On the evening after a two or three inch snowfall Daddy and me take our supper in the breakfast room where we can look out the window to where the floodlights shine through the limbs of our apricot and our elm and play off the peaks and drifts against the carshed and just generally make a spectacle of even our backyard. Of course by dinnertime Momma has been cooking in vatfuls all afternoon and has amassed an ambitious selection of stews and sauces and puddings along with a gracious plenty of garbage, which she insists has to go to the can in the yard before the night is out. So me and Daddy eye each other gravely since even the least little errand has become an expedition, and then Daddy usually bows out to me saying something like, “You take it admiral, I’m faint of heart.” And I go after my Baggies and my coat and when I get to the door with two armfuls of trash, Daddy sometimes toasts me with his coffee cup. “Safe return,” he says.
Sometime after midnight and before sunrise it is not at all uncommon for the clouds to blow off leaving the moon to break through and put a glow on things. Daddy says because the light is extraordinary and unnatural, it inflicts a kind of madness on some people while they sleep and they wake up in the morning wanting to drive their cars. Daddy says he cannot explain it otherwise since there’s no reason at all for a townful of people with absolutely nowhere to go to wheel their Buicks and Pontiacs and oversized Fords out into the streets of Neely where they pass the day veering off into ditches or phone poles or just running up onto the fenders of people going nowhere in the opposite direction. Folks only learn enough to use chains about the time the snow has begun to seep off into the ground and slush up in the gutters, and for at least an afternoon and most of an evening Neely sounds for all the world like a town under armored attack. Daddy holds with the notion that there’s nothing for a sane man to do on the day after a snowfall but plant himself in the northeast corner of his cellar and hope for the best. He’s always said that if Washington had kept company with Southerners at Valley Forge the whole group of them could have passed the winter making snow angels and igloos and generally having a high time of it.
But a hardy blizzard is a rarity in Neely and cannot be expected to arrive with any sort of regularity, cannot even be counted on for a yearly showing. Winters in Neely are mostly sadly predictable and barren and colorless and genuinely forlorn. Momma is the one of us who tends to suffer most through the season. She holds up well enough until Christmas and on into the New Year, but by the first week in February Momma is a lost woman. On February afternoons Momma turns on all the lamps in the house and sits in the livingroom in one of Grandma Yount’s burgandy boudoir chairs where she applies herself to the same novel she has been reading off and on for six years now, the one that starts out “Save when it happened to rain Vanderbank always walked home.” From year to year Momma forgets where she left off, so she sets in at page one and makes a kind of erratic go of it until March. Momma tells me she keeps expecting it to get lively and is annually disappointed. Daddy has tried that book himself; he says Momma is a woman of infinite hope.
But no matter the lamps and the distractions, the last two weeks in February tend to take Momma under and occasionally she frets and cries and tells Daddy how she has to get away from Neely, how she has to get away from February, how she’d nearly be willing to die for a spring day. And Daddy puts his arms around Momma and rocks with her to hush her up, and sometimes he’ll drive us out to the Holiday Inn on the by-pass where he treats Momma to a meal she doesn’t have to cook or wash up after, and Daddy talks to the waitresses and talks to the other customers and tells me and Momma how he’s been considering pulling up roots and moving to Buffalo where he says Momma can have her own caldron to stew in and I can go to the store with actual ice under my sled runners and Daddy tells how he’ll buy us a fleet of Buicks to run off into gullies and just generally slosh around in. Wouldn’t that be grand? Daddy says. Wouldn’t that be the life? And Momma abides him with a smile.
It was February that gave Momma the chance to think about Miss Pettigrew, and her theory as to why Miss Pettigrew showed up at the Methodist Christmas pageant after nearly ten years of not showing up much of anywhere else was probably born of Momma’s long, slow hours in Grandma Yount’s boudoir chair where she held the book about Mr. Vanderbank and pondered the somber February afternoons out the side window. Momma did not for a minute think Miss Myra Angelique could bring herself to pray for a set of dentures. But then Momma assumed what very few people in Neely cared to assume: she was of the opinion that Miss Pettigrew might be as human as everybody else. Momma said it must have been the winter or anyway the accumulation of winters that finally drove Miss Pettigrew out of the empty chambers and hallways of her daddy’s mansion and into the company of more or less regular people. Momma simply could not believe that a woman like Miss Pettigrew would go to church and pray for the gums of her colored help. That would be madness, and Momma did not think Miss Pettigrew was mad. She thought she was lonely.
