A Short History of a Small Place

by T. R. Pearson

  We found ourselves a little less fiery hot to meet up with Mr. P. Merriman Bledsoe after the painters got done and the carpenters left town, so dissappointment did not run wild and rampant when word got around that Mr. P. Merriman Bledsoe was not coming to Neely to get met up with. We were, however, somewhat distressed by the black and orange Rooms for Rent sign that was tacked onto one of Miss Pettigrew’s porch stanchions by Mr. Ellersby of Grant, Owen, & Ellersby, Realtors Inc. Not that a black and orange Rooms for Rent sign seemed inappropriate on a red and yellow house—the place would have looked naked without it—but just that people could not warm to the idea of rental property right there in the heart of downtown Neely under the very nose of Colonel Blalock. They said it was an exceedingly bad idea; they said you didn’t know what sort of ilk such a place would attract. But in truth that was not the problem. The problem was everybody knew exactly what sort of ilk such a place would attract, and it attracted them straight off in great sorry heaps and messes.

  Things got underway with a half dozen Otts. There was a momma Ott who used to be a Jones and a daddy Ott who’d gotten laid off from the cotton mill, and four little towheaded Otts who looked to be wearing on their shirtfronts some tiny part of most everything they had eaten or otherwise stuck in their mouths over a year’s time. These six particular Otts were a fairly unknown quantity to most of us but they were related by blood to a far more illustrious and remarkable Ott whose acquaintance did not usually make for any sort of lofty recommendation. Spencer Ott, first cousin to the cotton mill Ott and the Mrs. Jones Ott and second cousin to the four filthy little towheaded Otts, had operated the projector at the Palace Theatre downtown from the time he graduated high school on up until his thirtieth year. He lived with his mother at the Ott homeplace on Scales Street and was widely figured for a mild sort of a swish up until his momma’s death when he commenced to grieve her by wearing her clothes and the odd thing about it was he looked fairly ravishing in them. He had not been ravishing in trousers as far as I know, so it was a compound shock to most everybody when Spencer Ott showed up in the A&P in one of his Momma’s cotton blend outfits and did considerably more for it than she ever had. He’d gotten from somewhere a walnut hairpiece that fell in lustrous locks and ringlets down his back, and he was a regular artist with a lipstick, so nobody knew it was Spencer Ott until he tried to write a check for his groceries and then nobody wanted to believe it was Spencer Ott, especially the men, who felt a little ill about having looked at him in the way they had looked at him. But of course it was Spencer Ott and it continued to be Spencer Ott for several weeks thereafter all over town in pumps and nylons until some of his momma’s relations in Leaksville had Spencer shipped off to the Dix Hill Institute in Raleigh on what Daddy called a fashion scholarship. They turned him out eventually and he returned to Neely long enough to pick up and move to the capital for good where I suppose a pretty face is a little more appreciated, and that left Neely thoroughly Ottless except for the four little towheaded Otts and the Mrs. Jones Ott and the laid off cotton mill Ott who was not especially ravishing in trousers himself.

  The cotton mill Ott was fat and homely and near about as crusted over as his children. He weighed maybe two hundred and eighty pounds and I do not believe an ounce of it was gumption. He showed an extraordinary affection for chairs and was ever in one, and as best as we could tell he had a particular fondness for Miss Pettigrew’s fan-backed cedar porch furniture since he generally remained in contact with one piece of it or another. The cotton mill Ott tended to take his exercise on the second, third, or sometimes fourth day of the month when the mailman brought the checks, and he would cash them at the Big Apple, purchase about a sack’s worth of odds and ends, and then stroll on home with his shoulders laid back and the rest of him laid forward like maybe he was smuggling pumpkins under his shirt. The most of the odds and ends he purchased tended to be of the liquid variety and him and the Mrs. Jones Ott would evaporate them personally while the four towheaded Otts would decorate themselves with Cheez Whiz and peanut butter and run fairly wild throughout their part of the house and all roundabout the yard until their parents regained sufficient consciousness to rein them in some.

