In the opinion of the clerk at the FCX, who had been called in by Sheriff Browner to analyze the predicament once all the details and circumstances of it had finally been disclosed, Mr. Throckmorton and Mr. Scales had failed to portion out adequate doses of the substance in question and so had succeeded in making the pigeons as a flock, the clerk said, feel somewhat puny along about midnight and deteriorate until morning when they became outright and convulsively incapacitated, all of which, Daddy said, meant that the pigeons were too sick to fly but heavy enough to fall which they would not have done at all if Pinky had allowed and distributed enough rat killer to knock them over dead where they were. So the pigeons as a flock, Daddy said, crept to the edges of their respective windowsills and threw themselves into the street, flapping a few times on the way down for effect, and Daddy said there was such an abundance of outright and convulsive incapacitation, not to mention pigeons themselves, that Mr. Donzo and Pinky and Sheriff Browner and a firehouse lieutenant and the clerk from the FCX could hardly gather up the most recently expired batch before another one had already launched itself towards expiration, and Daddy said Mr. Donzo’s trashcan was all but filled up with deceased birds before it even began to look like there might in fact be an end to all the carnage, Daddy called it, and finally after a half minute with no pigeons whatsoever either landing or falling or departing from the post office, some one of the crowd said out loud to everybody else, “That’s it. That’s all of them,” but before the sound of his voice could die well away another pigeon pitched himself into the air and sailed gloriously down to the pavement. Then a full minute passed, Daddy said, with no sign of a live pigeon anywhere, and this time it was several people that said, “That’s it. That’s all of them,” which they had not even finished saying when three more birds hit the street. And then after a good minute and a half with no expirations, everybody but Sheriff Browner and Pinky and Mr. Donzo said more or less together, “That’s it. That’s all of them,” and it finally seemed like maybe it was until, after five or six pigeonless minutes, a pair of birds staggered into view on opposite ends of the post office and entertained the crowd with what was pretty much a synchronized expiration, and then everybody looked and waited and nobody said anything, but nothing else happened, Daddy said, because that was it. That was all of them.
Sheriff Browner didn’t charge Pinky or Mr. Donzo either with any sort of misdemeanor, didn’t even issue them a citation for littering. According to Daddy, all the sheriff did was to tell Pinky that if he were him he didn’t believe he’d do any such thing again, which was not in any way a threat but just a piece of advice the sheriff thought Pinky ought to have. And Daddy said Pinky told the sheriff back that as far as he knew he’d poisoned all the pigeons he was ever going to poison. Now the crowd itself, Daddy said, very obviously appreciated the diversion and probably, as a crowd, did not yet know that it had witnessed an atrocity, though Daddy imagined one or two among them could possibly have suspected that a pigeon massacre might be an atrocity but most likely were not exactly sure if it was or it wasn’t, and Daddy said in fact the pigeon fiasco did not officially become an atrocity until the witnesses had circulated various accounts of it which were filtered through, expanded upon, and recirculated by an ever increasing number of non-witnesses until finally two or three or four or maybe even a half dozen versions of the story reached the little pink shell-like ears, Daddy called them, of Mrs. Ira Penn and Miss Joyce Tullock who were respectively the president and vice-president of the Neely chapter of the D.A.R. and together set aside ten minutes of the Wednesday luncheon for a debate and vote on and condemnation of Mr. Pinky Throckmorton’s high crime against pigeondom, Daddy called it, which the ladies elected to be an atrocity and very soundly condemned along with Pinky himself while at the same time taking no official action against Mr. Donzo who was an old, fat, uneducated negro which, Daddy said, they figured to be condemnation enough.