Everything Momma could not know herself came by way of Mrs. Phillip J. King and her negro grapevine. Of course Mrs. King kept to her dental perspective and Momma said she spent a solid half hour discussing the sorry state of Aunt Willa’s gums and then told how Aunt Willa could not even get down her creamed corn without making faces like she might be working over a mouthful of carpet tacks. Mrs. King said the poor woman was in agony and she wanted a doctor and some painkiller but Miss Myra Angelique decided they would call on the Almighty instead. Everything else Momma knew for herself, since she never missed a Christmas pageant.
Momma had not started out as a Methodist but was raised a Baptist and converted when she married Daddy whose parents made him join the Methodist church when he was twelve and had forced him to attend Sunday services and revivals until he outgrew Granddaddy Benfield and took it upon himself to lapse into what he calls the ease of sinful living. Every week me and Momma go to the eight o’clock service and Sunday school after, and usually Momma takes me with her Wednesday nights to prayer meeting and ships me off to most every church retreat that comes along. Momma is considerably worrisome and bull-headed about my religious training since she knows I don’t have anybody to outgrow but her. She is ever trying to get Daddy on her side, and on Sundays just before lunch Momma tells him how she has prayed that God might reach down His hand from heaven and touch Daddy’s soul with His splendor. But Daddy says God knows better.
At Christmastime of 1962 Momma still had a wait of nearly a year and a half before she’d have me to drag to the sanctuary with her, so she attended the annual pageant in the company of Miss Mattie Gunn, a local spinster woman who Daddy said was normally a High Baptist but took pleasure in seeing what Methodists looked like from year to year. Late in 1961 the regular Methodist preacher, Mr. Miller, got rotated to Mt. Airy and was replaced by the Reverend Mr. Richard Crockett Shelton who was not even a half-dozen years out of divinity school when he took charge of the church. Mr. Miller had been good for nothing in that way that preachers have of being good for nothing, or good for hardly anything anyway, as they seem to figure getting paid to be holy is enough. Mr. Miller could be holy every now and again and could be quite successfully profane every once in awhile too, so naturally people had an affection for him since he seemed entirely capable of as much turpitude as they were.
The Reverend Mr. Richard Crockett Shelton, however, was another case altogether. He stood over six feet tall, was very blond and pure-looking, and did not have any vices to speak of. Momma said he delivered a stirring sermon, but Daddy always said that if religion had done nothing else for Momma it had made her merciful. Daddy had sat through several of the reverend’s funeral orations and he said Mr. Shelton distinguished himself by being one of the few preachers he had ever been exposed to who could bore the corpse. Daddy was always hard on preachers and he even slept through the Billy Graham crusades when Momma tried to make him watch them on television. Momma said the majority of the congregation simply did not believe that the Reverend Shelton was advanced enough
in years to be at all friendly with God. Folks suspected they’d have to wait until he got a little farther from the seminary and a little closer to the grave before he could tell them anything they didn’t already know for themselves. But Daddy did not imagine the passing years would get the Reverend Shelton anything but older. He said Mr. Shelton was merely the sort of preacher who’s always beating his wings but can never fly.
Most likely the Methodists tolerated the Reverend Shelton and kept him on at the church not because he showed any promise as a sermonizer but because he took their Christmas pageant to heart. Momma said the quality of the pageant had fallen off considerably under Mr. Miller, who had his own idea of the spirit of the season, and she said it suffered its first cancellation in 1960 when the preacher managed to round up only two wise men and the angel of the Lord came down with the mumps. But the Reverend Shelton changed all of that. He threw himself into the staging of the pageant with the sort of zeal and excitement Mr. Miller had been incapable of, or anyway not inclined to. And even though Mr. Shelton didn’t arrive in Neely until nearly the end of 1961, he put on a respectable initial production and vowed better things in the future.
