A Short History of a Small Place Read online

  Cora carried a dainty gold pen that she produced from her purse as Eustace drew the petition out of hers. Annie made her back available for a writing table if one wasn’t handy. Always before she handed over the paper, Eustace would clear her throat and read the terms of the proposal which the three of them had devised and one of them had scrawled across the top of the page:By order of Sheriff Carlton Benjamin Browner and as testified to by these fifty below written people, Eustace Joy Epperson, Cora Simpson Epperson, and Annie May Epperson are hereby officially and forevermore recognized as the three triplets they are and always have been ever since they were born into it.

  Then Eustace would determine whether or not the prospective signee understood the terms of the document and Cora would offer the pen to whoever it might be signing, and whoever it was surely must have looked up to take the pen and seen Cora and Annie side by side before him, the two of them related more by pure homeliness than anything else, and then Eustace, off a little to herself, and a half dozen years older than the both of them and already beset with long iron-colored strands of hair laying in with the brown, and whoever it might be would take hold of the gold pen, which was so slight and delicate as to be almost impossible to get a grip on, and he would sign anyway, probably not because he saw any advantage in being triplets over being just sisters or over being just two sisters and one cousin, but because he couldn’t see any harm in it either.

  By the afternoon of the third day the Epperson sisters had filled the fifty slots and we all thought they’d bolt directly for the courthouse while the ink was still clammy on that last name. But Eustace put the paper away in her purse and Cora put the pen away in hers and the three of them strolled home very leisurely and shut themselves up in the house for the better part of two hours. It seems they had gone to change and freshen up. Me and Momma stood at the front window and watched them when they finally did come out away from the porch and into the late afternoon sunlight. Momma said they were dazzling, just dazzling. It wasn’t blue frocks this time or scarlet ones but three awesomely elaborate ivory white dresses, and three pairs of long ivory gloves, and three lacy ivory hats garnished on the backside with peacock feathers. We thought a car might call for them, but they walked all the way to the courthouse and all gages of people fell in behind them as they went so that the crowd of us spilled out of Sheriff Browner’s office into the corridor and partway down the marble courthouse steps.

  Somehow Sheriff Browner didn’t seem at all surprised to find himself host to half of Neely. He just sat a little uneasily at his desk not quite looking at anybody, which was his way, while Eustace removed the petition from a pearl-laden purse dangling from her forearm and flattened it out on the desktop in front of him. He picked up a pencil from the blotter and began to check off the names, which resulted in the document being momentarily voided when it was discovered that Daddy had signed it twice. But the sheriff, a sensible man, just scratched out one of Daddy’s signatures and put his own in place of it. The jubilation was general and immediate. Eustace, Cora, and Annie accepted our congratulations with extreme modesty and thankfulness, and a courthouse clerk along with Mr. Singletary from the five and dime helped Eustace up onto a chair from which she delivered a brief speech directed mostly towards Sheriff Browner without whose assistance, she said, none of this would have been possible. That unleashed a fearsome ovation in the sheriff’s honor and he moved away from his desk, still refusing to look entirely at anybody, and made his way out of the room without ever offering to say a word.

  Three days later, in the fat part of the morning, two men in a state-licensed station wagon followed the sheriff to the Epperson house. I suppose we knew they would come of that somebody like them would come since we all knew that the state would not allow two sisters and a cousin to parade around as triplets. Sheriff Browner assured us they were kind men, gentle and competent men. He promised they would treat the Eppersons with respect and dignity, and we were satisfied. Me and Momma watched them bring Eustace and Cora and Annie out from the house and load them and their luggage into the car, and it struck Momma as an odd thing to see. She said everybody was a little too happy, a little too quick to laugh, everybody but Sheriff Browner who just looked all around himself at the treetops and the sidewalk and the hubcaps on the state-licensed station wagon. His coloring was funny, Momma said, and he was slightly more hunch-shouldered than usual. She thought he might be ill and I thought he looked it myself, but then we’d never seen shame on Sheriff Browner before so there was no call for us to recognize it.

