A Short History of a Small Place

by T. R. Pearson

  So on July the fourth 1970 when Peahead’s active pondering and his tragic vicissitudes began to mingle and collaborate at the base of his neck, Peahead grabbed ahold of the problem area with his right hand and, as he recollected it, he began to work his head back and forth soon after he’d passed the icehouse and along about when he’d breasted the hill and come into the company of Colonel Blalock. And Peahead said he worked his head to the left side and worked it back to the right side and then worked it to the left side once more and then back to the right side again and that was when he saw the dead muskrat that was not dead after all and did not seem very pleased to be alive either. Peahead said it was sitting on the backseat grinning at him with the kind of grin an animal gets when it’s about to tear your throat open, so naturally Peahead made an immediate and instinctual evasive manuever: he unlatched the door and bailed out into the gutter. And Peahead said he sat up on his elbows and watched his sky-blue 1961 Ford Falcon clip off a parking meter, ram headon into a poplar tree, and then finally disgorge itself of one highly antagonized and ferocious muskrat, which slipped out an open window and shot across the square towards the post office. And once he could not see the muskrat any longer, Peahead figured it was safe to relax so he lay down flush in the gutter and tried not to actively ponder any vicissitudes whatsoever.

  “Christ, what a wild tale!” Mr. Emmet Dabb exclaimed in what was for him an extraordinary show of enthusiasm.

  “Yes sir,” Peahead Boyette said. “Goddam muskrat.”

  According to Daddy Sheriff Burton, who was still Deputy Burton at the time, came up on the group of them right at the tailend of the Peahead Boyette saga and he took a spiral pad and a pencil out of his front shirtpocket and then bulled on into the crowd until he was standing directly overtop of Peahead and he licked the end of his pencil and said, “Now what’s all this I hear about a muskrat?” Well of course the question alone was quite enough to drive off that half of the crowd that did not want to hear Peahead’s story all over again and it was also quite enough to set off that half of the crowd that wanted to tell it for him, and Daddy said he hung around for a spell but finally gave it up when little Buford, Wyatt Benbow, and Emmet Dabb all at once and together attempted to explain to Sheriff Burton just exactly what a dynamo was.

  Most of the ladies headed back towards Miss Pettigrew’s when Sheriff Burton got his interrogation underway and Daddy said him and Mr. Phillip J. King walked over to the poplar tree to speak to Sheriff Browner, who at the time was just a little over three years shy of becoming the late Sheriff Browner. Daddy said the sheriff was sitting on his heels next to the left front tire of Peahead’s sky-blue 1961 Ford Falcon and was dragging his fingers across the crumpled fender in a somber and grievous sort of way. As near as Daddy could recollect he’d never known anyone to get so truly worked up and disheartened over somebody else’s misfortune the way Sheriff Browner did, and he was certainly a conspicuous figure in the middle of all that excitement and agitation inspired by Peahead’s tragic vicissitudes, especially the four-legged one. And Daddy said him and Mr. Phillip J. King and Sheriff Browner had just set in to doing some earnest commiserating together when Momma and Mrs. Estelle Singletary and Mrs. Estelle Singletary’s old maid sister Miss Frazier and Mrs. Mary Margaret Vance Needham and Mrs. Royce Venable and Mrs. Treva Jane Boyd McKinney all came out through Miss Pettigrew’s gate and recrossed the street looking rather forlorn and dazed. And Daddy said he asked Momma, “What is it?” and she told him the buffet and the party and the dancing were all done with. Momma said when they had gotten to the front porch they found a pile of tiny cloth flags and a few pocketbooks and clutch purses along with Mr. Wyatt Benbow’s open weave hat, and Momma said Mrs. Estelle Singletary tried the door but it was bolted to so she knocked on it and then she rapped on it and then she veritably beat on it the accumulated sum of which brought Aunt Willa into the foyer at length and she opened the door far enough to stick her head and shoulders outside.

  “Yes ma’m?” Aunt Willa said.

  “We mean to come in,” Mrs. Estelle Singletary told her. “We’re Miss Pettigrew’s guests.”

  “Miss Pettigrew says she’s weary,” Aunt Willa said and commenced to back out of the doorway.

  “Weary?” Mrs. Estelle Singletary asked her.