  By the middle of April the Otts had been joined by five Parhams, three Lyles, a pair of Moffets, four McKinneys who the block and mortar McKinneys insisted emphatically were not block and mortar McKinneys, one Gresham, three full-sized Dardens and one baby Darden, two Madison-Mayodan Rothrocks, and assorted Smiths who did not seem to bear any relation to each other. At first we could not help but believe that Miss Pettigrew’s house was incapable of holding such an unseemly bulk of people and we figured three must be going out the back door for every two that went in the front. But by and by we learned from Mr. Whitaker, who delivered a second-hand stove and a second-hand refrigerator into Miss Pettigrew’s upstairs hallway, that Mr. P. Merriman Bledsoe’s carpenters had not performed a general renovation, and had not performed a partial renovation, had not renovated to any degree exactly but had subdivided instead. They had separated the big rooms into quarters and the regular-sized rooms into thirds and the little rooms into halves, so the tenants were packed into Miss Pettigrew’s house like bullets in a box. I do not truly know how many people the place could accommodate, but I don’t believe Mr. Ellersby ever filled it up or ever filled it up for very long anyway since the rate of turnover was extraordinarily high and Dardens or Greshams or Rothrocks that had sat on the porch with their feet on the bannister one day were gone from the county the next only to be replaced by McGees or Linleys or some fresh Smiths and once by a puzzling batch of Hayeses who were all related to each other in some inexplicable and oblique way that not even Mrs. Phillip J. King could make any sense of.

  So the Pettigrew house and grounds took on what Daddy called a new complexion; it got so that even those people who could stomach the red and the yellow could not bring themselves to stop at the fence and lean up against it with their arms through the palings so as to contemplate Mr. Wallace Amory sr.’s majestic undertaking on account of the countless Otts and Parhams and McKinneys and Greshams and McGees and Hayeses and Smiths that had nothing else whatsoever to do but litter the majestic undertaking’s front porch and contemplate back. Mrs. Phillip J. King said it was unsettling to be perused so, and most everybody else agreed to the spirit of the observation if not the phrasing of it. Consequently local traffic along the boulevard diminished in a dramatic sort of way once folks became sufficiently unsettled and nobody who was going anywhere downtown got there like they used to get there. That is, almost nobody. Daddy still went like he generally went, went like he’d always gone, and would not confess to even the slightest degree of unsettlement because of it. He said it was his duty to eschew all detours and bypasses. He said it was his obligation to chronicle the demise. Daddy said he had a born gift for chronicling demises and did not intend to squander it on account of a porchful of slackjaws.

  So while most everybody else circled all roundabout the city and slipped up on wherever it was they were going from behind, Daddy went direct like always and paid some considerable attention to Mr. P. Merriman Bledsoe’s tenants no matter how much considerable attention they paid back to him in return. Understandably, then, it was Daddy that kept us abreast of the advancing general dilapidation and progressive ruination of Miss Pettigrew’s house and grounds. He counted the window screens on the portico roof and told us what’trash had accumulated in the shrubbery. He kept the Smiths all straight from each other and could tell which were born Smiths and which weren’t and what little Smith belonged to what big Smith, and when one of the Hayeses threatened to stomp another one of the Hayeses and then did in fact stomp him, Daddy did Sheriff Burton the favor of identifying the offending Hayes, which proved little or no difficulty for him on account of his intense work with Smiths previously. Of course Daddy was right on top of the story when the Rothrocks decided, for the sake of convenience, to drive their Plymouth around the house to the front yard and park it athw
art the sidewalk, and he reported the repercussions among Lyles and Dardens and Otts and Moffets who took a lesson from the Rothrocks’s example and filled up the front yard with their own vehicles. And understandably Daddy paid particular attention to Mr. P. Merriman Bledsoe’s tenants around the first of each month when the checks would come and things would get exceedingly lively, and usually a few Parhams and a Linley and a Darden and a couple of Hayeses and an Ott and every now and again a Smith or two would all throw in together and try to dismember each other just for the sheer diversion of it.

