A Short History of a Small Place

by T. R. Pearson

  It was a sorrowful few days in Neely after Mr. Zeno passed away. Stierses converged on Lamont Street from all over the southeast and most everybody from one end of town to the other went around with Mr. Zeno’s virtues on their lips. Of course it was an exceedingly black time for chickens as well. Legions of them got fried and roasted while a considerable few showed up in pot pies and casseroles boiled off the bone. There was beef too and pork barbeque and potato salad and bean salad and macaroni salad along with at least a metric ton of sweetened iced tea and enough molded gelatin to fill a bathtub. According to Daddy by the time he got to the Stiers’s house, which was the evening following Mr. Zeno’s expiration, the buffet had overflowed off the kitchen and diningroom tables onto a bureau and two nightstands that had been especially imported for the occasion. And Daddy said once he had shaken hands with near about twenty Stierses he dished himself up an assortment of prepared poultry and was coming up fast on the cobblers and the pound cakes when he first noticed, with measurable awe and trepidation Daddy called it, that he was sharing the dining room with perhaps the largest collection of deviled egg plates ever assembled under one roof. Daddy says it was a somewhat sobering revelation to him. Here he was enjoying a bounteous meal at Mr. Zeno’s house while Mr. Zeno himself was off at the mortuary being siphoned. But Daddy says he simply decided that is the way things are on God’s earth—the dead get embalmed and the living get seconds.

  Now almost precisely two hours previous to Mr. Zeno’s passing there was another death in Neely. At approximately 12:48 p.m. on Sunday the fifth of May, 1976, Jack Vestal lost his Guinea pig, Artemus Gordon, following a brief illness. Jack and Artemus had been close ever since Jack’s ninth birthday in 1973 when his momma and daddy presented Artemus to him in a shoebox with holes in the top. Artemus Gordon had been one of your rarer breeds of Guinea pigs. He was white with brown spots and had little clumps of hair standing up all over his body like maybe he’d been reared in a wind tunnel. Jack always said he was smart as most people, but the only thing I ever saw him do was take in leafy lettuce and process it, mostly all over the bottom of his cage but every now and then underneath Mrs. Vestal’s naugahyde sofa, which was where he generally got off to whenever Jack turned him loose. It was on the morning of May the third, 1976, that Jack first noticed a decline in Artemus Gordon’s condition. His cowlicks had wilted in the night and he looked to Jack a little puny around the mouth, but when Jack called in his mother for a second opinion she said it was the humidity or maybe a combination of the humidity and the sour stomach so her and Jack pulverized one of Jack’s daddy’s Maalox tablets and fed it to Artemus Gordon in the furrow of a stalk of celery. But when Jack got home from school Artemus Gordon was so thoroughly unimproved that Jack called together his associates for a consultation, and Marcus Bowles and Bill Ed Myrick jr., who lived on either side of Jack, along with Laurence Ridley, who lived with his mother’s sister around the corner, all collected in Jack Vestal’s bedroom and observed the patient with some considerable gravity and attention. Almost straightaway Marcus Bowles decided it was the pink eye or anyway a peculiar strain of the pink eye with a little mange thrown in which Marcus said would account for the wilted cowlicks, but Jack resisted Marcus’s diagnosis and Bill Ed Myrick called him a dumb fuck and Laurence Ridley said it was certainly not the pink eye and was not the mange either but was instead a clearcut case of gonorrhea. But since Laurence Ridley had only heard of gonorrhea the day before from his cousin Denise, who was studying social diseases in health class, he could not come up with a convincing set of symptoms right away and so could not persuade Jack in the least and could not persuade Marcus, who was still campaigning for the pink eye although with noticeably diminished vigor, and could not even begin to persuade Bill Ed Myrick, who called him a dumb fuck and then reminded Marcus that he was a dumb fuck also. Bill Ed said it was not pink eye; he said pink eye was what cows get. And he said it was not gonorrhea; he said gonorrhea was what Miss Tamara Gayle Grantham gave to his uncle. He said it was not a disease at all but was instead a very obvious case of advanced old age. Bill Ed had read somewhere, he could not remember where exactly, that a Guinea pig ages thirty-seven years for every one year of its life on earth and so by simple calculations Bill Ed figured Artemus Gordon to be upwards of one hundred and eleven years old and he said he hoped he looked so good when he was one hundred and eleven. And though Jack hesitated for several minutes he presently called Bill Ed a dumb fuck, which inspired Marcus Bowles and Laurence Ridley to call him a dumb fuck also, and in the absence of any logical and medically sound alternative Jack ground up another Maalox tablet and gave it to Artemus Gordon in the furrow of a celery stalk.

