“What Easter Party?” Daddy asked him.
“Why the one she gave back in 1972,” Mr, Newberry said.
“I don’t believe it was 1972, Russell,” Daddy told him.
“It was 1972,” Mrs. Newberry said, and crimped up half the Sears catalog in twisting herself around to look at Daddy, “but it was a Mayday party; didn’t have a thing in the world to do with Easter.”
“Mayday?” Mr. Newberry said.
“That’s right,” Mrs. Newberry told him.
“Well maybe it was,” Mr. Newberry said. “I don’t know.”
“Yes sir,” Daddy said, “maybe so.”
ii
They were all three wrong. It was July the fourth of 1970 and we got that from Momma who never forgets a date. She said Miss Pettigrew had not shown herself since the evening of the 1962 Methodist Christmas pageant and so had allowed near about seven years worth of holidays to come and go unobserved when Aunt Willa carried the shoebox full of envelopes across the boulevard and up the post office steps. Local history has it that the Neely postal department had never before and has never since moved any correspondence with the sort of breakneck expediency that Miss Pettigrew’s invitations inspired. Nobody even bothered to cancel the stamps, and the entire shoebox which Aunt Willa had given direct to Mr. Gillespie at the counter was in turn given direct to Mr. Eugene Ashburn, who had only recently come in from his appointed round and thereby happened to be handy enough to get made into a special courier. Mr. Ashburn was offered the use of a white jeep with a little special courier billboard on the roof, but six months previous Sherifi Burton had taken away Mr. Ashburn’s driving license on account of what Daddy called habitual vehicular stupidity, and Mr. Ashburn figured if he could not be vehicularly stupid in his own car he’d best not risk it in a government jeep. So Mr. Ashburn situated the shoebox full of invitations into the bottom of his leather mailbag and lit out from the post office with regular wingéd feet, Daddy said.
But according to Momma even wingéd feet could not outdistance the index finger, and before the second invitation hit the bottom of Mrs. Royce Venable’s mailbox, one of the Mrs. Petrees, Momma could not remember precisely which one, had Mrs. Royce Venable herself on the phone to tell her just what it was she was about to step out her front door and fetch in. And whichever particular Mrs. Petree this was read off her invitation item by item and so stole some of the thrill of it for Mrs. Venable, who fished out her invitation once she got off the line with Mrs. Petree but did not bother to open it until she had made a few calls herself. And Momma said Mrs. Petree and Mrs. Venable together with their furious index fingers thoroughly passed up Mr. Ashburn, notwithstanding his temporary wingédness Daddy called it, and successfully prevented him from putting any more invitations into any more mailboxes. Instead the addressees intercepted him before he could get well off the sidewalk and took the deliveries directly into their hands, everybody that is except Mrs. Phillip J. King, who had miscalculated the progress of Mr. Ashburn since his feet were not usually winged at all. Mrs. Phillip J. King figured Mr. Ashburn was still on Lawsonville Avenue when in actuality he had mercuriated himself partway down our street, Daddy said, so Mrs. Phillip J. King was preoccupied in exercising the phone dial when Mr. Ashburn dropped her invitation in through the mail slot and Itty Bit snatched it up off the carpet and very nearly chewed it to pieces. Soon afterwards me and Momma stood at the breakfast room window and watched Mrs. Phillip J. King and her terrier compete in a footrace around the perimeters of the King’s back yard. I do believe the dog won in the end, but it was a hotly contested event nonetheless.
Apparently Miss Pettigrew had not taken up a pen for some considerable years when she set about making out invitations to her July the fourth party of 1970, and even Momma was somewhat distressed by Miss Pettigrew’s penmanship. She had hoped for something a little more graceful and proper and for a time she seemed inclined to hold with Mrs. Estelle Singletary and Mrs. Treva Jane Boyd McKinney, of the block and mortar McKinneys, who insisted that Aunt Willa had filled out and addressed the invitations and so was responsible for the scrawl. But all of the available evidence, including testimony by several esteemed witnesses, indicated that Aunt Willa had never learned to write and could not read either. So eventually Momma had to bring herself to accept the fact that there were just some things about Miss Pettigrew that were not utterly elegant, and when she had grown accustomed to the idea, Momma decided that penmanship was certainly an expendable item.
