A Short History of a Small Place (17 page)

So he got shed of the underwear, got shed of trousers altogether, and anymore whenever Miss Pettigrew or the mayor turned him out the door and off the porch he arrived on the front lawn wearing a porkpie hat and a plaid sportcoat and only nature’s gifts otherwise. And Daddy said just after the monkey had been let outside he would always go up the flagpole straightaway and stand as he had grown accustomed to standing with one foot atop the knob and the toes of the other around the pole itself, and he would gaze out over the treetops as before, Daddy said, and on beyond the courthouse and into the country all the while looking very thoughtful and dignified except for the lack of trousers, and then he would begin to make water, Daddy said, just a little dribble at first but soon enough a regular stream of it, a looping arc of monkey water as thick as your little finger Daddy said. And Daddy said the monkey never much seemed to care where it went but just studied the horizon and left the people on the ground to care where it went for him, which they were more than willing to oblige him in since crowding up against the Pettigrew’s fence had become a rather bold and reckless undertaking and since the people of Neely, neither bold nor reckless by nature, always endeavored to be careful instead. So the mayor would turn the monkey out of the house and follow him on down into the yard, and Daddy said as the monkey shot up the flagpole the mayor would lean against the iron fence and say, “Watch yourselves,” which would send most everybody into the street.

But Daddy said it got so nobody had to go anywhere when the monkey relieved himself because he turned out to be so extremely though blindly accurate that he hardly ever missed the camellia bush Miss Pettigrew had planted at the corner of the lot where two runs of fence came together, but he said only a few of the shrewdest and most observant spectators first noticed what a reliable marksman the monkey was and made themselves some money on account of it before everybody else caught on. Daddy said the monkey would get himself situated atop his flagpole and just before he could cut loose someone in the crowd would shout out, “I got two dollars says he hits that bush yonder,” and several other people would join up with him while most everybody else, who considered that a monkey who didn’t look or care where he went certainly couldn’t be counted on to hit a single piece of shrubbery, took the wager up in a flash and stood by while Junious emptied himself into the camellia bush. But folks wised up, Daddy said, and soon enough nobody much would take that bet anymore, so the camellia bush was divided into quarters and a complete miss became the long shot which paid off handsomely but was only a popular risk on gusty days.

Daddy said the monkey could be counted on for at least two solid rounds of betting on weekdays and four, sometimes five rounds on Satur days, and he said Mr. Curtis Amos, who worked at the flour mill and always carried a pad and pencil in his apron pocket, took down the wagers and handled the money and chaired the panel of judges which determined the winning quarter in borderline shots. And Daddy said on account of what the monkey now did regularly into the camellia bush the Pettigrew front lawn attracted a new variety of observer and the crowd against the fence began to show a streak of meanness and poverty running through it, compliments mostly of the icehouse niggers and the night shift at the textile plant, where before the Pettigrew monkey had relieved himself in the company of the idly curious and not much of anybody else. And Daddy said with every passing day the talk grew generally rougher and crowd grew generally iller until it got so the mayor would hardly let Miss Myra Angelique into the yard anymore but attended to the activities himself because, as Daddy put it, the mayor was always one for a good wager even if it was his monkey and his camellia bush.

So the monkey became a regular attraction, Daddy said, and even after the betting had gone on for nearly a month it still had not happened yet though most everyone agreed later that it had been bound and determined to happen all along, that a monkey who was smart enough to liberate himself from two pairs of duck pants and as much underwear was certain to make it happen just exactly when and precisely to whom he wanted to make it happen, but Daddy said for a month it didn’t happen and then all of a sudden it did and to about the only person in the entire crowd who could be counted on to raise a colossal stink over it, who could be absolutely expected to. Daddy said it just seemed that the monkey got tired of everybody in the county eyeing his private functions and did what he could to let somebody else put on the sideshow for awhile.

Daddy said it all started on a Thursday in the middle of the afternoon. He said the weather had been especially windy the previous week and consequently the gambling had gone poorly since most everybody wanted to sit with the long shot and nobody much would risk the bush which left the crowd particularly nasty and unsettled until calm weather set back in on Sunday evening and even then, Daddy said, it took almost to Wednesday to get some of the edge off the general temperament. But Thursday dawned bright and windless, Daddy said, and along about two o’clock folks began to gather at the Pettigrew’s fence, a little anxious but no iller than usual. It was a sizeable crowd, according to Daddy, with plenty of money to lay down, enough anyway to keep Mr. Amos frantic with his pencil right up until Junious got himself turned out the door and made for the flagpole on his knuckles. The mayor came along behind him and took up his place at the gate while the monkey climbed to the knob and crouched atop it. Daddy said everybody studied the monkey who picked at himself and scratched some and curled his lips inside out, and then when he finally did stand up and erect Daddy said people half-watched the monkey and half-watched the bush until they saw that the creature’s face was beginning to draw up into a sort of severe and worldly expression and then nobody at all watched the monkey and everybody watched the bush only.