  By midmorning of Saturday, May the fourth, Artemus Gordon appeared to be partially recovered in that a half dozen of his cowlicks had righted themselves in the night, and the prognosis remained hopeful and promising throughout most of the afternoon, during the course of which Artemus Gordon did away with two pieces of un-Maaloxed celery and went after a hunk of cabbage with uncharacteristic zest. But by suppertime he had unexpectedly declined into a crisis. He refused all manner of vegetables and began to look a little down in the cowlicks again like maybe he’d been dipped in Brylcream. 9:30 p.m. found him leaning against the bars of his cage with his little pink tongue dangling out of the side of his mouth and by 10:15 when Jack Vestal went to bed it did not appear that Artemus Gordon would be around to greet the morning. But somehow he managed to survive the night and though he was not particularly robust at breakfast time he was sufficiently enthusiastic to notch out the lettuce leaf Jack dropped in through the top of the cage.

  As was their custom, at 10:20 a.m. all four Vestals—Jack and his sister, Kimberly Ann, and his momma and daddy—walked downtown to the Baptist church for the eleven o’clock service. Along the way Jack contracted from his momma and daddy sacred and sworn promises to pray for his afflicted guinea pig while his sister, Kimberly Ann, who got all squeally in the presence of most any rodent and was very openly pulling for the affliction, remained noncommittal. But as Jack figured it, his momma and his sister would cancel each other out and leave him and his daddy to carry the day, which Jack would only have to assist in since his daddy was a church deacon and so had influence in this sort of thing. The Reverend Lynwood Wilkerson was suffering from a spring cold and he held up the service several times as he rolled the congestion up out of his throat and bent down behind the pulpit to spit it into a can. Consequently, the general prayer, which ever preceded the weekly tithing, did not get underway until twenty minutes to twelve and even then Reverend Wilkerson blessed one thing and praised another for an uncharacteristically long spell before he finally turned the floor over to the congregation, and as R.B. Jemison from his pew up front set in to wailing for the arthritis to give him some relief, Jack commenced to talk with God in a very low and humble whisper. He prayed that Artemus Gordon did not have the pink eye and he prayed that Artemus Gordon did not have gonorrhea and he prayed that Artemus Gordon was not one hundred and eleven years old. Then he looked sideways at his sister, Kimberly Ann, and saw that her mouth was still moving, so he prayed for Artemus Gordon all over again and finished up just as Mrs. Harold Cosgrove Benedict of the Draper Benedicts was demanding some special attention for her nephew’s wife’s child who had been born with three big toes.

  Unfortunately, however, all the low and humble whispering that Jack and his daddy could muster together was not enough to save Artemus Gordon, and the Vestals returned home from the service to find him curled up dead atop his notched out lettuce leaf. Of course Jack went mad with grief right off and threatened all grades of violence to Kimberly Ann, but his daddy prevailed upon him with a few threats of his own and thereby reduced Jack to a state of excessive lugubriousness which lingered through lunch and on into the afternoon. For a solid hour he sat by Artemus Gordon’s cage and poked at the carcass with the eraser end of a pencil on the outside chance that Artemus Gordon was not so thoroughly dead he couldn’t recover, b
ut at length Jack became convinced his guinea pig was in fact irreparably deceased and the realization did not sit well with him. He sobbed most piteously and stomped his feet, which brought his mother and Kimberly Ann in to comfort him, but he sent them away directly and commenced to throw a few of his possessions against the bedroom walls, which brought his daddy in to wallop the fire out of him. However, Mr. Vestal was touched by the grief of the moment and consequently treated Jack to one of his less severe wallopings after which he allowed himself to agree to the purchase of a new guinea pig and thereby took most of the edge off of Jack’s lugubriousness.

