A Short History of a Small Place (26 page)

And that was about how things stood, Daddy said, when Pinky got his shirtsleeve in the way of Junious Pettigrew’s private functions, which he managed to do nearly a full year after he had successfully made himself what Daddy called atrocious and ubiquitous by means of an eight-pound bag of rat poison. Of course, Daddy said, by the time the monkey hosed off Pinky’s shirtsleeve by way of Mr. Chester Amos’s straw fedora, talk of Pinky had died down considerably, and it had probably been four or five months since the sight of a Throckmorton or any Throckmorton relation had inspired anything more than a little mild heartburn and certainly no fullblown indigestion. But Daddy said nobody much had left off being sour on Pinky, and so when the monkey emptied himself onto Pinky’s sleeve by way of the crown of Mr. Amos’s straw fedora most everybody was pleased and satisfied at the sight of Pinky hopping all around the sidewalk with his shirtsleeve between his fingers, everybody that is except for Mayor Pettigrew and Miss Myra Angelique, who were just before getting litigated, and maybe not the monkey either, who Daddy said was probably only relieved. And Daddy supposed even Pinky himself was pleased and satisfied since Throckmorton/Guilford Creamery had been his last official dose of jurisprudence and that had gotten itself all settled up before he could even begin to carry on about justice and mercy and the aroma of spoilt milk, so Daddy imagined prior to Pinky there had never been a man anywhere who got pissed on by a monkey and found it pleasing.

As for the mayor, Daddy said he did not much want matters to carry so far as the courthouse, and even after he’d offered to launder Pinky’s hosed-off shirt, to which Pinky said No sir, and even after he’d offered to buy Pinky a brand new unsprinkled shirt, to which Pinky said No sir also, the mayor went ahead and took a half a day to drive all the way to Greensboro on Pinky’s account where he bought for Pinky two very finely made white shirts with tapered tails and a striped blue and grey necktie that had a 1937 Plymouth worked into the design of it. But along about early evening when the mayor stopped off to see Pinky so as to give him the shirts and the necktie and attempt to settle up things before they got so far as Eden, he never saw anybody but the bald Jeeter and little Ivy Throckmorton since Pinky refused to come down out of the master bedroom and discuss a settlement and would not even consider one where he was. The bald Jeeter, of course, did not share Pinky’s passion for jurisprudence and did not hardly feel as comfortable behind the plaintiff’s table as Pinky did, and as for little Ivy the only thing she knew about Throckmortons was that she was one, so the two of them together were hardly as hot for a legal action as Pinky was, and little Ivy sat in the mayor’s lap while he took coffee and sugar cookies with the bald Jeeter and they all three tried to figure their way out of the litigation, though the mayor and the bald Jeeter did most of the talking since little Ivy knew slightly less about litigations than she did about Throckmortons.

The bald Jeeter told the mayor how all the monkey drippings had come clean out of Pinky’s shirtsleeve and the mayor asked her did that satisfy Pinky any, but the bald Jeeter said Pinky told her it wasn’t so much his shirt that had been pissed on—if the mayor would see clear to pardon her—but his dignity. And the mayor said that sounded awfully familiar to him. Then Daddy said the mayor asked the bald Jeeter if she thought maybe two new shirts and a silk necktie from Greensboro would settle Pinky down any, and the bald Jeeter certainly could not have thought so but said she did and the two boxes with the shirts in them and the box with the necktie in it went with her up the stairs and into the master bedroom but promptly came back down the steps by themselves and lay piled up in the foyer for a few minutes until the bald Jeeter arrived to pick them up and carry them on back into the parlor, where she told the mayor, “Pinky says thank you anyway.” So Daddy said the mayor asked her had Pinky gone to Eden yet and filed, and the bald Jeeter said yes he had. And the mayor asked her was it at all likely that Pinky might unfile, and the bald Jeeter said he’d die first.

