A Short History of a Small Place

by T. R. Pearson

  Of course it was the thirty-eight verses of “The Old Rugged Cross” after Reverend Hamilton’s twenty-minute three-minute prayer, and Momma made me look at the hymnal but Daddy and Mr. Phillip J. King simply stood with their hands clasped in front of them and sang the melody like they were chewing on slabs of tire rubber. Momma sang pleasantly herself and I vainly tried to find a key I could stick with while Mrs. Phillip J. King overrode all of us, even Daddy, with her rhythmic screeching that had all of the pitch and tonality of a lawn rake on a slate blackboard. And I don’t imagine we had gotten through even twenty-eight verses when most of the congregation became fagged out and winded and left off singing, and after another verse or two the choir got a little worn out itself and gave up the melody to Mrs. Rollie Cobb who persevered on through the refrain and then tacked on a hasty Amen and dropped her arms to her sides so the blood could circulate through her fingers once more. And by the time Mr. Ames Gatewood stood up to indicate to us that we should sit down, we already had our backsides about as flush against the pew seats as they could get and sneezing and coughing and noseblowing and general uneasiness was rampant throughout the sanctuary.

  Town councilman Mr. Jeffrey Elwood Crawford sr. took the pulpit once he considered that we had settled back into a proper funereal demeanor, and he removed a notecard from his inside jacket pocket and set it down in front of him where he glanced at it two or three times in a skittish sort of way and then studied the frontside, the backside, and the edges also with some acute interest. And when he was satisfied with his grasp of the situation, he returned the card to his inside jacket pocket and announced to us exactly who it was that had died, which was not the sort of news we were any longer receiving with much graciousness. But as it turned out Mr. Crawford’s purpose was twofold, and once he came to understand that we already knew exactly who it was that had died, he proceeded on to the introduction of the eulogists, who were sitting on opposite ends of the altar since they were both still suffering from what Daddy called the ranklement of the heated eulogy debate. Mr. Crawford started off with the Reverend Mr. Holroyd who was about twice as old as Reverend Shelton and who Mr. Crawford told us had aged with all the grace and dignity befitting his most esteemed position. A pillar of our community, Mr. Crawford called him, a picture of spiritual well-being, and then he swung around and with an open hand directed our attention to the reverend himself, who was sitting a little slumped over in a folding chair with his hair standing more or less straight up all over his head. The reverend jerked his nose at us and grunted; he was thoroughly creased, wrinkled, liver-spotted, was inestimably wealthy with chins, and appeared to have aged about as gracefully as a winesap apple. Daddy has always contended that if the preaching business ever went bust, the Reverend Holroyd could take up residence under a bridge and earn his living as a troll.

  After Mr. Crawford figured we’d soaked in enough of the Reverend Holroyd’s spiritual well-being for the moment, he turned his attention full upon the Reverend Mr. Richard Crockett Shelton who was sitting on the far side of the aisle a little sideways in his chair and with his arm thrown over the back of it. Somehow or another the Reverend Shelton had managed to recover from the 1962 Christmas Pageant fiasco, and once he put the shame and humiliation of it behind him he gradually regained his confidence and commenced to improve on his pulpit manner. According to Daddy, the Reverend Shelton had started out as a snoremonger extraordinaire but through several years of hard work and undying dedication had managed to cultivate a kind of flamboyant tediousness which the most of his congregation mistook for ecclesiastical charm, including Momma, who was ever having the reverend over for dinner so as to bring Daddy in contact with some genuine Godliness. But the Godliness never seemed to take with Daddy and he just said the Reverend Shelton had a way of making food taste sleepy. But Mr. Crawford did not touch upon that particular talent and instead told us that the Reverend Shelton was a local bastion of virtue and an unfaltering inspiration to his flock, which Daddy said was notecard talk for pillar of the community and picture of spiritual well-being. And when Mr. Crawford swung around and directed our attention to the reverend himself, Mr. Richard Crockett Shelton bowed towards us without getting up.