  The Epperson sisters were taken to the Dix Hill mental facility in Raleigh where they were tested for traces of sanity. We heard nothing from or about them for nearly a month until a very brief article appeared on the Statenews page of the Neely Chronicle. A committee of two doctors and a clinical psychologist had concluded that the Epperson sisters were “disoriented as to reality.” It seems they were a little more afflicted than we had imagined since the doctors judged them disoriented enough to have all three of them committed and their belongings auctioned off and their house put up for sale when a statewide search produced no heir. But nobody would buy the Epperson house. The realtor couldn’t even get anybody to look at it, and it was boarded up and sat empty for a year and a half. Then the roof collapsed in November, and people said it was a good thing the Epperson sisters had become triplets; otherwise they probably would have been crushed and mangled. In December the fire department burnt the remains in a training exercise and put on a less than encouraging show of firefighting; they managed to save the concrete footings.

  It got to Sheriff Browner, at least that’s what people would say when they would talk about him after he was gone, and they would hardly ever talk about him, but when they did, they would say it was the Epperson sisters that started it. Momma didn’t think so, and Daddy said no, it wasn’t them exactly. It was more than them, he said. I was seven years old when the Epperson sisters decided they were triplets. I was nine and a half when we got word of their transfer, which was the last we heard of them and which came to us in the form of a banner headline across the front of the Chronicle:

  TRIPLETS FIND HOME AT BUTNER

  Momma wrote them letters and sent them cards but left off the practice when they began to return to her unopened. So by the time I was eleven we had not heard much worth hearing from the Epperson sisters in over three years, and Momma said it wasn’t them, and Daddy said no it wasn’t them exactly. He said three and a half years was a long time. Momma said it was a very long time.

  I was only midway through my eleventh year when Sheriff Browner killed himself. Momma said the shock of it was in not knowing it was going to happen, was in not even suspecting that it might. But Daddy said we should have known, we should have suspected. Sheriff Browner had always been different. We would have called him peculiar except that he was sheriff and we couldn’t put our faith in a man who suffered from peculiarities, so we said he was different and left it at that. Momma said he was a painfully shy man, but Daddy just called it pensive, and when we found out he was dead Momma said something must have snapped, but Daddy said no that wasn’t it exactly. He said when the sheriff went to the well he drank too deep, and Daddy said the world became so burdensome for him that he eventually went down under the weight of it.

  I don’t recall that Sheriff Browner ever shot a man. I don’t remember ever hearing of him firing his revolver except one Fourth of July when it was raining and the town councilmen couldn’t get the fireworks lit. I don’t think he ever clubbed anyone with his nightstick; I don’t think he ever used it except to crack walnuts. And I’m sure he never hit anybody with his fists, though I imagine he spent half his life wanting to. Mostly Sheriff Browner whittled, carved on hunks of oak and beech-wood, spat occasionally, and pondered, I suppose. There’s never been much crime in Neely. Sometimes men get drunk and beat up their wives or try to beat up their friends. Sometimes people get their t.v. stolen or their grandmama’s silver or a little money they
were too lazy or ignorant to put in the bank. And every now and again a vagrant will break into the laundromat to keep warm, but from week to week that’s about all we ever get. Then there’s the less frequent sensational cases that rate a quarter column on the inside of the Greensboro Daily News. Sheriff Browner had two of those right near the end and Momma said they were the straws that broke the camel’s back. Daddy said yes, he imagined that was pretty much the truth of it.

  We had not had a murder in Neely in well over four years when the widow Mrs. Doris Lancaster was beaten to death with a chairleg on a Tuesday evening. She lived outside of town on the 48 highway in a house her husband had drawn up and built himself during their courtship. It was stuck back off the road in a maple grove and was separated from the nearest neighbor by a sprawling kudzu thicket that had once been a regular wood but was since reduced to mostly vines and rotting treetrunks. Nobody missed her for nearly a week until Mrs. Spencer came from the other side of the thicket and failed to get anybody to the door. She called Sheriff Browner who jimmied his way in and found Mrs. Lancaster in a heap on the livingroom throw rug.

