A Short History of a Small Place

by T. R. Pearson

  Momma said the mayor had been guilty of indelicacy with Miss Pettigrew’s emotions. Daddy said he had simply tried to farm her out and had failed at it. They both agreed the whole episode was sad and unnecessary since the mayor did not need Mr. Nance to win his seat in Congress and certainly could not have lost it without him. And although Momma would not admit it, Daddy said Miss Pettigrew herself became somewhat tainted on account of the circumstances, not that she had engaged in anything unseemly but because her brother had supposed that she might. So when the Pettigrews became what Momma called retiring, Neely let loose of them and watched them fade almost completely from sight. The mayor took to walking only in the dusk of the day and rarely was Miss Myra Angelique at his elbow anymore. Momma said she had become the victim of sick headaches which were so severe as to send her to her bed for days at a time. The mayor hired Aunt Willa Bristow to see to his sister and she would sit at Miss Pettigrew’s bedside and do nothing but steep Miss Myra Angelique’s lace handkerchiefs in a bowl of vinegar and apply them to her forehead. Charge of Mr. Britches also fell to Aunt Willa, and Daddy said anymore when folks stopped at the fence to watch him scuttle up his flagpole and squat on the knob at the top of it, they got just the monkey, or maybe just the monkey and the amusement of seeing Aunt Willa fetch it in by yanking stiffly on the tether and saying, “Come on h’yer you ape” until Mr. Britches relented since she never would. And Momma said there was nothing sadder than to watch the lights in both wings of the Pettigrew house go out one by one early on in the evening while the rest of Neely was still lively and bright.

  Then the mayor up and went on a cruise, or anyway Daddy said it seemed that he up and went since nobody knew he was leaving until he left or got wind of where he was going until he had already come back. He took a train out of Greensboro for Miami and from there he embarked on a ship called the Island Beauty which was scheduled for a stop at the Yucatan peninsula before heading on to points in the Caribbean. According to the ship’s captain, the mayor had been having a wonderful time of it, and he enclosed in his letter a snapshot of Wallace Amory jr. in the company of an Inca chief which, in a scrawled note on the back, was said to have been taken at a sacred burial ground at a cost to the mayor of one dollar and seventy-five cents. They had tried, the captain said, they had all tried to dislodge the radish from the mayor’s throat—the ship’s doctor had even attempted a tracheotomy with a carving knife—but he had suffocated anyway and the captain was very sorry, very sorry, and would see to the transportation of the body himself as soon as the ship redocked in Miami, which was nine days off when the mayor died and still six days off when Miss Pettigrew got the captain’s letter by way of a company representative.

  In the meantime the mayor was put in the meatlocker for safekeeping and Daddy said the freezer was either too cold or not cold enough and caused Wallace Amory jr. to turn an unspeakable color. So there was no viewing, no family hours at the funeral home, and by Miss Pettigrew’s request, the service was brief and private, so private in fact that she herself did not attend, leaving the preacher to carry on with God as his witness and under the passing scrutiny of a couple of funeral parlor attendants who wandered into the chapel to discover what in the world was going on there. When the mayor was finally laid to rest with his head at his daddy’s feet, Momma said that was in fact the end, but Daddy said that Wallace Amory had been more or less dead for a considerable spell already and this was just the official confirmation.

  So Miss Pettigrew was left alone in the world except for her monkey and her negro woman, and Momma said she closed herself up in her daddy’s house and did not interrupt her solitude but twice—once of a Sunday prior to Christmas of 1962 when she attended the Methodist Church, and once in the summer of 1970 when she gave a July 4th luncheon out of the clear blue and distributed little colonial flags as favors. Otherwise she confined herself to her bedroom and her parlor while Aunt Willa cleaned for her and cooked for her and tended to her monkey for her and generally allowed Miss Myra Angelique to become an old woman in the privacy of her family home. It was no wonder then, Daddy said, that Neely was electrified by the appearance of Miss Pettigrew in her frontyard after nearly a decade of just a monkey on a flagpole and a sullen negro woman in the shadows under the porch awning. And ranting no less, and wearing a fitted bedsheet up on her shoulders for a cape. And though Momma assured us that it was probably good linen, maybe even Irish, Daddy said it was still madness and that was all that mattered.