Daddy said Mr. Amos was nearest to it and almost had his nose in a camellia blossom, which was the sort of close range work his judgeship usually called for. Pinky Throckmorton had moved in next to him and was as tight up to Mr. Amos and the camellia bush as he could get since he had five dollars riding on the lower righthand quarter and wanted to see for himself exactly how things went. Daddy said Mrs. Nell Curtis had managed to get herself up next to Pinky. He said she was not a gambling woman by nature but had come in all the way from Leaksville with her egg money, the entire seventy-five cents of it, and had put it down on the long shot in hopes of taking home some instant capital for Mr. Curtis who was negotiating with his neighbor down the street for a used Studebaker. And Daddy said the farther out over the treetops and the courthouse that monkey looked the closer in folks leaned and edged and crowded until most everybody was up on somebody else’s back and had somebody up on his own, and Daddy said most people were staring so hard into the camellia bush that nobody much saw right off what the monkey did but heard it first and couldn’t collect themselves to look until he had already delivered the better part of a half pint directly onto the crown of Mr. Amos’ straw fedora, which Daddy said was not so unfortunate for Mr. Amos as it might seem since the straw made a particularly effective awning and sent most of the monkey water straight back up into the air. Daddy said half of what bounced off of Mr. Amos’ hat splattered harmlessly onto the camellia bush but most of the rest of it found its way to Mr. Pinky Throckmorton’s shirtsleeve. And that, Daddy said, was the hell of it.

He said Pinky jumped backwards and hollered, “Shitshitshitshitshit,” like a steam engine, and Mr. Amos removed his hat, waved it in front of his face and said, “No, Pinky, I don’t believe so,” which got quite a rise from the crowd but didn’t serve to sooth Pinky any who was having enough trouble of his own trying simultaneously to keep his shirtsleeve off his skin and duck his head away from Mrs. Nell Curtis, who had been all alone on the long shot, the day being fair and windless, and was whooping it up in Pinky’s ear. The mayor apologized to Pinky and offered to launder his shirt for him, but Daddy said Pinky was too hot to talk back right off so just bubbled and boiled and spewed at the mayor still with a little piece of his shirtsleeve between his fingers and Mrs. Curtis off his left flank screeching and yapping about a Studebaker. Then the mayor told Pinky he’d buy him a new shirt altogether, and Pinky still didn’t respond right off, Daddy said, but he did manage to get his mouth opened and his head turned along about the same time and he put his face up next to Mrs. Curtis’ face and screamed at her,
“Hush up!”
which Daddy said went right through Mrs. Curtis and down to Municipal Square and back again and sort of let all the air out of her before it died off completely. Then Pinky looked full at the mayor still with that little bit of shirtsleeve between his fingers and he said, “Mayor, you don’t have to buy me a new shirt cause it ain’t so much my shirt’s been pissed on. It’s my dignity, Mayor, and I’m gone have to clean that up for myself.” And Daddy said Pinky let loose of his sleeve and got halfway across the street before he turned around and said, “See you in the courthouse, Mayor.”

iv

 

 

It wasn’t that Pinky came from bad people, Daddy said, because a Throckmorton was no worse than most and better than some. According to Daddy, we’d known three generations of them in Neely, where they had seen fit to move from Kannapolis which had become home to a family of Tullahoma, Tennessee Throckmortons whose ancestors had gravitated southward out of Clarksburg, West Virginia after originating in Philadelphia where Daddy said the first Throckmorton stepped off the boat and threw down his luggage. Daddy said Pinky’s granddaddy got on at the cotton mill as a foreman and proceeded to work his way up into the executive offices where he earned a respectable salary with which he bought up a considerable amount of company stock, stock that he willed to his widow who willed it in her turn to her only child, Braxton Porter Throckmorton jr., who arrived at the full blush of manhood with no avocation and so lived off the benefits for awhile. Daddy said Braxton Throckmorton jr., who was Pinky’s daddy and went by Poppa in dealings that didn’t call for a signature, was the family throwback and so was not like his daddy or his daddy’s daddy or his granddaddy’s daddy but liked to think he was most related to and derived from a particular duke or prince or some such potentate in England, Daddy called him, who was a Throckmorton by the most obscure attachment possible and who Poppa said had been the first gentleman in the whole United Kingdom and Europe too possessed of enough social daring to decorate the lid of his snuffbox with a jewel. Daddy said Poppa liked to think the same species of unbridled recklessness and bravado coursed through his veins and set him off from regular humans, which was the explanation he gave whenever folks accused him of being lazy and foolhardy.

