A Short History of a Small Place (12 page)

The Reverend Mr. Richard Crockett Shelton, however, was another case altogether. He stood over six feet tall, was very blond and pure-looking, and did not have any vices to speak of. Momma said he delivered a stirring sermon, but Daddy always said that if religion had done nothing else for Momma it had made her merciful. Daddy had sat through several of the reverend’s funeral orations and he said Mr. Shelton distinguished himself by being one of the few preachers he had ever been exposed to who could bore the corpse. Daddy was always hard on preachers and he even slept through the Billy Graham crusades when Momma tried to make him watch them on television. Momma said the majority of the congregation simply did not believe that the Reverend Shelton was advanced enough in years to be at all friendly with God. Folks suspected they’d have to wait until he got a little farther from the seminary and a little closer to the grave before he could tell them anything they didn’t already know for themselves. But Daddy did not imagine the passing years would get the Reverend Shelton anything but older. He said Mr. Shelton was merely the sort of preacher who’s always beating his wings but can never fly.

Most likely the Methodists tolerated the Reverend Shelton and kept him on at the church not because he showed any promise as a sermonizer but because he took their Christmas pageant to heart. Momma said the quality of the pageant had fallen off considerably under Mr. Miller, who had his own idea of the spirit of the season, and she said it suffered its first cancellation in 1960 when the preacher managed to round up only two wise men and the angel of the Lord came down with the mumps. But the Reverend Shelton changed all of that. He threw himself into the staging of the pageant with the sort of zeal and excitement Mr. Miller had been incapable of, or anyway not inclined to. And even though Mr. Shelton didn’t arrive in Neely until nearly the end of 1961, he put on a respectable initial production and vowed better things in the future.

Consequently, work on the 1962 pageant commenced in August of that year with the formation of a Christmas committee and the scheduling of auditions for early September. Mr. Shelton wanted to provide himself with a half dozen wise men, three or four Josephs and angels, and a couple of Virgin Marys so as to protect against any unforseen occurences. In the latter part of October the reverend organized a building committee which saw to the construction of the stable and baby Jesus’ manger, both of which were made from shipping crates supplied by an appliance store in a shopping center near Draper. By the middle of November Miss Fay Dull had begun rehearsing the choir, and just after Thanksgiving the ladies from the Tuesday Biblettes set in to making costumes for the wise men out of old chair covers. The reverend’s schedule provided for two practice runs in December before the actual production on the evening of Sunday the twenty-third, and when Reverend Shelton addressed his congregation on the morning of the sixteenth he told them how the Christmas pageant would be an unforgettable affair. Momma said it surely was.

The animals normally used in the pageant were kept from year to year in the basement of the fellowship hall. They were made out of painted plywood and seemed very lifelike if you didn’t look at them anywhere but head-on. But the reverend didn’t think his pageant was suited for wooden animals; he thought it called for something a little more grand and spectacular. The Reverend Shelton had actual livestock in mind, livestock which he borrowed from local farmers who agreed to keep quiet about it until after the performance. He got hold of a half-dozen piglets, a pair of goats, three or four chickens, one goose, and Mr. Jip French’s old blind pony that his boys chased around the pasture and ran into fences. But when he tried the animals out at a full-dress rehearsal the reverend discovered that he couldn’t use the pony because it was given to breaking wind, not very loudly, Momma said, but in near lethal concentrations. So the reverend tried to get another pony but couldn’t and had to settle for Mr. Earl Jemison’s steely-grey hound, Mayhew, which was probably one of the biggest dogs in the county and which the reverend decided to transform into a camel by means of a couple of pillows and a brown rug.

Mayhew did not come easy, however. Mr. Jemison accounted himself a respectable actor and he bargained relentlessly for the part of the voice of God, a part Mr. Jemison said he had always wanted to play. Mr. Shelton had saved the voice of God for himself and he gave it up to Mr. Jemison with severe misgivings since he did not think God talked at all like Mr. Jemison, whose voice Daddy said could pass for an articulate doorhinge. But the reverend had somehow convinced himself he was desperate for a camel and he wasn’t about to lose the services of Mr. Jemison’s dog.