  But as Jack saw it, he hadn’t hardly collected his share of consolation and sympathy when Mrs. Pipkin’s sister-in-law, Mrs. Irene Price McKinney, called up his momma and told her of Mr. Zeno Stiers’s unfortunate demise, which was exceedingly fresh news at the time coming as it had from a hospital orderly through Mrs. McKinney and direct to Mrs. Vestal. But then news of most any demise, unfortunate or otherwise, generally does reach Mrs. Vestal in an exceedingly fresh state on account of her reputation. Mrs. Vestal is what Daddy likes to call a hearse chaser, and she’d think nothing whatsoever of driving an entire day to watch a corpse lie still. Not that she is a reprehensible or ghoulish woman; Daddy says she is no more reprehensible and ghoulish than the sorts of people who will leap up from the supper table and run headlong ten blocks down the street to see a house burn to the ground or watch people bleed after a wreck. It’s just that fire and carnage don’t hold much favor with Mrs. Vestal and instead she requires an unextraordinary and natural death to get her blood going. Generally speaking, Mrs. Vestal attends all gatherings and viewings and funerals and burial services in the honor of an acquaintance, no matter how marginal, and she attends all gatherings and viewings and funerals and burial services in the honor of a relative of an acquaintance, and she attends all gatherings and viewings and funerals and burial services in the honor of a neighbor of an acquaintance, and she attends all gatherings and viewings and funerals and burial services in the honor of an acquaintance of an acquaintance, and when she is hard pressed for exhilaration she attends the gatherings and viewings and funerals and burial services of people whose names indicate to her that they might possibly have been related to and/or did know someone Mrs. Vestal could herself have heard of at one time or another. Understandably Mrs. Vestal is a supremely harried woman, but no matter the great multitude of gatherings and viewings and funerals and burial services she attends from month to month and from year to year, she has never been known to allow a single casket to sink into the dark of the grave without a proper sendoff. Once the preacher wears himself out at the cemetery and gives whoever it is the high sign to switch on the electric chrome-plated casket lowering machine, Mrs. Vestal sets herself and at the first jolt of the belts cuts loose with some wild and genuine sobbing which perseveres until the casket settles onto the vault bottom after which she waves her arm over the open hole, manages to catch up enough breath to blubber, “Farewell, Brave Soul,” and then tosses a perfectly good linen handkerchief down onto the coffin lid. Anymore no respectable graveside service considers itself sanctified and suitably concluded without a personalized amen from Mrs. Vestal, and Daddy says for her part she is a most obliging woman, hardly the sort to let a corpse down. He says she is as reliable and regular as indigestion after breakfast. The bounteously sorrowful Mrs. Virginia Ann Crutchfield Vestal, Daddy calls her, friend to the dead.

  Now the Zeno Stiers expiration was especially invigorating for Mrs. Vestal on account of her attachments in the affair. She was very nearly acquainted with the immediate family, or anyway very nearly acquainted with the immediate widow, and she had in fact gotten her hair curled two chairs over from Mrs. Stiers on the very day Mr. Zeno was struck down with his authentic paroxysm. This seemed to Mrs. Vestal near about the same as a blood tie, so she jumped into a black dress quicker than you could say ashes to ashes and her and Mr. Vestal left the house at a canter. They stopped off briefly and picked up a bucket of chicken all white meat regular recipe, so as not to arrive empty handed, but even with the delay I do believe they had been sitting on the front steps for twenty minutes before Mrs. Stiers got home from the hospital. Of course Jack Vestal did not much appreciate his parents bolting off as they had and leaving him alone with his grief, and he was utterly alone with it since Kimberly Ann had thought it best to clear out once her momma and daddy did. So for company Jack called up Laurence Ridley and Marcus Bowles and Bill Ed Myrick, and they all came over to look at the corpse and each of them in turn determined it was certifiably and exceedingly lifeless. Then Bill Ed Myrick, who has a flair for this sort of thing, suggested they fix up Artemus Gordon with a properly glorious funeral service and they all agreed to it right off since none of them imagined a guinea pig could be flushed down a toilet with much of any success. Marcus and Laurence dug the hole in the far back corner of the Vestals’ lot next to the trash heap and Jack emptied out his mother’s Tupperware lettuce crisper for a coffin. Bill Ed kicked off the service with a truncated and semi-corrupted version of the Lord’s Prayer that somehow or another had become polluted and tangled up with various stray phrases from the Moravian Blessing. There were plans for a hymn, but the prospect was not greeted with much enthusiasm so instead Bill Ed turned to the text, which in this case was Mrs. Vestal’s copy of 101 of the World’s Best Loved Poems. He opened the book to a marked page and read at length selections from Miss Jean Ingelow’s “Mopsa the Fairy,” none of which had anything whatsoever to do with guinea pigs but seemed particularly consoling regardless. The reading was followed by a moment of silence, after which Bill Ed Myrick shook Jack’s hand in a frighteningly earnest sort of way and Marcus and Laurence raked the dirt back into the hole and stomped on it. Jack announced that Artemus Gordon had been a fine pet and Bill Ed and Marcus and Laurence agreed that he had been, and then all four of them went into the Vestals’ house and ate saltines in front of the t.v.

