A Short History of a Small Place Page 18

  Well, Daddy said it did not get much more judicial after that but got a far sight more lively, commencing with Pinky, who wagged his newly acquired silver tongue all around the issue and talked some about the toilet seat and talked some about professional responsibility and talked some about Casper Epps himself and then said a few words about justice and made an observation on the quality of mercy which the bald Jeeter had heard before and understood even less of now and which got Pinky gaveled all the way back to the plaintiff’s table and told to play dead there. Then it was Casper’s turn and he had plenty to say himself but none of it about the toilet seat, Daddy said, and not much of it directed at anybody but just generally aired out for whatever ears it happened to fall on. He said once he’d been lost but now he was found because he stood on Christ, who was a solid rock, and he said he’d never before guess what a friend he had in Jesus until he’d taken to standing on him, and Daddy said according to Casper all other ground was sinking sand including the modest little lot occupied by his Uncle Bill Collier’s house where Casper said he had been mired in sin for lo these many years. Then the judge beat the gavel once, Daddy said, and Casper blessed him, and then he beat it two more times and Casper blessed him again and asked Judge Mortenson if he’d ever been baptized, and Daddy said for about a half minute the judge played the bench like a jungle drum and when his arm gave out Casper offered to baptize him right then and there in any sort of basin that might be handy, and the judge by way of a counter offer told Casper he could cork himself up or get mailed to Butner in a Shoebox. So Casper blessed him again, Daddy said, and the judge rapped on the bench one time hard before leaning down towards Casper and asking him, “Are you the same Casper Epps that plumbed a half bath for Mr. Jimmy Lyle in Ruffin,” which Daddy said would be the same Jimmy Lyle that had married Judge Mortenson’s baby sister, Muffy, and Casper said no he was not that same Casper Epps ever since he’d been washed in the river of salvation, but yes he’d once been that Casper Epps when he was walking the road to hellfire and eternal suffering. So Daddy said the judge pounded the bench again even harder than the last time and said, “Guilty,” and two or three voices in the gallery rose up more or less in unison saying, “Shoot him,” and another one came in right behind them with, “Please.” But Daddy said the judge only assessed court costs and then directed Casper to drag his little sanctified ass on over to the Throckmortons’ and fix their new toilet seat to the bowl, which Daddy thought was unusually fair treatment for CaSper considering how salvation and clean living had thoroughly washed all the appeal out of him.

  And of course, Daddy said, that was pretty much when the romance commenced, and he supposed it was probably along about when the judge said, “Guilty,” that Pinky threw both his arms around jurisprudence and clutched it to his heart. As far as the bald Jeeter was concerned, she was just glad to get out of the courthouse only six dollars and fifty cents to the bad, but it was different for Pinky, Daddy said, because he’d been a Throckmorton a whole lifetime longer than she had and so had never had much occasion to get his hand shook and his back slapped, which kept him behind in the courtroom a full half hour after the bald Jeeter and the fat Jeeter and little Ivy had gone on to the car. Daddy said folks told him he had won something very fine, almost noble, and even Casper Epps himself, who Daddy said was so busy turning the other cheek he could have just as well been on a rotisserie, took Pinky’s hand and blessed him, and then left Pinky in the courtroom all by himself except for one of the bailiffs who touched his hat and said, “Afternoon, Mr. Throckmorton,” and Daddy said Pinky told him “Afternoon” back and then carried himself all proper and erect down the gallery aisle and to the far doorway where he turned on the courtoom one final time so as to soak in the pure feeling of the afternoon and haul it on away with him since it had not been anything to be a Throckmorton for as long as Pinky could remember and now it was something again at last. And Daddy said Pinky probably had not gotten so far as outside of Eden, maybe had not even started the car when he set in to figuring who he’d sue next.

