A Short History of a Small Place Read online

Daddy said he’d never seen anything wither and shrivel away like Miss Pettigrew’s spirit when she felt Sheriff Burton’s hand on her arm. Every bit of liveliness shrunk off from her, he said, and she deflated right there on the spot. He said the exhilaration had put some blush in her cheeks and her vigor had seemed to flesh her out some, but Daddy said when the sheriff touched her she became all tallowy again, and frail and slight and painfully ancient looking.

  The sheriff nudged her a little and said, “Let’s you and me go to the house, Miss Pettigrew,” and Daddy said she made a feeble noise in her throat and let him take her wherever he would. He helped her up the steps and onto the porch and Daddy said when that creature saw them coming he screeched and chattered most wildly and gave the screen door a ferocious beating with the leathery sides of both hands. The sheriff didn’t offer Aunt Willa charge of Miss Pettigrew as far as Daddy could tell. He took it upon himself to see her into the house, and Daddy said when he opened the screen door, that monkey bolted for the front lawn and would have been out and gone toward Africa if Aunt Willa hadn’t cut him off at the lip of the porch and scooped him up in both arms. And that was a sight, Daddy said, to see Aunt Willa there on the edge of the sunlight in her smock and with her usual grim expression lurking underneath the brim of what used to be Mr. Bristow’s fedora and her arms full of Miss Pettigrew’s monkey who had a hat of his own, a porkpie with a chin strap, and a plaid sportcoat, and a toothy ape face that was altogether as sour and unpleasant as Aunt Willa’s.

  Daddy said Sheriff Burton came out directly and as he passed Aunt Willa on his way off the porch he touched the brim of his hat and said, “Earn your money, Miss Willa,” and Daddy said Aunt Willa just looked at him with no more expression than a doorknob and that monkey lifted his porkpie a half foot straight up and then let the chin strap snap it back onto his head.

  Sheriff Button drew out his nightstick, Daddy said, and opened up his arms as if to herd everybody back toward their own business, but Daddy said there were few people there with any business earnest enough to call them away, so most everybody lingered by the fence and watched Sheriff Burton try to send them home. Daddy said he waggled his nightstick under folks’ noses and said, “The show’s over. Get along home now. The show’s over.” But people just looked at the sheriff and looked at the end of his nightstick and nobody went much of anywhere. And Daddy said he stalked up and back the length of the fence, all the while slapping the shaft into his palm and saying, “Don’t you folks have homes to go to? Don’t you have something you need to be doing?” But the same forearms dangled through the palings and the same shameless faces followed the sheriff back and forth across the lawn. “Am I gonna have to run you all in?” he wanted to know. Daddy thought Sheriff Burton had been watching entirely too much Dragnet, and when he finally did leave he said, “Suit yourselves,” and went storming off in the direction of the courthouse, Daddy said, like maybe he was going after a firehose or a load of mace.

  Daddy said folks watched him up the courthouse steps and out of sight and then turned back to Aunt Willa who was still standing in the band of sunlight on the edge of the porch. She had set the monkey beside her on the planking and had snatched up a handful of sportcoat collar to keep him there. Daddy said the creature curled his lips and screeched once or twice and Aunt Willa just stood for several minutes facing the fence and the people canted up against it and the people behind them but not really looking at anything or anybody. Then she plucked the monkey up into her arms and went inside, Daddy said, and shut the heavy front door behind her. And he said folks looked at the door and looked at the windows hung with chintz curtains and studied the bushes across the front of the house and considered both halves of the lawn and the sidewalk in between and pondered the stump where the geraniums should have been and then watched Everet Little climb back up onto the gate and ride it in and out of the yard.

  Daddy fished a Tareyton out of his shirtpocket and Momma eased herself against the edge of the doorframe and looked up to where the wall met the ceiling.

  “She was so elegant in her day,” Momma said.

  Daddy grunted and brought out a matchbook from the depths of the magazine hamper.

  “She was such a fine lady,” Momma said.

  And Daddy cupped his hands over the lit match and told her, “Well, seems she’s gone bats.”