Momma said she and Miss Mattie Gunn did not know just what to think when they entered a sanctuary entirely darkened except for three railroad lanterns hung here and there on a fairly legitimate-looking stable up by the altar. And she said neither Miss Mattie nor herself noticed that the reverend had imported actual animals until the both of them caught a whiff of the chickens at about the same time. Unfortunately Miss Mattie suffered from an allergy to feathers and her eyes immediately teared up so that she couldn’t see past the pew in front of her and Momma had to tell her just how everything looked. Momma said the reverend and his committees had created a most impressive effect with just a few oven crates, some paint, a couple of bales of hay, a handful of livestock, and the accompanying barnyard aroma. Momma said the reverend had strewn hay across the altar, set the stablefront on top of it, hung a few lanterns, tethered the goats, caught up the piglets and the chickens and the goose together in a wire corral, and left the ammonia to drift where it would. Momma said she could have been out of doors for all she knew and every now and then she wished she was.

Momma did not know exactly when Miss Pettigrew made her entry into the sanctuary since the usher seated her a full two aisles over from Momma, who could hardly make out Miss Mattie as it was. But she suspected Miss Pettigrew arrived just after the reverend had presented himself from a niche beneath the choir loft and come forward onto the altar to greet the congregation. Along about then Momma heard a distinct buzzing off to her left that carried the length of the aisle and she said it was probably the sound of people asking each other if that was indeed Miss Pettigrew or telling each other it was indeed Aunt Willa, not because they could make out her features, not even because they could tell she was colored, but because even in the lanternlight they could detect the radical limp Aunt Willa got from being dropped onto a stone hearth as a baby. And Momma said the usher and Miss Pettigrew and Aunt Willa advanced to the front pew with the noise of their passing advancing just behind them. She said anybody knew whoever was with Aunt Willa had to be Miss Pettigrew.

According to Momma the pageant got underway when the arm of the innkeeper came far enough out of the shadows to direct the Virgin Mary and Joseph to a place where they might bed down for the night. She said the Virgin Mary, as played by Miss Alice Covens, seemed somewhat frightened of the goats and swung excessively wide of them on her way into the stable while Joseph, as played by Mr. Jeffrey Elwood Crawford jr., lingered outside and delivered a little speech on starlight and poverty and the kindness of men. He concluded to a very short burst of applause that lasted only as long at it took for Mrs. Crawford to get hold of her husband’s hands. Then Joseph joined the Virgin Mary in the stable and the choir took over with Miss Dull’s arrangement of “0 Little Town of Bethlehem.” Mr. Jemison’s big scene followed the music and began with Reverend Shelton playing a flashlight beam onto the angel of the Lord, who was perched a little recklessly on the choir-loft bannister. But nothing happened right away, and Momma said the angel clung onto the railing and waited and the congregation waited and the Reverend Shelton coughed and cleared his throat until finally the voice of God exploded out of the darkness like a train whistle and nearly scared everybody to death. Momma said Mr. Jemison told his angel where to go and what to do when he got there, and then the angel sort of saluted, she said, and threw himself off the bannister, which caused the entire congregation to suck air. But he was harnessed into a system of ropes and pulleys, and after he swooped back into the railing once, he descended more or less without incident to a point just over the stable roof where he could hover and wait for the wise men.

The Reverend Shelton threw a switch that activated a bulb in a Moravian star suspended somewhere above the angel of the Lord and somewhere below the choir loft, and almost simultaneously the three kings from the orient came forward out of the narthex wearing everybody’s old upholstery and beards made from cotton swabs and crowns wrapped in aluminum foil. One of them bore frankincense and another one bore both myrrh and gold since the one who was supposed to bear the gold had his hands full with the camel, who did not seem especially interested in witnessing the birth of the Christchild but showed a preference for sniffing shoetops along the aisle. Miss Fay Dull led the choir in four verses of “We Three Kings,” which served to carry the gift-bearing wise men on up to the stable but broke off a minute or two before the one with the camel had a chance to make the altar. Only the angel of the Lord seemed at all perturbed by the delay, but then he had just grown somewhat harness-weary and thrashed around in an effort to relieve himself.

