A Short History of a Small Place Read online

  Miss Pettigrew was the wealthiest woman I’d ever come across, but Daddy said it hadn’t always been that way. Miss Pettigrew’s daddy had arrived in Neely in relative poverty and had proceeded to become successful and rich, which was cause of both pride and resentment among native Neelyites, who would boast of the Pettigrew fortune to strangers but who generally had either come into the world with little to speak of themselves and had failed to make any noticeable advancement or had been born into considerable resources and had managed to backslide into insolvency. It’s not that the people of Neely are unusually idle, it’s just that they are not particularly lucky like Mr. Pettigrew was lucky, or shrewd like Mr. Pettigrew was shrewd, or willing like Mr. Pettigrew was willing.

  Mr. Pettigrew was what most people call enterprising. He made his money speculating in construction, and since nobody in Neely had ever speculated himself into a fortune before, people were a little suspicious of Mr. Pettigrew’s success and imagined his money was somehow indecently gotten. He had arrived in town directly from New York State with. nothing more than a valise, a sizeable carpetbag, and a Mrs. Pettigrew (nee Bennet, Daddy said), and Daddy said he immediately hired himself out as a carpenter’s apprentice without really knowing which end of the hammer drove the nail. He worked for three different carpenters in Neely and one in Eden before leaving off the occupation altogether and getting on with the McKinney brothers, who were brick masons, and he hauled brick and slopped mortar for them for nearly a year. Then he took up with a plasterer for a spell, then a house painter, and afterwards got himself on as an electrician at the power plant before finally apprenticing to one of the first plumbers Neely ever had call for.

  Along about 1904 the railroad decided to hook Neely into the Southern Crescent route, which swung south out of West Virginia all the way to New Orleans. That meant laying new track through the north end of town and building a new passenger depot to go with it. The railroad dispatched two men out of Danville and the one in charge of getting the track laid collected himself a work crew made up mostly of negroes and hard luck whites. But the other one needed skill and, not being from Neely, he didn’t know exactly where to get it. Daddy said that’s when Mr. Pettigrew’s career as a speculator got off the ground. Daddy didn’t call it contractor, he called it liaison, and he said the railroad man just put it down as coordinator and then sat back and let Mr. Pettigrew coordinate.

  All they gave him was a budget and a blueprint, and Mr. Pettigrew hired out the carpenters and the masons and the plasterer and the painter and the electrician and the plumber and built himself a train station without ever striking a lick. The railroad man collected his salary for doing little or nothing and was satisfied. The carpenters and the masons and the plasterer and the painter and the electrician and the plumber all earned steady wages and were happy to get them. And when the depot was finished and the expenses were all paid up, Mr. Pettigrew took what was left and discovered that he was already nearly rich. That was when Mr. Pettigrew became a contractor, Daddy said, the minute he walked out of the train station for the last time with that railroad voucher in his pocket. He set up an office in the garage of the house he was renting and advertised himself as a builder with one depot to his credit already, and then it was a depot and a bank, and then it was a depot and a bank and two private residences, and then he left off advertising entirely. There was no need to anymore since everybody in Neely who built for a living built for Mr. Pettigrew.

  Sometime along about when he became established and saw that he would probably remain a wealthy man, Mr. Pettigrew must have decided it was advisable to build himself a homeplace and have himself an heir. He saw to the homeplace, that being in his line, and he bought a parcel of land right there in the heart of Neely where municipal square runs into the boulevard. There was the shell of a guest house and the remains of an old harness shop on the property when he bought it, and he hired out a crew of men to raze the both of them and level off the lot with picks and shovels. Then he proceeded to put himself up a mansion, Daddy called it. It was the biggest, most sprawling, most elaborate house Neely had ever seen. Daddy said it was built on the plan of one of the churches of Rome with half of it running north-south and half of it running east-west and the two wings meeting towards the tip of one and towards the middle of the other. Daddy said it was meant to look something like a cross, but it looked more like an airplane or maybe some kind of ship what with the porch coming off the front end in a half-circle and a balustrade running the length of the roof like the rail on a flying bridge.

