A Short History of a Small Place (34 page)

Mr. Wade Shorty Glidewell’s brother’s boy, Lyle, was still hunting up duck cases in the legal section of the Burlington library on the morning of what Mrs. Phillip J. King said was day two of the duck imbroglio which was actually day three if you counted the afternoon of the Gottlieb invasion as day one which Mrs. Phillip J. King neglected to do and so arrived at day two instead of day three. And on the morning of day two which was actually day three Mr. Alton and Mr. Alton’s daddy, having heard nothing at all from Mr. Wade Shorty Glidewell and having heard nothing at all from Mr. Wade Shorty Glidewell’s brother’s boy, Lyle, decided between the two of them that they would take what measures they could on their own in the form of a fence between the pond and the Gottliebs. So Mr. Alton’s daddy had the gardener make up a load of staubs and him and Mr. Alton carried an armful apiece down through the pine grove and around to the backside of the pond, where they discussed and diagrammed and plotted and wandered around in the trees and where they had even driven a staub or two before the first of what Mrs. Phillip J. King called the distant salvos filled the air and fell, Mrs. Phillip J. King called it, on their ears. Of course the pistol report followed by the rifle report followed by the double volley from the shotgun agitated and distracted Mr. Alton and his daddy all over again and set them to reviling Gottliebs afresh which turned out to be more fitting for the patio than the pine grove since Mr. Alton’s daddy, who was driving the staubs, and Mr. Alton, who was holding the staubs, temporarily lost sight of their present undertaking and so had an accident in the form of a direct blow delivered full from the head of Mr. Alton’s daddy’s twenty ounce hammer squarely onto the first two knuckles of Mr. Alton’s right hand. And Mrs. Phillip J. King said Mr. Alton circled the pond twice at a gallop and then tore up through the pine grove towards the bungalow with his daddy behind him in full stride apologizing with what wind he could muster.

According to Mrs. Phillip J. King, by the morning of the third day of the duck imbroglio, which was actually the fourth day, Mr. Alton and his daddy were so completely preoccupied and eaten up with Gottliebs and ducks that neither one of them could breathe a word that didn’t carry a hint of imbroglio with it, so nobody but the former Miss Dupont, who did not care a fiddle for ducks except under an orange sauce, was free to pay any notice to Miss Sissy who had pretty much been running amuck, Mrs. Phillip J. King called it, ever since she found out she could get away with it. Of course Mrs. Phillip J. King held by her belief that Miss Sissy was naturally inclined towards running amuck and so would have anyway with or without a diversionary imbroglio, but since Mr. Alton had been engaged for a number of weeks now, first with the digging of the pond and then with the collecting of the ducks followed by the despising of the Gottliebs, Miss Sissy had managed to run amuck entirely undetected until the former Miss Dupont drew her first suspicious breath. Now according to Mrs. Phillip J. King, the former Miss Dupont was cagey enough to recognize a tropical disposition when she saw one, but Mrs. Phillip J. King said since Duponts were raised to allow for the worst in people, especially a Dundee of the Congressman Dundees, the former Miss Dupont did not hold Miss Sissy’s tropical disposition against her and figured Miss Sissy could keep the reins on it well enough herself. Of course that was before the former Miss Dupont discovered that her daughter-in-law was exhibiting what Mrs. Phillip J. King called some loosely unprincipled behavior, which was the same as running amuck, which was the same as an unladylike showing which Momma landed on once Mrs. Phillip J. King took plain unprincipled and corrupted it.

As far as Mr. Alton knew Miss Sissy was spending the most of her afternoons and some of her evenings with an old classmate named Marie Ketner, a slightly built brunette who Mrs. Phillip J. King said her momma told her was a genuine trollop but who Mr. Alton had only met once and probably then did not think to wonder if she simmered like she did. According to Mrs. Phillip J. King, Miss Sissy was ever telling Mr. Alton how her and Miss Marie Ketner were planning to hop over to Raleigh and do some shopping or motor to Chapel Hill and visit the college or take in a matinee in Greensboro, and Mrs. Phillip J. King said sometimes they did get as far as Raleigh and occasionally to Chapel Hill and every now and again to the picture show in Greensboro but mostly they never got past Club 54, which was located on the road to Carboro just outside the Burlington city limits. Club 54 was a concrete block structure that had been a Texaco station for near about a decade until the owner, a Mr. Jerome Little of Graham who Mrs. Phillip J. King said was the sort who could work up a sweat bending over, decided to get out of the gas business and get into the roadhouse business. So he boarded up the service bay doors and filled in the grease pit and bargained with a Baptist preacher from Pittsboro for a thirdhand piano which Mrs. Little could beat on almost melodically while her husband sat behind the counter in a cane-bottom chair and sold whatever manner of alcohol he could get his hands on, some of it even bonded.