  Jack’s momma and daddy did not get home until well past 9:00 in the evening and six hours of uninterrupted grieving had left the both of them unduly irritable, so Jack did not tell his momma about the lettuce crisper right away and he did not tell her how Marcus Bowles spilt orange juice on the bathroom floor and for the moment he did not attempt to explain to her why the little glass Chinaman in the living room was missing all of his right elbow. Jack just sat at the kitchen table gnawing on a chicken thigh his momma had brought home to him in her pocketbook and listened to her and his daddy exchange examples of Mr. Zeno Stiers’s goodliness. And apparently Mr. Zeno Stiers had been an utterly goodly man because every few minutes Jack expected his mother to temper and besmirch the virtues some with an assortment of vices, as was her practice, but every few minutes he was disappointed with more pure goodliness. “Saintly,” his daddy said. “Yes indeed, truly saintly,” his momma said, and Jack sucked on his thighbone and ruminated over the destiny of a saintly man.

  He did not actually decide to dig up Artemus Gordon until the following afternoon, though he did consider it off and on throughout the night and tended towards it during the course of the school day, but he did not actually decide to dig up Artemus Gordon until after his mother had carried him down to Walgreen’s where she bought for him Mr. Singletary’s last guinea pig which was an albino of the uncowlicked variety. However, Jack could not bring himself to accept a white, uncowlicked guinea pig straightaway, what with his recent bereavement, and it took upwards of an hour and a half before he could get used to a pet whose hair did not stand up in clumps all over its body. But after he’d fed it several stalks of celery and a chunk of purple cabbage and after it had wet on him once, which Jack took to be a show of affection, he named it Napoleon Solo and finally decided outright he would dig up Artemus Gordon, finally concluded he could bring himself to give up Artemus Gordon’s earthly remains in the hope of securing a place of glory for Artemus Gordon’s everlasting soul. So Jack exhumed the lettuce crisper and removed Artemus Gordon from it and wrapped h
im in a handkerchief, and when his parents commenced to dress for the viewing at Commander Avery’s Heavenly Rest, Jack commenced to dress also which inspired Miss Kimberly Ann, who got all squealy around dead things, to slip into a frock herself since she did not want to be left at home alone. And at seven o’clock sharp all of the Vestals, except for the newest albino Vestal, left the house and took to the sidewalk two abreast on their way to the commander’s and in the company of one deceased guinea pig Vestal, shrouded in a handkerchief and hidden in a coatpocket, who was on his way to the streets of gold.

  Daddy says it was partly the fault of the commander himself though of course the commander has never assumed any degree of the blame for it, but Daddy insists that if the commander had not gone on so about his capacious caskets he would not have found himself with the rodent problem that he eventually found himself with. However, Daddy says the commander is the sort of man who believes it requires more than a rivet to get ahead in the mortuarial game, so he is ever taking to the airwaves of WNEQ—Radio Neely—to advertise his business and aside from the individual reposing rooms and the air-cooled sanctuary and the complete limousine service for the bereaved, the commander invariably includes an assurance of capacious caskets and in a very significant and prominent way as if it is his moral obligation to provide the deceased ample room to sit up on their elbows or play the violin. And Daddy says it was the capacious caskets part of it that stuck with Jack Vestal and worked in combination with Mr. Zeno Stiers’s unbesmirched virtue to give him an idea he would not have gotten otherwise. As Jack figured it, Mr. Stiers was unquestionably bound for glory while Artemus Gordon’s destination was a little less certain, so as long as Mr. Zeno was going to his reward anyway why not let Artemus Gordon occupy a guinea pig’s worth of capaciousness and go to Mr. Zeno’s reward along with him. Beatitude by association, Daddy called it.