A Short History of a Small Place

by T. R. Pearson

  So Daddy set out to whip himself into shape, and Momma likes to tell how he’d come out of the bedroom in a T-shirt and a pair of white boxer shorts, which was the closest thing to athletic wear he owned, and stretch out on the living room floor where he would commence with what he called his program which Momma says began as twenty-five sit-ups and became fifteen before falling off to a dozen, all of which Daddy would perform with one hand behind his head and the other holding his fly shut; Momma says Daddy was nothing if not modest. Then Daddy complained that a little bone in the base of his back didn’t get along with the hardwood floor and he changed over from sit-ups to push-ups which Momma says started out at eight and got as far as ten before Daddy began to show signs of shiftlessness when Momma says he would rise from the supper table, announce how he was off to suit up for his program, and then disappear into the bedroom where Momma would find him a half hour later sprawled across the bed asleep.

  According to Momma, we’d have buried Daddy in a piano case long ago if he hadn’t wandered into Sears one Saturday morning and come across a badminton set. Daddy says he had gone after a pound of maple nuts and two white chocolate bars and had to walk through sporting goods to get back out the door, and he says he was not hardly browsing but just carting around with him his thorough dislike for and dread of calisthenics which probably steered him to the badminton set with its aluminum shafted rackets and foreign made shuttlecocks all of which were very lively with color and did not seem in any way dreadful or unpleasant, and Daddy says as he snatched up a box to check the price a salesclerk showed up to tell him it would be a wise investment for a portly gentleman like himself. He bought it anyway. Momma says Daddy did not even come into the house when he got home but went straight into the backyard and strung the net between two poplar trees. Then he called out for Momma to come play with him and she says she tried to but had no talent for the game. Daddy says Momma was as quick as a snake and could swing at the birdie four or five times before it ever hit the ground; she simply could not lay the racket on it except maybe after the bounce when she’d hit it a lick to send it screaming under the net towards Daddy who’d have to double up to avoid it. Daddy says he was reconsidering the push-ups when he happened to look over and see his neighbor just the other side of the property line with his hands in his pockets and the rest of him intent on what Momma and Daddy were calling exercise, and Daddy says he raised the birdie in one hand and his racket in the other and said, “Badminton?”

  Momma and Daddy had not become especially friendly with anybody in Danville since they traveled to Neely most every weekend so the relatives could fawn over little Bumpins before she got past precious, and Daddy says what exchanges they’d been party to with the folks next door had come primarily in the shank of the evening with Momma and Daddy on their screen porch and the neighbors across a narrow sideyard on theirs, and Daddy says him and Momma could hear the sound of voices but not the words themselves and could see the firecoal on what turned out to be the tip of a Tampa Jewel, and Momma says since Daddy was already keeping the Tareyton people in profits, across the way they were probably getting an eye and an earful of pretty much the same thing. And Daddy says every now and again the conversation would fall off first on one porch and then on the other and the crickets would fill up the silence until a voice not much louder than any previously but far clearer and more distinguishable would rise up out of the darkness saying, “Lovely night,” and then would come the crickets again until another voice just as soft and pure as the first would rise up out of the darkness answering, “Surely is.”

  His name was Chick, otherwise Raymond Nathaniel Jarvis, whose Daddy bred trotters outside of Manassas, and she was the former Miss Dickenleigh Fay Warner of Culpepper who went by Dickey and who liked to tell how Chick would come over from Washington and Lee, where he was studying finance, and call for her at Mary Baldwin, where she had hoped to take a degree in social work but got swept up in matrimony after only three years. Momma says Dickey liked to recall how Chick would arrive in his roadster, which Chick himself told Daddy was his Momma’s Wyllis-Knight, and take her up onto the ridge for a picnic. And Dickey always told how half a hundred girls would peek out at them from the dormitory windows because everybody on campus thought Chick was simply the limit, which Momma says is the way Dickey Jarvis usually talked. Daddy never says whether Chick was the limit or not, he just generally tells how Chick showed a marked resemblance to Danny Kaye in White Christmas except around the eyes. Daddy says Chick’s eyes were considerably more bugged out than Danny Kaye’s so that he permanently looked like somebody had just jumped out of a closet at him.