  Even after the verdict, what Daddy said Pinky liked to call the Finding, the Throckmortons didn’t get their toilet seat right off just like the clerk of court didn’t get the eleven dollars’ worth of court costs in any sort of hurry. And even when Pinky finally did get his toilet ring and the clerk of court finally did get his eleven dollars it wasn’t from Casper Epps that they got them but from Casper’s Uncle Bill Collier, who recognized that salvation had fairly much incapacitated his nephew and took matters into his own hands so as to keep Jesus from getting Casper thrown into the lockup. But Daddy said even Uncle Bill didn’t exactly crack like a whip so the court costs did not get paid until a deputy from Eden came to fetch away the defendant, and Uncle Bill delivered the toilet seat to Pinky in the most technical sense only since it was Uncle Bill that climbed into the truckbed and it was Pinky that stood at the tailgate and it was Uncle Bill that wrestled the boxed-up toilet seat out from a pile of wrenches and pipe fittings and it was Pinky that took it from him and drove it home in his car. So all that court business in Eden, what Pinky liked to call the Throckmorton/Epps litigation, did not in any manner amount to, what Daddy liked to call, a happy horseshit. But then Pinky held he was only after the satisfaction which Daddy said was fine since that was all he got anyway aside from the publicity in the Chronicle which Daddy said brought with it the opportunity for some renewed blustering, and Pinky, never one to pass up the chance to swagger when it presented itself to him, spent the best part of the month swollen up like a blowfish.

  But of course, Daddy said, memory of the Throckmorton/Epps litigation soon enough wore off and faded away for most everybody but Pinky, who Daddy supposed was only then truly discovering that he did in fact harbor in his breast a burning unquenchable desire for jurisprudence. So Daddy said it was probably along about when the speculation concerning and general talk about Pinky’s day in court had come as near to ceasing altogether as it ever would that Pinky began to cast around with his eyes open and his ears pricked up wanting to sue somebody but not knowing who to sue or what for. And Daddy said it wasn’t until June, near about a year after the Casper/Epps case, that Pinky finally got himself sufficiently offended to make his way to Eden and file with the clerk there. According to Daddy what happened was that Pinky and the bald Jeeter rented a cottage down at Nags Head on the outer banks so as to take little Ivy on her first vacation to the coast where she could see for herself, Daddy said, what sort of boundless joy there was in going numb in the Atlantic ocean, barbecuing her little carcass on the beach, and feeding the flies and mosquitoes for seven days and six nights. Now just prior to their departure the bald Jeeter had scribbled out a note to the milkman directing him not to leave them any milk, whole or butter, until the following Monday which she had dropped into the metal milk keeper by the side door and which she did not think about again until her and Pinky and little Ivy returned from the seashore along towards Sunday evening the three of them together, Daddy said, a little ragged and irritated from all the fun they’d had.

  It was, of course, the bald Jeeter that noticed it first, Daddy said, her being the one that normally kept the house clean and sweet smelling, and she sniffed her way through the parlor and the dining room and on into the kitchen where she told Pinky it smelled like something had passed away behind the wainscotting and was going to heaven a little at a time, and she asked him did he smell it himself, but Daddy said the fresh sea air had played such a tune on Pinky’s sinuses that he could have taken his supper in a henhouse and not been the worse for it, so he told her the kitchen smelled exactly to him like the dining room which smelled like the parlor, which smelled like the front yard, and consequently the bald Jeeter rooted around on her own in the cabinets and the pantry and all throughout the refrigerator and then just for the sake of variety she swung open the side door and stepped out onto the stoop where the air was thick sure enough, and Daddy said she lifted the lid of the milkbox ever so slightly and near abo
ut a week’s worth of indescribable ripeness came boiling up from the bottom and over the sides and almost knocked the bald Jeeter off the stoop and into the pyracantha bush under the kitchen window. Daddy said the top had blown off each of the quart bottles and most of the milk had managed to get loose in the milkbox where some of it had crusted up and the rest of it was still stewing away.

