A Short History of a Small Place (31 page)

And once Mrs. Phillip J. King broke off long enough to change directions I managed to ask her, “What’s a viscount anyway?”

And Mrs. Phillip J. King told me it was near about the same as a count.

“Like Dracula?” I said, who was the only count I knew of right off.

But Mrs. Phillip J. King said it wasn’t like Dracula at all. She said Dracula was an Italian kind of count and Mr. Alton’s viscount was an English kind of count, so while Dracula didn’t have anything in the world to do but chase folks all over the countryside, Mr. Alton’s was all the time being called upon to represent the royal family at parades and such.

“Sort of like a Duke?” I asked her.

And she said yes, a viscount is like a duke who is like a prince only there are more viscounts than dukes and more dukes than princes. Then she asked me did I see what she meant.

And I said, “Yes ma’m” so as to let her get on with it.

Mrs. Phillip J. King told me and Momma that Mr. Alton’s father-in-law, Congressman Dundee, threw a welcome home party for Mr. Alton and Miss Sissy right there between the ligustrum hedges where their wedding had been, and Mrs. Phillip J. King said all of Congressman Dundee’s Republican friends were there and some Democrats too, she added, and she said her Momma told her Mr. Alton hobnobbed with the politicians and Miss Sissy hobnobbed with the politicians’ wives and the men talked about campaigns and fund raising while the women talked about the Prince of Wales who was still a fairly fresh topic in Burlington. And Mrs. Phillip J. King said before the week was out Mr. Alton’s Daddy and Mr. Alton’s Momma threw a welcome home sitdown dinner at the Nance mansion, and she said all of the men raved over the roast duckling and the women raved over the sauce on top of it and then left the men by themselves at the table where they talked about finances and profits while the women took coffee on the patio and quizzed Miss Sissy on the Prince of Wales. And Mrs. Phillip J. King said it was the next weekend that Mr. Alton and Miss Sissy threw a party of their own on the lawn outside the bungalow, and she said her momma told her half the guest were friends of Congressman Dundee and half the guests where Mr. Alton’s daddy’s former business associates, and she said the men mostly stood around with their hands in their pockets and talked about baseball while the women continued to dissect the Prince of Wales who they had already very nearly worn out but not entirely.

So Mrs. Phillip J. King said it shaped up that Mr. Alton’s daddy’s friends and Mr. Alton’s daddy-in-law’s friends were Mr. Alton’s friends too which was fine with Mr. Alton but which also meant that Mr. Alton’s momma’s friends and Mr. Alton’s momma-in-law’s friends were Miss Sissy’s friends too, which Mrs. Phillip J. King said was not particularly fine with Miss Sissy since that made all her friends old enough to be her mother while one of them was. According to Mrs. Phillip J. King Miss Sissy desired a little more pizzazz in her life than Mr. Alton seemed inclined to allow for. Mrs. Phillip J. King said Miss Sissy needed pizzazz like she needed food, which Mrs. Phillip J. King said her momma told her was on account of Miss Sissy’s tropical disposition. “Hot, don’t you know,” Mrs. Phillip J. King said.

“Hot?” Momma asked her.

“Yes ma’m. Hot.” And Mrs. Phillip J. King said it turned out that Miss Sissy had a touch of hussy in her after all.

“A Dundee of the Congressman Dundee’s?” Momma said.

And Mrs. Phillip J. King told her, “Yes’ma’m. Flat out loose.”

And Momma shot her eyes at me and said to Mrs. Phillip J. King, “Unprincipled.”

And Mrs. Phillip J. King said, “Yes ma’m. Unprincipled too.”