  The Reverend Mr. Holroyd kicked off the double-barrel eulogy partly on account of his religious seniority and partly, Daddy said, on account of the ever present danger that the reverend might join Miss Pettigrew straightaway. He did not have a notecard or a Bible of his own and not a scrap of paper or a matchbook cover to refer to either, but after he took the pulpit and leered at us for a spell it did not appear that the reverend had anything to say which fairly much excused his empty-handedness. So we looked at him and he looked at us and then some of us looked at him and some of us looked at Miss Pettigrew’s casket while he looked at us and then he looked at Miss Pettigrew’s casket and so drew some more of us to look at it also and then he cleared his throat and we all looked at him except for Daddy who looked at Momma out of the side of his face. And still the reverend did not say anything but gazed all up in the rafters like he had payed a quarter and was taking the tour, and when he finally did open his mouth and speak to us he did not utter a word we had expected to hear. “I once danced with that woman,” he told us. “I do recall it very clearly. It was after Mr. Wallace Amory got elected mayor and him and Miss Myra Angelique put on the ball themselves in their daddy’s house. There was a little ensemble playing in one corner of the front room and along the back wall there was a champagne fountain and a buffet with fruits and cheeses and finger sandwiches and a great big meaty smoked salmon that still had the head on it. Miss Pettigrew had decorated the walls and the ceiling with crepe, red crepe and yellow crepe and blue crepe, and banners made out of bedsheets and balloons and ribbons and sprigs off juniper bushes. But you remember,” the Reverend Mr. Holroyd told us and looked out over the congregation for the first time since he had begun to speak. “Most of you were there so you must remember. I mean it was all so glorious and splendid, and her, why she was simply beautiful. Beautiful. And in my profession I don’t get much occasion to dance with beautiful women, but I danced with her. I said to her, ‘Miss Pettigrew, would you consider going round the floor with a man of the cloth?’ and she told me, ‘How divine.’ She touched me right on the forearm and told me, ‘How divine,’ and then she put me down on her card. I was number eleven and came just after Mr. Emory Hobson. Isn’t that right, Emory?”

  And directly Mr. Hobson himself, from somewhere up in the front of the chapel that I couldn’t see, answered the Reverend Mr. Holroyd in a very high, antique voice that creaked like shoeleather. “Yes sir,” he said, “That’s right.”

  “You had hair then, Emory,” the reverend told him.

  “Yes sir,” Mr. Hobson said, “and teeth too.”

  “And you near about frazzled her out for me Emory,” the reverend told him.

  “Yes sir,” Mr. Hobson said. “As best I could.”

  “But as I recall, she was a woman of exceptional wind,” the reverend said, talking to all of us again, “and I do believe the ensemble had not hardly commenced to sawing away good when me and Miss Pettigrew shot past the buffet table and by the doorway and twirled on down the length of the far wall. Seems to me it was a waltz, a very famous waltz, and time was I could call the name of it but,” and the reverend squinted up into the recesses of the commander’s semi-vaulted ceiling, “it don’t seem to come to me just now. I do, however, very clearly recollect the way Miss Pettigrew went round the ballroom. She had the lightest touch with her fingers and on her feet why she was air itself, even made me feel like I could dance a little. And I do remember how we spun on by Mr. Wallace Amory who was pressed in all around by a great gaggle of women, and I leaned over and said into Miss Pettigrew’s ear how I believed Mr. Wallace Amory was surely qualified enough to be the mayor and was probably pretty enough to be the mayor’s wife, and she just laid her head back and laughed ever so softly.” And the Reverend Mr. Holroyd laughed a little softly himself w
ith the most of the congregation chuckling some behind him, and for a very brief moment thereafter it did appear to me that the reverend was in fact the picture of spiritual well-being, but then he peered out overtop of our heads and into the back reaches of the sanctuary and presently he was thoroughly creased and wrinkled and liver-spotted and chin-ridden all over again. “But that was quite a long time ago,” he told us, “and the mayor’s gone and now she’s gone too. Dead,” he said, “dead and gone.” And I guess we all supposed the Reverend Mr. Holroyd might be setting us up for a sermonette on suicide and damnation, at least that is what I expected to get and, by the grim look on Daddy’s face, that is what he expected to get also. But instead the Reverend Mr. Holroyd did a most extraordinary thing: he left the pulpit, went back to his chair, and sat down in it. Of course we all watched him do it, and of course we all persisted in watching him after he had done it, especially Sheriff Burton who had the seat next to the reverend’s and who turned his head sideways and studied Mr. Holroyd like he’d just washed in with the tide. And as for the Reverend Mr. Holroyd himself, he looked at Miss Pettigrew’s casket and then looked at the floor beside him and then he looked at Miss Pettigrew’s casket again and then at the floor beside him once more and then he crossed his arms over his chest and smiled at the carpet.

