A Short History of a Small Place Read online

  “Yes sir,” the commander would say, studying his rivet, “this here’s a piece of history. My granddaddy took it from the belly of the Virginia just as she was to be scuttled.”

  But Daddy insisted it was not a piece of history at all. He said either Commander Douglas or Commander Jack had probably pried it off the water tower one moonless night.

  Commander Jack had had dealings with Miss Pettigrew prior to April of 1952 when she arrived in the grand hallway of the Heavenly Rest with news of the mayor’s misfortune at sea. As apprentice to Commander Douglas, he had helped tend to the burial of Mrs. Pettigrew in 1914 along with that of Mr. Wallace Amory sr. in the winter of 1926. Commander Jack had buried Commander Douglas in 1934 and had run the business with no additional Tuttles until 1951 when he was joined by his son, who was only nineteen at the time so was just plain Avery but would become Commander Avery when he reached his majority in October of 1953. Commander Jack told how he was not shocked by the news of the mayor’s death but was certainly saddened by it, and he said Miss Pettigrew did not at all dally on her instructions but kept them extremely brief and to the point.

  “Bury him,” she said.

  Of course there were no particulars; there was not even a corpse as of yet. And the commander told how Miss Pettigrew did not seem disposed to select a casket at the moment, did not seem disposed to have anything at all to do with her brother’s burial besides the commissioning of it. But even if Miss Pettigrew did not care to chat, Commander Jack had never been caught at a loss for words, even in the face of the most acute bereavement, so he carried on well enough for the both of them. As Commander Avery recollected it, his daddy got underway by explaining to Miss Pettigrew his theory of the evil magnetism of birthdays which he illustrated by way of a desk calendar that provided what Commander Jack called graphic proof of the tendency in people to succumb hard by and sometimes directly on the date of their birth. He called it a phenomenon and said it was most mysterious and unaccountable. Then he asked Miss Pettigrew just when the mayor had come into the world.

  “December,” she said.

  The commander told her he had been a July baby himself.

  Daddy said of course the commander talked about the rivet, had to talk about the rivet since Miss Pettigrew provided him an ear he had not bent in that direction before. But she brought it upon herself in part, Daddy said, having made the mistake of saying “ship” and having made the mistake of saying “ocean.” And Commander Avery said yes, his daddy did produce the Tuttle rivet from out of his fob pocket, and did hold it up between his thumb and forefinger so Miss Pettigrew could get an eyeful of it, and did go on to tell her how it was a piece of history. Daddy said that’s a scene he always wished he had a picture of, just the least little snapshot of Miss Pettigrew there in the grand hallway of the Heavenly Rest as near to the front door as she could get without being out it and still an extremely handsome woman, still elegant and fine Momma would say, and more or less courageously suffering the Tuttle rivet beneath her nose as displayed between the fingers of Commander Jack who, looking generally like a Tuttle, seemed convincingly incapable of any sort of dauntlessness and who, out of the entire Tuttle clan, was the one most framed like a melon, the one most hairless, the one most eternally short of breath.

  Daddy said he simply wanted a picture of it and maybe to go along with that one a companion shot of the commander’s face taken sometime after his elaborate and painstaking explanation of the Tuttle honorific, probably taken along about when Miss Pettigrew said, “Good day” and nothing more whatsoever.

  Commander Jack did not see Miss Pettigrew again on the business of the mayor’s interment, most likely did not ever lay eyes on Miss Pettigrew again since he was already two years in the grave before she bothered to set foot outside once more. He got all his instructions over the telephone and even then only once. That was after the body had arrived and his men had fetched it over from the train station. He called for a funeral suit, but she did not see the need to provide one and told the commander to take something appropriate from the mayor’s luggage.

  The Commander reported that the mayor did not arrive with any luggage.

  So Miss Pettigrew told him to bury the mayor in whatever he had on.

  “He’s wearing a white dinner jacket,” the Commander said.

  “That’ll do fine,” she replied and hung up.

