A Short History of a Small Place (20 page)

So soon enough there was nothing left to them but the house, and Mrs. Throckmorton herself struck up a deal for it. With a portion of the money she hired out a wagon which all of the remaining Throckmorton furniture and possessions could hardly fill up, and Daddy said she gave over a little change to Poppa, who hired and paid for the same negro he had hired and paid for before, directing him to pull and unbend the nails and haul the rolled up hammock on his shoulder behind the wagon. Daddy said they moved on a Saturday in the rain with little Evelyn Maynard and Pinky on the seat alongside Mrs. Throckmorton who drove the team while Poppa lay sprawled across the loose items to keep them from blowing. And everybody watched, Daddy said, from doorways and windows as Mrs. Throckmorton guided the horses onto the boulevard away from the square and the courthouse and out to southend where she had bought a little white clapboard house in among a dozen other little white clapboard houses, and Daddy said since there was no porch anywhere but only a stoop on the front and three wooden steps at the back, Poppa picked out a pair of trees in the sideyard and had the negro drive and rebend the nails and so suspend the hammock between them while little Evelyn Maynard and Pinky and Mrs. Throckmorton emptied the wagonbed.

Daddy said the people of southend never bothered to gape at the Throckmortons since they had enough misery and hardship of their own to keep them occupied, but most everybody else found time to parade by the house just to see Poppa swinging in his hammock in the sideyard, and he said the general feeling was that Poppa had disgraced his family and shamed his blood, but Daddy said that was not the case exactly; he said Poppa had simply miscalculated his ties. According to Daddy, who researched it and studied it all, Poppa was not so attached to the snuffbox Throckmorton as he thought but owed considerably more to the West Virginia clan of his kinfolk who had pooled their willingness and knowhow to construct an extraordinary and utterly unforgettable collection of vats and troughs and copper tubing that was less a still than a refinery and which operated on such a scale that it was said to have produced liquor more than brewed it. And Daddy said then or now all anybody had to do was walk into a town or even a widespot most anywhere in the Allegheny Mountains and say the name out loud and every available voice would answer back, “Jesus, them Throckmortons.” So Daddy said Poppa’s main failing was nothing but pure miscalculation which left him in a very sad and unfortunate predicament, not that he had disgraced the family name, which he hadn’t, and not that he hadn’t turned out to be a throwback of sorts, which he had, but just that he wasn’t thrown back near far enough, which he never would be.

 

So Poppa lasted it out in his hammock, Daddy said, until his liver took him under which left Mrs. Throckmorton to raise the boys, and Daddy said in spite of everything that had happened and in spite of everybody who remembered it, Mrs. Throckmorton lived to be an old woman which Daddy didn’t figure to be any great blessing in this instance considering how things turned out. Daddy said once little Evelyn Maynard left babyhood he gave Mrs. Throckmorton all grades of trouble right on up into manhood and direct to middle age. Along about his fifteenth year he decided he didn’t much care for Evelyn or Maynard either and went by Bubba instead, and Daddy said as Bubba Throckmorton he began to run with the wrong crowd of people and had already been in and out of jail four times for various disturbances before his twenty-first birthday on the occasion of which, Daddy said, the former Miss Fuller presented him with an all expenses paid excursion to the Dix Hill facility in Raleigh where he went to take the cure. But even at twenty-one Bubba was too saturated to dry out, not just saturated with liquor, Daddy said, but with heritage too, so the cure failed the first time and the time after that and the time after that, and Daddy said once Bubba hit thirty he was already pure post-stereoscopic Poppa, so there was nothing for him to do but live at the homeplace with his Momma, and there was nothing for her to do but buy him a rope hammock of his own since Poppa had stipulated and specified that he wear his into the casket like a shroud. And Daddy said on account of Bubba the Throckmortons achieved a sort of immortality, or two generations worth anyway, since Bubba took to swinging between the trees Poppa had swung between and since some of the folks who had gaped at Poppa and the sons and daughters of the rest of the folks who had gaped at Poppa could now pacify themselves gaping at Bubba, who Daddy said carried the Throckmorton torch, or in this case the alcohol lamp.