  “Louis Benfield!” And I knew by the way Momma said it she wasn’t talking to me. She gave Daddy an icy once-over and he just shook the match out and looked right back at her with his cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth in the way Momma said made him look like a hoodlum. “That’s no way to speak of a woman of her position,” Momma told him, and when he never did say anything back, she went off shoulders first to the kitchen and left a kind of chill hanging behind her.

  We could hear the water running and the sound of Momma loading the sink up with dishes, probably clean ones since she’d washed the dinner dishes already and we’d yet to have supper. But that didn’t matter to Momma; she just needed her hands in the suds. There’s a window over Momma’s sink that looks out into the spiny branches of an apricot tree and, beyond them, onto the tin roof of our carshed which is flaked with rust and shot through all over with holes, and whenever Momma washes dishes, she looks out into those limbs and onto that carshed roof like she’s never seen them before. After we buried Grandma Yount Momma came straight home to the kitchen and put an apron on over her funeral dress. She took a stack of plates out of the cabinet, ran the sink full of water, and scoured each dish until the drainer was piled high with them; then she dumped them back into the sink and started over. I remember climbing up onto the countertop and watching Momma handle those plates without ever bothering to see them and I remember watching her look out the window and I remember looking out the window myself and finding the same old apricot tree, the same weathered roofing, and just a glimpse of the sunset, a puny jagged edge of it off beyond the far wall of the carshed. And I remember drawing away from the window and saying, “What do you see, Momma?” and when she didn’t answer me I tugged on her apron and said, “What do you see, Momma?” and she dropped her plate on the linoleum, where it pretty much exploded in all directions.

  I surely would have gone off the countertop backwards if Daddy hadn’t grabbed me from behind. He took me off to his and Momma’s bedroom and set me on the edge of the bed, and he said, “Louis, you can’t do that to your Momma.”

  And I said, “Yes sir.”

  And Daddy said, “When your Momma’s washing dishes, she’s always somewhere else.” He waited until I looked at him and he looked directly at me and said, “Do you see what I mean?”

  And I said, “Yes sir.”

  So Daddy uncreased his afternoon paper and I sat on the floor beside his chair and listened to the sound of Momma rattling dishes in the kitchen. Then there came a particularly long spell of silence and Daddy lit a fresh Tareyton off the butt of an old one, blew a plume of smoke straight out into the room, and winked at me over the top of it.

  ii

  That was the day Miss Pettigrew stopped being just peculiar. She’d been peculiar ever since I’d heard tell of her and ever since I’d known what being peculiar meant, but now when folks spoke of her they would say she was Not Right, which was an advancement of a sort. The town of Neely had seen a blue million peculiarities in its history, but those among its citizenry who were genuinely not right were rare and cherished. In my day alone I’d seen any number of oddballs but less than a handful of the truly unbalanced, and three of them were from the same family. They were the Epperson sisters, and they had distinguished themselves in the minds of the Neelyites by going from reasonably normal to unquestionably insane without ever pausing at peculiar.

  The Epperson sisters had lived across the street from us in a huge clapboard house that went entirely uncared for from the moment their father died to the day the roof collapsed and the fire department decided to burn what was left for practice. Daddy told me Mr. Epperson had
been in commodities but had done so poorly at it that he had to take a job at the FCX on the side where he was given a pick-up truck and was employed delivering salt licks to the surrounding farms. He died three years before I was born. Daddy said he was nailing a shutter tight against the siding when he was taken by a stroke.

  I don’t ever remember seeing Mrs. Epperson except when they carried her out of the parlor all bedecked with flowers and greenery and loaded her into the back of the hearse, and I couldn’t see her then. Momma said she was a mousy woman. Daddy said he’d always suspected she was mute, but Momma told me that wasn’t so. Momma and Daddy both agreed that she was nobody’s pretty child, and I didn’t need anybody to tell me that her daughters were three of the homeliest women I’d ever laid eyes on. They looked like old photographs of sodbusters’ wives—shapeless figures, plain, manly faces, and heads full of thin brown hair drawn back tight into buns.