  Most of the town watched it go up and people were in general agreement that it was an ambitious, grand, and awesome structure. Daddy said Mr. Pettigrew built it with an eye towards eternity and maybe had hopes of hosting the last judgement in the front parlor. To avoid rot and deterioration, he had the siding done in cedar clapboard and the roof laid with orange terra cotta tiles brought in from Georgia. A furniture builder in Eden custom made the window sashes and doors out of clear blond oak and hand carved each newel post for the main stairway from a hunk of mahogany. Mr. Pettigrew ordered his iron fence direct from a foundry in Newcastle, England, and it arrived in eight separate crates on the bed of a truck out of Norfolk. As a finishing touch he had a load of shrubbery, mostly boxwoods and camellia bushes, brought in from a nursery in Albermarle down near Charlotte, and he sowed the frontyard himself in a hardy strain of rye. Daddy said folks were generally indifferent to what came from where, but he said that most anybody old enough to recollect the building of the Pettigrew house would tell how for a week solid when the carpenters were sawing and nailing up the cedar siding, all of downtown Neely smelled like the inside of a hope chest.

  Mrs. Pettigrew saw to the heir, that being in her line, and she hit it right off with a son that Mr. Pettigrew named Wallace Amory after himself. Two years later in March of 1911 Mrs. Pettigrew had another baby, this one a little girl that Mr. Pettigrew named Myra Angelique after nobody anyone could ever determine. Daddy said that second birth gave Mrs. Pettigrew all grades of trouble and she was hardly ever out of a nightgown from there on out. Then in the winter of 1914 she went onto the front porch in her robe to hear the Baptist choir sing Christmas songs and caught a chill that came to be pneumonia and caused her to succumb, Momma said, in February. Daddy said he’d always suspected the Baptist choir was deadly.

  Momma said Mr. Pettigrew didn’t have much of a way with children and hired a negro woman to raise them up until they were old enough for him to ship off to a private school in Virginia where Wallace Amory Pettigrew jr. was educated and Miss Myra Angelique Pettigrew refined. And Daddy said they were still off at school in 1925 when Mr. Pettigrew climbed up onto a slapdash scaffold two of his carpenters had thrown together and the whole business collapsed out from under him. It nearly killed him. The impact fractured an arm and cracked several ribs, and a ten-foot section of 2 X 8 planking fell edge-first onto his left hip and shattered it. I guess they thought he was dead—the carpenters and the electrician and the masons and their mortar boy—when they all came tearing around the house and found Mr. Pettigrew in a heap with a plank athwart him. One of the carpenters leaned over him and patted him on the cheek and said, “Mr. Pettigrew. Mr. Pettigrew. Say something, Mr. Pettigrew.”

  And Daddy said Mr. Pettigrew popped straight up from the waist and said, “You no count sons-of-bitches,” and he picked up a handy scrap of board, Daddy said, and clubbed that carpenter on the crown of the head with it. Then he flung it at the rest of them, and scooped up some dirt and threw that, and picked up some rocks and threw them and Daddy said he was so unbelievably accurate that the whole bunch of them—the remaining carpenter and the electrician and the mason and the mortar boy—all went tearing back around the house. And Daddy said Mr. Pettigrew took hold of the collar of that man he’d clubbed on the head and shook him awake so he could tell him what a jackass he was.

  That episode was Mr. Pettigrew’s last hurrah, Daddy said. His arm and ribs mended fine, but the docto
rs couldn’t do much of anything for his hip, and the same negro woman who’d raised his children was engaged to take care of him. Daddy said Mr. Pettigrew bought himself a fine wicker-bottomed wheelchair, and his hired woman, Mrs. Broadnax, would wrap him in an afghan and wheel him up and down the sidewalks of Neely. But he wasn’t right anymore and when folks would meet him out on the walkway he’d grab any part of them he could get hold of and look at them all wild and fiery-eyed, and sometimes he’d say, “Them sons-of-bitches nearly killed me,” and sometimes he wouldn’t say anything at all.

  After Mr. Pettigrew had wasted away sufficiently, he contracted a virulent infection, Momma said, and succumbed also. Mr. Wallace Amory Pettigrew jr. and Miss Myra Angelique Pettigrew returned to Neely for the services and were said to have blossomed into an extremely handsome and graceful couple, and although they were in town for only a week before they returned to school, their show of culture and refinement inspired among the ladies of Neely the frenzied conviction that the town could not possibly thrive and flourish without a finishing school of its own. The ladies organized and held conferences and debates and handed out fliers on the steps of the courthouse and went door-to-door for donations, but they couldn’t seem to stir up any sort of widespread cultural anxiety. So when a gentleman who claimed to hail from New York but was actually from Winston-Salem arrived in Neely and opened up a tapdancing school in the basement of the hardware store, the ladies counted themselves victorious, having decided that even if tapdancing was not exactly culture it wasn’t very far from it. A kind of refinement for the feet, Daddy said.

