A Short History of a Small Place

by T. R. Pearson

  Peahead said the trouble had started on the day previous when he had taken the afternoon off to do some fishing. Now Peahead worked on the dock at the cigarette plant unloading hogsheads and usually when he took time off him and Willis Beeson and either Jimmy Pitts or his brother Sleepy would all ride in Willis’s truck down 29 south to the Haw River after catfish. According to Daddy, there are any number of decent and sporting ways to catch catfish. You can angle for them with a legitimate rod and reel or you can run a trot line across the river or set bank hooks or even wade out in the water and wrestle with them, but Daddy said Peahead and Willis Beeson and Jimmy Pitts and his brother Sleepy both were not the sort to be much interested in the ethics of fishing, so whenever they went down to the Haw River they got their catfish the easiest way they knew how which was to telephone for them.

  It was Peahead’s phonebox, or anyway it was the handcranked dynamo out of Peahead’s Momma’s phonebox, and Peahead had customized it somewhat with fifteen feet of additional insulated wire hooked into each of the two terminals, which Peahead figured was enough to reach to the bottom of any river he could get to. All you did was throw the wires in the water and let them sink down to the river bed where the catfish would be and then you set in to cranking the dynamo and thereby made things a little hot for the marine life. However, according to Peahead the charge didn’t damage much of anything except for the catfish and it went in through their whiskers and near about electrocuted them, but Peahead insisted that telephoning was in no way as harmful as fishing with dynamite which tended to bring everything that was under up, and Peahead found some considerable sport and challenge in corraling all the catfish once they floated to the surface. But nonetheless Daddy said he did not believe it was the sort of thing you’d ever see Kurt Gowdy do on t.v.

  Now on the afternoon of July the third Peahead and Willis Beeson and Sleepy Pitts took Willis’s truck down 29 to the river and then east to a trestle crossing where the local folks tended to dump their garbage down the banks and directly into the water which made for a catfish paradise. Peahead had a little rubber boat about the size of a bathtub, and he said when Willis and Sleepy finished blowing it up he got in it with the phonebox and paddled out around the pilings, where he commenced to charge up the water. Then he crisscrossed underneath the trestle cranking and paddling and cranking and paddling and cranking some more, and Peahead said soon enough the catfish were coming up like corks all over the place and most every one of them as big around as a man’s thigh. So Peahead called for Sleepy Pitts to toss out the hook which was a three-pronged floated gaffer on forty feet of clothesline and Sleepy Pitts flung it a good dozen yards ahead of the boat where Peahead could paddle up to it and hook it into a fish. Then Sleepy Pitts would draw it in to Willis Beeson, who would take the fish by the tail, knock it on the head for good measure, and free the hook so Sleepy Pitts could send it back out into the river again. Peahead said they had found this a very fine and reliable system for gathering in their catfish and generally, according to Peahead, there was nobody better than a Pitts for flinging the hook. He said Jimmy and Sleepy both could usually lay the clothesline across whatever fish they were after and fairly much draw the gaff into him on their own. So Peahead was not expecting Sleepy Pitts to do what he did but then Sleepy Pitts was not expecting a train to come when it came. Peahead said Sleepy Pitts had the gaff going round above his head and appeared just prior to releasing it when the front end of the engine broke clear of the treeline and hit the trestle with the whistle wailing, and Peahead said he liked to have leapt clean out of the boat but he managed to restrain himself somehow and he saw on the riverbank Willis Beeson and Sleepy Pitts both jump straight up in the air, which was fine for Willis since he was not otherwise engaged at the moment but which was not so fine for Sleepy Pitts, who let fly with the three-pronged floated gaffer in the very midst of his agitation. And according to Peahead it was one of Sleepy Pitts’s more beautiful flings with a high, gentle arc to it and some considerable distance and though it was a little wide of the catfish it appeared to Peahead to be a direct hit on the boat, so he did in fact leap clean out of it after all and Peahead said the gaffer landed near about amidships and the prongs of it dug into the inflatable port gunwhale which caused the whole business to flip over and sent Peahead’s Momma’s dynamo to the river bottom.

  “So you lost your phonebox,” Mr. Emmet Dabb said.

  “Yes sir,” Peahead told him. “Goddam rubber boat.”

  “And you lost your rubber boat,” Mr. Wyatt Benbow said.