  When their mother died, they were all three still fairly young women. Eustace was near forty, which was a good seven or eight years older than Cora and Annie whose ages were indistinguishable from each other since sometimes Cora looked older than Annie and sometimes Annie looked older than Cora depending on the light. I’d usually see one or the other of them a couple of times a week pulling a metal shopping cart off to the Big Apple, and whichever one of them it was would always say, “Hello little Louis Benfield.”

  And I’d say, “Hello Miss Epperson.”

  And she’d come back with, “It’s wonderful to be out of doors, isn’t it?” which Mrs. Epperson must have taught all three of them to say since they all three said it and which they probably would have still insisted on saying even if it were raining hot lead.

  And I’d always answer, “Yes ma’m, it is nice to be outside.”

  And whichever Epperson it was would unfailingly leave her regards to my Momma and Daddy which I would usually deliver at the supper table. “An Epperson said hello,” I would say.

  We never suspected that the Eppcrsons would ever be anything but kindly spinster women, so all of us were a little shocked when Annie got married, or anyway when she ran off with a man. He wasn’t from Neely but somewhere else, had to be from somewhere else since there wasn’t a man in Neely desperate enough to take up with an Epperson. He’d been in the area three or four days before he got down to our end of town. He was selling rhyming dictionaries, which came in a handsome two-volume set and for a very slight charge the owner could have his name tooled in gold across the front of each volume. When he arrived at our house, Momma had to field him since Daddy always refused to do that sort of thing, and she said he was a handsome enough gentleman and that he had entertained her by talking in couplets. She said he promised to make us all more poetical than we ever dreamed we could be, but Momma said she told him Daddy was an actuary and had no desire to be poetical, and as for herself she was too busy a homemaker to engage in such frivolity, and her son, God bless him, suffered from a brain deficiency which left him with no hopes of ever being an accomplished rhymer. Momma said he told her he was extremely sorry about my condition, and Momma told Daddy that made her feel mean and low. Daddy said better mean and low than poetical.

  The Epperson sisters bought three sets of dictionaries. For almost a week solid we saw the salesman come and go from their house, and we assumed that he was merely working out the details and delivering the merchandise. But on a Friday evening when he left for the last time, he took Annie with him. Eustace and Cora acted like there’d never been anything but the two of them, and Annie was gone for the better part of a month before she came back to town one afternoon on a bus from Martinsville, Virginia. She walked all the way home from the bus station carrying her suitcase and a paper sack, and I stood on the end of the sidewalk and watched her come from way off down the opposite side of the street.

  When she got abreast of me she said, “Hello little Louis Benfield.”

  And I said, “Hello Miss Epperson.”

  And she said, “It’s wonderful to be out of doors, isn’t it?”

  And I said, “Yes ma’m, it is nice to be outside.”

  Daddy imagined that salesman thought Miss Annie rich, resourceful, or potentially beautiful and then discovered she was just an Epperson.

  That summer the Epperson sisters would sit out on their porch in the evenings and one of them would read interesting bits out of the Neely Chronicle to the other two. Then autumn set in, and winter, and they shut themselves up in the house until spring. Something happened to the Epperson sisters that winter, and Daddy said it was probably Eustace’s idea and that it must have just stewed there with the three of them all closed up together. He called it a certifiable case of simultaneous insanity, which he said was certainly rare and probably unheard of.

  They had decided they were triplets.

  One morning in early April when it was still a little cool and breezy, a hired car pulled up in front of the Epperson house and Eustace and Cora and Annie came parading out the door and down the sidewalk, each one of them dressed in the same identical sky-blue frock, and the same black heels, and the same elbow-length gloves, and the same little white hats the shape of an aspirin tablet, and each one of them carrying the same black patent clutch purse. They were gone for most of the afternoon and the news of where they’d gone to and what they’d gone to do got back almost before they did. They had traveled to the county seat of Eden, which was just a few miles down the road, and had paid a visit to the county clerk there, a Mr. Woodley. Carl Browner was sheriff of Neely then and he said Mr. Woodley called him along about mid-afternoon sounding decidedly agitated and distraught. He said there were three Neely Eppersons in his office who had come to declare themselves triplets. Sheriff Browner told him he was surprised to learn the Epperson sisters were triplets, and Mr. Woodley replied that they didn’t appear to be triplets as far as he could tell, that they didn’t even appear to be the same age. Sheriff Browner said no, he didn’t believe they were, and Mr. Woodley said that Eustace—he called her the mature one—wanted him to search the records and draw up a document certifying their triplethood, and he wanted to know from Sheriff Browner just what he was to do about that.