  But nobody else seemed to pay much attention to Mr. P. Merriman Bledsoe’s tenants except maybe for Mr. Russell Newberry and Mr. Wyatt Benbow and Mrs. Phillip J. King though she swore several demonstrative oaths to the contrary. Hardly anybody even talked about Miss Pettigrew’s house anymore; folks just made ghastly faces over it and tried to recollect what it used to be back when it was something. So Daddy persisted in chronicling the demise very nearly by himself, but after the checks came in October, when the Hayes stomping occurred, there was not much left to chronicle on account of how the tenants, or some one of the tenants anyway, carried the dilapidation and ruination to the very boundaries of utter destruction and beyond which I do not believe he was aiming for but which he hit direct nonetheless. All the Hayeses said it was a Smith and all the Smiths said it was a Hayes and all the McKinneys and the Moffets and the Dardens and the Otts and the Parhams and the Lyles and the Linleys agreed among themselves it was a Smith or a Hayes though they could not be sure of precisely which. There was no doubt, however, as to the when of it: the evening of October 4 , 1980, which was not one of your storm-tossed lightning-wrent October nights like Neely has been known for, but was more along the lines of one of your regular tranquil early autumn evenings.

  It seems a Smith or a Hayes could not find any matches to light his cigarette and woke up a Darden to get some. But the Darden, who could not recollect if it was a Smith or a Hayes that woke him up, did not have anything but a striker himself, so whoever it was that had woke up the Darden in the first place gave up on the notion of matches altogether and proceeded to light his cigarette off the back burner of the electric range in the upstairs hallway. I suppose he was so taken with his resourcefulness that he neglected to switch off the range eye once he’d lit up his cigarette without singeing his nose appreciably, and this particular Smith or Hayes went off to wherever it was he was going and left the burner to glow unattended for awhile. Of course the hallway got exceedingly warm presently, especially the stovetop, and a halfroll of paper-towels laying longways up against the oven switch turned a little brown and then began to smoke some and at length burst into legitimate flames and sent fiery ashes all across the hallway floor. Apparently even by the time they settled down several of the ashes still had enough glow to them to touch off the wallpaper which was old and brittle and made a respectable kindling for the lathing strips which set the rafters and the joists afire, or anyway that’s how Mr. Pipkin figured it once he’d stirred up the rubble to his satisfaction.

  Naturally, people were far too busy avoiding the Pettigrew house to notice it was on fire straightaway, so by the time Mr. Wily Gant happened onto the catastrophe and ran down the boulevard to the Omega firehouse to spread the news, smoke and flames were already boiling out some of the upper windows and an assortment of Smiths and Hayeses and McKinneys and Dardens along with a lone Parham had climbed out onto the portico roof and were making highly animated requests for assistance. The fire whistle brought the most of Neely outdoors and we all chased the sirens down the boulevard to Miss Pettigrew’s house where the firemen were trying to make a path for themselves through the front yard, which was littered all roundabout with various vehicles and all manner of near hysterical tenants. The Smiths and Hayeses and McKinneys and Dardens and Parhams on the ground were waving their arms and screaming and generally attempting to impress upon Chief Pipkin and his men the gravity of the predicament of the Smiths and Hayeses and McKinneys and Dardens and Parham up on the portico roof who themselves were growing more animated by the minute. Chief Pipkin, never a man at a loss in a grave predicament, responded almost immediately by waving in the hook and ladder which he was bound and determined to use for something besides reindeer, but no matter how Mr. Myrick at the front end and Mr. Bridger at the backend maneuvered the unit they could not seem to put it where it would serve anything but a decorative purpose. So two otherwise unengaged firefighters fetched an extension ladder off the pump truck and ran it up to the portico roof.