  Chick and Dickey already had two children when Momma and Daddy moved in next door to them. One of them was a little girl, Melanie Fay, who was diapered up like Bumpins and who had what Chick called the postman’s nose and plumber’s red hair. Her brother, Ray Jarvis jr., was three years her senior and Momma says he turned out to be spiteful and mean though at first he did not hardly make himself noticeable and she and Daddy mistakenly assumed he was well-mannered, but Daddy says him and Momma simply happened to move to Danville along about when little Ray was convinced that most anybody could breathe through his ears if he only took time to make the effort, so he was ever trying to force breath up into his head and out either side which was not the sort of process that could accommodate much talking. But Momma says soon enough he stopped using his ears for breathing and started back to using his mouth for shouting and his feet for kicking and his head for butting and generally became unbearable for anybody who ran upon him. According to Daddy, Chick didn’t have much of a hand in the rearing of his children but left Dickey to see after them on her own, and whenever things got a little dicey around the Jarvis household with little Ray goosestepping on the coffee table and Melanie Fay howl ing to be changed and Dickey herself so beat and frazzled down that she didn’t know which one to go at first, Daddy says Chick would step out onto the screen porch and begin to sing “Shall We Gather at the River?” in a voice that drowned out and overcame most everything else. Daddy says somehow Chick considered this his contribution to resolving the crisis.

  But Momma and Daddy did not know Chick and Dickey until Daddy raised up his racket in one hand and the birdie in the other and said, “Badminton?” to which Chick said, “You bet,” and came over directly to take Momma’s place and to take Momma’s racket, both of which Momma says she was thrilled to give up. They played for the rest of the morning and all the afternoon and on up into the evening until it got too dark to see the birdie, and Momma says in the meantime her and Dickey got up with each other and arranged for a hamburger dinner on Momma and Daddy’s back porch which Momma says carried on into the night after Melanie Fay was put in to sleep with little Bumpins and after Ray jr., who had sent his foot through the screen door and bit his sister but otherwise behaved himself, dozed off in mid-rant on Daddy’s sofa.

  Momma says they played all day Sunday and all the next weekend and the weekend after that, and when the both of them decided they could not get enough of it Daddy brought home a droplight from the train depot and hung it over a limb of one of the poplar trees so him and Chick could play in the evenings after work. Momma says anymore she could hardly get Daddy to sit down at the supper table before he was out the back door to meet Chick and play a match, and she says her and Dickey would sit out in the yard in lawn chairs and talk about little or nothing until the bugs would get too bad for them and Dickey would go to her porch while Momma would go to hers, and Momma says they would chat across the sideyard as the darkness set in.

  Daddy likes to tell how that was a glorious summer when him and Chick played badminton on into the night, and even though the rackets stayed sound and the net didn’t rot, Daddy says they did not ever play again after those few evenings in that one summer, did not ever mention it between them again according to Daddy since both him and Chick seemed to know it would never be the same again, would always be less glorious. Daddy says in June ther
e is nothing so beautiful and grand as the Virginia night sky, nothing so mild and easeful as the evening air, and he says sometimes he would look up through the treelimbs at the stars and watch the leaves turn over on the slightest breath of the night and would not even discover that he was lost from the world until Chick would say, “Serving,” and deliver him into it again. Daddy says the house would be dark except for the light over the kitchen sink, and he says he would know Momma was on the porch with little Bumpins in her lap though he could not see her and could not hear her for all of the ruckus the crickets and the jarflies made. Daddy says Chick would lift the serve high into the air, past the droplight and the moths and down to Daddy who would send it back in the same fashion and wait for Chick to lift it towards him again, and Daddy says the sound of the birdie springing from the racket heads never quite joined with the other sounds of the night but remained distinct and measured and regular like the beating of a heart. And that’s usually when Daddy kicks himself back from the table, locks his hands behind his head, and says, “Yes sir, I was a young man once,” and Momma looks past him through the breakfast room window and smiles.