The baby Jesus had gotten born in the meantime and as the wise men closed in to adore him, the camel, who was supposed to be tethered up away from the goose and the piglets and the chickens and the goats, got loose into the back of the stable and sprawled on the hay where he licked himself through the better part of Miss Dull’s solo performance of “Away in a Manger.” Then came time for Reverend Shelton to read a passage from the Book of Matthew, and Momma said that’s when the trouble started. When the reverend turned on his pulpit lamp so as to see the Bible, considerable light was thrown onto the front edge of the congregation, and best as Momma could figure it the Virgin Mary, who had the Christchild in her arms and was flanked all around by Joseph and the wise men, looked up long enough to get an eyeful of a colored woman in the front pew, which would have been a rarity in any pew, and then she looked again and saw it was Aunt Willa and since she knew wherever Aunt Willa went Miss Pettigrew might be, she looked off beside Aunt Willa and found Miss Pettigrew herself, who had already become a kind of local spook.

Momma said the sight of Miss Pettigrew must have simply shocked the Virgin Mary and in her agitation she lost her grip on the baby Jesus and dropped him onto the edge of the manger, where his porcelain head got jarred loose from the rest of him and fell onto the hay next to one of the goats, and Momma said the sound of the baby Jesus’ head hitting the floor startled the one goat, who bucked into the other one who lunged the length of his tether and jolted one of the lanterns off its peg, and Momma said when it hit the floor the glass chimney broke and the hay caught fire. The wise men bolted off in one direction, Joseph cleared out in the other, and the Virgin Mary crept backwards into the stable with her hands over her mouth until she stepped on the camel’s hindquarters, which caused him to jump to his feet and start barking. By this time the angel of the Lord figured things had pretty much fallen to pieces and he set up a fuss to be hauled in right away; he said the harness was making his legs blue. But Momma said he was left to dangle over the stable while two baritones came down out of the choir loft and smothered the flames with their robes before going to the assistance of the Virgin Mary, who had momentarily lost her wits. In a matter of minutes everything was back to order except for the camel who continued to bark and make threatening noises, but he cowed immediately when the voice of God shouted down from the rafters, “Mayhew, shut up!”

Momma said some one of the ushers finally showed the great good sense to turn the sanctuary lights up and everybody along the left aisle leapt bolt upright to see if that was indeed Miss Pettigrew in the company of Aunt Willa in the front row, and when they found out that yes, it was, they told the people beside them who told the people beside them who told the people beside them and the news shot through the sanctuary like electricity. Momma said nobody seemed to care that the reverend’s Christmas pageant had nearly burned the church down or that the reverend himself had fallen into a faint behind the pulpit or that the angel of the Lord had commenced to wail and sob and say how doctors would have to cut his legs off with a handsaw if somebody didn’t draw him into the choir loft straightaway. She said all people wanted to do was look at Miss Pettigrew since they’d been without the chance to in nearly a decade and didn’t know when the opportunity might present itself again. So everybody stood up, she said, and looked. Aunt Willa helped Miss Pettigrew off the pew, and Momma said she tried to lead her on out of the sanctuary but Miss Pettigrew held up and faced the congregation, not seeming at all mysterious or tainted or stern, but just a little wilted and sheepish and fairly human.

Momma said Aunt Willa’s cheeks were all puffy and swollen and her gums obviously gave her some pain when she snatched at Miss Pettigrew’s elbow and said, “Come on h’yer,” but Miss Pettigrew just stood where she was and worked her lips as if she might say something, as if she might say hello. Momma said folks looked at each other and looked at Miss Pettigrew and looked at each other again until Miss Pettigrew finally opened her mouth and said nothing whatsoever.

Then Aunt Willa took her by the elbow. “Come on h‘yer Miss Pettigrew,” she said. “Come on h’yer to home.” And Momma said this time Miss Pettigrew let Aunt Willa have her way and everybody watched them down the aisle, watched them into the narthex, watched them even after the angel of the Lord unhooked himself from the rope and fell through the stable roof.

 

 

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