  Pinky told her she should have left a note, told her they didn’t have money to be throwing away on spoilt milk, which was probably the sort of talk the bald Jeeter expected since Pinky could still wring water out of a dry dollar bill, and she told him back she had left a note, and Pinky said, “Uh huh,” and she told him she remembered dropping it into the milkbox, and Pinky said, “Uh huh,” again. But when she had settled her stomach sufficiently to clean the thing out she found the note for herself stuck to the bottom of one of the quart bottles and she took it on into the house and waved it in Pinky’s face, and Daddy said once Pinky had stopped it from flapping enough to see just what it was, he went ahead and blew up right there in the master bedroom. Daddy said it was very probably a Castleberryesque explosion only a degree or two less violent since there was not actually anyone present to explode at, and he said Pinky was already talking lawsuit before he got well into the hallway, but the bald Jeeter, who did not share Pinky’s affection for jurisprudence, grabbed ahold of him and somehow or another managed to make him into a reasonable creature once again. She told him there wouldn’t be any trouble to it, that she’d talk to the milkman herself and get the whole business squared away, and then she sent Pinky off to the post office to pick up the week’s worth of mail because she figured the walk would do him some good. And Daddy said the walk probably did him good; it was the mail that didn’t because he’d gotten—aside from a Sears tool catalog, a Reader’s Digest, and three identical fliers announcing the Beef Extravaganza at the Big Apple—a bill from the Guilford Creamery for a month’s worth of milk and butter with a note typed in at the bottom of the page asking Pinky to please have his payment in the mail by the fifteenth. So he exploded all over again, Daddy said, and by the time he got home he was already too far gone for the bald Jeeter to do a thing with him. She begged and pleaded and tried to wedge herself between Pinky and the sideboard but Pinky just moved her on out of the way and got the pad of paper from the bottom shelf and sat down with it at the diningroom table where he began to draft up his accusations. And Daddy said by midmorning of the following day Pinky was a plaintiff again.

  So Daddy said two and a half weeks later there they all were in the courtroom once more, Pinky and the bald Jeeter and the fat Jeeter and little Ivy, and the honorable Judge Mortenson himself saw it clear to call the Throckmorton case ahead of two divorce actions and one custody suit disputed between Mr. and Mrs. Harold Underhill, who had come to despise each other most violently and so could not between them reach any sort of mutually agreeable decision as to who should get the house trailer and who should get the Pontiac. Daddy said the clerk of court called out Pinky’s name and he advanced to the plaintiff’s table carrying with him his pad full of accusations and the bald Jeeter’s note to the milkman, which had long since curdled but still had a little aroma to it. Judge Mortenson, however, did not allow Pinky to sit down at the plaintiff’s table but motioned him on up to the bench where the judge had a note of his own, this one from the dairy in Greensboro and which was not an open admission of guilt but did constitute, the judge told Pinky, an offer of two free quarts of milk to replace the ones that got spoiled. Now Judge Mortenson said he considered that a fair and just remuneration, but Pinky told him he’d just as soon go ahead and pursue the litigation as long as he was already there, and Daddy said Judge Mortenson leaned down across the bench and put his face right up snug to Pinky’s face and suggested that Pinky take the milk and clear out or get his head bit off. So Pinky reconsidered the initial proposition and decided that yes he would take the milk but wanted to know could he have a letter of apology from the dairy to go along with it, and that’s when the judge up and asked him to leave, or actually, Daddy said, told him to get out.

  So as far as most everybody knew it was two Findings for Pinky Throckmorton and none against him, and anybody who had previously happened to miss hearing about the Throckmorton/Epps litigation heard about it now in the same breath with the Throckmorton/Guilford Creamery litigation, which Daddy said meant that every time Pinky Throckmorton’s name came up in conversation it arrived attached to two lungfuls of proceedings, and it got so that anymore, according to Daddy, nobody hardly felt secure enough to even say “Throckmorton” without some manner of legal background. Daddy said most folks agreed you had to admire a man who stood up for himself in a court of law, so most folks admired Pinky, Daddy said, because they agreed they had to. And as for himself, Pinky blustered and swaggered and carried on and mostly got avoided everywhere he went so that it started to look like he’d never again become sufficiently offended to go to court, and Daddy said in fact it wasn’t until eight months later that Pinky managed to get himself offended, or if not truthfully and entirely offended riled up anyway, and even then he couldn’t haul his grievance all the way to Eden before it gave out on him. According to Daddy, what happened was that Pinky bought a three-inch paintbrush from Mr. Jackson P. Eaton, owner, proprietor, and namesake of Eaton’s Hardware and General Merchandise on the Boulevard, and he set in to painting window shutters with it on a Friday evening and took it up again on Saturday and once more on the following Tuesday along about twilight when he noticed that the bristles were pulling off from the brushhandle in huge clumps and sticking all over the shutter louvers. So come Wednesday morning off Pinky went to see Mr. Eaton and get some satisfaction.