  So I turned around just as the porch light came on and did not for a minute think Momma simply wanted us to find the keyhole when we got home, did not think anything really bur just knew right off where Momma was going and what she was going to do. I saw in my mind the sad way Momma’s mouth turns up when Daddy talks about Danville, and then I didn’t see anything at all and I didn’t think anything at all until something came over me like a fit of blushing that settled into the bottom of my stomach and I thought to myself, This will never happen just this way again. Then I looked at Daddy and at Mr. Gibbons’s white oak tree and at the sky above it and I bit my cheek hard between my teeth.

  ii

  Nobody wanted to go after the monkey, so the sheriff asked for volunteers to go after the breadsack, but nobody wanted to go after the breadsack until somebody had gone after the monkey, and nobody wanted to go after the monkey. Part of the trouble was Miss Bambi Kinch had hauled her Action News Five team on back to Greensboro and there wasn’t anybody left around the tower who seemed very eager to be glorious only locally, so the sheriff suggested that one of the three regular deputies climb on up and fetch the monkey back but they all three said they would rather not, so the sheriff asked for one of them to outright but they all three said they would not, so the sheriff made an order out of it and they all three tried to hand him their badges. Then the sheriff went to work on the four men he’d deputized to control what he liked to call the throngs, but the two bankers and the druggist just laughed and told him he was the funniest son-of-a-bitch they’d come across lately, and according to Mr. Newberry, who happened to be standing hard by at the time, the sheriff’s conversation with the municipal employee earned him an invitation to crawl on up into a place that simply could not accommodate him.

  The hook and ladder unit from the Omega firehouse on the Boulevard arrived along about nightfall and the driver trained his spotlight onto the upper portion of the tower but Miss Pettigrew’s monkey must have been far enough off from the top edge to keep out of the beam so there was nothing to look at except for the breadsack which was nothing much to look at at all from where we were. The fire chief Mr. Pipkin came by in his red station wagon after he’d finished supper. He’d already changed out of his uniform but had remembered himself enough to wear his official fire chief’s hat which looked very much like a saucepan and stayed atop Mr. Pipkin’s head by grace of his ears each of which he prized up between his head and the hatband so as to make the hat snug. Mr. Pipkin walked completely around the water tower once and then did what he usually did at the scene of an emergency: he sat down on the running board of the firetruck. After he’d settled himself in the firemen sat down with him and the regular deputies distributed themselves along the fenders. Sheriff Burton, who was not given to sitting down on or canting up against anything, moved in to stand facing the bunch of them, and all of us in the throngs—which had not swelled or dwindled considerably, which Daddy said is what throngs are apt to do, but had retained a standard thronglike size—all of us moved in behind the sheriff so we could see what went on.

  Except for Mr. Pipkin the firemen were wearing their rubber pants and otherwise just white T-shirts and they passed between them a pack of cigarettes one of the deputies had made the mistake of giving over to them. Mr. Pipkin himself had changed into his bermuda shorts and he sat on the running board with his legs crossed and one hand scratching his ankle while the other ruffled the hairs on his shin. Mr. Newberry told Daddy how Neely’s band of firefighters struck him as a sterling example of selfless civil servitude and intrepidation, and Daddy said the bunch of them together probably couldn’t put out a pilot light.

  So the sheriff stood there in front of Mr. Pipkin all draped and dripping with his usual bullets and shackles and cuffs and badges and whistles, and he caught his thumbs up in his front beltloops, bowed himself out some, and said, “Well?”

  Mr. Pipkin did not answer right off but picked at a sore on his leg with his fingernail and then scratched the underside of his nose before he went back to ruffling the hair on his shin, and after about a minute and a half of studying his shoelaces he looked up at the crowd of us there and we looked back at him and then he looked at the sheriff, who sort of glared in his direction, and then he reconsidered his shoelaces and generally pondered his whole shoe before he finally opened his mouth and said, “Well what?”