  Momma said it was the fall of 1935 when Wallace Amory and Myra Angelique Pettigrew came home to Neely for good. The care of the Pettigrew mansion had been left to Mr. and Mrs. Broadnax, who saw to the upkeep of the house and grounds for two years after Mr. Pettigrew’s death up until July 4, 1927, when they were dismissed from their duties after Sheriff Browner, who was Deputy Browner then, investigated a complaint from a neighbor and discovered the Broadnaxes and twenty-seven of their negro friends sprawled throughout Mr. Pettigrew’s parlor waiting for some sort of creature to finish roasting in the fireplace. Daddy said it was very possibly a goat. So the Pettigrew house had been closed up for a little over eight years when Wallace Amory jr. and his sister moved back into it, and Momma said they revived it entirely. Wallace Amory had the exterior of the house painted a sparkling white and Miss Myra Angelique planted a blue million trumpet flowers in among the shrubbery and along all four runs of the iron fence. The Rescue Mission hauled off two truckloads of old chairs, sofas, endtables and the like, and Momma said new furnishings arrived in a boxcar from New York, including a countless number of Turkish rugs and a pair of cement cupids for the flower beds.

  The Pettigrews gave their first ball at Christmastime and Momma said it was lavish, just lavish. They hired out a chamber ensemble from Greensboro and a caterer from there also, and the engraved invitations were brought around from house to house by a local negro who had been given a black suit and gloves for the occasion. Of course all the good Baptists of Neely sent their automatic theological regrets since, as far as they were concerned, the only place you could dance to was Hell, but most everybody else would have attended or had to die first. The women made themselves dresses and the men had their funeral suits cleaned and pressed, and couples gathered in front of radios all over Neely and practiced the three-step, which very few of them could maintain for more than a half-minute at a time without misfiring and banging together. Even the younger, more agile Neelyites were clumsy waltzers though most of them could tapdance up a storm.

  Momma said it was a smashing success. Momma was only seven then and wasn’t invited herself, but she said her Momma and Daddy went and left her with a babysitter and that she and the babysitter snuck out the back door while Grandma and Granddaddy Yount were going out the front one. It seems that most everybody who was not in attendance on the dance floor was in attendance at the imported iron fence in front of the Pettigrews’ house, and Momma said there was such a crowd of people that she couldn’t hardly see anything until Deacon Furches picked her up and set her on his shoulder. She said the windows were hung with sheer draperies which gave the ballroom a soft, dreamy look and Momma said what music came out from the house sounded very far-off and magical. She and the deacon both agreed that it was a glorious affair and they decided that Miss Pettigrew looked especially handsome and comely in her pale-yellow gown and that Mr. Wallace Amory jr., in his formal black suit and with his mother’s dark features, was pretty in the way that antique princes and kings were pretty. Momma said Grandma Yount came home all flushed and lightheaded and complained that she’d done too much dancing, but Granddaddy said she’d just washed down too many finger sandwiches with too much champagne punch and he packed her off to bed. Momma told him she imagined it had been a glorious affair, simply glorious, and she said Granddaddy Yount thought for a minute and then responded that no, it had not been glorious exactly but had seemed to him very much like musical wrestling.

  Daddy said it was a good thing Wallace Amory could dance and look pretty because he was hardly able to do anything else. One of the underlings had taken charge of the business upon Mr. Pettigrew’s death and Wallace Amory left him to run the construction end of it while he hired a bookkeeper to take charge of the payroll and the supply expenses. Daddy said Wallace Amory took charge of the profits on his own. He had no other responsibilities as far as anyone could tell. He didn’t rise in the morning and head out to his daddy’s office and he rarely showed up at construction sites except for groundbreakings when there would be a photographer from the Chronicle handy. Daddy said Wallace Amory had a garden spade he’d painted gold on the blade and the grip, and he said about every half year you could open the Chronicle and find a picture of him stomping his gold shovel into the ground to mark the commencement of some sort of construction in Neely, but Daddy said he had no more of a hand in the completion of the building than the man who rings the bell at the track has in the outcome of the race.