  “Yes ma’m,” Aunt Willa said.

  “You mean you’re not going to let us back inside?” Mrs. Estelle Singletary wanted to know.

  And Aunt Willa said, “No ma’m” and shut the door.

  The ladies all agreed they were stunned and then Mrs. Treva Jane Boyd McKinney suggested flabbergasted and they all agreed they were stunned and flabbergasted except for Mrs. Phillip J. King who was not present and who Momma said had been stunned and flabbergasted and incensed and had gone off around the house in a huff with the intention of getting at Miss Pettigrew through the back door. And Daddy said Momma had not hardly closed her mouth from talking when the stunned, flabbergasted, and incensed Mrs. Phillip J. King cut loose with an unholy shriek from the backyard and soon thereafter showed herself at the corner of the house flapping her arms and stomping her feet like maybe she had a hornet up her skirt. “Oooohh oooohh,” she wailed, “get away, get away from me,” and she came forward another five yards and flapped and stomped some more, and Daddy said just as Mrs. Phillip J. King was setting herself to air out another high-pitched pitiful lament two creatures passed her up and slipped out of Miss Pettigrew’s yard through the front gateway, two odd and maybe even extraordinary creatures, Daddy said, that looked to be somehow related to the pig family but were plastered all over with dried grass and leaves and scraps of paper and dirt. And as soon as they’d made the sidewalk they turned left together and hoofed it along the boulevard past the square and down the hill towards the icehouse. Of course most everybody followed them as far as to where the road dropped off just to see where they went and what they were anyway, and Daddy said once he had decided for himself that they were in fact pigs, he started back to the wreck and came upon Peahead Boyette, who was sitting by himself on the curb tapping the end of his nose with a long sheet of folded white paper.

  “What you got there, Peahead?” Daddy asked him.

  “Citation,” Peahead said.

  “What for?” Daddy asked him.

  “Fishing with a phonebox,” Peahead said. “Goddam Deputy Burton.”

  “Well,” Daddy told him, “don’t never seem to rain but it pours.”

  “Yes sir,” Peahead said. “It’s all chicken but the bill and that’s his pecker.”

  So Momma and Daddy did not have much of a get together on the fourth of July in 1970 and they had already been home an hour by the time the Y.M.C.A. volunteers and Mr. J. L. Graham and Mr. Harland Lynch allowed us to leave off chasing the pigs which not any of us had laid eyes on since they went through the hole in the fence. There were supposed to be fireworks at the fairgrounds come dark but along about 4:30 a storm set in from the southwest and dumped what Daddy called a scandalous amount of rain all over the county, two feet of which ended up in the courthouse basement where the fireworks were in boxes on the slab floor. So Momma cooked us scrambled eggs for supper and we all three sat on the front porch and listened to the rain blow through the treetops and drip from the gutters, and it was just at dark when we heard Sheriff Browner, though we did not know then it was Sheriff Browner, fire off his revolver six times. “Happy fourth of July,” Daddy said and laid his head back on the glider cushion so as to blow a plume of smoke straight up to the beaded ceiling.

  iii

  Once we’d passed through the stone archway at the cemetery, Mrs. Coleen Ruth Hoots Newberry almost immediately ran square overtop of Mr. Ernest Harold Ratliff with her right front tire. It seems her navigator had been blowing his nose at the time and so had failed to warn Mrs. Newberry of the sharp turn the road took just beyond the cemetery gate which was not the sort of thing Mrs. Newberry could readily see for herself from down below the dashboard. So the Pontiac went up onto the gr
anite curbing and the right front tire passed directly across Mr. Ernest Harold Ratliff’s midsection, but I do not believe it did him much of any damage since he had died already in 1958 and so could not be done in again, not even by a Pontiac. The incident, however, did serve to speed Daddy’s handkerchief back into his coatpocket and he hung over the front seat most devotedly until we had eased up behind the Frenches and docked there.