  The Commander had the mayor’s jacket cleaned and his trousers pressed while the head mortician attempted to do something about the mayor’s color, which had gone from its usual ruddiness way past pallor and down to blue-black, due primarily, the mortician said, to freezer burns and general mistreatment. But when he could find no remedy short of housepaint, him and the Commander agreed to screw down the coffin lid, which sat well with the both of them since the mayor looked pretty much like a minstrel and since the cleaners had been unable to remove the swallow-tailed blue ribbon that had sort of glued itself to the mayor’s lapel, a ribbon lettered in bold, white characters that spelled out TOP FOXTROTTER diagonally. So the mayor was sent to his reward in a closed coffin and with a private ceremony that no one attended except for the preacher and, briefly, Avery Tuttle and an apprentice embalmer who entered the chapel out of sheer curiosity and joined in with the reverend on two verses of “The Old Rugged Cross” so he wouldn’t have to sing alone.

  Momma said ten years and eight months, almost eleven years, and Momma never forgets a date. Momma did not suspect Miss Pettigrew as much as put her nose to a windowscreen from the April of the mayor’s death to Christmastime of 1962, and she imagined most everybody in Neely had supposed Miss Myra Angelique would not ever again depart from the Pettigrew mansion except in the horizontal. But, along with Aunt Willa, Miss Pettigrew presented herself at the Methodist church on the evening of the children’s nativity play after over a decade of pure invisibility, and Momma said it just went to show how the only thing you could know about Miss Pettigrew was that you could never know anything about her.

  Of course Miss Pettigrew was not a Methodist. Momma did not figure she held by any strict affiliation but at best retained loose ties with the Presbyterians since she had received her schooling at a Presbyterian institution. Mrs. Pettigrew had been raised in a Catholic household, but Momma said she surrendered her faith when she married Wallace Amory sr. who would not sit still for Catholicism, who would really not sit still for any sort of organized spirit mongering. Daddy said Mr. Wallace Amory sr. might have been the first practicing heathen ever to make his home in Neely. The mayor attended a kind of military academy with vague attachments to a peculiar strain of Virginia Baptists, but Daddy did not recall the mayor ever mentioning anything about religious training except indirectly when he once told how his education had been overseen by the sort of men who probably thought the Spanish Inquisition was a fine thing. As far as anybody could tell, Mayor Pettigrew was pretty much his daddy’s son, and he only showed himself in local sanctuaries during his post-appointment mayoral campaign when he worked on the assumption that God-fearing people would not vote an openly faithless man into office.

  Momma said it had not been the children’s nativity play that brought Miss Pettigrew to the Methodist church, though she did add that the Methodists had a reputation for putting on a truly inspiring Christmas pageant. But as Momma heard it from Mrs. Phillip J. King who got it from her cleaning woman who got it from Aunt Willa’s cousin who had not exactly gotten it from Aunt Willa but who had speculated and deducted on her own, which was her right as a relative, and had then broadcast more or less the same version throughout town, one species of which Mrs. Phillip J. King’s cleaning woman picked up and relayed to Mrs. King who relayed it to Momma who said the children’s nativity play had not lured Miss Pettigrew to the Methodist church; she had come to pray for Aunt Willa’s gums and to meditate and seek consultation upon the whole shabby business of Aunt Willa’s dentures.

  Momma said Aunt Willa had always been cursed with a mouthful of bad teeth and when it got
to the point where she could hardly chew meat she set her mind on a pair of plates and immediately began to accumulate whatever money she could so as to prevent herself from becoming a vegetarian. Of course Aunt Willa could not afford a regular dentist, which caused her to fall in with an old disreputable negro named Janks Alison that folks called Mr. Janks who owned a covered truck and made his money driving mostly other negroes to and from a roadside dental clinic in Sumter, South Carolina. Momma said Mr. Janks got away with anywhere from twelve to twenty dollars a head, depending on the desperation of the client. His customers did not ever know exactly when they would be leaving for Sumter since Mr. Janks refused to travel without a full load of seventeen—fifteen in the truckbed and two in the cab along with Mr. Janks himself. So Aunt Willa stayed on standby for several weeks, Momma said, while Mr. Janks drummed up business throughout the county, all of which was his territory. Momma said he had attained to a kind of slick and accomplished salesmanship which was part sheer deception, part threat, all of it helped along by means of a pair of uppers and lowers that Mr. Janks carried in his coatpocket and produced from time to time for effect. As for himself, Momma said, Mr. Janks had retained all of his original teeth.