  “Yes sir,” Peahead told him. “Goddam Sleepy Pitts.”

  “And I guess you lost the most of your catfish too,” little Buford said.

  “Yes sir,” Peahead told him. “Goddam train whistle.”

  And Daddy said Mrs. Estelle Singletary’s spinster sister, Miss Frazier, laid her hand across the knobby part of Peahead’s left shoulder and told him, “You’ve truly had your share of misfortune of late, Mr. Boyette.”

  “Shit lady,” Peahead said, “that ain’t the half of it.” And Daddy said Peahead put his fist against his ear and commenced to tell how his entire Fourth of July had gone sour on him. Of course it started out sour in the first place what with his third of July being so thorough a disaster on its own, but Peahead said he had never expected his fourth of July to become such a fullblown and sorry mess. Peahead said him and Mrs. Boyette and little Melanie Marie Boyette were supposed to go over to Mrs. Boyette’s brother’s house for a barbeque at four o‘clock, so Peahead figured he’d have time to run out to French’s creekbottom after dinner and check his traps. He went after muskrats and minks mostly and sold the pelts to an outfit in Greensboro, and Peahead said he’d laid five traps in all and was expecting to find a couple of muskrats and maybe a mink or two if his luck had improved any. He parked his Falcon alongside the Danville highway like usual and set out down through the woods with his cabbage sack over his shoulder, and Peahead said the first trap he came to had a muskrat in it that was near about dead already and he said he held it under water with the heel of his boot and began to feel somewhat recovered from the events of the day previous. But the second trap he came to was empty and though the third one wasn’t, Peahead said he wished it had been. It seems Peahead had caught himself some sort of long-legged waterbird, and though he did not know what species it was exactly he said he was immediately impressed with the vigorous displeasure it showed at having its rubbery foot closed up in the jaws of a steel muskrat trap. Peahead said he tried to get up next to it to let it loose but the bird was feeling considerably antagonized already and managed to scratch and peck and screech and beat around sufficiently to hold Peahead off. So he retreated some and consulted with himself as to what he would do next, and Peahead said that was when he landed on the idea of the cabbage sack and he dumped the muskrat carcass out of it straightaway and commenced to circle the bird with the intention of getting the fiercest parts of it inside the bag somehow or another. And Peahead said it took a very liberal dose of some highly serious circling before the bird let down his defenses sufficiently to allow Peahead a shot at him, but even then nothing much got bagged but the head and part of one wing and Peahead said it seemed to him right off that the bird was a little meaner inside of the sack than out of it. So he did some more serious circling on top of what he’d already done, and when the bird finally did appear suitably confused and give out, Peahead slipped in and snatched the trap off his foot, and Peahead said it was most astounding to see how that bird left there at a dead run.

  “With the sack on his head?” Mr. Phillip J. King wanted to know.

  “Yes sir,” Peahead told him. “Goddam long-legged bird.” Peahead guessed it could see out the little holes in the sackcloth, and he said he’d never seen a creature bolt through the woods so, especially a half-maimed bird with a bag on its head, and even though Peahead lit out after it straightaway and chased it along the creekbottom and up the east bank and back through the trees to Mr. Donald Holloway’s t
hree-acre pond, he did not figure he’d made up much of any ground at all when that bird worked its wing loose from the cabbage sack and sailed out over the water and on up towards the treetops with the bag still dangling off its head. And Peahead said he watched it light in among the uppermost branches of one of Mr. Holloway’s loblolly pines where it shook and screeched and thrashed around until it had succeeded in getting shed of the cabbage sack, which dropped maybe a dozen feet before it hung up on a big bristling cluster of pine needles.

  “So you lost your phonebox,” Daddy said, “and you lost your rubber boat, and you lost a sizeable number of catfish, and now you lost your cabbage sack.”

  “That’s right,” Peahead told him. “Goddam loblolly pine.”

  “Well is that the end of it, Peahead?” little Buford wanted to know.

  “No sir,” Peahead replied. “I guess I lost my concentration too.” And Peahead said his mind was still on that cabbage sack and that great big rubbery-footed long-legged bird when he came up on trap number four which had closed itself on a muskrat, and he said he drowned it with the heel of his boot and then took it up by the tail and carried it on along with the previous carcass to trap number five which had ahold of a muskrat also. Now Peahead said this last one was a little more freshly caught than the first two so he had to club it on the head with a treelimb before he could move in to hold it on the creekbottom, and Peahead figured this was the one that was not dead after all though when he took it up by the tail and held it with the other two it looked as thoroughly dispatched as they did.