So Daddy said what on Tuesday had been your simple fiasco got elevated to an atrocity lunchtime Wednesday and then was distributed as such on the bottom half of the front page of the Thursday Chronicle, and consequently all those people who were previously not exactly sure if a pigeon massacre was or was not an atrocity got told for certain that it was and all those people who had not even suspected that it might be also got told that it was and so at least had to consider the possibility whereas otherwise, Daddy said, they probably would have just gone around ignorant and would never even have suspected that Pinky was guilty of atrociousness. But he was, Daddy said, anyway Mrs. Ira Penn said he was right there on the bottom half of the front page of section A of the Chronicle, which is actually the only section aside from the advertising inserts which are called section B but are not a section at all and are only stuck inside of section A, according to Daddy, in order to make the Chronicle feel like fifteen cents worth of newspaper. At first Mrs. Ira Penn said she was “scandalized” by what Mr. Pinky Throckmorton had “instigated,” which would be the pigeon fiasco, and then she said she was “scandalized and distressed,” and then she said she was “scandalized, distressed, and deeply saddened,” and as far as Mrs. Ira Penn saw it Neely could not yet but would soon “fathom the myriad reverberations of the innumerable death knells sounded Tuesday last for the companions at our feet,” all of which the reporter Mr. Upchurch called “pigeons” in parentheses. And Daddy said even though Mrs. Ira Penn could not tick off any specific reverberations right at the moment, just the hint of some on the way stirred up about half of Neely, which would be mostly the female half since not much of the male half paid any attention to Mrs. Ira Penn except for Mr. Ira Penn, who Daddy said was the sort of man who always knew what was good for him.
But Daddy said even after the pigeon fiasco had been officially declared an atrocity and played up as such in the newspaper, nothing much came of it except for an abundance of fiery talk directed mostly at Pinky but partially at Sheriff Browner for allowing him to run free, and throughout all of a Monday and part of a Tuesday the D.A.R. did manage to collect eighty-three names on a petition which requested that Braxton Porter Throckmorton III be made legally bound to purchase for the township of Neely one sizeable and undamaged flock of pigeons to be distributed throughout the municipal square and environs, but when it came Mrs. Nettles’s turn to make herself the eighty-fourth signee she left the petition untended on the eating table while she went after her spectacles, and Mr. Nettles, who Daddy said never quite ran on all four cylinders, started up a fire in the cookstove with it and nobody much bothered to draw up another one. So the petition business sort of piddled out and all variety of speculation on and discussion of pigeons died down some and Pinky and the bald Jeeter stayed close to home until the whole atrocity business could blow over, which it eventually did, Daddy said, with the help of a national convention of the D.A.R. in Nashville, Tennessee, what Daddy called a Dowager Jamboree, which so thoroughly distracted the members of the local chapter that they forgot all about the pigeon issue since packing for Nashville did not leave them much time to help sustain the outcry against those innumerable death knells, and so the outcry itself, Daddy said, left off reverberating entirely.
Pinky got off the hook, then, or anyway got pretty much shed of the pigeon fiasco once the whole local unit of the D.A.R. chartered out the First Baptist Church activity bus and headed west for the weekend, and when they returned to Neely all blue-blooded afresh and historically agitated anew, a trashcan full of poisoned pigeons did not seem such an atrocity anymore, and Daddy said not Mrs. Ira Penn nor Miss Joyce Tullock nor any single woman or group of women in or around Neely could appreciably rejuvenate in themselves, or in anybody else for that matter, even the slightest degree of the pigeon hubbub they’d all helped to stir up previously, so all organized opposition to Pinky Throckmorton’s pigeon fiasco fell off to nothing, or next to nothing anyway, and Daddy said it began to look like Pinky might recover after all and maybe even bluster once again, but anymore it was not just the bad feeling of the women he