  When they heard in Greensboro that something grisly had happened in Neely, the Daily News dispatched a correspondent, who caught up with Sheriff Browner in his office and asked for a few details of the murder. The sheriff told him it wasn’t a murder; it was a slaughter.

  And the correspondent made a few notes and said, “Yes sir.”

  And Sheriff Browner asked the correspondent if he knew what he meant.

  And the correspondent said, “Yes sir, it was a savage murder.”

  And Sheriff Browner told him it was no murder at all; it was a slaughter and slaughter is what happens to a cow when the man puts its head on a block and breaks it open with a sledgehammer.

  And the correspondent thought that was extremely clever and said, “Can I use that?”

  Sheriff Burton was deputy then and he’s the one that told everybody how, as near as they could reconstruct it, the victim had been surprised by the assailant in her bedroom, had struggled with him across the bedroom floor and out into the hallway, and had finally been subdued in the livingroom where the assailant wrenched loose one of the legs from an old ladderback chair and proceeded to render the victim unconscious with repeated blows to the frontal portion of the skull. He said the wounds sustained by the victim proved to be fatal and that the condition of the interior of the victim’s house suggested robbery as a probable motive. But Daddy said the thievery was just a sidelight. He said pure meanness was certainly the motive.

  In the several weeks that followed the murder, Deputy Burton kept talking about tips, and leads, and hunches, and lights at the end of the tunnel, but Sheriff Browner didn’t have anything on anybody, not any. thing at all. Then, in what appeared an episode of unrelated violence, two rail bums got into a knife fight out back by the loading dock of the Bright Leaf tobacco warehouse. The second shift was packing up a box. car for Richmond when the two of them came out from around the back. side of it already kicking and swearing at each other. The activity drained most everybody out from the warehouse and they collected on the dock where they watched those bums claw and spit and roll around in the high weeds of the right of way. Then they said one of them pulled a knife out from his trouser pocket. It wasn’t anything but a little hinged Barlow, they said, with about three and a half inches worth of blade and the point of that broken off, but they said. he waved it around like it was a saber and swore the other fellow a blue streak. And they said the other one reached inside his coat and brought out a hunk of steel nearly a foot long that had been rubbed down to a point at one end. Then they commenced to circling each other, they said, and swearing ferociously and eyeing each other out from under the ridge of their foreheads. And then they said they ran together like two old bulls and fell to slicing at each other as best they could. And they said in the first encounter alone the one with the little Barlow got his leg gashed and lost the most of his left ear and the other one had his cheek laid open from his eye all the way to his chin. Then they drew apart, they said, and circled some more until they came together again in a clench, and they said the one with the steel blade was clearly getting the best of it this time. The other one tried to break away, they said, and fell over backwards, and the one with the blade jumped on him and laid into him, and they said from up on the loading dock it sounded like he was sticking a plump melon.

  Then somebody went after the sheriff. The one with the little Barlow was long dead when he got there, and the other one was too cut and beat up himself to have the strength to run off. Deputy Burton took him away to the doctor’s and had him stitched up and fumigated before he locked him in the holding cell in the basement of the courthouse. Sheriff Browner stayed with the dead one, and what few men were left on the loading dock said the sheriff started going through that bum’s pockets and pulled out a handful of string, a few pennies, some foil, and one of Mrs. Doris Lancaster’s good silver forks. They said the sheriff fell back onto his haunches there in the high weeds and with that corpse stretched out in front of him, and they said he studied that fork for what seemed a quarter hour, just looked at it, they said. And then they said he put it down beside him and looked off beneath the carriage of the boxcar to the other side of the tracks and the weeds over there, and then back at that bum, and then at Mrs. Doris Lancaster’s fork where he’d set it next to him on the dirt.

