A Short History of a Small Place (25 page)

“Come back, Sweetums, come back to Momma,” and the effect itself being, Daddy said, one frantically quivering Jump of schnauzer flesh which Mrs. Greenly hauled on into the post office with her as evidence in her complaint. And after she had finished with the two employees at the stamp window, and after she had finished with the bigger wheels upstairs, and after she had finished with the post office in general, Pinky and Lawd Scales together carried the nailed board into the basement and deposited it behind the heat plant.

And Daddy said once Mrs. Greenly and Sweetums had left for home and once the nailed board had been safely done away with and once the pigeons had repopulated the windowsill, Pinky closed himself up in his office again where he allowed himself a half hour to stew over the circumstances of the afternoon, and after considerable mental turmoil and distress Pinky decided that the pigeons had caused him enough humiliation already to warrant anything he might see fit to do to them. So he gave Mr. Donzo a pocketful of post office money and sent him over to the FCX after a sack of any sort of poison that might be potent enough to do away with a pigeon and shortly thereafter Mr. Donzo returned with an eight pound bag of rat killer which the clerk had told him was of course designed for rats but would polish off any sort of vermin, of which he considered a pigeon to be one. And Daddy said along with the rat killer the clerk had provided Mr. Donzo with precise instructions on how to portion it out and Mr. Donzo repeated them word for word to Pinky, or as near to word for word as he could recall, and Pinky listened very close to him and said, “Alright,” once Mr. Donzo had finished, and then proceeded to distribute exactly half as much simply because Pinky was Pinky and didn’t figure there was any call to be extravagant, even with rat killer. It was Mr. Donzo that figured pigeons to have enough on the ball not to eat pure and undisguised poison, and so it was Mr. Donzo that got sent after a box of oatmeal, part of which he distributed on top of what windowsills Pinky had already baited and the rest of which him and Pinky mixed in with poison itself before they put it out on what windowsills remained. So by the time Pinky and Mr. Donzo got done with the oatmeal and got done with the rat poison, the post office was nearly one hundred percent vermin proofed, and Pinky left for the evening supposing he’d return the following day, pick up the little feathered corpses off the sills, and then go on with his business un-plagued for awhile, and Daddy said Mr. Donzo probably supposed much of the same thing.

According to Daddy, the morning of the great pigeon fiasco dawned bright and calm and even before the bald Jeeter had scrambled up Pinky’s eggs, half the town was out in the daylight taking the air, so when the commotion kicked up it had an audience that Daddy said was already extremely thronglike long before Mr. Donzo got around to calling the sheriff and the fire chief, probably before he ever thought he would have to.

Daddy said Pinky stopped dead before he ever started out across the square and looked at the crowd and at the pump truck and at the top of the sheriff’s hat, which is all he could see of him, and then at Mr. Donzo, who had momentarily set onto the pavement the tin trashcan he’d been carrying with him up and down the street and who had commenced to wave his arms over his head and scream, “Lawd Lawd, Mr. Pinky, Lawd Lawd!” Daddy said the air all around and above Mr. Donzo was thick with pigeons that had bailed off the post office windowsills in twos and threes and were plummeting earthward and expiring, Daddy called it, against the pavement. And Daddy said once Mr. Donzo left off waving and Lawd Lawding, he took up the trashcan by the handles again and attempted to run under and catch as many pigeons as he possibly could which turned out to be no pigeons whatsoever since Mr. Donzo could not very agilely carry both the trashcan and his own stomach and since he could not get well underway after one pigeon without seeing four more in four different directions and setting out after them too, which meant that Mr. Donzo got no pigeons at all and hardly went anywhere. And Daddy said once Pinky made his way through the crowd and stepped into the street, Mr. Donzo stopped from his pigeon collecting long enough to say, “Lawd Lawd, Mr. Pinky, we done it now,” and according to Daddy for a moment or two it looked like Mr. Donzo might expire against the pavement along with the pigeons.