Consequently, work on the 1962 pageant commenced in August of that year with the formation of a Christmas committee and the scheduling of auditions for early September. Mr. Shelton wanted to provide himself with a half dozen wise men, three or four Josephs and angels, and a couple of Virgin Marys so as to protect against any unforseen occurences. In the latter part of October the reverend organized a building committee which saw to the construction of the stable and baby Jesus’ manger, both of which were made from shipping crates supplied by an appliance store in a shopping center near Draper. By the middle of November Miss Fay Dull had begun rehearsing the choir, and just after Thanksgiving the ladies from the Tuesday Biblettes set in to making costumes for the wise men out of old chair covers. The reverend’s schedule provided for two practice runs in December before the actual production on the evening of Sunday the twenty-third, and when Reverend Shelton addressed his congregation on the morning of the sixteenth he told them how the Christmas pageant would be an unforgettable affair. Momma said it surely was.
The animals normally used in the pageant were kept from year to year in the basement of the fellowship hall. They were made out of painted plywood and seemed very lifelike if you didn’t look at them anywhere but head-on. But the reverend didn’t think his pageant was suited for wooden animals; he thought it called for something a little more grand and spectacular. The Reverend Shelton had actual livestock in mind, livestock which he borrowed from local farmers who agreed to keep quiet about it until after the performance. He got hold of a half-dozen piglets, a pair of goats, three or four chickens, one goose, and Mr. Jip French’s old blind pony that his boys chased around the pasture and ran into fences. But when he tried the animals out at a full-dress rehearsal the reverend discovered that he couldn’t use the pony because it was given to breaking wind, not very loudly, Momma said, but in near lethal concentrations. So the reverend tried to get another pony but couldn’t and had to settle for Mr. Earl Jemison’s steely-grey hound, Mayhew, which was probably one of the biggest dogs in the county and which the reverend decided to transform into a camel by means of a couple of pillows and a brown rug.
Mayhew did not come easy, however. Mr. Jemison accounted himself a respectable actor and he bargained relentlessly for the part of the voice of God, a part Mr. Jemison said he had always wanted to play. Mr. Shelton had saved the voice of God for himself and he gave it up to Mr. Jemison with severe misgivings since he did not think God talked at all like Mr. Jemison, whose voice Daddy said could pass for an articulate doorhinge. But the reverend had somehow convinced himself he was desperate for a camel and he wasn’t about to lose the services of Mr. Jemison’s dog.
Momma said she and Miss Mattie Gunn did not know just what to think when they entered a sanctuary entirely darkened except for three railroad lanterns hung here and there on a fairly legitimate-looking stable up by the altar. And she said neither Miss Mattie nor herself noticed that the reverend had imported actual animals until the both of them caught a whiff of the chickens at about the same time. Unfortunately Miss Mattie suffered from an allergy to feathers and her eyes immediately teared up so that she couldn’t see past the pew in front of her and Momma had to tell her just how everything looked. Momma said the reverend and his committees had created a most impressive effect with just a few oven crates, some paint, a couple of bales of hay, a handful of livestock, and the accompanying barnyard aroma. Momma said the reverend had strewn hay across the altar, set the stablefront on top of it, hung a few lanterns, tethered the goats, caught up the piglets and the chickens and the goose together in a wire corral, and left the ammonia to drift where it would. Momma said she could have been out of doors for all she knew and every now and then she wished she was.
Momma did not know exactly when Miss Pettigrew made her entry into the sanctuary since the usher seated her a full two aisles over from Momma, who could hardly make out Miss Mattie as it was. But she suspected Miss Pettigrew arrived just after the reverend had presented himself from a niche beneath the choir loft and come forward onto the altar to greet the congregation. Along about then Momma heard a distinct buzzing off to her left that carried the length of the aisle and she said it was probably the sound of people asking each other if that was indeed Miss Pettigrew or telling each other it was indeed Aunt Willa, not because they could make out her features, not even because they could tell she was colored, but because even in the lanternlight they could detect the radical limp Aunt Willa got from being dropped onto a stone hearth as a baby. And Momma said the usher and Miss Pettigrew and Aunt Willa advanced to the front pew with the noise of their passing advancing just behind them. She said anybody knew whoever was with Aunt Willa had to be Miss Pettigrew.