Of course nobody knew right off that Miss Sissy was loose and unprincipled, probably not even Miss Sissy herself. According to Mrs. Phillip J. King all anybody knew was that Mr. Alton kept on with his Daddy-in-law’s politicians and with his daddy’s former business associates while Miss Sissy did not keep on with their wives. Instead Miss Sissy took up consorting, Mrs. Phillip J. King called it, with several girls she’d known in school all of whom Mrs. Phillip J. King’s momma had told her traveled with a fast crowd which Mrs. Phillip J. King said was the same as loose which Momma said was the same as unprincipled. According to Mrs. Phillip J. King Mr. Alton didn’t object to or interfere with Miss Sissy’s renewed connections because he had a pure and trusting heart and so most likely did not even suppose that Mrs. Sissy could manage anything sinful, and aside from his pure and trusting heart Mr. Alton, along with his daddy, was at the time pretty thoroughly preoccupied with what Mrs. Phillip J. King called a scorching dispute which sounded to me more in the way of a Throckmorton imbroglio than anything else. What had happened was Mr. Alton’s daddy had decided there was really no reason for him to settle for a painted duck dropping into a painted pond when he could have the real feathered kind setting down in legitimate water if he only applied himself to the pursuit of it, so Mrs. Phillip J. King said he did apply himself to the pursuit of it and applied Mr. Alton to the pursuit of it also which gave the both of them something to do since Mr. Alton’s daddy had already retired from his occupation and Mr. Alton himself had yet to embark on one. Of course they started with the pond since the Nance property had not come supplied with one already, and Mrs. Phillip J. King said Mr. Alton and Mr. Alton’s daddy staked it out over a creekbed that ran near the backside of the Nance acreage so as to put a sizeable pine grove between the ducks and the Nance mansion and bungalow. Mrs. Phillip J. King said a duck was a very private sort of creature.

Mr. Alton oversaw the clearing of the land and Mr. Alton’s daddy oversaw the actual digging of the pond and the eventual stocking of it with the sorts of fish Mrs. Phillip J. King said a duck would go tail up over. Then Mr. Alton and Mr. Alton’s daddy together built a number of duck boxes for the animals to breed in and set them out around the pond along with a load of bread crusts and several dozen decoys. And Mrs. Phillip J. King said of course they got all the ducks they wanted almost right off, and Mr. Alton’s daddy made a bench out of a hewn log and put it back a ways in the pine grove so he could sit on it and watch the ducks approach from over the far treetops and drop into the pond with all of the grace and agility of bowling balls which Mrs. Phillip J. King said is natural for a duck. So Mr. Alton’s daddy and Mr. Alton when he chose to would sit on Mr. Alton’s daddy’s hewn log bench in the seclusion of the pine grove and study any number of the creatures as they fell out of the sky or climbed back up into it, and Mrs. Phillip J. King said Mr. Alton’s daddy and Mr. Alton too could not have been more satisfied with the way the ducks took to the pond and took to the duck boxes, so she said the trouble when it started was not ducks exactly; the trouble was almost purely Gottliebs.

Mrs. Phillip J. King said a whole assortment of Gottliebs lived just beyond the back reaches of the Nance property on about an acre and a half of packed dirt. They had started out in two houses with Grandmomma and Granddaddy Gottlieb in the one and their boy Buster Gottlieb and his wife Cynthia June Cuthbert Gottlieb in the other, but Mrs. Phillip J. King said right from the first Buster had a way of keeping Miss Cynthia loaded up with a Gottlieb year round and it didn’t seem that she would hardly drop a new one before another one was already in the breech, so once Buster and Miss Cynthia’s house got packed full with Gottliebs they sent the next few on over to Buster’s momma and daddy’s house, which wasn’t but fifteen or so yards away, and then a few after that and a few after that until both Gottlieb houses were slam full up with Gottliebs. Mrs. Phillip J. King said consequently Buster and his daddy had to do some expanding and they slapped together a room on the end of Buster’s house so as to catch the Gottlieb overflow, but Mrs. Phillip J. King said that was just a temporary solution since what Gottliebs there were already got steadily bigger and what Gottliebs there hadn’t been continued to arrive, so Buster and his daddy set at it again and this time they stuck a room on the end of the other house and several Gottliebs spilled over into it relieving the pressure for a spell. And Mrs. Phillip J. King said just when it looked like Miss Cynthia was all done with Gottliebs she had a set of twin girls followed by a single male Gottlieb all three of which forced Buster and his daddy into the construction business again, and this time they went ahead and put a room between the new one on Buster’s house and the new one on Buster’s daddy’s house and thereby connected the two houses together so that all the Gottliebs could mix and circulate freely. Mrs. Phillip J. King said Buster and his daddy let it out that what they had built was a breezeway, but she said her momma told her it most resembled a mine shaft without the earth on top of it.