  Nobody much seemed to know what to do, not anybody in the congregation including the commander, and not the sheriff, and not the councilman Mr. Jeffrey Elwood Crawford sr., and not Mr. Ames Gatewood of the Reading Rack, and not Mrs. Rollie Cobb or her hair either, and not Miss Fay Dull or any of her sopranos or altos or baritones or her Jewish tenor, and not the Reverend Lynwood Wilkerson of the Baptist church, and not the Reverend W.B. Red Hamilton of the Gospel Light Chapel, which left only the Methodist Preacher Mr. Richard Crockett Shelton who possessed a natural instinct for empty pulpits and so leapt directly up into this one. I don’t remember what he said at first and I don’t remember much of what he said eventually but I am reasonably certain somewhere or another he took the time to remind us just who it was that had died. I also recall that he had gone to the trouble to set down his half of the eulogy on a heap of folded yellow paper which he produced almost magically from the inside of his robe and then proceeded to read from although he pretended that he wasn’t. And I do believe the Reverend Shelton quoted extensively from the works of Mr. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who apparently could keep a beat a little more truly than the reverend could. However, I do not recollect much of what Mr. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had to say either, and only later on at the supper table when Momma was trying to convince me and Daddy that we had been interested in what we had been numbed by did Daddy remind me of one of the reverend’s more colorful and enlightening utterances. Life, he had said, is like a butterfly and death is God’s insecticide that carries strong and meek alike off into everlasting light. I think even Momma was a little embarrassed and she did not offer much of any objection when Daddy associated Reverend Shelton with the Red Hamilton school of eulogization and prayer.

  And although there was in fact an interesting moment in the Reverend Shelton’s half of the double-barrel eulogy it cannot be accurately attributed to the Reverend Shelton himself who was simply carrying on through with his tediousness when the Reverend Holroyd uncrossed his arms, jacked himself straight up in his seat, and said, “The Tennessee Four Step, that’s what it was,” and then recrossed his arms and allowed gravity to draw him back into a slouch. After that I don’t believe Reverend Shelton was ever able to recover himself entirely and it seemed he became all lost and confused in his heap of yellow paper and not him or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow or even the two of them all at once and together could straighten things out. So the Reverend Shelton left off his eulogizing a little prematurely and where he had planned to conclude with a smattering of Tennyson, who Daddy said was a lot like Longfellow only taller, instead he blessed and amened Miss Pettigrew and her brass fittings and then abandoned the pulpit.

  Unfortunately, Mrs. Rollie Cobb was still waiting for the Tennyson several minutes after Reverend Shelton had already sat down and only when the commander had cleared his throat raw did she commence to hammering out on the piano what initially sounded like the “Maple Leaf Rag” but turned into “How Great Thou Art” once Mrs. Cobb got the reins on it. The choir sang this one by themselves and it was intended as their recessional, but since they had not proceeded extensively they did not have much territory to recede across and so were already entirely outside with near about three full verses to go, and as it did not seem that Mrs. Cobb was disposed to leave off playing, Miss Fay Dull turned around her sopranos and her altos and her baritones and her Jewish tenor and they polished off the selection from down along the street. And that was to have been pretty much the end of it except for the rolling out of the casket; however, once Mr. Ames Gatewood had indicated us upright and once Mr. Dunn from Spray and the commander himself had commenced to roll Miss Pettigrew down the center aisle towards the chapel doors, the Reverend Mr. W.B. Red Hamilton found himself so utterly overcome by the immediate circumstances that he set in to delivering an impromptu benediction which had some English to it but was mostly in Swahili as far as Daddy could tell, and the Reverend Mr. W.B. Red Hamilton stomped and waved his arms and generally cut up like an African until the commander could nod at Mr. Jeffrey Elwood Crawford sr., who nudged Sheriff Burton, who took ahold of Reverend Red with both hands and moved him a little more violently than the spirit had. So at length the commander and Mr. Dunn managed to get Miss Pettigrew all the way out the church and down the sidewalk and slid her into the back of the hearse, and then the commander returned to the chapel alone and advanced up to the family pew where he stood aside to excuse the occupants who we had not been able to see previously and who turned out to be Aunt Willa and Aunt Willa’s sister and Aunt Willa’s sister’s daughter along with Mr. Jack Vestal and his wife who had redoubled her efforts at funerals ever since she gave up viewings and so appeared particularly overwrought and inconsolable, and I do believe it was all Mrs. Phillip J. King could do to keep from spitting on her as she walked by.