  iv

  Miss Pettigrew first jigged on her lawn in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon and Daddy said folks lingered and dallied along the fence well on into twilight and were out early Wednesday morning so that they might happen by the Pettigrew house before midday came when they would commit themselves to casing it in earnest. But the doors stayed closed up and the yard remained vacant throughout the day, even to the top of the flagpole, and on Thursday only the most tenacious and otherwise unoccupied citizens of Neely haunted the Pettigrew end of the boulevard until they eventually went home unrewarded.

  Then Friday came and nobody expected anything at all from Miss Pettigrew in the way of entertainment, so just the few folks with genuine business in the area saw her strike out from the house and turn south on the walkway in the direction of downtown. She was in the company of Mr. Britches, who, aside from his usual blazer and porkpie hat, was wearing black sneakers for the occasion; Miss Pettigrew kept him in check on a jewel-studded dog lead. Momma said Miss Myra Angelique was rather stylishly dressed for a woman who had hardly seen sunlight in almost a decade. She was wearing a navy skirt and matching jacket along with a white ruffly blouse and some sort of neckerchief that Momma said was certainly silk. Miss Pettigrew’s gloves buttoned at the wrist and were as startlingly white as her clutch purse, which was extremely elegant and sheathed in pearls. Momma had her reservations only as to Miss Pettigrew’s choice of hats. The one she had decided on set up on her head like a jarlid and was not quite as purely white as her gloves or her purse. It had put forth feathers in the back and was hung in front with a partial veil that stopped just short of Miss Myra Angelique’s eyebrows. Momma considered this sort of headwear a bit severe for a weekday afternoon. Otherwise, though, she said Miss Pettigrew was at the height of fashion and taste; Daddy said she had just managed to leave the bedsheets on the bed.

  Daddy called it outright gawking. He said the mere sight of Miss Pettigrew on the street blasted folks into a kind of instant idiocy and faces fell slack and people went silent wherever she passed. Mr. Britches didn’t get the least little attention, not even when he climbed up atop a parking meter and relieved himself onto the curbing out front of the Guilford Dairy Bar. Daddy said you’d have thought the gutters of Neely were intended to run with monkey urine. Nobody greeted Miss Pettigrew, he said, and nobody was greeted by her, though she looked pleasant enough and did not seem to be in any sort of hurry. And the only people who showed any noticeable signs of consciousness in the presence of her and her monkey were two salesmen in the doorway of the Ford dealership. One of them howled and pounded the jamb with his fist while the other just leered at him; he was dressed for all the world exactly like Mr. Britches except for the sneakers.

  Miss Pettigrew and her monkey walked all the way from the Pettigrew house at municipal square, through town, past the cotton mill, and didn’t stop until they arrived at what is known as Southend, where people who can’t afford to live anywhere else live. Southenders are generally not exceptionally trashy, just poor. According to Daddy they are fairly proud, reasonably well-scrubbed people, and when Miss Pettigrew showed up in their part of town, everybody who knew what a Miss Pettigrew was (which was almost everybody) took her visit to be proof that Southend had finally arrived. Housewives mostly eased themselves out onto their front porches and then down to the street, where they collected in spirited little bands along the sidewalk and studied Miss Pettigrew’s progress, which was fairly steady and unswerving and took her dead towards Southend’s only park,
a small plot of land that dwindles to a point where the boulevard and the Burlington highway run up on each other from more or less the same direction.