Mrs. Phillip J. King said back in those days if you weren’t a Nance or a Dundee you didn’t have much of anything and if you were a Gottlieb you didn’t have anything at all. She said Buster and his daddy didn’t own but the two houses and the breezeway and the acre and a half of baked ground the whole mess sat on top of, and they helped tend another man’s tobacco when the season called for it but otherwise just trapped and fished and tried to wish a few vegetables up out of the hardpan. And Mrs. Phillip J. King said her momma told her that in November of the year preceding Mr. Alton’s daddy’s duck pond the Gottlieb fortunes took a turn for the worse when Grandaddy Gottlieb very nearly killed himself on account of a carp; Mrs. Phillip J. King called it a serious mishap. She said Granddaddy Gottlieb had set several bank hooks along the Haw River on the afternoon of a Tuesday and had left them overnight until midmorning Wednesday when he walked the four miles to the river bottom so see what he had caught. And Mrs. Phillip J. King imagined he hadn’t hauled in but a few bream and the rest bare hooks when he arrived at the last line and commenced rolling it up on the pole, but she said the hook seemed to have set itself into a log or at least a sizeable treelimb and it was all Granddaddy Gottlieb could do to bring in a half foot of line at the time for fear of breaking it off otherwise, so it was a tedious process, Mrs. Phillip J. King said, but finally Granddaddy Gottlieb drew the first lead sinker out from the water and then the second one and then the third one and then he brought in another handful of line and looked to see what sort of trash the hook might have snagged itself up on, and Mrs. Phillip J. King said Granddaddy Gottlieb found himself nearly eye to eye with a carp about the size of a full grown collie. Now it seems that the carp and Granddaddy Gottlieb saw each other at almost the same instant, and though Granddaddy Gottlieb knew right off he was looking at enough dinner for all the Gottliebs in both houses and the breezeway too, he did not know right off how to get the meal so far as the riverbank, not to mention the dinner table, while the carp for his part took action almost immediately and streaked for the deep water. So just as Granddaddy Gottlieb was deciding whether he would go into the river or not, he got yanked off the bank and went into it. And they set in to thrashing and wrestling and beating around in the water, Granddaddy Gottlieb and the carp, and Mrs. Phillip J. King told me and Momma it must have been a truly glorious and inspiring sight what with all that determination and all that valor and all that sheer brute strength and animal instinct coming together in the wilds of the Haw River bottom in November. Mrs. Phillip J. King said just the though of it made her shake and tremble all over. She said mortal combat had a way with her.

It seems Granddaddy Gottlieb would get the upper hand on the fish and then the fish would get the upper hand on Granddaddy Gottlieb and then the two of them would go at it even for awhile until one or the other of them would take the advantage again temporarily. And Mrs. Phillip J. King said it didn’t appear that the carp could best Granddaddy Gottlieb or that Granddaddy Gottlieb could best the carp, but then once they both became fairly much worn out Granddaddy Gottlieb managed to lock one arm around the carp’s midsection, and with his free hand he groped in the back of his britches after the pistol he always carried there but what he found was only his underpants because the thrashing and the wrestling and the beating around in combination with all that glorious and inspiring determination and valor and brute strength and animal instinct had caused Granddaddy Gottlieb’s pistol to fall down his britches’ leg and into his right boot. So with his one arm still tight around the carp’s midsection, him and the fish together went down to the river bed after the pistol and three or four breaths later Granddaddy Gottlieb fetched up into the air what Mrs. Phillip J. King called the instrument of death which Granddaddy Gottlieb had made himself out of a filed-down rifle barrel and a shotgun trigger and a revolver hammer and a hunk of whittled oak for a grip. So Grandaddy Gottlieb leaned back as far as he could and brought the front end of the carp out of the water long enough to introduce it to the instrument of death, and Mrs. Phillip J. King said the shot played among the treetops and echoed and resounded throughout the valley while apparently killing the fish also since the carp became what Mrs. Phillip J. King called vanquished.

At first it was all Granddaddy Gottlieb could do to get his carp and himself out of the water and onto the river bank, and Mrs. Phillip J. King said he crawled on up into the underbrush and stretched out there for near three quarters of an hour in an attempt to recover his wind. Of course he was sopping wet all over, which is hardly any way to go around in November, so by the time he did get his breath back he was already genuinely ill and had to endure a number of shuddering fits before he could gather the strength to heft the carp up onto his shoulder. And as Mrs. Phillip J. King figured it Granddaddy Gottlieb was the rest of the morning making it from the river bottom to the Gottlieb acre and a half, what with the shuddering and the carp working together to slow him down, and she said it wasn’t until he got in sight of the bi-winged and breezewayed Gottlieb manor that he was set upon by a slew of little Gottliebs who relieved him of the carp and carried it on into the kitchen in triumph. And Mrs. Phillip J. King said the Gottliebs feasted off their granddaddy’s carp; she said they all got carp steaks and carp fritters and carp meat patties except for Granddaddy Gottlieb himself who got pneumonia.