  The Pettigrew plot was halfway up a hillside just below three cedars of Lebanon that ran across the grade in a straight line. Miss Pettigrew’s daddy had provided for his family to lie four abreast under a common headstone with him on one end, his son on the other, and his wife and daughter in between. Off to Mr. Pettigrew’s right were about five Mordecais and a sprinkling of Fosters while Mr. Wallace Amory jr. was less than an arm’s length removed from three generations of Timberlakes on the other side. The rest of the slope all the way down to where it bottomed out was fairly much covered up in Dardens who apparently had that Gottlieb flair for heirmaking. The commander’s men had set up a green canvas awning which stretched over the entire Pettigrew plot and there was room under it for a half dozen chairs on the downslope just below the Pettigrews and just prior to the onslaught of Dardens. Of course by the time me and Momma and Daddy and Mr. and Mrs. Newberry got to the graveside the casket was already sitting atop the commander’s shiny chrome casket-lowering device and five of the six seats were already occupied by Aunt Willa and Aunt Willa’s sister and Aunt Willa’s sister’s daughter and beside them Mrs. Jack Vestal and beside her Mrs. Phillip J. King with the sixth chair being held in reserve for Mrs. Ouida Gattis, who had fallen and broken her hip in 1976 and had not been able to do much standing around ever since.

  The service did not get started right away because the latter third of the procession had been held up at the Mayview Street light and the commander figured they had as much of a right to a full show as anybody else. So we all lingered there in among the tombstones and Daddy and Mr. Newberry leaned up against Mr. Lester Mordecai’s marker and smoked Daddy’s cigarettes off Mr. Newberry’s matches even though Momma and Mrs. Newberry both told them it was a profane and sacrilegious thing to do, but Daddy said he doubted if the smoke would be much of a bother to Lester. And even after the last third of the procession arrived we got to linger some more while Mrs. Ouida Gattis’s son-in-law helped Mrs. Ouida Gattis out of the car and then steered her all roundabout the cemetery in an effort to get her to the graveside without stepping on anybody along the way which was a matter of some significance with Mrs. Ouida Gattis, who did not want to be stepped on herself once circumstances put her in a position to be. So Mrs. Ouida Gattis and her partially mended hip bone and her son-in-law all toured the cemetery together and eventually arrived at the canvas awning and the son-in-law along with the commander lowered Mrs. Ouida Gattis into the vacant folding wooden chair which had been moved partway up the hill for her convenience and appeared to be sitting somewhere in the vicinity of Mr. Wallace Amory jr.’s kneecaps.

  The graveside ceremony commenced nearly immediately after Mrs. Ouida Gattis’s arrival. It would have commenced precisely immediately afterwards, but when the commander nodded at the Reverend Richard Crockett Shelton who nudged the Reverend Mr. Holroyd with the pointiest part of his elbow, the Reverend Mr. Holroyd just looked all around himself rather vaguely and then went back to pondering the casket which he had been engaged in at the time of the nudge. So the commander nodded once more and the Reverend Mr. Shelton nudged once more and the Reverend Mr. Holroyd looked all around himself to see what the disturbance had been before he returned his attention to the casket. Consequently, the graveside ceremony did not commence immediately but only after a pair of nods, a pair of nudges, and two distinct instances of vague circumspection, and when the graveside ceremony finally did commence it did not commence with a prayer from the Reverend Holroyd as was planned but commenced instead with a few words from the Reverend Mr. Richard Crockett Shelton who cleared his throat, drew off a most prodigious breath, and then reminded us just who it was that had died. Of course the Reverend Shelton had carried with him to the cemetery a burial prayer which he had taken the trouble to set down in longhand on a sheet of yellow legal paper, but seeing as how he was called upon prematurely the reverend was forced to make several observations right off the top of his head as he fished around in his jacket pockets, and Daddy recollected that in the course of the hunt the reverend managed to come out with five completely separate, purely unrelated, and entirely insignificant statements, none of which, taken singly, was particularly offensive but all of which, taken as a group, were magnificently inconsequential. And when the reverend discovered the burial prayer tucked away in his right hip pocket behind his wallet he compounded his triumph and soared to new and rarified heights of tediousness with the able assistance of Mr. Longfellow and Mr. Tennyson and especially Mr. William Wordsworth whose natural inclination towards idiocy seemed fairly much indisputable. Daddy said it was the most appropriate burial prayer he’d ever heard since we all died a little in listening to it.