  Now Daddy said over the years Mr. Eaton had formulated a very particular opinion of his line of merchandise and actually had developed a thoroughgoing philosophy on the significance of hardware in general. As Mr. Eaton saw it, the human race could not possibly go without hardware for even two full days on end before most all activity on the face of the earth would grind to a halt for lack of woodscrews, doorhinges, cow-hooks, toilet floats, and the like. Hardware, Mr. Eaton said, holds the world together, and Daddy said he was so fond of that sentiment he had it painted on the front plate glass in a half circle. But according to Daddy when it got down to cases Mr. Eaton was not nearly so farseeing or philosophical, which usually worked out fine since very few of his customers came looking to hold the world together; they had just as soon keep their houses from falling apart. But sometimes despite all the mass and volume of hardware that had been nailed and glued and screwed and wedged and bolted and just generally applied to it, a house fell apart anyway, and whenever such an unspeakable thing occurred Mr. Eaton could not in any degree make himself believe it was the hardware that gave out or broke up since, to Mr. Eaton’s way of thinking, hardware simply did not give out or break up without, of course, someone to abuse it. So Mr. Eaton thought considerably more of his merchandise than of his customers, and Daddy said the most accurate Eaton motto certainly had to be “Never blame the implement, blame the implementor,” which Daddy said was not painted on the plate glass but should have been.

  Daddy said Mr. Eaton had never let his hair grow out much and usually kept it clipped so short that it stood straight up all over his head, and whenever he was faced with any sort of dilemma that required more than ten seconds’ worth of concentrated thought he would reach up with his left hand and rub the palm of it on his topnotch so vigorously, Daddy said, it was a wonder he didn’t electrocute himself. And so when Pinky brought his paintbrush in on Wednesday morning, Mr. Eaton took it up in his right hand, set in immediately with his left hand, and proceeded to become so utterly confounded and annoyed with the sorry state of Pinky’s brush that he very nearly set his head on fire. He couldn’t even talk at first, Daddy said, couldn’t begin to think of the words that would adequately express his dismay, and so he just held the paintbrush up between his face and Pinky’s face and looked at Pinky through i
t which was not so difficult to do since the bristles were gone completely all the way through the middle, leaving Mr. Eaton with what looked like two brushes on one handle. And Daddy did not know whether or not Mr. Eaton could have ever stirred himself into speech if Pinky hadn’t said to him, “The thing fell apart on me,” and then laughed once and slapped the counter as if he did not quite grasp that he was talking about a piece of hardware.

  So of course, Daddy said, that sort of touched off Mr. Eaton, who knew for himself that a paintbrush simply could not fall flat apart without some sort of desperado, Daddy called it, attached to the handle, and consequently Mr. Eaton shook the remaining bristles in Pinky’s face and said to him, “You been hammering on something with this?”

  “Hammering?” Pinky asked him back. “I been painting with it. It’s a paintbrush.”

  And Mr. Eaton ran his finger along about where the brush was most severely defoliated, Daddy said, and then observed mostly to himself, “Looks like somebody’s been hammering with it.”

  Pinky set the heels of his hands firmly on the countertop, drew his nose in towards Mr. Eaton’s nose, and said to Mr. Eaton, “I generally hammer with my hammer and paint with my paintbrush.”