Ware told it, she couldn’t stop him, couldn’t even slow him down, and before she got past, “Well, I” Poppa had pushed on by her into the bedroom where he dove under the duster on the north end of the bed and came out on the south end with Mr. Ware’s shotgun in his hands and a hairball dangling from each elbow.

  According to Daddy, once Mrs. Throckmorton discovered that the pantry was not afire and there was no hambone in the house she went instantaneously and thoroughly berserk, he called it, and bolted headlong down the front steps with little Evelyn Maynard on her hip and a firm hold on Pinky’s wrist which sort of left Pinky to skid and bounce along behind her until she pulled up in the middle of the road and screamed, “Braxton Braxton Braxton Braxton!” in most every possible direction before finally dropping onto the dirt and wailing like a madwoman. Of course, Daddy said, most everybody within earshot showed up in the street to see what in God’s name had come over Mrs. Throckmorton, and some one or two of them ventured to console her while most of the rest talked among themselves and speculated as to Poppa’s whereabouts, and Daddy said nobody seemed to get particularly excited or upset, aside from Mrs. Throckmorton, until Mrs. Ware came forward from the sidewalk and announced how Poppa had gone off with Buddy’s gun, which inspired a whole new feeling among the onlookers, who suddenly found themselves attracted and propelled by the idea that whatever in the world Poppa could manage with a shotgun would most certainly be worth seeing, and the whole crowd of them together set off in the direction of Mrs. Ware’s house except, Daddy said, for Mrs. Throckmorton and Mrs. Ware herself who paused long enough to bend over Mrs. Throckmorton and tell her how sorry she was about the groundhogs.

  Poppa got a ride with Mr. Lemont Graham on his vegetable wagon which was harnessed to and being hauled by a pair of ancient mudcolored draft horses and so was not exactly flashing through town when Poppa caught up with it. Poppa came bursting out of a clump of shrubbery beside the road and threw himself on up into the wagon bed among the leafy lettuce and the snap beans and the Irish potatoes. Daddy said Mr. Graham did not become especially excited or distressed at the sight of a man leaping out of the bushes at him in the company of a double-aught-six shotgun but merely looked half over his shoulder and said, “Afternoon Mr. Throckmorton” before clearing off the far end of the wagon seat and inviting Poppa to have it, but Poppa told Mr. Graham he’d prefer to lay in among the Irish potatoes and the snap beans which Daddy said was equally agreeable to Mr. Graham who was simply pleased with the companionship no matter what part of the wagon it chose to occupy. So Poppa burrowed in underneath the potatoes and covered what they wouldn’t with several lettuce leaves and a few handfuls of snap beans which left him entirely blanketed in produce except for his face and would have been an absolutely inconspicuous way to travel, Daddy said, if Mr. Graham had not gone the better part of a day without an ear to bend and so passed directly through the heart of Neely carrying on a highly animated conversation with his vegetables which attracted no inconsiderable attention on its own.

  But nobody put any of it together right off and the unofficial Throckmorton posse was still fanned out on the wrong end of town when Mr. Graham passed along the boulevard by municipal square and on down the hill to the icehouse where he brought the team to a halt at the edge of the platform and waited for one of the icehouse niggers to load Mrs. Graham’s block onto the back of the wagon bed. Now Daddy said there were three or four shiver rats up under the eave next to the icehouse itself, who are nothing but northend boys that hang around the platform waiting for the puny chips and pieces of ice that the niggers figure they can’t sell, and he said one of them, a little one maybe seven or eight years old, saw Mr. Graham swing around on the wagon seat and commence to jabber at his heap of Irish potatoes, which was fairly unusual even for the icehouse, and so drew that boy on out to the edge of the platform, where Daddy said he must have supposed he might find out just what there was to say to an Irish potato. As Daddy heard it, Mr. Graham was talking primarily about the sucker problem he’d had the year previous with his tobacco acreage and the boy had already stood there on the lip of the platform looking at him for about a minute or two before Mr. Graham broke off long enough to say, “Hello George,” and then set back in with his potatoes. Daddy said that boy spat a flat piece of ice out of his mouth and into his hand and said, “My name ain’t George,” but Mr. Graham didn’t pay him any mind and carried on at some length about his suckers until the nigger lowered the ice onto the wagon bed and went around to settle up with him which left the boy all to himself with the potatoes. Daddy said that boy licked his ice and studied Mr. Graham’s Irish potatoes by turns but didn’t offer to converse with any of the vegetables until Mr. Graham popped the reins and the wagon jolted away from the platform, and then he brought his face out of his hand, looked directly at the potatoes, and said, “Hello,” and Daddy said the potatoes replied, “Goodbye George,” and the boy flinched and opened his mouth but never bothered to speak as if he suddenly and singlehandedly concluded it was permissible for a heap of Irish potatoes to call him anything it pleased.