  Understandably, after the Reverend Mr. Richard Crockett Shelton’s prayer the Reverend Mr. Holroyd could not be roused up into speech no matter how vigorously the Reverend Shelton applied his elbow to the undertaking, so instead the commander nodded at the Reverend Mr. Red Hamilton who had not been scheduled to speak but who was always prepared to. The Reverend Hamilton struck in straightaway with a benediction of his own devising and though it was stirring enough it was certainly not one of the Reverend Red’s famous unbridled African benedictions, but then the reverend was being actively discouraged from any sort of fanatical antics by Sheriff Burton who had ahold of a handful of Reverend Red’s jacket from the back. So the reverend delivered a fairly brief and altogether unobjectionable sendoff and afterwards turned the proceedings back over to the commander who nodded again at the Reverend Shelton who obliged him by reaching for the switch on the commander’s shiny chrome casket-lowering contraption, but before he could get his hand even halfway to it the Reverend Mr. Holroyd came to life of a sudden, stooped over, and threw the switch himself. The entire frame jumped once and creaked and then the webbing commenced to unfurl and Miss Pettigrew sank ever so delicately into the ground. And that was the end of it, or anyway that was the end of the official part of it, but that was not actually the absolute end of it since as soon as the casket touched bottom Mrs. Jack Vestal leapt up out of her folding wooden chair all wild and desperate with grief and she waved her arms and wailed and snorted and eventually shrieked, “Goodbye, brave soul” and tossed her good linen handkerchief on into the grave. And that would have been the end of it usually, but that was not the end of it this time because Mrs. Jack Vestal’s handkerchief had hardly lighted on the casket when Mrs. Phillip J. King leapt up out of her folding chair all wild and desperate with grief herself and she waved her arms and wailed and snorted and at length worked herself up into a shriek also. “Adieu, sweet princess,” she said and let fly with a clump of Kleenex. And that was in fact the actual and absolute end of it unless you count how Aunt Willa and Aunt Willa’s sister and Aunt Willa’s sister’s daughter all stood up together and momentarily pondered Mrs. Jack Vestal and Mrs. Phillip J. King in that impeccably bloodless sort of way before exiting out the opposite side of the canopy.

  After it was over Daddy and Mr. Newberry smoked some more in the company of Mr. Lester Mordecai while Momma and Mrs. Newberry went off to visit Mrs. Newberry’s mother where she was laying in with a smattering of Hootses on the far incline. Two men from the vault outfit who had kept themselves and their truck at a discreet distance off behind some sycamore trees during the course of the service started up the engine once most everybody had departed except for me and Momma and Daddy and the Newberrys and Mrs. Ouida Gattis and her son-in-law, who were very nearly to their car, and the truck lurched out into view with the concrete vault top swinging from a cable over the bed. The driver backed on in among the tombstones and hard up to the commander’
s canvas awning and him and the other fellow together commenced to clear out the chairs and the flowers and the shiny chrome casket-lowering device and then they dragged the green indoor/outdoor carpet off the dirtpile and rolled it up. Me and Daddy and Mr. Newberry watched them work with Daddy and Mr. Newberry propped comfortably against Mr. Mordecai’s headstone and me alongside them trying not to step anywhere Mr. Mordecai could possibly be, and at length after the gravesite was near about vacant Mr. Newberry spat between his shoes and said, “I wonder what in the world is wrong with that old fart Holroyd. Seems to me he’s lost his mind.”

  “You think so?” Daddy asked him.

  “Yes sir,” Mr. Newberry said, “I truly do. Seems to me it’s a pure and simple case of decrepitude, don’t you think?”

  And Daddy crossed his arms over his chest and looked at his shirtfront for a spell. “No,” he said, “no, I don’t believe it is.”

  “Well, what is it then?” Mr. Newberry wanted to know.

  And while Daddy was considering his reply, the driver of the vault truck started up a mechanical block and tackle and played out the steel support arm until the vault top was suspended directly over Miss Pettigrew’s grave, and as me and Mr. Newberry and Daddy all three watched the concrete slab sway there in midair Mr. Newberry said, “Well?” and Daddy told him, “Not decrepitude, Russell. Futility.” And I do not believe that word had left off rattling in my ears when the vault truck driver dropped the vault top into place at a reckless velocity. The concussion shook Mr. Lester Mordecai I am certain and turned Momma and Mrs. Newberry completely around on the far hillside. It was most dramatic.