  “We’ve got a monkey up there on top the water tower,” the sheriff told him, “and one of your men is gonna have to go up after it.”

  Mr. Pipkin looked off over the sheriff’s head to where the spotlight shone on the upper section of the water tower; then he looked back at the crowd of us before he made his way to the sheriff again and said, “I don’t see no smoke and I don’t see no flame and I ain’t gonna see none of my men having anything to do with this.” Then he reached up with one hand and pushed his hat far enough down on his head so as to make his earlobes stick out into the air and turn bright scarlet like some sort of exotic fruit. “Anyway sheriff,” he said, “I don’t see no monkey.”

  And Mr. Pipkin looked hard at Sheriff Burton, who looked hard at Mr. Pipkin in return, and then the sheriff opened his mouth the least little bit and hollered out, “Small!” cutting loose with it so sharply that it came back at us from off the fronts of the houses across the street, and before we could stop hearing it the sheriff hollered out, “Small, where are you?” again moving his mouth just the least little bit and not even twitching otherwise so that from behind you couldn’t swear the sheriff was the one doing the screaming.

  After that one died off we didn’t hear anything right away, not that there was nothing to be heard only that nothing was being bellowed, screeched, or hollered out; it was simply being said and in an insignificant voice from a considerable distance away. The folks on the back edge of the throngs heard it first and they passed it on to the people in the middle who passed it on to us up at the front edge and we all turned around to find Mr. Small off to himself sitting in one of his own folding chairs that the sheriff had appropriated to use for the barricade and which Daddy said was located almost directly over the old eyewitness burial ground. Mr. Small sat a little forward with his hands on his knees and he kept repeating, “Right here, Sheriff, right here, Sheriff” as many times as he thought he needed to to be heard.

  Still Sheriff Burton didn’t look anywhere but at Mr. Pipkin who didn’t look anywhere but at Sheriff Burton and the sheriff opened his mouth the least little bit again and hollered out, “Come ’ere,” which brought Mr. Small up off of his seat and directly into the crowd of us there who made way for him. As he walked he took his seersucker sportcoat off his forearm and worked his way into it and by the time he got abreast of the sheriff he’d also finished tucking the folds of his shirt down into his pants. Then he said, “Yes sir?” and when Sheriff Burton who looked nowhere but at Mr. Pipkin who lo
oked nowhere but at Sheriff Burton didn’t say anything back, Mr. Small said, “Yes sir?” again. And without ever turning away from Mr. Pipkin and towards Mr. Small, the sheriff opened his mouth the least little bit and said, “Where’s that monkey, Small?”

  Mr. Small drew himself upright somewhat, flattened his hair with the palm of his hand and generally groomed himself in preparation for his answer, but before he could get past “Well Sheriff” some woman in the back of the crowd started screaming and moaning like something wild and then three or four other women set in to screeching with her so that the bunch of them together sounded like a sack of cats until some one of them finally collected herself enough to say, “He’s jumped!” which was about all anybody needed to say. Nobody much seemed to feel the desire to look up and see just what had jumped from where; we all took that woman at her word and cleared out as best we could. Some of the people along the back edge of the crowd were lucky enough to make it through the barricade and they kept getting it on out into the street, but there were plenty of people that got tangled up in the rope and the chairs and the sawbucks and they clogged it up for the rest of us so that we had to be content with going down on our bellies in the grass and throwing our arms over our heads for protection. All the firemen including the firechief Mr. Pipkin rolled off the running board under the truck and the sheriff crawled up into the cab while the deputies circled around the back end of the engine and out into the road. Only Mr. Small did not go anywhere, did not even make a motion to go anywhere, but remained standing just as he had stood with the sheriff and looked just as he had looked except for the way his chin dangled a little now when it hadn’t before.