In the opinion of the clerk at the FCX, who had been called in by Sheriff Browner to analyze the predicament once all the details and circumstances of it had finally been disclosed, Mr. Throckmorton and Mr. Scales had failed to portion out adequate doses of the substance in question and so had succeeded in making the pigeons as a flock, the clerk said, feel somewhat puny along about midnight and deteriorate until morning when they became outright and convulsively incapacitated, all of which, Daddy said, meant that the pigeons were too sick to fly but heavy enough to fall which they would not have done at all if Pinky had allowed and distributed enough rat killer to knock them over dead where they were. So the pigeons as a flock, Daddy said, crept to the edges of their respective windowsills and threw themselves into the street, flapping a few times on the way down for effect, and Daddy said there was such an abundance of outright and convulsive incapacitation, not to mention pigeons themselves, that Mr. Donzo and Pinky and Sheriff Browner and a firehouse lieutenant and the clerk from the FCX could hardly gather up the most recently expired batch before another one had already launched itself towards expiration, and Daddy said Mr. Donzo’s trashcan was all but filled up with deceased birds before it even began to look like there might in fact be an end to all the carnage, Daddy called it, and finally after a half minute with no pigeons whatsoever either landing or falling or departing from the post office, some one of the crowd said out loud to everybody else, “That’s it. That’s all of them,” but before the sound of his voice could die well away another pigeon pitched himself into the air and sailed gloriously down to the pavement. Then a full minute passed, Daddy said, with no sign of a live pigeon anywhere, and this time it was several people that said, “That’s it. That’s all of them,” which they had not even finished saying when three more birds hit the street. And then after a good minute and a half with no expirations, everybody but Sheriff Browner and Pinky and Mr. Donzo said more or less together, “That’s it. That’s all of them,” and it finally seemed like maybe it was until, after five or six pigeonless minutes, a pair of birds staggered into view on opposite ends of the post office and entertained the crowd with what was pretty much a synchronized expiration, and then everybody looked and waited and nobody said anything, but nothing else happened, Daddy said, because that was it. That was all of them.

Sheriff Browner didn’t charge Pinky or Mr. Donzo either with any sort of misdemeanor, didn’t even issue them a citation for littering. According to Daddy, all the sheriff did was to tell Pinky that if he were him he didn’t believe he’d do any such thing again, which was not in any way a threat but just a piece of advice the sheriff thought Pinky ought to have. And Daddy said Pinky told the sheriff back that as far as he knew he’d poisoned all the pigeons he was ever going to poison. Now the crowd itself, Daddy said, very obviously appreciated the diversion and probably, as a crowd, did not yet know that it had witnessed an atrocity, though Daddy imagined one or two among them could possibly have suspected that a pigeon massacre might be an atrocity but most likely were not exactly sure if it was or it wasn’t, and Daddy said in fact the pigeon fiasco did not officially become an atrocity until the witnesses had circulated various accounts of it which were filtered through, expanded upon, and recirculated by an ever increasing number of non-witnesses until finally two or three or four or maybe even a half dozen versions of the story reached the little pink shell-like ears, Daddy called them, of Mrs. Ira Penn and Miss Joyce Tullock who were respectively the president and vice-president of the Neely chapter of the D.A.R. and together set aside ten minutes of the Wednesday luncheon for a debate and vote on and condemnation of Mr. Pinky Throckmorton’s high crime against pigeondom, Daddy called it, which the ladies elected to be an atrocity and very soundly condemned along with Pinky himself while at the same time taking no official action against Mr. Donzo who was an old, fat, uneducated negro which, Daddy said, they figured to be condemnation enough.

So Daddy said what on Tuesday had been your simple fiasco got elevated to an atrocity lunchtime Wednesday and then was distributed as such on the bottom half of the front page of the Thursday Chronicle, and consequently all those people who were previously not exactly sure if a pigeon massacre was or was not an atrocity got told for certain that it was and all those people who had not even suspected that it might be also got told that it was and so at least had to consider the possibility whereas otherwise, Daddy said, they probably would have just gone around ignorant and would never even have suspected that Pinky was guilty of atrociousness. But he was, Daddy said, anyway Mrs. Ira Penn said he was right there on the bottom half of the front page of section A of the
Chronicle,
which is actually the only section aside from the advertising inserts which are called section B but are not a section at all and are only stuck inside of section A, according to Daddy, in order to make the
Chronicle
feel like fifteen cents worth of newspaper. At first Mrs. Ira Penn said she was “scandalized” by what Mr. Pinky Throckmorton had “instigated,” which would be the pigeon fiasco, and then she said she was “scandalized and distressed,” and then she said she was “scandalized, distressed, and deeply saddened,” and as far as Mrs. Ira Penn saw it Neely could not yet but would soon “fathom the myriad reverberations of the innumerable death knells sounded Tuesday last for the companions at our feet,” all of which the reporter Mr. Upchurch called “pigeons” in parentheses. And Daddy said even though Mrs. Ira Penn could not tick off any specific reverberations right at the moment, just the hint of some on the way stirred up about half of Neely, which would be mostly the female half since not much of the male half paid any attention to Mrs. Ira Penn except for Mr. Ira Penn, who Daddy said was the sort of man who always knew what was good for him.