Pinky, however, got on with his life a little more successfully than Bubba did. He married one of the Jeeter girls whose family had inherited a chicken ranch in Draper and so had relocated there from Rock Hill, South Carolina. There were five Jeeters altogether, Momma and Daddy Jeeter, Grandma Jeeter, and the two Jeeter daughters, who had legitimate Christian names that got no sort of wide circulation and who were known instead as the fat Jeeter and the bald Jeeter. Daddy said the fat Jeeter was what Momma might call hefty, which according to Daddy was a lady’s way of saying she had the girth of a tractor tire, and Daddy himself said the fat Jeeter was a girl of tremendous quantity who cut an imposing if not disgusting figure. But Daddy said she was the one Pinky lost his head over at first and he wooed her and courted her and kept her in chocolates for the best part of three months before the wind changed, Daddy said, and blew what flame there was from the fat one over to the bald one and Pinky began to call on her and bring her candied fruit since chocolates made her scalp break out. Daddy said the bald Jeeter had not been born bald but lost her hair in childhood during a bout with scarlet fever and had been as slick as an egg ever since. And Daddy said once she got old enough to care that she was hairless her Grandma Jeeter made her a pair of wigs out of a combination of human and horse hair, one of which was satiny black while the other, taken mostly from a chestnut mare, was a lovely natural brown and heightened the otherwise drab features of the bald Miss Jeeter’s face. And Daddy said once Pinky married the bald one and left the fat one to go her own way, most everybody agreed he had done a wise thing since the bald one was not always bald or always brunette or always chestnut-headed, but the fat one was always fat. Daddy said Pinky had simply opted for variety, which nobody much was willing to blame him for.

Pinky worked as a day laborer right after his marriage but soon enough took a job with the post office downtown where he sorted mail and sold stamps at the window. According to Daddy, Pinky was as tight as twelve cent shoes with his money and for the first two years of their married life him and the bald Jeeter lived in half a shack down by the cotton mill which they did not leave until Pinky had saved and scraped and otherwise strangled enough dollars to put a downpayment on his granddaddy’s house which his momma had sold on account of Poppa’s infirmity, Daddy called it.

Daddy said Pinky and the bald Jeeter girl moved into the Throckmorton house in the winter of 1938 which gave rise to considerable optimism throughout Neely that come spring folks would have a Throckmorton to gape at on each end of town, and everybody concluded that would go a ways towards making the whole business more convenient and agreeable. But Daddy said spring arrived and Pinky proved out to be less accommodating than folks had hoped. He kept on at the post office like a regular Trojan, Daddy said, and nights and weekends him and the bald Mrs. Throckmorton worked over the old homeplace from top to bottom in an effort to make it respectable and maybe a little bit awesome once more. And Daddy said people were generally disappointed and fairly much appalled when summer came and went and Pinky never even strung up a hammock, but then Daddy said Pinky was not Bubba and Pinky was not Poppa either but was some of both of them and a little of something else. Of the two remaining Throckmorton heirs, Daddy said Pinky became known as “the other one” while Bubba was unanimously considered “the one who drinks,” as in “which one was it, the one who drinks or the other one?” Not that Pinky didn’t drink, Daddy said, and not that he drank less than Bubba who even in 1938 was saturated enough to steep in nothing but his own juices for a few days without risking full consciousness, but just that Pinky kept his liquor in the crook of the porch support and drank it in seclusion, which was pretty much discounted as any sort of Throckmorton-induced alcoholic dependence but was instead broadly and publicly taken as a form of polite imbibing, Daddy said.

