A Short History of a Small Place Page 7

“My kingdom,” he said. “My people.”

  It seems a doctor had told him there wasn’t a Prussia anymore so there wasn’t any use for a king of Prussia anymore. He called it therapy.

  Daddy always had a special attachment for Uncle Warren after that, and I remember how right after Sheriff Browner died a reporter from the Raleigh News and Observer showed up in Neely with the theory that something in town was driving people crazy; he suspected fluoridated water. I think he was hoping for front-page news, so he diligently scratched around in our past and dug up the Epperson sisters along with Uncle Warren. He also tried to tell us how a Mr. Harry Gunn had “desperately thrown himself in the path of the 4:15 out of Danville,” and he was convinced as well that Shep Bristow, Aunt Willa’s husband, had “sought to end his travails at the bottom of a millpond.” But that’s where his theory fell apart because Mr. Harry Gunn had never done anything desperately but drink; he had simply managed to pass out in the wrong place. And Shep Bristow discovered the pondbottom when he slipped off the end of a fishing dock and swam like granite for a quarter hour. We thought that would be the end of it, but the reporter merely lightened up his tone a little and his editors moved his story from the front page to the inside of the Sunday travel section. The Epperson sisters became “zany,” Uncle Warren got knocked down to “just another local lunatic,” and the whole of the state was warned against long stopovers in Neely since life there tended to “bore folks to distraction.” When Daddy saw the article he goddammed that reporter up one side and down the other and, Sunday afternoon or not, there wasn’t a thing Momma could do about it.

  So Daddy said it was better than the madhouse, but then he had always had a soft spot for suicide. When I was little and Daddy would put me to bed with a story, I think Momma supposed he was giving me knights and princesses and faeries and ogres and the occasional scaly beast, but Daddy told me how the Greeks were always drinking hemlock or throwing themselves off bluffs into the Aegean, and he said when things got tough for the Romans they fell on the pointy ends of their swords, and according to Daddy hardly a day went by in England when you couldn’t pick up a paper and read how lord somebody or another had been discovered dead in his study with a brace of pistols in his lap. Most people supposed you had to be weak and cowardly to take your own life; Daddy said you had to be brave. He didn’t see any other way for a man to bugger fate except by his own hand, and I always got the feeling Daddy would have tried it himself if he didn’t have to die from it. The idea was really all he was warm to.

  Momma did not ever allow Daddy to speak of death in her presence, which I guess is why he told me all about the Greeks and Romans; he had to tell somebody. Of course Momma had her reasons and it was when I came home from the second grade one afternoon and asked why my Momma and Daddy were older than everybody else’s that Daddy took me off to the breakfast room and showed me a picture of a little girl he said was my sister who got run over and died; Daddy said that had scared Momma off from children for a while. She was named Margaret after Grandma Yount, and Momma could never ever bring herself to say the least little thing about her. So it was only when Daddy put me to bed that he got the chance to talk of fate and courage and the trials of existence. Momma could not bear to hear of them. Daddy said she had probably never imagined life could be so sad.

  That’s why Momma sat down on the rug, dropped right down on the floor of the sitting room alongside of where Daddy’s belongings lay all in a heap. She did not speak and had not spoken except to ask, “Who? What?” when Daddy came in with his collar all full of sweat and his face bleached and drained of color. “The old girl jumped,” Daddy had said, and Momma asked him, “Who? What?” and then it just seemed that her legs left her, crumpled underneath her, and she sat right down on top of them. “From the tower,” Daddy said. “From up near the top of the tower.” And Momma did not speak and Daddy did not speak again until I asked him, “Daddy, who jumped off the tower,” because I truly didn’t know. And Daddy looked directly at Momma. “Why, Miss Pettigrew,” he said. “Miss Pettigrew.” Then Momma took a breath in stages and shuddered most violently. Even after everything she’d seen and everything she’d been pressed to suffer, there was no heartbreak, no calamity that did not come to her as a fearful surprise.