But Daddy said even after the pigeon fiasco had been officially declared an atrocity and played up as such in the newspaper, nothing much came of it except for an abundance of fiery talk directed mostly at Pinky but partially at Sheriff Browner for allowing him to run free, and throughout all of a Monday and part of a Tuesday the D.A.R. did manage to collect eighty-three names on a petition which requested that Braxton Porter Throckmorton III be made legally bound to purchase for the township of Neely one sizeable and undamaged flock of pigeons to be distributed throughout the municipal square and environs, but when it came Mrs. Nettles’s turn to make herself the eighty-fourth signee she left the petition untended on the eating table while she went after her spectacles, and Mr. Nettles, who Daddy said never quite ran on all four cylinders, started up a fire in the cookstove with it and nobody much bothered to draw up another one. So the petition business sort of piddled out and all variety of speculation on and discussion of pigeons died down some and Pinky and the bald Jeeter stayed close to home until the whole atrocity business could blow over, which it eventually did, Daddy said, with the help of a national convention of the D.A.R. in Nashville, Tennessee, what Daddy called a Dowager Jamboree, which so thoroughly distracted the members of the local chapter that they forgot all about the pigeon issue since packing for Nashville did not leave them much time to help sustain the outcry against those innumerable death knells, and so the outcry itself, Daddy said, left off reverberating entirely.

Pinky got off the hook, then, or anyway got pretty much shed of the pigeon fiasco once the whole local unit of the D.A.R. chartered out the First Baptist Church activity bus and headed west for the weekend, and when they returned to Neely all blue-blooded afresh and historically agitated anew, a trashcan full of poisoned pigeons did not seem such an atrocity anymore, and Daddy said not Mrs. Ira Penn nor Miss Joyce Tullock nor any single woman or group of women in or around Neely could appreciably rejuvenate in themselves, or in anybody else for that matter, even the slightest degree of the pigeon hubbub they’d all helped to stir up previously, so all organized opposition to Pinky Throckmorton’s pigeon fiasco fell off to nothing, or next to nothing anyway, and Daddy said it began to look like Pinky might recover after all and maybe even bluster once again, but anymore it was not just the bad feeling of the women he had to overcome; the men of Neely had gone a little sour on him too. Now Daddy said if it had just been the women, Pinky would probably have been alright since women are generally opposed to swearing and drinking and pool playing and just about every other thing that makes life worth living, while, according to Daddy, men are generally in favor of them and so most regularly feel obliged to come out on the side of most everything that women come out against. And as far as Daddy knew, no self-respecting native gentleman had ever had a civilized word to say about the local flock of pigeons while they were alive and were not exactly shot through with remorse now that they were dead, so it wasn’t the pigeons that did Pinky in, it was just Pinky, and not even Pinky really, Daddy said, but only near ceaseless, interminable, never-ending, everpresent talk of Pinky from the women, which meant Pinky Throckmorton to digest over breakfast, during lunch and at the supper table, which meant the evening air all ripe with Pinky Throckmorton, which meant Pinky Throckmorton in the bedroom at night with the house dark after an entire day of Pinky Throckmorton with the sun in the sky and the lights burning. But of course it wasn’t just Pinky alone, Daddy said, since talk of Pinky naturally led to talk of Bubba and talk of Bubba led to talk of Poppa and talk of Poppa led to talk of the former Miss Fuller and her Momma and Daddy, the prophetess and the Latter Day Saint-Quaker, and her older sister who was still a Miss Fuller and so gave cause for some comment. And Daddy said once folks had followed the Throckmorton-Fuller line of descent until it narrowed down into a deer run and dead-ended in a thicket, they would light out in the other direction and theorize as to why the bald Jeeter was bald or why the fat Jeeter was fat or just generally wonder at the sorry state of the Jeeter chicken ranch which was going rapidly to pot since the Jeeters had only inherited chickens and so had not been raised to any understanding of them which, according to Daddy, is about as necessary as the henhouse itself. Consequently, what the men of Neely got fed up with did not have much of anything to do with pigeons or rat poison or any sort of atrocity that Pinky might have been the cause of. It was the women that objected to what Pinky did. As for the men, they just got wore out on hearing about it and hearing about Pinky and hearing about all of Pinky’s connections, and Daddy said the male portion of Neely had gone such an unreasonably long time with some manner of Throckmorton to digest at every meal that it got where even the sight of a Throckmorton or a Fuller or a Jeeter could set off a severe case of acid stomach in any number of people.