  “Search the records, I guess,” Sheriff Browner told him.

  The sheriff dismissed the hired car when he got to Eden and he said he found Mr. Woodley at his desk neck-deep in official papers with Eustace and Annie and Cora Epperson hovering over him from behind. Mr. Woodley was tracing the Epperson migration from the banks of the French Broad River to the east and then to the north towards Neely. He was still a hundred years and over two hundred and fifty miles out of the county when the sheriff arrived, so Sheriff Browner suggested the Epperson sisters give Mr. Woodley a little time to do his work on the matter, which the three of them thought altogether reasonable, and they made an appointment for the following week. The sheriff said he feared Mr. Woodley might leap up from his desk and kiss him.

  Once he got them in the car, Sheriff Browner turned to Eustace who had taken the front seat and told her he had no idea the three of them were triplets.

  He said she bristled a little and drew her purse up tight against her chest. “We have discovered that we are,” she said.

  When Mr. and Mrs. Epperson moved to Neely they came complete with three more or less full-blown daughters, so we only had our suspicions about the attachments from Epperson to Epperson and were probably more surprised at what Mr. Woodley dug up than Eustace, Annie, and Cora were. The Epperson sisters weren’t triplets; one of them wasn’t even an Epperson. That was Cora and she was her Momma’s brother’s child, which made her a Greene. Mr. Epperson had taken her in after Mrs. Epperson’s sister-in-law had died and Mrs. Epperson’s brother had turned out to be no count. Cora must have known all this at one time, since she was five when it happened, and Eustace certainly knew it, but Cora told Mr. Woodley it was a baldfaced lie and Eustace said yes indeed it was a baldfaced lie and Annie said it absolutely had to be a baldfaced lie. Sheriff Browner, who had driven th
e three of them to Eden, said it was a sad sight to see those women, all of them in identical scarlet dresses, wailing and moaning at poor Mr. Woodley who the sheriff said looked as if he might be willing to strike up a compromise and recognize Annie and Cora as twins in exchange for some peace and quiet. He said the news had put all three Eppersons in a kind of indignant but still moderately polite rage, since they were respectable ladies after all, and the sheriff said he was so pained by their predicament that he suddenly suffered a massive lapse in good judgement. In an effort to offer some sort of comfort the sheriff told them he would consider recognizing them as triplets if they were able to get fifty adults in Neely to sign a petition verifying their claim. It was a tremendous mistake. The sheriff said he had temporarily forgotten what people were like.

  They collected the names on an ordinary sheet of lined white paper, and for three mornings only at nine o’clock they came out of their house and set out towards town. On the first and the third day they wore their blue frocks and on the middle day they wore their scarlet outfits which were quite a hit with the ladies of Neely and got them no end of comment. Eustace always carried the paper in her purse and when they visited homes and shops and stopped folks on the street, the three of them would take turns explaining their situation. People said they were gracious and altogether levelheaded, and I suppose with nothing more than their manners and show of good sense they managed to inspire among the citizenry of Neely the general impression that they had been victimized by some sort of terrible prenatal injustice. Nobody who was asked didn’t sign. The three church deacons signed. The ladies of the garden club signed. All of the icehouse employees signed. Every shop-keeper on the boulevard signed. The mayor signed and the mayor’s wife signed and the mayor’s ninety-three-year-old blind and bedridden aunt signed. Miss Pettigrew signed and Miss Willa Bristow made her mark. And Mr. and Mrs. Pendzinski, who were passing through on their vacation from Ohio with a carful of little Pendzinskies and who qualified by virtue of being adults in Neely, signed and then took turns having their pictures made with the Epperson sisters.