  The news of Miss Pettigrew’s death made Momma quite ill. She drew the shades in her and Daddy’s bedroom and wrapped herself up in the covers and tried to sleep. Daddy changed out of his suit and me and him went off towards Southend to see what we could find out. Daddy was not ill in the least; he was utterly astounded and about half pleased. “You know,” he said to me, “I didn’t think the old girl had it in her.” I told him, no sir, I didn’t think so either. And after we’d stopped off at Mr. Gibbons’s mailbox so Daddy could get a light, he said to me, “You know, I never even suspected she had it in her,” and he kind of looked off into the sky and away. Daddy was considerably proud of Miss Pettigrew.

  Sheriff Burton had thrown up a barricade around the water tower. It was not a proper barricade but was put together mostly with sawbucks and rope and a few folding chairs filched from Mr. Small’s grocery across the street. All variety of people were wandering around outside of it and as many were wandering around inside of it, regardless of the efforts of the sheriff’s three regular deputies along with his auxiliary force—two bankers, a municipal employee, and a druggist who had been sworn in for the occasion. By the time me and Daddy arrived the body had long since been hauled off in an ambulance so there was nothing much left to see except where it fell from and where it landed, but we could no more determine exactly which rung Miss Pettigrew had launched herself off of than we could tell which rosebush she had ended up in since there was one on either side of the broken section of fence and they both appeared beaten back and naturally unsightly.

  So Daddy and I didn’t know just what to think until we ran up on Mr. Russell Newberry, a gentleman who had been retired from barbering by glaucoma and who was friendly enough with Daddy to light his cigarettes for him without him having to ask. He took us off to where Mr. Small had perched himself on the hood of one of the sheriff’s patrol cars. Mr. Small was a very slight man and although Daddy said he was not a public speaker by disposition, he surely gave a fine accounting of himself in this instance and in front of a sizeable audience. Sheer repetition had pretty much refined his story by the time we heard it, and Mr. Small heightened the effect some with pauses and asides and a sprinkling of dramatic gestures. Several of the lady customers who had been party to the event verified certain details of Mr. Small’s version and elaborated on others, but they had to yield completely to Mr. Small when the story arrived at Miss Pettigrew’s departure from the access ladder since the ladies had left off watching at that point. Daddy called this part of the narrative Mr. Small’s soliloquy and Daddy thought it was just splendid. He said it was enough to make the bard cry.

  Mr. Small pointed up to the rung of the ladder from which Miss Pettigrew’s breadsack still dangled and he counted down four rungs from that one and said, “There. That’s where she stood.” Then he indicated the rung above the one with the breadsack on it and said, “There. That’s where she held on.” He was not so precise with Mr. Britches and his “There” took in about a fifteen-foot section of ladder. “That’s where that monkey hung from,” he said, “sometimes headfirst and gripping with his feet.” Then Mr. Small told how Miss Pettigrew did not pitch herself off from the ladder but simply let go and fell over backwards, and he said she did not for a moment tend towards tumbling but remained in the horizontal all the way to the ground. Mr. Small said she almost gave the impression of flight, an observation which caused Daddy and Mr. Newberry to look at each other and say more or less at the same time, “Flight?”

  Mr. Small was emphatic about Miss Pettigrew’s line of descent and he traced it for us with his finger from the breadsack down through the railing and into the rosebush, choosing not to respond to Daddy’s question concerning crosswinds. Miss Pettigrew’s encoun
ter with the section of fence was given a full reckoning by Mr. Small. He told exactly how she hit it and which pieces she caused to fly up and which pieces she caused to fly out and which pieces she caused to fly down, and then he made a very harsh, unpleasant noise in his throat and said, “There. That’s what it sounded like when she landed in the rosebush,” which prompted one of the lady customers to pipe in and say yes, she had heard it just that way, precisely that way. Then Mr. Small told how he bolted across the street and discovered that Miss Pettigrew, although noticeably dead, did not appear disfigured or brutalized at all except for the scratches from the rose thorns, and he said it was next to miraculous to him how Miss Pettigrew’s hat had managed to remain in its proper place atop her head. “All in all,” Mr. Small assured us, “she looked very presentable.”