But Daddy said Pinky was as much his father’s son as Bubba was, only in the other direction. He said, like Poppa, Pinky had a little of the potentate in him while Bubba could only own up to a perforated stomach and the ruins of a liver, but unlike Poppa, Pinky was also blessed with a dash of Fuller which Daddy supposed might have supplied him with the determination and wherewithal, he called it, that Poppa could never quite muster in his day. So according to Daddy, Pinky wasn’t much like Bubba and wasn’t exactly like Poppa who had only talked about his regal attachments while Pinky tried to act like one, which meant he blustered, Daddy said, since that’s what Pinky assumed potentates did best. The bald Jeeter was not given to drawing attention to herself and so was not much help to Pinky where blustering was concerned, but Daddy said once Pinky had settled into the homeplace and had gotten himself promoted out of mailsorting and up to clerking only, he developed a full swagger for outdoor use, a kind of bloated lordliness, Daddy called, for the Throckmorton parlor, and his own particular way of blowing around in the post office like maybe he’d invented the envelope. Now Daddy said people generally don’t sit still for this sort of thing but they let Pinky play the big fish for awhile since most everybody figured he had a generation or two of Throckmortons to live down and so would have to truly apply himself to this potentate business if he wanted to buff up the family name even the least little bit, and anyway, Daddy said, nobody could get his fill of Pinky as long as there was a Bubba swinging between two trees in his Momma’s sideyard and clapping the empty galvanized coffee cup against the near trunk after Poppa’s example, so the sight of one Throckmorton and the recollection of another tended to dilute and generally offset any full-scale blustering undertaken by the third one. And Daddy said it got so that the worst thing anybody could say to Pinky was, “I remember your Daddy.” He said it got so that wherever Pinky was Poppa was too and whatever Pinky did Poppa had already done it, he said it got so that the faster Pinky ran and the harder he worked his arms the quicker Poppa pulled even with him. Daddy said Poppa was Pinky’s lead necktie.

So all of the blustering and blowing around Pinky could manage simply would not get it, and Daddy imagined Pinky might have never found his niche in Throckmortondom if a peculiar set of circumstances hadn’t come along to open up whole new vistas for him. Daddy said along about six months after the bald Jeeter had delivered Pinky a daughter into the world, the Throckmortons began to have some trouble with their upstairs toilet. Nothing much would go down it, Daddy said, or anyway nothing much that went down it stayed down it and no amount of plunging on Pinky’s part could persuade the toilet to swallow any of the sorts of items it usually made off with very casually and without complaint. So Pinky called in for consultation and advice one of the few local plumbers, Mr. Casper Epps, who Daddy said did respectable work if you could find a sharp enough stick to poke him with. Now Daddy said Mr. Epps had a brother, Justin, who was a servant of Jehovah in Decatur, Georgia and recent to Pinky’s toilet problems Justin had written Casper to tell how he had constructed an entire sermon around samples of Casper’s sinfulness and personal vice, which had been received very enthusiastically by the congregation, and Daddy said since Casper had yet to amount to much otherwise he was proud to have been displayed so prominently and to have earned such a reception and consequently he took it upon himself to cultivate and catalog his shortcomings and dispatch a biweekly report to his brother so that between the two of them they might better show the congregation what transgression is all about. Casper’s plan was to work his way systematically through the seven deadly sins taking in a number of the less lethal ones along the way, and he had most recently begun to air out his slothfulness, which he was already partial to, when Pinky called him about the toilet. So they agreed to meet the following morning and Casper, of course, didn’t show up, so Pinky called him the next day and made another appointment and again Casper didn’t come, so he called him a third time, all fed up and indignant, and threatened and browbeat Casper until he had squeezed a commitment out of him for noon of the day after, and when Pinky left the post office to go home and keep the appointment he found Casper asleep in the square on one of the benches underneath the statue of Colonel Blalock. Pinky took hold of Casper’s collar and dragged him on home with him.

The little Throckmorton girl was responsible for the trouble though nobody knew it yet nor would know it until Mr. Epps had unbolted the toilet and turned it upside down. The bald Jeeter had insisted they name the baby Ivy after the fat Jeeter in hopes of smoothing out relations between them which had become a little strained on account of Pinky, and Daddy said the bald Jeeter left little Ivy on the bathroom counter while she cleaned out the tub and somehow the baby got hold of a small tin of toothpowder which she accidentally dropped into the toilet bowl where it sank on out of sight and became wedged in the crook just this side of the drainoff. Daddy said Casper leaned over the bowl and peered into it and Pinky leaned over behind him and peered into it for himself, and then Casper poked the handle of the plunger as far down into the neck as it would go and Pinky took the plunger from him and poked around for himself, and then Casper lifted the lid off the tank and fiddled with some of the paraphernalia and Pinky stuck his hand in the tank too and fiddled a little for himself, and then Casper told Pinky he didn’t know just what was wrong with the toilet and Pinky told Casper he didn’t know himself. So Casper set out after his tools and Pinky made the mistake of letting him which left the Throckmortons without an upstairs toilet until the following Tuesday, when the time came for Casper to take up another vice.