  There isn’t much in the way of recreation in the Southend park since the center of the property is occupied by a concrete slab that supports the Neely water tower. Daddy has always said that the Neely tower is a gem of its breed since it is not of the usual variety with legs and a basin atop but is instead a steel cylinder which rises about one hundred and fifty feet into the air and, according to Daddy, can be seen by motorists a good mile or mile and a half outside of town. The outer shell fairly much bristles with rivets, and at regular five-year intervals the city council comes to terms with the most daring paint crew it can run up on and the exterior gets silvered over afresh. Nobody remembers precisely how but somehow two faithful reproductions of the Lucky Strike emblem found their way onto the upper quarter of what are more or less the east and west faces. It is the general consensus that the American Tobacco Company, which lies midway between Neely and Danville, paid for the privilege of permanent advertisement by funding the construction of the tower, and only old Mr. Nettles ever objected to the theory: before he passed on he swore up and down that the likeness of a jar of brilliantine had once been located partway up the Burlington side. But then Mr. Nettles didn’t ever recollect his dead wife’s name the same way twice, so it was probably the case that the Lucky Strike emblems had always been where they were and would still be there when the steel finally gave way and the water ran out on the ground.

  Mr. Raymond Small told Sheriff Burton he was weighing a woman’s apples by the fruit bin out front of his grocery when he noticed Miss Pettigrew in the park across the street. He said he didn’t know her right off, since it would have been twenty-seven years in August that he had last seen her, but the monkey gave her away. He reported how he asked the woman beside him, “Isn’t that Miss Pettigrew there?” and he said she recognized the monkey too. Then all the women in the market came outside and Mr. Small said there were about a half dozen of them altogether and they watched Miss Pettigrew and Mr. Britches go in among the shrubbery at the base of the water tower.

  The Ladies Garden Society of Neely had seen to the planting of several rosebushes around the concrete slab and had supplied a few sections of splitrail fence for them to cling to, but they had never flourished and taken hold like the ones along the borders of the sewage plant, which were said to have produced some truly incredible blossoms, so Miss Pettigrew had to poke around for awhile before she came up with any rose worth having. Mr. Small said she finally decided on two, a red one and a white one, and she broke them off from the vines and put them into her purse. Then she pulled a bread sack out from her jacket pocket, he said, and dropped her purse into that before leading Mr. Britches around to the access ladder and sending him up it ahead of her.

  Mr. Small said he was astounded by her agility, and as far as he was concerned that monkey had nothing on her, though Mr. Small was obliged to add that Mr. Britches was slightly handicapped by his sneakers which were giving him fits. He said she climbed steadily, nudging the monkey on ahead of her when she caught up with him, and the two of them didn’t stop until they were along about as high as the Lucky Strike emblems, not so far up as the words “Lucky Strike,” he said, but pretty much on a line with “It’s toasted.” And even then she didn’t take a breath, he said, but set in tying the neck of the breadsack to a ladder rung. And she never looked down, as far as Mr. Small could recollect, and he said she never jumped at all, just let go and fell over backwards. He said the ladies screamed and hid their faces but he just watched the hem of her skirt flap in the wind and never even blinked when she splintered a section of splitrail fence and landed in the scraggly heart of a rose bush. Mr. Small said the most miraculous part of the whole business was that her hat never came off, never even got batted askew.

  Me and Momma didn’t know a thing about it, didn’t hear the sirens trailing off Southend way, didn’t get a word by phone or otherwise, just didn’t know anything at all until Daddy came home to tell us, and you’d have thought he would come sailing down the sidewalk screaming blood and murder, but it wasn’t like that, not in the least. He simply appeared, not on the walkway or the front porch, but inside the house, right there in the sitting room where I was lolling in his chair with my legs over the armrest. I never heard him coming and I don’t know how long he’d been standing beside me when I saw him, but I must have yelped like death. Anyway, Momma said that’s what brought her out of the kitchen, and she took one look at Daddy and said, “Louis?”

  He didn’t have any color to speak of or much of any expression on his face, and without ever seeming to move at all he dropped his suitcoat, his satchel, his lunchbag, and his afternoon paper in a pile on the floor.

  “Louis, are you alright?” Momma asked him. But Daddy just looked over her head to the far wall or maybe on into the kitchen and Momma reached out and touched his forearm with the tipends of her fingers.