  Daddy said since Sheriff Browner was quiet and private anyway nobody noticed when he became more quiet and more private, and that’s why Momma says we were shocked and couldn’t have known, but Daddy says we were just caught up in the glamor of violence and murder and weren’t paying any attention. Poor Mrs. Browner, who was as plain and normal as a bar of soap, didn’t see it coming and never forgave herself for it, but Daddy says she probably saw less of the sheriff than we did what with the reporters and the newsmen and that one fellow from a national crime magazine who wouldn’t let off hounding him until he got an interview. And Mrs. Browner said he just came in one night for supper after not coming home hardly at all since the stabbing, and she told him she’d cook him up a quarter chicken with potatoes and green beans, which he was very fond of, and she said he went off to the bathroom and drew himself a tub full of water while she boiled the potatoes and the beans and started the chicken baking. And she said she got it on the table and called him to eat but he didn’t answer. And she said she called him again and he didn’t answer again. And she said she went to get him herself and found him slouched over the edge of the bathtub with his head entirely under water and nothing in the world to hold him there, Daddy said, except his own desperation.

  That was in November just before Thanksgiving and on the day we buried Sheriff Browner it was threatening to sleet and the sky was close and dark. The pastor talked very generally about death and the everlasting, and Deputy Burton said a few words in praise of what he called the sheriff’s professional integrity. Then we all sang “On Christ a Solid Rock I Stand” and Mrs. Browner had to be helped from the sanctuary. It began to rain as we were on our way to the cemetery, and some people didn’t bother to get out of their cars for the graveside service. Mrs. Browner and a half dozen of her and the sheriff’s kin sat under a green canopy with the coffin, and the members of the sheriff’s legion post stood in rank by the grave and recited a prayer in unison. Another preacher from another church committed Sheriff Browner to the earth, and Mrs. Browner, as she was being taken away, reached out and gently patted the top of the casket twice.

  Momma washed every dish in the house when Sheriff Browner was laid to rest. She stood at the window over the sink for hours and gazed out through the limbs of the apricot tree to the carshed roof where the raindrops and pellets of sleet were rebounding into the air. Daddy said it took a bold man to end his own life, to perish in an act of will, but Momma didn’t say anything; she just cried and cried and watched the rainwater run off the carshed roof and drip from the limbs of the apricot tree.

 
Daddy put it this way. He said that sanity had been a scarce commodity among the Epperson sisters and that’s why their madness had seemed such a jolly affair, but that Sheriff Browner was plagued with sanity in spadefuls, loaded down with it, and Daddy said the weight had put the sheriff on a kind of slow burn. He called it thinking man’s madness and said there was never a thing giddy about it. But folks forget, Daddy said. I was eleven when Sheriff Browner died and it wasn’t until I was fifteen and a half, near sixteen, that Miss Pettigrew wrapped herself up in a bedsheet and took to her frontyard, so we’d enjoyed a spell of levelheadedness in Neely, and I imagine most people were anxious for a little relief from it.

  iii

  When Daddy leaned his face down towards mine there in the sitting room and looked directly at me and talked directly at Momma and said, “Madness,” I was somewhat confused since I didn’t see any reason for people like Miss Pettigrew to go mad, but Momma was openly dismayed and deflated. Miss Pettigrew had been beautiful until she got old and wasn’t beautiful anymore and then she had become merely elegant. That’s where she was when she took the pot of geraniums off the stump and climbed up onto it herself, and Momma and all the women of Neely suffered a kind of defeat that afternoon because they themselves were not elegant, did not lead elegant lives, and required for their own satisfaction that Miss Pettigrew do it for them. And that’s why Momma stormed off to the kitchen and to her sink of dishes and her window. I didn’t really understand it then, but something had passed on that day and Momma was obliged to mourn for it.