Daddy said Poppa married a Fuller girl but not until after his thirty-fifth birthday, when folks had already concluded he would not marry and not until after her thirty-seventh birthday when folks had already concluded she could not marry.

So everybody assumed Poppa Throckmorton would have to go to work at last, what with a new wife and, soon enough, a little one on the way, but Daddy said he merely persisted in the Throckmorton recklessness and bravado which he most regularly displayed from a rope hammock strung between two pillars of the Throckmorton front porch and suspended from a half-dozen sixteen-penny nails that Poppa had hired a negro to drive in and bend over. Then with the arrival of Braxton Porter Throckmorton III, who would be Pinky, folks became more truly convinced and satisfied that Poppa would have to take employment and earn a respectable salary, but Daddy said even after the new baby the only labor Poppa could ever be accused of was holding open the front door for the men who came to pay for and fetch away the furniture as he sold it off item by item. And according to Daddy it wasn’t a year and a half later that Mrs. Throckmorton was expecting again and so fired up new speculation around town as to what Poppa would now be pressed to do for money which in this case, Daddy said, could not include selling off furniture since he had already unloaded two sideboards, a hutch, three sets of bedsteads with the accompanying mattresses and springs, four stuffed chairs, a dining room table, a pair of matching velvet ottomans, a maple drysink, countless dressers and marble-topped endtables, two sets of stemware, and a box of silver, so Daddy said nobody bothered to suppose that even one more stick of furniture could be brought out through Poppa’s front doorway without a Throckmorton riding on top of it or somehow attached to it anyway. But when the former Miss Fuller had her second Throckmorton, who she named Evelyn Maynard after her daddy and her daddy’s daddy, Poppa still did not seem inclined to do anything by way of getting a living but continued to display the usual recklessness and bravado from the porch hammock, only now, Daddy said, folks sometimes saw him scribbling ciphers in the air with his finger, which was taken as a considerable advancement on his part.

Daddy said little Evelyn Maynard was coming up on two months when the package arrived from New Jersey and sat unclaimed in the post office for the better part of a week before Poppa managed to get himself upright long enough to go down and claim it. Of course, Daddy said, once it had lingered with the mailmen for a day or two there wasn’t anybody in town who didn’t know where it was from and who it was to and who would not have attempted anything short of opening to find out just exactly what it was. So the traffic was extraordinarily heavy in front of the Throckmorton house on the afternoon Poppa picked up his package, and Daddy said he took it on into the hammock with him and opened it there. According to Daddy, most folks were a little disappointed and the rest were surely puzzled by what Poppa drew out of the box, which Daddy said was nothing but a stereoscope and a parcel of picture cards both of which entirely delighted Poppa who did not unwrap the cards right away but put the stereoscope eyepiece up to his face and looked out into the front yard. Daddy said he did not suppose Poppa’s package contained more than a dozen picture cards altogether, and he said when Poppa finally unwrapped them he stuck the first one into the clip and studied it for a full quarter-hour, all the while sliding it up and down the focusing arm and talking to himself underneath the eyepiece. Daddy said he could only speculate as to what Poppa might have been seeing since he had not been exposed to any great variety of stereoscopes himself but had only looked through Great-grandmomma Benfield’s on several occasions and had once made use of our neighbor Mr. Phillip J. King’s model at the fullblown insistence of Mr. King himself, Daddy said, who had received in the mail from his cousin in Baltimore a stereoscopic picture of the frontside of a naked woman which Daddy said went a ways towards pointing out the virtues of the contraption. But Daddy didn’t imagine Poppa Throckmorton had come into the possession of even a single picture of the frontside or backside of anything naked since he would look at each one himself for a few minutes before calling out, “Momma,” and thereby bringing the former Miss Fuller out the side door and onto the porch where she would grab up the stereoscope herself, adjust it as she saw fit, and look through it for maybe ten seconds before pulling it away from her face and saying, “It does look real, Braxton,” to which Poppa would reply, “Don’t it though,” and take the thing back from her. Daddy said it was probably a few landscapes and most likely a dead-on look into the breech of a rifle or a view of the bottoms of some old bugger’s feet poking out from under the bedclothes, which were a couple of big sellers for the stereoscope people. Daddy supposed Poppa might have gotten hold of a few theatrical shots as well, maybe one or two like the one Great-grandmomma Benfield had of a sour-looking woman pointing a dagger and entitled “Lady Macbeth as portrayed by Mrs. Veronica Beech-Whitham of the London Stage.”