  Aunt Willa finally made the trip to Sumter sometime along about the first week of December, 1962. All of Mr. Janks’ customers collected in the middle of the night at the icehouse where Mr. Janks picked them up, timing himself so as to arrive at the clinic with the morning. As Aunt Willa told it, the patients were as much as herded into a common room equipped with four dentist’s chairs, one hygienist, and two dentists—Dr. Hathcock and Dr. Ursone—who Daddy said had probably never quite evolved into respectable human beings. Aunt Willa said they started in on the first four right off, yanking teeth and dropping them into metal pails between the chairs, and she told how each of them took two patients and alternated from mouth to mouth working so feverishly as to keep the incisors and molars and bicuspids ringing against the sides of the buckets like hailstones. The hygienist took molds for the plates before the gums had time to swell, or anyway before they had time to swell much, and the remainder of her duties consisted of providing the patients with cubes of ice to suck on which she distributed directly out of freezer trays. According to Aunt Willa, Mr. Janks stopped at the state line on the return trip for what he said was the standard complimentary dinner, but since nobody was willing to chew just then he had to eat alone.

  The trouble with Aunt Willa’s teeth was that they never did fit properly, not even after she’d fought off two infections and her gums had shrunk down to their regular size. The uppers would not stay up and the lowers would not stay down, which turned out to be the general complaint among Mr. Janks’ customers who would collect on occasion at a negro dance hall and trade plates in hopes of finding a snugger fit. But Aunt Willa did not come up on any dentures that rattled around in her mouth any less than her own, so she just experimented with what she had and discovered that if she wore her uppers where her lowers should be and her lowers where her uppers should be she could chew passably well and without much worry of either plate dropping onto the table. Of course Aunt Willa’s dentures were not especially attractive upsidedown. Daddy said they made her look like some sort of flesh-tearing creature and he imagined Aunt Willa and her dentures could make a home for themselves in any jungle of the world.

  According to Mrs. Phillip J. King, who told Momma she had studied the matter from every conceivable angle, Aunt Willa and Miss Pettigrew probably decided to apply themselves in prayer directed towards the gums instead of the teeth because Miss Pettigrew had concluded that while the size of the teeth was pretty much set, the gums might be somehow divinely manipulated. Momma told Mrs. King yes, she supposed so, but actually Momma did not at all hold with the view that Aunt Willa’s dental troubles could draw Miss Pettigrew out of her daddy’s house after ten years of unbroken solitude. Momma said Aunt Willa’s gums were not good enough reason to send Miss Pettigrew to church but served as a fair excuse for getting her there, and Momma had her own theory as to why Miss Pettigrew might trade her daddy’s parlor for the Methodist sanctuary if only on one evening out of a decade’s worth of evenings. Momma’s theory did not reflect poorly on Miss Pettigrew’s faculties, did not reflect poorly on Miss Pettigrew at all, but then Daddy said Momma always thought better of Miss Pettigrew than most everybody else did.

  iii

  Winters in Neely can be most forlorn and desolate. By the time November arrives the trees have all gone bare and what leaves were not raked into ditches and burned lie under shrubbery and against the backsides of houses where they blacken and rot. There is always a particular day no closer to Halloween than Thanksgiving when Daddy sends me into the backyard with a rake and has me clean the last of the leaves and the rubbish out from the row of mock orange bushes that marks the far line of our lot. I’ve never tangled with anything so aggravating as a mock orange bush in November, and I suppose I lost all patience with them the first time I was big enough to hold a rake and Daddy turned me out into the backyard alone. Later Momma told me how he watched me from one of the windows of the breakfast room and just grinned. She said that was a golden day for Daddy; she said the mock orange bushes was why he wanted a son.