had to overcome; the men of Neely had gone a little sour on him too. Now Daddy said if it had just been the women, Pinky would probably have been alright since women are generally opposed to swearing and drinking and pool playing and just about every other thing that makes life worth living, while, according to Daddy, men are generally in favor of them and so most regularly feel obliged to come out on the side of most everything that women come out against. And as far as Daddy knew, no self-respecting native gentleman had ever had a civilized word to say about the local flock of pigeons while they were alive and were not exactly shot through with remorse now that they were dead, so it wasn’t the pigeons that did Pinky in, it was just Pinky, and not even Pinky really, Daddy said, but only near ceaseless, interminable, never-ending, everpresent talk of Pinky from the women, which meant Pinky Throckmorton to digest over breakfast, during lunch and at the supper table, which meant the evening air all ripe with Pinky Throckmorton, which meant Pinky Throckmorton in the bedroom at night with the house dark after an entire day of Pinky Throckmorton with the sun in the sky and the lights burning. But of course it wasn’t just Pinky alone, Daddy said, since talk of Pinky naturally led to talk of Bubba and talk of Bubba led to talk of Poppa and talk of Poppa led to talk of the former Miss Fuller and her Momma and Daddy, the prophetess and the Latter Day Saint-Quaker, and her older sister who was still a Miss Fuller and so gave cause for some comment. And Daddy said once folks had followed the Throckmorton-Fuller line of descent until it narrowed down into a deer run and dead-ended in a thicket, they would light out in the other direction and theorize as to why the bald Jeeter was bald or why the fat Jeeter was fat or just generally wonder at the sorry state of the Jeeter chicken ranch which was going rapidly to pot since the Jeeters had only inherited chickens and so had not been raised to any understanding of them which, according to Daddy, is about as necessary as the henhouse itself. Consequently, what the men of Neely got fed up with did not have much of anything to do with pigeons or rat poison or any sort of atrocity that Pinky might have been the cause of. It was the women that objected to what Pinky did. As for the men, they just got wore out on hearing about it and hearing about Pinky and hearing about all of Pinky’s connections, and Daddy said the male portion of Neely had gone such an unreasonably long time with some manner of Throckmorton to digest at every meal that it got where even the sight of a Throckmorton or a Fuller or a Jeeter could set off a severe case of acid stomach in any number of people.
And that was about how things stood, Daddy said, when Pinky got his shirtsleeve in the way of Junious Pettigrew’s private functions, which he managed to do nearly a full year after he had successfully made himself what Daddy called atrocious and ubiquitous by means of an eight-pound bag of rat poison. Of course, Daddy said, by the time the monkey hosed off Pinky’s shirtsleeve by way of Mr. Chester Amos’s straw fedora, talk of Pinky had died down considerably, and it had probably been four or five months since the sight of a Throckmorton or any Throckmorton relation had inspired anything more than a little mild heartburn and certainly no fullblown indigestion. But Daddy said nobody much had left off being sour on Pinky, and so when the monkey emptied himself onto Pinky’s sleeve by way of the crown of Mr. Amos’s straw fedora most everybody was pleased and satisfied at the sight of Pinky hopping all around the sidewalk with his shirtsleeve between his fingers, everybody that is except for Mayor Pettigrew and Miss Myra Angelique, who were just before getting litigated, and maybe not the monkey either, who Daddy said was probably only relieved. And Daddy supposed even Pinky himself was pleased and satisfied since Throckmorton/Guilford Creamery had been his last official dose of jurisprudence and that had gotten itself all settled up before he could even begin to carry on about justice and mercy and the aroma of spoilt milk, so Daddy imagined prior to Pinky there had never been a man anywhere who got pissed on by a monkey and found it pleasing.
As for the mayor, Daddy said he did not much want matters to carry so far as the courthouse, and even after he’d offered to launder Pinky’s hosed-off shirt, to which Pinky said No sir, and even after he’d offered to buy Pinky a brand new unsprinkled shirt, to which Pinky said No sir also, the mayor went ahead and took a half a day to drive all the way to Greensboro on Pinky’s account where he bought for Pinky two very finely made white shirts with tapered tails and a striped blue and grey necktie that had a 1937 Plymouth worked into the design of it. But along about early evening when the mayor stopped off to see Pinky so as to give him the shirts and the necktie and attempt to settle up things before they got so far as Eden, he never saw anybody but the bald Jeeter and little Ivy Throckmorton since Pinky refused to come down out of the master bedroom and discuss a settlement and would not even consider one where he was. The bald Jeeter, of course, did not share Pinky’s passion for jurisprudence and did not hardly feel as comfortable behind the plaintiff’s table as Pinky did, and as for little Ivy the only thing she knew about Throckmortons was that she was one, so the two of them together were hardly as hot for a legal action as Pinky was, and little Ivy sat in the mayor’s lap while he took coffee and sugar cookies with the bald Jeeter and they all three tried to figure their way out of the litigation, though the mayor and the bald Jeeter did most of the talking since little Ivy knew slightly less about litigations than she did about Throckmortons.