Seeing how things stood, then, the mayor set about formulating some manner of defense for him and Sister’s monkey, or anyway he intended to formulate a variety of strategies and arguments, but being the accomplished piddler that he was, he let most all of the formulating go until the summons arrived directing him and Miss Myra Angelique and the Pettigrew chimpanzee to show themselves in the Eden courthouse on the morning of April the twenty-second, and consequently it struck home with the mayor that he’d best set about some genuine formulating and devising, Daddy called it, before it was too late. So on the evening of April the fifteenth the mayor sat down at the paymaster’s desk his daddy had bought for himself and scratched around in most all the nooks and drawers after a clean piece of paper which he found eventually but not until he’d come across a pile of old snapshots that had to be laboriously piddled through followed by a pair of letters to his momma from his Grandmomma Bennet, neither of which was entirely decipherable and so required what Daddy called perusal, and once he’d done with the snapshots and done with the letters and opened the drawer where the clean paper was he found beside the pile of it a steel cylinder that had previously been a piece of something else and owned up to several movable parts itself, including a spring down the shaft of it which more than anything set the mayor to fiddling with it and wondering at it and speculating over it. And Daddy said he still had not satisfied himself that he knew precisely what it was or even generally what it was when he managed to return it to the drawer and take up several sheets of paper instead. Then he had to find himself a pencil, Daddy said, but the search for it did not lead to much more than several bobby pins and a postage stamp from Portugal since the mayor already knew where the pencils were before he ever started looking. So with the paper before him and the pencil in his hand the mayor set in to formulating and devising and he pondered his alternatives for a number of minutes before he finally licked the pencil point and wrote “April 22” in the top righthand corner of one of the sheets. Well, Daddy said that satisfied the mayor for a while and he passed a quarter hour cleaning out his ears with the eraser before licking the lead tip again and applying it and himself to near about the middle of the page, where he drew an automobile tire and then a fender above it and above that what started out to be a running light but turned into a poplar tree somewhere along the way. Beside the poplar tree he drew a dappled mare in profile and then another tree off its flank, what Daddy said looked most like some sort of hybrid maple—and next to the maple he drew a little pond for it to be on the bank of, and along the rest of the shoreline where the maple tree wasn’t he drew a variety of shrubbery and several clumps of cattails underneath a pair of which he sketched a very flattering likeness of Franklin Roosevelt from the necktie knot up. Then he left off drawing for a spell and with his incisors gnawed most every gnawable portion of the pencil shaft before licking the lead point again and setting it back to the paper, and he didn’t draw anything this time, Daddy said, but didn’t write anything either, at least not until he’d picked the pencil back up, licked the point yet again, and brought it to the paper once more. And Daddy said when the mayor had sufficiently adjusted his grip so that he was satisfied with it, he wrote all at once and in one extended burst of industriousness, “Good morning, your honor.” Then he marveled at what he had done, Daddy said, until he became a little drowsy, got up from the desk, and switched the lamp off.

Now as far as Daddy knew, Miss Myra Angelique must have honestly imagined that Wallace Amory jr. was actually formulating and devising a defense during those seven evenings from April the fifteenth to April the twenty-second when he would close himself up after supper in what had been his daddy’s personal office and not come out for anything until near about eleven o‘clock. But Daddy said the truth of it was that the mayor sat himself down at the paymaster’s desk on the night of the fifteenth only and did not get any further than intending to on the other six nights since instead he would throw himself into his daddy’s recliner and set in to studying all his legal alternatives with a section of the Greensboro
Daily News
draped over his face, and Daddy said around eleven o’clock the mayor would just naturally wake up and haul himself on to bed. So from the hours her brother kept in the office after supper, Miss Myra Angelique assumed he was formulating and devising somewhat successfully, and since the mayor always washed the newsprint off the end of his nose before she could see it, she did not learn then and did not ever know, as far as Daddy could tell, that when her and the mayor and Mr. Britches, who was still Junious at the time, arrived at the Eden courthouse the mayor’s argument in their defense was dominated mostly by a pencil sketch of Franklin Roosevelt. And Daddy supposed Miss Myra Angelique could not have even been made to believe that when the mayor and her and the monkey came up on Judge Mortenson in the hallway and the mayor said to him, “Good morning, your honor,” he had used up the extent of his prepared notes.