  Daddy and Mr. Newberry agreed that Mr. Small’s version of what Daddy called Miss Pettigrew’s departure from this life was the most satisfying to be had. We heard several afterwards, all of which were second-hand and delivered by men who Daddy said had sat at the feet of Mr. Small, and pretty soon it got to the point that you couldn’t turn around without seeing somebody’s raised finger caught up in the business of tracing Miss Pettigrew’s path to glory. However, no matter how lively and colorful the various accounts we sampled, Daddy and Mr. Newberry stuck by Mr. Small’s version. The others did not differ considerably from the original except in authority, but Daddy said that makes a world of difference in this sort of thing.

  Sheriff Burton was not altogether pleased with the way his deputies were controlling the crowd, and he took it upon himself to encourage us towards the outside of the barricade, but folks generally resisted him or ignored him altogether and the sheriff was only successful in removing Mr. Small from the hood of his patrol car. “Car hoods aren’t made to be stood on,” he told him.

  When we came up on the sheriff Daddy asked him right out what harm there was in folks poking around the water tower, and Sheriff Burton sort of drew himself up and said there was a very good chance that every last shred of evidence would be trampled underfoot. But Mr. Newberry told the sheriff not to worry about his evidence and then he put his mouth up close to the sheriff’s ear and whispered to him, “I think I know who did it,” which caused Daddy to hoot and stomp but hardly got a rise out of Sheriff Burton. He just spat and said a very vile thing.

  Mr. Newberry was about half blind since his operations, and the lenses in his glasses were so thick that you could hardly see his eyes through them unless the light was just right. As it was with me and him and Daddy sitting on a sawbuck and facing pretty much to where the sun was flat out in the west, I couldn’t see his eyes at all for the glare, so it appeared to me that Mr. Newberry was not looking at anything in particular but maybe just ruminating or pondering over some weighty notion or another. Him and Daddy didn’t exchange a word for what seemed a quarter hour but just sat on the sawbuck and smoked Daddy’s cigarettes courtesy of Mr. Newberry’s matches, which is all Mrs. Newberry would allow him to carry. They were hard smokers the two of them and went about the business of inhaling with a kind of undue ferocity, and just about as soon as Daddy could draw his cigarette down to ash Mr. Newberry was right along with him and they would each have another one. So I suppose Mr. Newberry was only partway pondering and partway caught up in the joys of tobacco, but anyway he showed he was paying at least some consideration to Miss Pettigrew when he eventually said, “Funny thing, I don’t think I’ve laid eyes on that woman in maybe fourteen or fifteen years.”

  “What woman?” Daddy said.

  “For Godsakes, Louis, Miss Pettigrew. I say I don’t think I’ve seen her, up close anyway, in what I know is ten years and maybe fifteen.”

  “When was that?” Daddy wanted to know.

  “The spring of the year as I recall,” Mr. Newberry said. “Yes, the spring of the year in nineteen and sixty-four. She came to church, up and came to church and brought that niggerwoman with her. I think it was for Easter services.”

  “Maybe it was,” Daddy said, “but seems to me it was earlier than that. Maybe along about 1960.”

  “How in the hell would you know?” Mr. Newberry asked him. “You ain’t never set foot in a sanctuary.”

  “I don’t need to,” Daddy said. “Inez comes home and tells me every little thing that goes on, and she as good as sprinted into the livingroom that day. And I don’t think it was in the spring, Russell. As I remember it was in the late fall, right around Thanksgiving I think.”

  “Maybe it was,” Mr. Newberry said, “but I seem to recall it was along about the time Momma Newberry passed on and that would put it in April of nineteen and sixty-four.”

  “Maybe it was,” Daddy said. “I don’t know.”

  And Mr. Newberry said, “Well, I don’t know either. Maybe so.” Then him and Daddy lit fresh cigarettes and thoroughly engaged themselves in smoking them.

  ii

  They were both wrong. It was Christmas of 1962 and I got that from Momma who never forgets a date. She said Miss Pettigrew had hardly shown herself since the evening the mayor and Mr. Nance contrived to make her what Daddy called a paramour. That was late in the summer of 1949 and Momma said Miss Pettigrew did not actually venture into town in broad daylight until the spring of 1952 when the shipping company representative arrived in Neely to tell her the sad news of how the mayor had managed to stopper up his windpipe with a radish. Momma got the story from our neighbor Mrs. Phillip J. King who got it from her cleaning woman, who had gotten it from a cousin of Aunt Willa’s who had gotten it from Aunt Willa herself. It seems the gentleman was left waiting in the outer hallway for the best part of a quarter hour, long enough anyway for Mr. Britches to back him up between the hatrack and the umbrella jug, and by the time Miss Pettigrew descended the stairs that fellow had established a toehold on the lip of the baseboard and appeared set to scale the wall if necessary.