Now as Mrs. Phillip J. King understood it, Miss Sissy liked a little taste every once and again and Miss Marie liked a little taste every once and again as well, so the two of them took to stopping in at Mr. Little’s Club 54 on the way to Raleigh or on the way to Chapel Hill and they would each have a taste to face the road with while taking care to keep themselves away from the riffraff and away from what Mrs. Phillip J. King called the underbelly, both of which tended to congregate at Mr. Little’s establishment. And Mrs. Phillip J. King said soon enough Miss Sissy and Miss Marie took to stopping in at the Club 54 on the way to Greensboro even though it was not on the way to Greensboro and they would treat themselves to a bigger taste apiece and so end up in High Point where they didn’t even have a picture show. And Mrs. Phillip J. King said it got so that Miss Sissy and Miss Marie would set out from the bungalow for Raleigh or Chapel Hill or Greensboro and would not get anywhere at all beyond Mr. Little’s Club 54 where they had even begun to mingle some with the riffraff and the underbelly too. And then it was not just mingling but dancing also, that is it was dancing whenever the patrons could encourage Mrs. Little to bang. out something on the keyboard which mostly turned out to be Methodist hymns played in a sort of jumpy, half-syncopated beat that was suitable for dancing if you didn’t listen too close. And Mrs. Phillip J. King said since Miss Sissy and Miss Marie were about the only women the Club 54 attracted aside from the Potts sisters, who Mrs. Phillip J. King said had probably come to be female by some sort of divine mistake, Miss Sissy and Miss Marie were ever taking to the dance floor and kicking up their heels to “Whispering Hope” or “Stand Up for Jesus” or “Sweet Hour of Prayer,” three of Mrs. Little’s favorites. And Mrs. Phillip J. King said it got so that Miss Sissy and Miss Marie could hardly sit down and finish off their little tastes before some gentleman patron or another would buy a whole bottle and insist they have a few snorts out of it, which they generally felt they could not refuse to do without flying in the face of human kindness. So in the course of an afternoon at the club 54 Miss Sissy and Miss Marie most usually became what Mrs. Phillip J. King called lubricated, and being the genuine article that she was, Miss Marie would regularly pick out some big strapping fellow across the room—Mrs. Phillip J. King said Miss Marie’s sort was always partial to the brawny ones—and dance him on through the door and into the parking lot where the two of them would mingle in Miss Marie’s daddy’s car.

Miss Sissy of course did not go in for that sort of mingling right off, being a married woman and still being possessed of a few grains of what Mrs. Phillip J. King called Dundee compunction. But according to Mrs. Phillip J. King, with that sandy-colored Dundee hair and those big brown Dundee eyes Miss Sissy was the sort of woman that made men’s hormones jump to their feet and tapdance, which caused Momma to say, “Helen!” on the inhale and turn rose-petal pink from the neck up. But Mrs. Phillip J. King just carried on with what she was about and told me and Momma, well told Momma mostly, how all the males at the Club 54 except for Mr. Little, who Mrs. Little kept an eye on, would pile up all over themselves trying to get a seat at Miss Sissy’s table especially once Miss Marie had two-stepped on out the door to do some private mingling, which usually left an additional opening on Miss Sissy’s flank. And Mrs. Phillip J. King said Miss Sissy would stir up a breeze with her eyelids and roll her head all around on her shoulders and lick her lips and laugh from way back in her throat and reach out with her fingers to touch very lightly whoever she might be talking to at any particular moment, and Mrs. Phillip J. King said you could near about hear the hoofing of the hormones above Mrs. Little’s piano music.

But Mrs. Phillip J. King said even after it became clear to Miss Sissy that she had a definite tendency to mingle, which is certainly the sort of definite tendency she had, she still refused to do it in the back of Miss Marie’s daddy’s car notwithstanding Miss Marie’s assurances that there was a gracious plenty room even for a leggy creature like Miss Sissy. After all, Miss Sissy did have her principles and Dundees of the Congressman Dundees simply would not compromise on some things. So Miss Sissy continued to agitate hormones there inside the Club 54 while Miss Marie continued to entertain what Mrs. Phillip J. King called clients outside in the open spaces of her daddy’s car. But then Miss Sissy had not laid eyes on much of anybody at the Club 54 who even made her hormones sit up straight until one afternoon when her and Miss Marie were on their way to Greensboro and would not even get to High Point, and it was while Miss Marie was fox trotting with the prospects that Miss Sissy first saw the man who caused her hormones to slip into their tap shoes. His name was Jackson Dubois Byrd, and Mrs. Phillip J. King said even before Miss Sissy knew about the Dubois part she gathered from his looks that there was something worldly and exotic about him, and Mrs. Phillip J. King told me and Momma he was from Connecticut as it turned out and so was as good as foreign as far as Burlington was concerned. According to Mrs. Phillip J. King, he’d come south to work in textiles and had rented a house in the mill village on the northeast side of the city where he lived by himself except for a speckled tomcat that he called Dardanelles, which he told Miss Sissy he’d gotten from a book. Mrs. Phillip J. King said Mr. Jack Byrd was brawny in the Miss Marie Ketner sense of the word and owned a wondrously elaborate black waxed moustache that lay across his face like a decorative wrought iron strut. He was not very loud and was not very vulgar, which fairly much distinguished him at the Club 54, and Mrs. Phillip J. King said he first caught Miss Sissy’s eye when he showed her how he could make the veins on his forehead stand up and twitch.