On the front of each of Miss Pettigrew’s invitations was a big red firecracker just prior to blowing up, and on the inside spelled out in sparklers was LET’S HAVE A PARTY! which seemed to me about as elegant as the penmanship, but Momma did not allow it to strike a nerve with her, probably on account of her previous disappointment and probably on account of how Miss Pettigrew did not persist in calling it a capitalized, exclamation-marked, sparkler-spelled party herself but called it instead a “get together” which seemed to Momma a far more agreeable and civilized sort of thing. Miss Pettigrew’s get together was to commence at three o’clock on the afternoon of the fourth of July and proceed on to six in the evening with “refreshments provided.” Suggested dress was given as “leisurely” and on the line marked “Location” Miss Pettigrew had taken some obvious care in writing out her address as if she actually needed to. And at the very bottom of the card, behind the firecracker and underneath the sparklers and down below all of the pertinent information, and in thick, clumsy, headlong letters Miss Pettigrew had written “Please do come” which most everybody rubbed their eyes and looked at twice before they even began to speculate as to why it was there.
But of course the speculation did commence eventually, and once folks had done some extensive wondering about the “Please do come” they shifted over and began to wonder about most everything else also. Daddy said he had never before encountered a piece of greeting card literature that was open to such widespread and varied interpretation. At length people generally agreed that the “Please do come” did in fact mean please do come, but the unity broke down entirely when it came to “get together.” Nobody much had ever attended a get together before so nobody much was familiar with the genuine characteristics and qualities of a get together as a phenomenon, Daddy called it. Now several people had attended what they considered to be get together-like functions, but even the handful of them could not agree as to exactly what constituted a get together since no one of their get together-like functions had been like any of the others. Mrs. Mary Margaret Vance Needham had attended her get together in a hay barn in Rutherford County where all of the get togetherees had eaten barbecue and square danced, while Mr. Wyatt Benbow, sole surviving Benbow of the Big Apple Benbows, had attended his get together on a tour boat in the Cape Fear River off Wilmington. He recalled that drinks were served and he recollected food also, but to the best of his memory the mosquitoes had done most of the eating. One of the Mrs. Browns, Daddy said it was the one that lived on the ninth fairway but Momma insisted it was not, had gone with her husband to a Christmas get together at a Moose Lodge east of Greensboro and she held forth that a get together was nothing but a party with a holiday to back it up. However Mrs. Phillip J. King disagreed with her most harshly and told everybody how she herself had attended an authentic get together in our nation’s capital during the course of which she had been personally introduced to the sister-in-law of President Johnson’s daughter. The women, Mrs. Phillip J. King said, wore stunning gowns, the men wore dinner jackets, and everybody ate off crystal plates. And it seemed very apparent to Mrs. Phillip J. King that this was just the sort of thing to which Miss Pettigrew would be accustomed, and in fact Mrs. Phillip J. King was successful in convincing a portion of people that this was exactly the sort of thing to which Miss Pettigrew would be accustomed, but Daddy said fortunately it was only that portion of people who were as foolish as Mrs. Phillip J. King was which did not make for any sizeable number of converts.
As a group, th
en, folks did not ever exactly puzzle out just what a get together was and instead they turned their attention to the pertinent information so as to haggle about it for awhile. First there was the problem of leisurely dress. Daddy said to him leisurely meant just one thing: green polyester. But that was only one man’s view of it, and folks generally felt that their leisurely and Miss Pettigrew’s leisurely could not carry anything near the same meaning. So some of the people who had spearheaded the movement to describe a get together set about developing a workable definition of Miss Pettigrew’s leisurely, and after several extensive discussions and any number of unofficial and thoroughly unscientific opinion polls, it was concluded that Miss Pettigrew’s leisurely was the same thing as everybody else’s semi-formal, which was a very agreeable finding as far as the women were concerned but the men did not much relish the prospect of wearing coats and ties on the afternoon of the fourth of July and they all objected to it with as much of an unpleasant uproar as they could muster, most all of them anyway except for Mr. Phillip J. King and Mr. Estelle Singletary who had been broken of their spunk previously and so did not make much fuss.