  He told Miss Pettigrew he’d always had a fondness for monkeys and he patted Mr. Britches on the belly without actually touching him.

  “What is it you want, sir?” Miss Pettigrew asked.

  And the gentleman recollected himself in time to be appropriately somber and grave. “It’s bad news, ma’m,” he said. “You might want to take a chair.”

  “What is it?” Miss Pettigrew did not show any desire to sit down.

  “Your brother, ma’m.”

  “Mr. Pettigrew has died I suppose.” And Momma said she let it out just like that, like maybe she was supposing the weather would change or that she should wear a green dress instead of a blue one.

  “Yes ma’m,” the gentleman said, “Mr. Pettigrew passed on at sea.”

  “Was he buried there?” she wanted to know.

  “No ma’m.” He produced the captain’s letter from the inner pocket of his coat and gave an account of the particulars of the mayor’s case, including storage and arrangements. He bore with him personal condolences from the president of the shipping line, and he assured Miss Pettigrew that her brother’s last hours had been happy ones. He said that Mr. Pettigrew and his partner had just taken ribbons in the foxtrot immediately prior to the mayor’s encounter with the vegetable platter.

  Miss Myra Angelique said, “I see,” and she did not thank him and did not formally excuse herself but yelled out down the hallway, “Aunt Willa, get my purse,” which Aunt Willa got and which Miss Pettigrew took with her as she stepped out into the sunlight of an April afternoon.

  Momma did not imagine more than a half dozen people actually laid eyes on Miss Pettigrew, a fact she attributed not so much to surprise and chance as to Miss Myra Angelique’s carriage. Daddy has always said Miss Pettigrew walked like she was being hauled in on a winch, and Momma supposed the mixture of purpose and sheer velocity was what got her from her front door to Commander Tuttle’s Heavenly Rest pretty much unnoticed. The commander ran his operation out of a monstrous Victorian house with a slate roof and a cupola and a wrap-around porch protected from the weather by green canvas awni
ngs. Of course he was not a legitimate commander but had gotten the title from his daddy who was not a legitimate commander either but who had gotten the title from his daddy who all the Tuttles swore was a bona fide war hero and duly commissioned ship’s captain, but Daddy said he was no more legitimate than the rest of them no matter what any Tuttle claimed, and it seemed they hardly ever shut up about it. Commander III, who would be Commander Jack Tuttle, carried in his fob pocket a steel rivet which he said his daddy, Commander Douglas Tuttle, had carried before him and which his granddaddy, Commander Rupert Tuttle, had introduced into the Tuttle lineage sometime directly after the war between the states. Daddy said Commander Jack had a great fondness for the Tuttle rivet and could not be kept from extracting it from his fob pocket and holding it aloft between his thumb and forefinger. “This here’s a piece of history,” he would say, and then he would elaborate by way of recounting the development of naval knowhow beginning with the Phoenicians and carrying on through to the confederacy, which had seen Rupert Tuttle miraculously advance from port gunner to ship’s captain on a vessel Commander Jack called the ironclad Virginia, otherwise the Merrimac.

  The commander was understandably vague as to the precise circumstances of his granddaddy’s promotion and he pretty much held to his daddy’s version of the story, which had the original captain of the ship sometimes shot and sometimes temporarily blinded by a powder blast and sometimes just generally incapacitated, any one of which opened the door for the crew to simultaneously insist that port gunner Rupert Tuttle be given command of the vessel, which he unaccountably was—due to his peerless bravery, Commander Jack would say, due to his matchless nautical wisdom. Displaying his rivet prominently, Commander Jack would go on to tell how his granddaddy’s ship sank a pair of Union frigates in the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay and then engaged the Monitor for two days solid before routing her into the open sea where she foundered and was lost.