  And that was the end of the funeral part of it but before Momma could get together with Mrs. Phillip J. King and discuss how we would get to the burial part of it, Mrs. Phillip J. King grabbed onto her husband’s arm and lit out down the center aisle and on through the chapel doors, and Momma was not able to find her again until her and me and Daddy got outside and she happened to glance into the family limousine, which was thoroughly loaded up with three negroes and two Vestals in the back seat and Mr. Dunn and Mr. and Mrs. Phillip J. King in the front seat. So Momma turned things entirely over to Daddy and presently Daddy got up with Mr. Russell Newberry and with his wife, Mrs. Coleen Ruth Hoots Newberry, who was known as Little Momma on account of how she only came up to Mr. Newberry’s armpit which was not itself at any lofty height. Mr. and Mrs. Newberry had come to the service in their green Pontiac and they were both most pleased at the prospect of passengers to the cemetery. Of course Mr. Newberry’s glaucoma kept him from driving and Little Momma had to sit on two sofa cushions and a Sears catalog just to get the point of her nose up overtop the steering wheel. Consequently Mrs. Newberry and Mr. Newberry too were always appreciative of any outside navigational advice since they themselves were somewhat afflicted and since their green Pontiac, with all of its sheer bulk and magnitude, was about the size of a modest cabin cruiser.

  So me and Momma and Daddy climbed into the back seat and me and Momma took the windows and Daddy crossed his arms over the front seattop and talked Little Momma away from the curb. We got into the processional four cars back from the hearse which meant three cars back from the limousine which meant two cars back from the hardware store Eatons which meant one car back from an assortment of Oregon Hill Frenches and directly in front of the bald Jeeter Throckmorton and her daughter, little Ivy, with Mrs. and Mr. Estelle Singletary at their rear. And once Daddy had navigated Mrs. Newberry out onto the boulevard and had set her to ta
ilgating the Frenches the tension gave way somewhat and Mr. Newberry leaned his back against the doorpanel and asked Daddy his opinion of the church service which apparently Daddy had anticipated since he answered straightaway that, as far as he was concerned, it was a good thing Miss Pettigrew was already dead. I believe Momma punched Daddy in the ribcage shortly thereafter though I’m not to any degree certain of it; however I do know that Mrs. Newberry reached across the frontseat and slapped at Mr. Newberry when he laughed through his teeth. Then her and Momma together came to the defense of the Reverend Hamilton and the Reverend Holroyd and the Reverend Shelton and they came to the defense of Mr. Ames Gatewood and Mr. Jeffrey Elwood Crawford sr. and they came to the defense of Miss Fay Dull and Miss Fay Dull’s interdenominational choir and they attempted to come to the defense of Mrs. Rollie Cobb also but Mrs. Rollie Cobb and her piano playing turned out to be fairly much indefensible. And on account of the way Little Momma kept wheeling around in her seat when she should have been intent on tailgating Frenches, Daddy and Mr. Newberry decided to leave off antagonizing the women for fear of their personal safety and as a change of pace Mr. Newberry said, “I do wish the casket had been opened up. I don’t believe I’ve seen Miss Pettigrew since she gave that Easter party back in 1972.”