The bald Jeeter told the mayor how all the monkey drippings had come clean out of Pinky’s shirtsleeve and the mayor asked her did that satisfy Pinky any, but the bald Jeeter said Pinky told her it wasn’t so much his shirt that had been pissed on—if the mayor would see clear to pardon her—but his dignity. And the mayor said that sounded awfully familiar to him. Then Daddy said the mayor asked the bald Jeeter if she thought maybe two new shirts and a silk necktie from Greensboro would settle Pinky down any, and the bald Jeeter certainly could not have thought so but said she did and the two boxes with the shirts in them and the box with the necktie in it went with her up the stairs and into the master bedroom but promptly came back down the steps by themselves and lay piled up in the foyer for a few minutes until the bald Jeeter arrived to pick them up and carry them on back into the parlor, where she told the mayor, “Pinky says thank you anyway.” So Daddy said the mayor asked her had Pinky gone to Eden yet and filed, and the bald Jeeter said yes he had. And the mayor asked her was it at all likely that Pinky might unfile, and the bald Jeeter said he’d die first.
Seeing how things stood, then, the mayor set about formulating some manner of defense for him and Sister’s monkey, or anyway he intended to formulate a variety of strategies and arguments, but being the accomplished piddler that he was, he let most all of the formulating go until the summons arrived directing him and Miss Myra Angelique and the Pettigrew chimpanzee to show themselves in the Eden courthouse on the morning of April the twenty-second, and consequently it struck home with the mayor that he’d best set about some genuine formulating and devising, Daddy called it, before it was too late. So on the evening of April the fifteenth the mayor sat down at the paymaster’s desk his daddy had bought for himself and scratched around in most all the nooks and drawers after a clean piece of paper which he found eventually but not until he’d come across a pile of old snapshots that had to be laboriously piddled through followed by a pair of letters to his momma from his Grandmomma Bennet, neither of which was entirely decipherable and so required what Daddy called perusal, and once he’d done with the snapshots and done with the letters and opened the drawer where the clean paper was he found beside the pile of it a steel cylinder that had previously been a piece of something else and owned up to several movable parts itself, including a spring down the shaft of it which more than anything set the mayor to fiddling with it and wondering at it and speculating over it. And Daddy said he still had not satisfied himself that he knew precisely what it was or even generally what it was when he managed to return it to the drawer and take up several sheets of paper instead. Then he had to find himself a pencil, Daddy said, but the search for it did not lead to much more than se
veral bobby pins and a postage stamp from Portugal since the mayor already knew where the pencils were before he ever started looking. So with the paper before him and the pencil in his hand the mayor set in to formulating and devising and he pondered his alternatives for a number of minutes before he finally licked the pencil point and wrote “April 22” in the top righthand corner of one of the sheets. Well, Daddy said that satisfied the mayor for a while and he passed a quarter hour cleaning out his ears with the eraser before licking the lead tip again and applying it and himself to near about the middle of the page, where he drew an automobile tire and then a fender above it and above that what started out to be a running light but turned into a poplar tree somewhere along the way. Beside the poplar tree he drew a dappled mare in profile and then another tree off its flank, what Daddy said looked most like some sort of hybrid maple—and next to the maple he drew a little pond for it to be on the bank of, and along the rest of the shoreline where the maple tree wasn’t he drew a variety of shrubbery and several clumps of cattails underneath a pair of which he sketched a very flattering likeness of Franklin Roosevelt from the necktie knot up. Then he left off drawing for a spell and with his incisors gnawed most every gnawable portion of the pencil shaft before licking the lead point again and setting it back to the paper, and he didn’t draw anything this time, Daddy said, but didn’t write anything either, at least not until he’d picked the pencil back up, licked the point yet again, and brought it to the paper once more. And Daddy said when the mayor had sufficiently adjusted his grip so that he was satisfied with it, he wrote all at once and in one extended burst of industriousness, “Good morning, your honor.” Then he marveled at what he had done, Daddy said, until he became a little drowsy, got up from the desk, and switched the lamp off.
A Short History of a Small Place Page 20