  Daddy said by the middle of the afternoon the Poppa Throckmorton rescue team and eyewitness brigade washed through the center of town like a floodtide, catching up and carting off most every bystander and straggler until it got so the width of the street could hardly accommodate the bunch of them. He said one of the shiver rats saw them first as they came abreast of the square and he went after the icehouse niggers who gathered on the platform all bug-eyed and fearful and watched the crowd pour by the courthouse and on down the hill. Daddy said it was probably next to impossible for the niggers to judge the temperament of the crowd at such a considerable distance, so taking a precautionary and, Daddy called it, nearly instinctual measure, they immediately began to accuse each other of violating white women which set off a ferocious brawl between all four of them that started out with just bare fists, Daddy said, but soon after became more complicated and sincere with the introduction of a variety of packing crates, two folding metal chairs, and an assortment of boards and stray planking. Daddy said those niggers beat and bludgeoned each other all up and down the platform leaving a splintery shambles wherever they went and they ended up in a pile by the freezer door once they had all become subdued and more or less equally exhausted. Daddy said the front edge of the crowd had already worked its way to the lip of the platform before the niggers knew anybody had arrived, and he said the deputy sheriff, who was at that time a Doyle of the Walnut Cove Doyles and was extensively known to be about as compassionate as a cattle prod, beat on the platform with a hunk of wood he carried in his belt and shouted, “HEY!” which caused all four of those niggers to pick up their heads at once and look at him. “Any a you seen Braxton Throckmorton come through here?” he said, and Daddy said those niggers eyed each other momentarily before completely deflating onto the decking where they stayed until the deputy said, “HEY!” again, which still didn’t get much more than a ripple out of
them but did bring a little towheaded boy away from the icehouse wall and on out to the edge of the platform where he spat a sizeable chunk of ice into his hand and said, “I seen part a somebody come through here.” Some one or two of the crowd recognized him as Punk Kirby’s boy, S.D., who had no documented name other than the letters which Punk himself said stood for Sundrop, as in the cola. So Daddy said the deputy adjusted and regulated himself for a child and tried again. “Tell me, S.D.,” he said, “just what is it you seen?” And S.D. slurped up what part of his ice had melted, then pointed to the lip of the platform and said, “I seen somebody right there.” “Whar was he doing there, S.D.?” the deputy wanted to know. And according to Daddy, S.D. got a little disgusted with Deputy Doyle and said, “He wasn’t there. I was there. That’s where I seen him.” “Well where was he?” the deputy asked him. And S.D. pointed along about where the deputy himself was standing and said, “He was yonder in a wagon under a pile of arsh potatoes,” which Daddy said sort of stupefied Deputy Doyle for a couple of seconds, long enough anyway for the widow Mrs. Ware to ask herself out loud, “What in the world was he doing there?” And Daddy said S.D. pondered his chunk of ice and scratched himself and then looked at Mrs. Ware with his face all twisted up in puzzlement and confusion. “I can’t imagine,” he said.