  Of course you can’t hardly get leaves and rubbish out from a mock orange bush, but I didn’t know that then. And of course Daddy did not expect me to be any more effective at it than he had been, but I didn’t know that then either. Confronting the mock orange bushes had simply become what Daddy called a point of honor, a sort of obligation he had seen through until I could inherit it. So once a year in November I wake up on a Saturday with the sort of feeling that must come over birds just before they migrate, and I get straight out of bed into my playclothes and put on my carcoat and my workgloves and my green corduroy hat with the earflaps and I fetch the rake out of our cellar and set out for the bottom of the back lot, where I am condemned to thrash at the mock orange bushes for the balance of the day. And that is when it usually happens, not while I’m still trying to extract from the mock oranges everything that has blown or fallen into them in the course of the year, but after I have left off from the struggle for a spell and have sat down on the grass where I pluck at the rakehead to make the tines sing, and I listen to the sound of the sprung metal dying away sometimes mixed with the cry of a hound or the low, indecipherable noise of a voice on the air, and suddenly I am aware of the sort of chill I haven’t known in a year and I notice that the sky is very high and tufted and the color of ash in a grate, which is the color of my breath, which is the color of the afternoon, which is the color of the season; and I know it isn’t autumn anymore.

  In our household we have never kept the seasons by a calendar. Spring commences with the buds on the apricot tree. When Momma lets me go barefoot it’s summer. The first chill night after Labor Day means autumn. And I bring winter in myself when I return the rake to the cellar and meet Momma in the breakfast room where I find her gazing out the back window. “My my, Louis,” she always tells me, “those mock oranges look a hundred percent better.” Daddy says that’s her part in the ritual.

  Winter in Neely is a monotonous time of year and nothing much can really break the spell of the season except for a healthy snowfall, which tends to drive the good sense out of most people since very few of the natives have seen enough snow to have become indifferent to it. We are accustomed to sleet and to the sort of rain that freezes in treetops and downs powerlines, so even the rumor of flurries makes people’s eyes bright. I don’t suppose there is anyone in all of Neely or in the farthest reaches of the outlying areas around it who could not be called upon to tell how on the evening of January ninth, 1957, a storm set in which raged and blew for a day and a half and left behind it a six and three-quarter inch accumulation not counting drifts, a record for the area. According to Daddy, that was a time of general lunacy in Neely, but then Daddy has always said there’s nothing like a good snowfall to bring out the feeble-mindedness in people.

/>   There is a tendency among Neelyites to panic in the face of poor weather, and the reaction to snow is no less frantic, just a little more lightheaded. Before the first few flakes have had time to settle in and melt, every school in the county closes down and any merchant who does not specifically deal in provisions, what are usually called groceries, has locked up his shop and gone home. When we children arrive from school, the mothers and housewives of Neely begin to expect the worst and busy themselves making shopping lists for such indispensable items as dish-powder and confectioner’s sugar and institutional-sized cans of ravioli, just the sorts of things no family can be snowbound without. Since it is us children who will make the trip to the store, we set ourselves to rooting around in the bottoms of the closets looking for boots, which most of us usually find only one of and that one made to go on last year’s foot. About the only citizens of Neely with boots that fit are the garbage men, who have to stomp trash all day and who, of course, don’t work when it snows. So we settle for Baggies over our sneakers, and while our mothers finish up their grocery lists, we go into the cellar after our sleds which have usually had a full year to rust and deteriorate but which require only a little candle wax on the runners to be operational again. I don’t imagine very many of us ever get away without the sort of sendoff that is a mixture of warnings, instructions, and outright threats and that, Daddy says, is probably just the kind of thing Commander Scott heard from his mother before he weighed anchor for the antarctic. Momma usually tells me not to dally unless I want to catch pneumonia or get frostbit or become disoriented in the snow and lose my way, which would be a sheer impossibility since most everybody under voting age is either going to or coming from the Big Apple and making enough racket for ten people in dragging their sleds over pavement that is considerably wetted down but far from icy. Daddy says the idiocy falls with the snow and sometimes Momma manages to avoid it and sometimes she doesn’t.