  Momma

  DADDY SAID it was better than the madhouse. He recalled how he’d been to a madhouse once to see his mother’s brother, Uncle Warren Lanier, and he said anything at all was better than the madhouse. Daddy was twenty-five then and Uncle Warren was already an old man who had failed to marry, who had failed to settle into an occupation, and whose own mother held him directly accountable for Great-granddaddy Lanier’s untimely death at the age of fifty-seven. She said he had been galled into an early grave. However, Daddy said Great-granddaddy Lanier had died of angina complicated by regular and ungentlemanly drafts of the local mash; acute disappointment had nothing to do with it. According to Daddy that was Great-grandmomma Lanier’s affliction. She was ravenous for grandbabies, he said, and she was convinced that Uncle Warren’s bachelorhood was at the least inexcusably inconsiderate and otherwise very possibly unlawful. Daddy supposed Great-grandmomma Lanier would have taken Uncle Warren into litigation if she’d thought she could get a favorable judgement by it. But since there were no laws on the books specifically against bachelorhood or celibacy, Daddy called it, she vented herself by raging at Uncle Warren when he was at hand and just generally despising him in his absence. Daddy said she talked about him like maybe he’d helped the Romans crucify Christ, like maybe she thought he’d driven a nail or two. Yes, Daddy said, Uncle Warren was the one that was committed.

  Daddy did not hold Great-grandmomma Lanier exclusively responsible for Uncle Warren’s deterioration; he imagined she merely contributed to it and hurried it along some. It seems Uncle Warren had always been a solitary individual who sought out no one’s company and was never sought out himself. He lived in a room over a signpainter’s shop and worked as a paper carrier for the Greensboro Daily News, an occupation which took him out into the world only two times a day and one of them before dawn. Daddy said the nature of Uncle Warren’s employment probably afforded him the great leisure insanity requires and he imagined Uncle Warren had spent the better part of his life losing his mind. He never went violently or dangerously crazy, Daddy said, just noticeably so, but according to Daddy there was no reason to suppose that Uncle Warren would have ever been committed if not for the combination of his particular brand of madness with Great-grandmomma Lanier’s affliction. They simply did not mix.

  Somehow Uncle Warren had decided he was the rightful king of Prussia, and Daddy said he was fairly modest as far as kings go. He did not demand any knee bending or ring kissing, just an occasional “your highness” or “by your leave.” And Daddy said the coronation had even brought him out some and done him a bit of good, but when Great-grandmomma Lanier heard that her Warren had made himself king of Prussia she went into absolute fits. Daddy said it was difficult enough for her to abide missing out on a regular grandbaby; she could hardly stand being denied a regal one.

  So it was Great-grandmomma Lanier that had Uncle Warren packed off to the madhouse in Raleigh and he had been there nearly twelve years when Daddy visited him in the fall of 1946. A nu
rse let him into the ward and showed him to Uncle Warren’s bed, and Daddy said since he’d never been to a mental hospital before he half expected the patients to be swinging from the light fixtures and hanging upside down on the bedsteads. But it wasn’t like that at all, he said. Only a very few of them twitched and rolled under the bedclothes, and some one of them on the farthest side of the ward sang sweetly to himself in a high soprano voice. Daddy said all of the rest were as still as death.

  Uncle Warren didn’t know him right off, leastways he didn’t let on that he did. Daddy said he just sat on the edge of the bed with his hands on his knees and looked out beyond his headboard through a window covered over with wire mesh that gave onto the corner of a little barren courtyard and the backside of an adjacent building. Uncle Warren was a huge man with big fleshy ears and rangy limbs, and Daddy said the orderlies had stuffed him into a nightdress that didn’t hardly cover him down to the thighs. He said it was awfully sad to see, awfully pathetic. When he started talking, Daddy steered clear of anything to do with Hitler and the allied effort and he said he mostly talked family to Uncle Warren and told him how folks asked after him regularly. Daddy supposed he was still chattering away when Uncle Warren finally looked at him. He was already crying, Daddy said, and the tears were rolling freely down his cheeks and some of them were running into his mouth and some of them were dripping from his chin. Daddy said he’d never seen a man cry before and didn’t know what in the world to do, so he put as much of his arm around Uncle Warren’s shoulder as he could manage and he said Uncle Warren laid his head on his chest and sobbed into his shirt.