As a diversion from the coats and ties, the women proceeded to focus attention on the “refreshments provided” which was the sort of thing that would naturally lend itself to extensive speculation. Loosely, there were three separate and distinct camps on the refreshment issue and the largest of them was jointly headed up by Mrs. Phillip J. King and Mrs. Estelle Singletary and Mrs. Estelle Singletary’s old maid sister, Miss Bernice Fay Frazier. These women along with all of their supporters backed the notion that since Miss Pettigrew’s leisurely was the same thing as everybody else’s semi-formal then it would follow that Miss Pettigrew’s refreshments provided would probably be the same thing as everybody else’s sit-down meal. Now there was some dissent and disagreement as to exactly what sort of sit-down meal it might be—Mrs. Phillip J. King held with a late dinner served on crystal while Miss Frazier and Mrs. Estelle Singletary were more inclined towards an early supper on stoneware but otherwise they were all thoroughly unified and solid. Momma took the moderate position that Miss Pettigrew would probably offer up a mixed buffet of meats and vegetables and cheeses and fruits and desserts complemented by some sort of lightly alcoholic punch cooler and she believed the whole affair would be pretty much like a wedding reception without the wedding. And as for Daddy, he lent his support to a very small, undignified, and almost entirely indifferent group of people who figured on peanuts and pretzels and potato chips and possibly a tray of pigs in a blanket with Pepsi-Cola on ice for a chaser.
Of course the refreshments provided part of the invitation ultimately did not get any more clarified than the get together part of it, and after nearly everybody had worn themselves out interpreting and speculating and soliloquizing on the two of them, the general interest temporarily got shifted over to the arrival and departure times which seemed clear and decisive enough to most people but spurred some discussion anyway when the sit-down meal society began to insist that three o’clock until six o’clock meant in actuality four o’clock until seven o’clock. Daddy said it was a kind of daylight savings time for the upper crust, but not Mrs. Phillip J. King or Mrs. Estelle Singletary or her old maid sister Miss Frazier either could convince much of anybody of the virtue in arriving at four o’clock since most people figured the best of the food would be gone by then. So the discussion migrated to about the only thing left it could migrate to which was very obviously Miss Pettigrew’s reason for throwing a get together in the first place. People were naturally curious as to why a woman who had not sought public company since Christmas of 1962 would suddenly, come July of 1970, up and invite half the town into her own house and offer to feed them on top of it. This was, on the whole, a matter of exceeding bafflement and most everybody expended some considerable energy in wondering at it. Of course right off a general alarm was raised by the sorts of people that tend to raise general alarms, and it was suggested around town that perhaps Miss Pettigrew no longer possessed the faculties to be entrusted with the preparation of safe and digestible food, that perhaps Aunt Willa had put her up to the party and intended to do some mischief to a whole bunch of white people at once, which some folks said was the way with negroes, who are a very wily breed, especially on the fourth of July. And a few people even insisted that the monkey had a part in it since monkeys are notoriously wily themselves. But the general alarm died off fairly quickly and Daddy says it is simply the sort of thing you have to expect when you share your city with ignoramuses. And once the notion of poisoning was dispensed with, some people took up with the idea that Miss Pettigrew had only lost a little of her senses while other people began to believe she had regained about as much, and then there was Momma, who thought something altogether different. So there were nearly as many opinions of Miss Pettigrew’s motives as there were readings of Miss Pettigrew’s firecracker-decked, sparkler-laden invitations, and only in their response on the afternoon of July the fourth 1970 did people show themselves to be generally and completely agreed about one thing since everybody who got invited went.