  However, even once the Smiths and Hayes and McKinneys and Dardens and Parham on the portico roof had been reunited with the Smiths and Hayes and McKinneys and Dardens and Parhams on the ground, nobody could say for certain whether or not the house was entirely empty. I mean of course Sheriff Burton ordered a head count and from it he determined there was a full complement of Otts and Moffets and Linleys and McKinneys and Dardens and Parhams but he could not be certain as to the sum total of Hayes and Smiths since even the Hayes and Smiths were not certain as to their sum total themselves. So Chief Pipkin sent a half dozen of his men on into the flames to hunt up any malingerers and though they did not discover a single Smith or a solitary Hayes, they did carry a Gresham out in the horizontal and laid him on the front lawn. The firefighters studied him and poked at him, and Chief Pipkin and Sheriff Burton stooped over him and studied him too, and from out in the street where we were we tried to see him but couldn’t really so we discussed him and speculated as to his circumstances and decided fairly unanimously that things were probably pretty much up with that Gresham. We figured the flames or the smoke had taken him in his sleep and Mrs. Phillip J. King blessed his everlasting soul, but she reversed herself soon thereafter when two of the firemen picked Mr. Gresham up onto his feet and leaned him against a Pontiac. It seems it had not been flames and had not been smoke either but had instead been two and a half quarts of Wild Irish Rose.

  With the rescue of Mr. Gresham behind them, the firemen decided they’d best go ahead and put some water on the house since it had become all wrapped up in what Daddy called a full-fledged conflagration. I recollect everything was on fire but the brick chimneys and the concrete front steps by the time Mr. Bridger and Mr. Myrick took ahold of a hose together and ran on into the front yard with it. And though they yelled and hollered and hooted and said they were ready for the water, I guess they weren’t actually ready for it when it finally came because Mr. Myrick slipped down in the grass and the hose got away from Mr. Bridger and went off across the lawn by itself. It bolted and squirmed and darted throughout the whole of the front yard and then jumped nozzle-first all over the cotton mill Ott’s Chevrolet and nobody managed to close down the hydrant until that hose had squirted near about every squirtable item in the vicinity except for the house, which was roasting away in a most glorious fashion. In fact, the fire was such a success that Chief Pipkin gave up on Miss Pettigrew’s house almost before his men could douse it down any, and instead he directed water to be concentrated on the surrounding trees and onto the roof of Mrs. Tullock’s outbuilding across the alleyway as a precautionary measure, and Daddy said it was his experience that if the fire department could get to a thing before it started burning they could usually put it out. So Miss Pettigrew’s trees got saved and Mrs. Tullock’s outbuilding survived also, but Miss Pettigrew’s newly painted, freshly rented house burnt to the ground, and we all watched it go, watched it late into the night and with some melancholy and regret I suppose, but the most of us marveled at the smoke and the flames like maybe we had set the thing ourselves. And in the morning we came to watch it smoulder a little, though there was not much left to smoulder but for a pile of ashes and charred wood which the chimneys had collapsed onto. There was not much else to see really. The tenants’ cars had been moved out into the alleyway and the tenants themselves had gone wherever it is those sorts of people go while the trucks and firemen and firefighting paraphernalia had returned to the stationhouse. Only Mr. Pi
pkin and Sheriff Burton had remained behind to poke around in the rubble, so we watched them do their poking and then even they left and we had nothing to look at but the blackened wood and the jagged hunks of chimney and the miraculous concrete front steps which had remained uncluttered and unbroken and led up off the front walk to nowhere at all.

  iii

  The ladies of the Neely Garden Society desired to purchase the property, not straightaway but once the city had cleared it of all the rubbish and cinders, everything that is except for the concrete front steps which nobody seemed to have the means to lift or the truck to put it on. The ladies intended to erect, build, and cultivate a Pettigrew memorial park complete with a wide and exotic assortment of trumpet flowers, a selection of blossoming bushes, a vine-covered lattice arbor, and a gazebo, and since they meant to pay dearly for what they called the accoutrements of the place, they did not wish to pay dearly at all for the place itself and so in a formal letter they petitioned Mr. P. Merriman Bledsoe of Stokesdale to seek out the charitable corner of his heart and let the property go for what Daddy said was not even a song but more like two stanzas and a refrain. I suppose Mr. P. Merriman Bledsoe sought and sought, but he came up empty in the end and gave the ladies what amounted to a symphonic price which they simply could not begin to pay. So the Garden Society went back to tending its rose bushes at the water tower and the sewage plant and Mr. P. Merriman Bledsoe let it be known through Mr. Ellersby that he would entertain most any reasonable offer, would even consider negotiating with the garden club ladies if they would seek out the sensible corner of their hearts.