According to Momma the pageant got underway when the arm of the innkeeper came far enough out of the shadows to direct the Virgin Mary and Joseph to a place where they might bed down for the night. She said the Virgin Mary, as played by Miss Alice Covens, seemed somewhat frightened of the goats and swung excessively wide of them on her way into the stable while Joseph, as played by Mr. Jeffrey Elwood Crawford jr., lingered outside and delivered a little speech on starlight and poverty and the kindness of men. He concluded to a very short burst of applause that lasted only as long at it took for Mrs. Crawford to get hold of her husband’s hands. Then Joseph joined the Virgin Mary in the stable and the choir took over with Miss Dull’s arrangement of “0 Little Town of Bethlehem.” Mr. Jemison’s big scene followed the music and began with Reverend Shelton playing a flashlight beam onto the angel of the Lord, who was perched a little recklessly on the choir-loft bannister. But nothing happened right away, and Momma said the angel clung onto the railing and waited and the congregation waited and the Reverend Shelton coughed and cleared his throat until finally the voice of God exploded out of the darkness like a train whistle and nearly scared everybody to death. Momma said Mr. Jemison told his angel where to go and what to do when he got there, and then the angel sort of saluted, she said, and threw himself off the bannister, which caused the entire congregation to suck air. But he was harnessed into a system of ropes and pulleys, and after he swooped back into the railing once, he descended more or less without incident to a point just over the stable roof where he could hover and wait for the wise men.
The Reverend Shelton threw a switch that activated a bulb in a Moravian star suspended somewhere above the angel of the Lord and somewhere below the choir loft, and almost simultaneously the three kings from the orient came forward out of the narthex wearing everybody’s old upholstery and beards made from cotton swabs and crowns wrapped in aluminum foil. One of them bore frankincense and another one bore both myrrh and gold since the one who was supposed to bear the gold had his hands full with the camel, who did not seem especially interested in witnessing the birth of the Christchild but showed a preference for sniffi
ng shoetops along the aisle. Miss Fay Dull led the choir in four verses of “We Three Kings,” which served to carry the gift-bearing wise men on up to the stable but broke off a minute or two before the one with the camel had a chance to make the altar. Only the angel of the Lord seemed at all perturbed by the delay, but then he had just grown somewhat harness-weary and thrashed around in an effort to relieve himself.
The baby Jesus had gotten born in the meantime and as the wise men closed in to adore him, the camel, who was supposed to be tethered up away from the goose and the piglets and the chickens and the goats, got loose into the back of the stable and sprawled on the hay where he licked himself through the better part of Miss Dull’s solo performance of “Away in a Manger.” Then came time for Reverend Shelton to read a passage from the Book of Matthew, and Momma said that’s when the trouble started. When the reverend turned on his pulpit lamp so as to see the Bible, considerable light was thrown onto the front edge of the congregation, and best as Momma could figure it the Virgin Mary, who had the Christchild in her arms and was flanked all around by Joseph and the wise men, looked up long enough to get an eyeful of a colored woman in the front pew, which would have been a rarity in any pew, and then she looked again and saw it was Aunt Willa and since she knew wherever Aunt Willa went Miss Pettigrew might be, she looked off beside Aunt Willa and found Miss Pettigrew herself, who had already become a kind of local spook.
Momma said the sight of Miss Pettigrew must have simply shocked the Virgin Mary and in her agitation she lost her grip on the baby Jesus and dropped him onto the edge of the manger, where his porcelain head got jarred loose from the rest of him and fell onto the hay next to one of the goats, and Momma said the sound of the baby Jesus’ head hitting the floor startled the one goat, who bucked into the other one who lunged the length of his tether and jolted one of the lanterns off its peg, and Momma said when it hit the floor the glass chimney broke and the hay caught fire. The wise men bolted off in one direction, Joseph cleared out in the other, and the Virgin Mary crept backwards into the stable with her hands over her mouth until she stepped on the camel’s hindquarters, which caused him to jump to his feet and start barking. By this time the angel of the Lord figured things had pretty much fallen to pieces and he set up a fuss to be hauled in right away; he said the harness was making his legs blue. But Momma said he was left to dangle over the stable while two baritones came down out of the choir loft and smothered the flames with their robes before going to the assistance of the Virgin Mary, who had momentarily lost her wits. In a matter of minutes everything was back to order except for the camel who continued to bark and make threatening noises, but he cowed immediately when the voice of God shouted down from the rafters, “Mayhew, shut up!”
A Short History of a Small Place Page 9