  Daddy said Wallace Amory jr. was an accomplished piddler. He could engage himself for days on end in the sorts of chores an average man could dispatch with in an afternoon. And he was not ashamed to piddle, Daddy said, but made himself conspicuous at it. He said Wallace Amory could squat on his lawn grubbing weeds for three days running, or drag a mattock and a shovel out of his cellar and tell every passerby how he was digging a drainage ditch off from the house, or announce to his carpenters how he planned to help them hang doors or lay shingles. And Daddy said his lawn was always as ragged with weeds as it ever was, and he said a little ground might get cut up but the ditch was never dug, and the carpenters told how Mr. Pettigrew would get him a hammer and a nail apron and then occasionally finger a door hinge and sometimes set foot on the roof. But he waltzed divinely, Momma said, and made delightful conversation. And Daddy said it was a good thing.

  Then the war came and everything stopped. Daddy was twenty in 1941 and he wanted to be an air cadet, but he said when he was standing outside the induction center in Texas, he saw a fighter plane and a B-17 collide over the airstrip and fall to the ground in a fiery heap. So when the sergeant called him in and said, “Air corps?” Daddy said, “No sir. Infantry,” and Daddy said that’s how he got to tour Europe clinging onto the outside of a tank. He saw action in France and Belgium and got wounded in Paris when a buddy dropped his rifle and it went off and creased Daddy’s calf. Daddy loved to tell that story and he would just cackle, but Momma lost a cousin at Corregidor and a neighbor of hers got drowned coming off a troop transport at Sicily, so she never laughed when Daddy talked about the war.

  Momma said that in the war years Neely was full of little boys and granddaddies and old worn-out women and young worn-out women, and she said there was nothing in the world to do but wait for the mailman to come and pray that he wouldn’t. Momma said the postmen in Neely had never worn neckties until the war, had never worn their grey wool uniforms with stripes d
own the trouser legs, had never worn their postal issue caps, had never been so severe and proper until the war came along to make them extraordinarily significant. They would knock on doors, Momma said, and out would come mothers and wives and sisters already on the raw edge of agony, and the postman would extend the notice towards them and he would not say, “I’m sorry,” or “Forgive me,” or “If there’s anything I can do,” but simply “Ma’m.” And Momma said nobody who got one ever opened it right off, but clutched it and bent it and worked it through their fingers and never neglected to say, “Thank you.” Kissing the axe, Daddy called it.

  Daddy said Wallace Amory jr. didn’t go to war but went only as far as Georgia where he got attached to the personal staff of a colonel at Fort Benning. He was charged with the responsibility of being handsome and diverting at formal functions, and Daddy said Mr. Pettigrew built himself a reputation as a man with a rarified knowledge of the intricacies of the German mind. But after the war was over and everybody had either come home for good or not come home at all, Mr. Pettigrew told Daddy that everything he knew about Germany he had gotten from a man he’d once shared a table with in a restaurant, including the only two sentences he could utter in the language: “The weather is pleasant though cool” and “Bismarck was a remarkable fellow.”

  Momma said he came home to Neely about once every six weeks, and he and Myra Angelique (Sister, he called her) would stroll arm in arm down the boulevard, Wallace Amory in his snappy dress uniform and Miss Pettigrew done up in a simple frock and hair ribbons so as to seem, Momma said, almost inadvertently lovely. They would chat with people on the sidewalk and stop into the shops and businesses, and Momma said Mr. Pettigrew would talk in the most lighthearted and careless way about “our little European engagement,” or “our little continental flare-up,” or just “our little skirmish.” And he was jolly, Momma said, offhanded, and seemed always to assume that everyone was as untouched and unscathed by the war as he was. She said he gave pain to some folks, especially to those men and women who had lost a son or a brother or a husband and who had not quite gotten out of the habit of listening for troop trains and watching for that familiar scrawl in the letterbox. They didn’t want to hear about skirmishes and flare-ups, but they let Mr. Pettigrew tell them and they let him laugh and be casual about the war, probably, Daddy said, because he was Mr. Pettigrew of the Pettigrew fortune and the Pettigrew mansion and the Pettigrew heritage, all of which assured him of the sort of respectability that he would sometimes fail to live up to.