It seems Miss Sissy had a soft spot for the hulking shy type, so Mr. Jack Byrd found favor with her right from the beginning and the two of them embarked on what Mrs. Phillip J. King could not bring herself to call a romance but called instead a series of relations which was some form of advanced mingling that Momma would not allow Mrs. Phillip J. King to elaborate on. Of course part of Mr. Jack Byrd’s appeal, aside from his brawn and aside from his twitching veins and aside from his flat Connecticut accent that Miss Sissy tended to hear a little French in, was his car and the house that it would drive him and Miss Sissy to. Now the car alone was fit for mingling, but since Dundees were historically non-minglers Mr. Jack Byrd would probably not have ever laid a finger on Miss Sissy if not for the house, because Mrs. Phillip J. King said you needed a house to carry on a series of relations, more specifically you needed a legitimate bedroom, and while Miss Sissy did not have mingling in her blood she seemed well enough suited for a Posturepedic. And of a sudden Momma scratched her head and asked Mrs. Phillip J. King didn’t she think it might rain and Mrs. Phillip J. King said, “Lord no, honey,” without ever looking out the breakfast room window.

As near as Mrs. Phillip J. King could figure it, Miss Sissy and Mr. Jack Byrd collaborated on the first in their series of relations along about the time when Mr. Alton and his daddy were engaged in plotting and staking out the boundaries of what would be Mr. Alton’s daddy’s duck pond. By then Miss Sissy and Miss Marie had left off going to Raleigh or Chapel Hill or Greensboro or High Point, had left off even intending to and instead made straight for the Club 54 almost daily where Miss Marie would dance and mingle and where Miss Sissy would wait for Mr. Jack Byrd to get off his shift at the millworks and come pick her up and take her home with him. And then it wasn’t even as far as the Club 54 anymore, at least not for Miss Sissy who would borrow Mr. Alton’s daddy’s Bentley and drive it to the mill village herself and play with Dardanelles in Mr. Jack Byrd’s bedroom until Mr. Jack got home from the mill when the two of them would carry on, Mrs. Phillip J. King called it, and the cat would sit on the windowsill and watch. And Mrs. Phillip J. King said Miss Sissy and Mr. Jack Byrd got away clean with their relations for the longest time and probably would have continued to carry on scot free if the former Miss Dupont had had anything else in the world to do but wonder where Miss Sissy and the Bentley got off to most every afternoon. But Mrs. Phillip J. King said since the former Miss Dupont was filthy with it she didn’t have anything else in the world to do but wonder and speculate and ponder and suspect, and so she would stand by the parlor window in the afternoons and watch Miss Sissy ease the Bentley out of the garage and on along the driveway to where it bent out of sight behind a hedgerow, and even after Miss Sissy and the Bentley were gone from view the former Miss Dupont would linger at the parlor window, which was where she did her best wondering and speculating and pondering and suspecting.

And it was on what turned out to be the actual day one of the Gottlieb imbroglio that the former Miss Dupont finally decided to do something about Miss Sissy and the Bentley besides just wonder and just speculate and just ponder and just suspect, so almost the very instant Miss Sissy wheeled Mr Alton’s daddy’s vehicle around the bend in the driveway and beyond the hedgerow the former Miss Dupont reached across the front seat of her sedan and slapped at the driver’s shoulder with the pair of dress gloves she was clutching in her hand, and the driver eased the former Miss Dupont’s car out from the far end of the garage and around behind the hedgerow and down towards the street. The former Miss Dupont did not drive herself and had engaged the services of her gardener, Mr. Gallos, who owned a perfectly valid operator’s license but who both lived and worked on the Nance estate and so did not have much occasion to drive either. Consequently, Miss Sissy in Mr. Alton’s daddy’s Bentley opened up a sizeable margin between herself and the former Miss Dupont’s sedan, which was understandable since . Miss Sissy was traveling at what Mrs. Phillip J. King called the speed of desire while the former Miss Dupont was moving at the speed of a first-generation Greek gardener who did not know exactly what he was doing. So Miss Sissy was already inside Mr. Jack Byrd’s bedroom with his cat in her lap long before the former Miss Dupont and her gardener got so far as the mill village which they were not sure was where Miss Sissy went anyway. But between the two of them the former Miss Dupont and Mr. Gallos spied Mr. Alton’s daddy’s Bentley in front of Mr. Jack Byrd’s house, and Mrs. Phillip J. King said the former Miss Dupont instructed her driver to pause a ways down the street so as to avoid suspicion.