Of course Miss Pettigrew’s party being a get together, it was not considered the sort of thing suitable for children so only Mr. and Mrs. Cromer brought their little girl, Sally Anne, since at the time she was about the size of a breadloaf and could not get along on her own. The rest of us collected at the Franklin Street schoolyard, where four Y.M.C.A. volunteers attempted to do us some damage with a series of coordinated activities, and we had already suffered through the wheel-barrow race and the watermelon relay when time came for the greased pig chase. Now the previous July Mr. Tadlock had lent the Y.M.C.A. four of his pigs to be larded up and hounded all over the schoolyard and on up into June of 1970 the folks at the Y figured they would simply borrow Mr. Tadlock’s pigs again. But just prior to Independence Day when they finally bothered to get in touch with him, Mr. Tadlock told them he had made his pigs into some considerable sausage and sidemeat and shank hams which he believed had taken most of the pluck out of them. So on short notice the best the Y.M.C.A. volunteers could do was two piglets the size of housecats from Mr. Harland Lynch III and three of Mr. J. L. Graham’s Rhode Island hens. Mr. Harland Lynch himself, along with the only one of the volunteers who did not have any natural fear of barnyard animals, saw to the greasing of the pigs, and it was decided by Mr. J. L. Graham and the three remaining volunteers that the chickens were vicious already and so did not require any assistance from the lard bucket to be slippery also.
The animals were turned out for a five minute head start on the crowd of us, but since they did not know what we were about to put them through they did not go hardly anywhere in their five minutes and still were fairly much underfoot when we got the signal to have at them. But it didn’t take long for the piglets and the chickens too to come to a thorough understanding of their predicament, and almost before the first two or three of us could manage any sort of proper lunges at them the chickens took off in one direction and the piglets lit out in another. Naturally we broke up into two units and the piglet pursuit squad drove their quarry on down towards the far corner of the schoolyard while the rest of us chased all three of the chickens up into the top of a crabapple tree. Of course crabapple trees are generally dense and brambly and difficult to climb and the one in the Franklin Street schoolyard is near about the same thing as an upright thicket, so we decided to send Trudy Tally up into it after the chickens since at the time she was far and away the slightest and wispiest Tally available. And all of her slight wispiness and wispy slightness together enabled her to slip up through the limbs to where the chickens were, but slightness and wispiness even in concentrated combination are not in the leastways sufficient to dislodge terrorized chickens from the top of a crabapple tree, and every time Trudy Tally took a swat at the birds they would all three peck and claw at her in a most fierce and savage sort of way. Understandably we figured that a slight and wispy male would probably be more effective than a
slight and wispy female, so we selected from our unit a couple of scrawny boys, though by no means as scrawny as a Tally, and lifted them up into the crabapple tree. But even when Trudy Tally and the two scrawny boys pooled their energies the chickens still got the best of them, so we sent two regular-sized people up as reinforcements but the chickens brutalized them as well, and shortly afterwards there was a general evacuation from the crabapple tree of everything that was not a chicken, and once we had pondered over the input from Trudy Tally and from the two scrawny boys and from the pair of regular-sized people also, we decided as a unit that we’d just as soon chase Egyptian cobras as Rhode Island hens.
Naturally we abandoned the chickens and struck out after the piglets, which looked to be hemmed up in the corner of the schoolyard. But when we arrived at the scene the only thing left in the corner of the schoolyard was the piglet pursuit unit with no readily perceptible piglets to pursue. Instead some considerable attention was being paid to a square of chickenwire patching at the bottom of the chainlink fence that runs entirely roundabout the school property. Directly in the center of the chickenwire was a very round, cleanly made hole which a sizeable number of witnesses claimed to be a miraculous product of piglet engineering. They said they drove the pigs into the corner and once they had begun to close in on them the pigs themselves grew somewhat wild and desperate looking and seemed a little frothy on account of the lard, and when they could not find an alternate means of escape the larger of the two got a running start at the chickenwire and hurled himself straight through it like a little pork bullet. The second one slipped on through behind him and the last anybody saw of them they were rooting around in the jonquil patch back of Mr. Dupree’s house. So we formed ourselves into several distinct squads and fanned out across the neighborhood squealing in what we imagined to be a most appealing way.
A Short History of a Small Place Page 39