  Peahead said he carried the two legitimately deceased muskrats and the one half beaten and half drowned muskrat, which he figured for legitimately deceased also, up out of the creekbottom to the roadside where he tossed them onto the back floorboard of his sky-blue 1961 Ford Falcon. Then he got into the car himself, turned it around, and headed home towards Neely, and Peahead said he was still considerably worked up about the cabbage sack long before he ever got to town and he said he believed it was along about where the Danville road turns into the Boulevard that he began to actively ponder his tragic vicissitudes of July the third, Daddy called them, to which he added what was so far his solitary vicissitude of July the fourth, and according to Peahead the bunch of vicissitudes in conjunction with the active pondering they had inspired caused the muscles in the base of Peahead’s neck to tense up in a knotty lump which gave Peahead some noticeable discomfort, Now the tense knotty lumpiness in the base of Peahead’s neck was a fairly new sensation for Peahead since time was most all of Peahead’s tension, be it a knotty lump or a lumpy knot, had regularly collected at the bottom of his back just overtop his gluteus maximus. But on the first Sunday in March of 1970 Peahead had decided that since he could not get any relief from his doctor he would attempt to get himself healed otherwise, so him and Mrs. Boyette and little Melanie Marie Boyette all attended the ten o’clock service at the Holy Jesus Chapel which had been Casper Epps’s Uncle Bill Collier’s living room until Casper Epps’s Uncle Bill Collier passed away, when it became Casper Epps’s living room and underwent some partial renovation at the hands of Casper Epps himself who turned all the chairs to face in the same direction, brought in a pie tin from the kitchen for a collection plate and renamed the entire front part of his house the Holy Jesus Chapel which was duly documented on a piece of plywood nailed directly into the clapboard to the left of the front door.

  Daddy said Casper Epps took up healing shortly after he left off plumbing, which was along about when he blessed Pinky Throckmorton in the Eden courthouse. But Daddy could not think right off of anybody Casper Epps had actually healed, though between 1950 and 1970 he had probably laid his hands on anywhere from three hundred to four hundred people, some of them even consenting to it. Casper himself laid claim to any number of miracles the most prominent of which was the restoration of sight to Mr. Odell Cheek, but Daddy insisted Mr. Cheek had not been blind at the time. Daddy said Casper Epps started out in a brush arbor out back of his Uncle Bill Collier’s house between the driveway and the cemetery fence and on fair Sundays he would attract a number of negroes and cotton mill workers and he would lay on hands and chant and preach and sing and made himself somewhat of a reputation easing hangovers. Of course word got around about the hangovers soon enough and people figured a man who could relieve that sort of acute ailment could probably take care of a toothache or an inner ear complaint or any sort of mild gastritis and Casper Epps began to collect a sizeable following on account of his holy talents. Trouble was the brush arbor was a seasonal sort of sanctuary while sickness and pain and suffering is generally a year-round kind of thing, so naturally Casper Epps went to his Uncle Bill Collier with the dilemma and asked for the use of the living room, but his Uncle Bill Collier liked to sit in his favorite chair and read the paper and listen to the Baptist service on the radio every Sunday morning and he did not much like the idea of having a whole bunch of negroes and cotton mill workers do it with him. Consequently, for two years running Casper Epps held service in the brush arbor from April through October and healed by appointment the other six months, but in mid-autumn of 1953 Casper’s Uncle Bill Collier finally succumbed to his bladder ailment and Casper Epps was able to transform the living room into the Holy Jesus Chapel and commence to preach in it barely a week before the cold weather set in, which Daddy said was one of those things people tended to point at when they talked about how mysterious the lord was.