So for her part, Daddy said, Miss Pettigrew approached the defense table all confident and calm and with Mr. Britches in her arms. Britches was the culprit in the case and made quite a splash in the halls of justice, Daddy called it, with his porkpie hat and plaid blazer and green bathtowel underwear that Miss Pettigrew had outfitted him with purely for the sake of modesty. As for the mayor, Daddy could not recall that he looked much of anything but maybe numb and a little terrified, and he carried in his arms an oversized paper shopping bag that he could not make quiet no matter what he did and which he caught on a newel post just short of the defense table and very nearly ripped all to pieces. And as for the courtroom itself, Daddy said the whole place was absolutely slam full up with people, most of them from Neely, a few of them even designated witnesses for the plaintiff, and everybody else just folks from Eden and Spray and Draper who had heard a monkey was going on trial, had never seen a monkey up close before, and so had dropped in for the morning to remedy that.

Now Daddy said of course Pinky had not yet occupied his chair at the plaintiff’s table when Miss Myra Angelique and Mr. Britches and the mayor got situated in theirs, and he did not even enter the courtroom itself until just before the judge did, which Daddy said Pinky must have supposed to be the mark of a seasoned litigator, so he blew on in the back doors and up the aisle and fairly much wrestled with his chair until he got it under just what part of the table pleased him best. Then he slapped his customary list of accusations down on the tabletop before him and let loose most all his breath in one windy blast. Daddy said the mayor certainly heard all the commotion of Pinky’s arrival but probably did not see hardly any of the plaintiff’s entrance since at the time he was otherwise engaged with the clerk of court who wanted to know if the monkey had a name so that he could make a proper announcement of the case since it was not just Throckmorton vs. Pettigrew but was instead Braxton Porter Throckmorton III vs. the Pettigrew Chimpanzee, and as the clerk figured it any monkey who went around in a plaid sportcoat and a porkpie hat was bound to have some sort of personalized designation aside from just plain chimpanzee so the clerk asked the mayor what his chimpanzee went by, and Daddy said that’s when Wallace Amory decided not to call his monkey Junious anymore simply because he did not wish to bind up his cousin’s name with what the mayor supposed would very likely be a court conviction, so he looked at the monkey for inspiration and landed on Mr. Britches instead since they were what he was most noticeably without.

Consequently, it was Braxton Porter Throckmorton III vs. Mr. Britches Pettigrew that the clerk announced to the court just before bringing out Judge Mortenson, and Daddy said it wasn’t until everybody had sat back down that the mayor finally got a look at Pinky who was busy adding a few last touches to his list of accusations and who had behind him for support a whole benchful of Jeeters including of course the bald Jeeter and the fat Jeeter and along with them their momma and daddy, who were neither passably bald nor fat between them, and along with their momma and daddy Grandmother Jeeter herself, who was by now so old and wispy that she probably should have been dead ten years previously but had found something or another to clutch at and cling to and so wasn’t. As for Throckmortons, aside from little Ivy and her daddy there was only one in attendance, that being the former Miss Fuller who had never watched Pinky litigate before and probably would not have this time if he had not insisted she take the opportunity to see a Throckmorton succeed at something if for no other reason than the pure novelty of it. So the mayor looked at Pinky scratching up a few new accusations with his pencil and looked at all of the Jeeters and Jeeter-Throckmortons and Throckmortons behind him, and then fished out from the shopping bag all thirty pages of his defense, which he figured could stand a bit of elaboration since twenty-nine of them were still blank and since he did not have for his own inspiration and support an entire benchful of in-laws and relations but only one sister to his far left and one monkey to his near left, though of course, Daddy said, the gallery was just as warm for the mayor as they were sour on Pinky which might have helped Mr. Wallace Amory some if he had only known it.

According to Daddy, most everybody was anticipating a partial midmorning and entire afternoon full of accusations and arguments and objections and sworn testimony and all variety of evidence, circumstantial and otherwise, along with enough gavel beating to drive ten pounds of twenty-penny nails. But as it turned out, Judge Mortenson was not disposed to any of it except maybe for the gavel beating, which he opened up with before asking the mayor and Pinky to get to their feet, and with the defendant and the plaintiff standing before them the gallery expected to hear a few stanzas of the national anthem from the one followed by a smattering of wild bombast from the other as a sort of prologue to the regular proceedings, but the judge was simply not disposed to hearing from either one of them and so set in to talking himself. “Mr. Pettigrew,” he said, “Mr. Throckmorton, I’ve been studying over the facts of this case and have talked to several people who were there to see what happened and have heard from several more who weren’t anywhere around but figure they know what’s what anyway, and now I’d like to check with the two of you just to make sure I’ve got everything straight. Is that agreeable to you both?”