  Of course in March of 1970 Casper Epps was still a regular bedbug, and Daddy said he was healing hangovers and relieving flatulence and had been thrust afresh into the public eye the summer before when he cured Mr. Alphonse Broadnax of the thirty-seven dollars he carried in his hat liner, which was not what Mr. Broadnax had expected to be cured of. But nonetheless, the healing business was fairly much thriving for Casper Epps and his reputation in the field of alcohol related complaints had remained untarnished through the years, so Peahead said he went ahead and gave Casper Epps a chance after his doctor failed to provide him any relief because, as he figured it, a backache and a hangover were near about the same thing only in different places. According to Peahead, the Holy Jesus Chapel was maybe half full on the first Sunday in March of 1970 and promptly at ten o’clock Casper Epps came out from the kitchen in what looked to be a bathrobe, and he said a few words about God the father and Jesus Christ the holy savior and he blessed everybody generally and then blessed a few folks specifically after which he invited the ailing and infirm among the congregation to come forward for the laying on of hands, and Peahead said everybody but Mrs. Boyette and little Melanie Marie Boyette got up from their chairs and advanced on the podium which presented Casper Epps with a considerable volume of ailments and infirmities to lay his hands on, and Peahead himself lingered at the back of the crowd since he did not feel especially infirm or chronically ailed either and didn’t want to get the jump on anybody who was.

  Now Peahead said it being the first weekend in March the weather was still right wintery, so Casper Epps had the cook stove in the kitchen fired up and had fed a couple of sticks of wood into it just prior to entering the sanctuary. Of course, Daddy said, before you can feed a stove you have to feed a woodpile, and since Casper Epps was not the sort to chop wood himself or, God forbid, pay money for it, he generally filched it off the pile beside Mr. and Mrs. Bill and Nellie Sapp’s carshed and he took such a trifling bit at a time that not Mr. Bill or Mrs. Nellie Sapp either one grew suspicious in the least until they visited Mr. Bill Sapp’s nephew in West Virginia for a week and returned to find that in the course of seven days they had used an appreciable amount of wood for two people who had not lit a fire between them. Daddy said Mr. Bill Sapp took action almost immediately. He picked out a couple of choice pieces of dried oak and, with a brace and bit, bored a hole down the center of each one. Then he filled the holes with black powder and stoppered them with a pair of whittled plugs after which he returned the wood to the woodpile and him and Mrs. Nellie Sapp together waited to
see whose house would blow up.

  However, Casper Epp’s house and adjoining Holy Jesus Chapel did not blow up exactly, but as for the cast iron cook stove in the kitchen it very thoroughly exploded. Fortunately nobody was injured by the flying fragments from the first blast or by the firecoals either when the second log went off in the middle of the kitchen floor. But unfortunately there was an injury, not an excessively grave injury but an injury nonetheless inflicted upon Peahead Boyette who was in precisely the wrong place at precisely the wrong time which Daddy said seemed to be a regular sort of thing with Peahead what with train whistles, gaff hooks, rubber boats and such. As Peahead told it, he lingered at the back of the crowd of infirmities and ailments until there wasn’t any crowd left and it was just him and Casper Epps up at the podium. And Casper Epps blessed Peahead so naturally Peahead blessed him back, and then Casper Epps asked Peahead just what sort of suffering he was troubled with and Peahead told him about the sharp pains in his lower back. Understandably, Peahead thought Capser Epps would want to see the problem spot for himself so he pulled his shirt partway up to his shoulders but Casper Epps just laid the palm of his hand on Peahead’s forehead and commenced to chanting and moaning and wailing occasionally. Then he drew his hand back and chanted some more. Then he brought it forward and tapped Peahead’s skull with his fingertips. Then he drew it back again and moaned some. Then he brought it forward once more and laid his palm on Peahead’s forehead. Then he drew it back again and wailed twice very sharply. Then the stove blew up, and as Peahead got it from Mrs. Boyette Casper Epps did not tap Peahead’s skull and did not lay his hand on Peahead’s forehead but instead delivered a fairly potent straight right that did not entirely cure Peahead but managed to make him unconscious temporarily. And Peahead said by the time he woke up, Mr. Armond Renfrow who had been healed of a sinus affliction and Mr. Tommy Underhill who had received some relief from the itch of a sumac infection on his ankle had managed to stomp out most all the fire on the kitchen floor under the frantic and rather discomposed direction of Mr. Casper Epps who was trying to take the explosion as a goodly omen but could not figure out how. And Peahead said Mrs. Boyette helped him onto his feet and he checked himself all over for injuries which was when he discovered that the pain was altogether gone from his lower back and had miraculously migrated up to the base of his neck where it had collected in a tense lumpy knot and where it stayed ever since.