A Short History of a Small Place (40 page)

So in the meantime for amusement most of us watched Mr. Britches, who had fairly much doused the flagpole and who was squatting on the knob engaged in picking at the fur on his belly which was just the sort of undertaking to undo most everything a blazer and a porkpie hat might appear to accomplish. Then a portion of the crowd grew weary of watching Mr. Britches be a monkey and went back to circling the green Buick that was very nearly from West Virginia, and just when it seemed like the Pettigrew house had gone ahead and swallowed up Aunt Willa and Mrs. T. Fay Rackley and Mr. Pettigrew heir, a window sash on the far end of the first level sailed up with a thunderous rattle and Mr. Pettigrew heir himself stuck his head outside and sucked at the afternoon like he’d been under water for a quarter hour. Of course the whole time the window was open we could all hear Mrs. T. Fay Rackley exercising her noseholes over a floorlamp that had been made from a butter churn and the only thing in the world she wanted was for Mr. Pettigrew heir to look at it which he did not seem the least inclined to do right up to the moment Mrs. T. Fay Rackley fetched him away from the window with one hand and slammed the sash down with the other. So we all went back to watching the monkey and pondering the Buick and Daddy and Mr. Newberry leaned backwards against the fence and smoked Daddy’s Tareytons off Mr. Newberry’s matches until finally a second floor window went flying up with about as much fuss and rattle as the other and Mr. Pettigrew heir popped out clear down to his midsection and siphoned off considerably more of the afternoon than he’d been able to manage previously. As far as we could tell, Mrs. T. Fay Rackley was working her noseholes over a bedstead this time and she could not seem to decide whether it was an oak bedstead or a fur bedstead or a walnut bedstead or a loblolly pine bedstead, so she asked Aunt Willa who apparently did not know or would not say because after the spell of silence that was Aunt Willa’s response, Mrs. T. Fay Rackley set in to screeching at Mr. Pettigrew heir about it and allowed him to protrude into the afternoon for only a short while longer before she caused him to disappear a little prematurely again.

We didn’t see Mr. Pettigrew heir for a considerable while after the bedstead episode, which is what folks were beginning to call it, and we didn’t see Aunt Willa or hear from Mrs. T. Fay Rackley either, so understandably interest in the monkey and the Buick proceeded to erode some and I do believe even Daddy and Mr. Russell Newberry were growing somewhat weary of the Tareytons by the time Mr. Pettigrew heir showed himself high up in the gable of the house behind a little round attic window. Of course we all watched him try to get it open, first by tugging at it, then by pushing on it, then by beating it with the heel of his hand, then by tugging at it again, but no matter what he did short of putting his foot through it the little round attic window wouldn’t budge, probably because it was never meant to. And then Mr. Pettigrew heir was gone from sight again for what turned out to be a while just as considerable as the one previous, but we all bore it a little more bravely this time since Mr. Paul Needham and his daddy little Buford had been away to the drugstore after a Coca-Cola during the entire of the attic window episode, which was what it was getting called all around, so everybody got to take a turn telling the both of them just what it was they hadn’t seen and the process kept us all thoroughly occupied until near about when Mr. Pettigrew heir himself scampered on out the front door and down off the porch into the yard which turned out to be a reasonably rare thing to witness since Mr. Pettigrew heir did not appear to have the architecture for scampering.

He brought with him into the afternoon a long-handled shoehorn that he’d grabbed up somewhere and right off he shook it at Mr. Britches who was still squatting on top of the knob on top of the flagpole but was too busy picking at himself to notice. Then Mr. Pettigrew heir and his long-handled shoehorn continued on up the sidewalk to the gate where me and Daddy and Mr. Newberry were still holding the fence up, and once Mr. Pettigrew heir stopped to fumble at the gatelatch Mr. Newberry took the opportunity to tell him, “Lovely day,” which seemed to be just enough to set Mr. Pettigrew heir off and he let loose of the latch, wagged his shoehorn in the general direction of the Pettigrew house, and said, “Whole goddam place smells like monkey clean up to the rafters.”

“You don’t mean it,” Daddy said.

“Yes sir, I do. Some people just ain’t worth a happy shit, can live any old how and stand the stink just fine, not to mention the hairballs up there the size a melons, and it ain’t like you could air the place out. Hell, half the windows are painted shut. Just between you and me,” Mr. Pettigrew heir said, and indicated Daddy with his shoehorn, “you’d think a woman with her kind a money would have the great good sense to hire herself a nigger with some gumption stead a that thing she’s got. I’d as soon take that monkey for my wife as take that nigger for my house-keeper.”

And Daddy and Mr. Newberry glanced at each other quick and sideways before Daddy smiled at Mr. Pettigrew heir ever so slightly and asked him, “Are you a full-blooded Pettigrew?”

“No sir,” Mr. Pettigrew heir told him, “I’m a Rackley, Conrad Rackley. Her daddy’s sister was my momma.”

“But you get the whole load, do you,” Mr. Newberry said.

“I guess so,” Mr. Rackley told him, “but ain’t much of it worth having.” Then he laid his backside against the fence, crossed his arms over his chest, and studied the front of the house up and down until he arrived at a piece of dental molding that had pulled away from the eave and was sagging somewhat pathetically overtop a second-story window. “Look at that there, ain’t that the sorriest mess. Who built this heap anyway?”

“Your uncle, I believe,” Daddy told him.

“Ain’t surprising,” Mr. Rackley said. “He never was worth a big goddam.”

And Daddy and Mr. Newberry looked at each other again but before either one of them could conjure up any sort of polite remark Mrs. T. Fay Rackley herself came scampering out the front door and down the steps and along the sidewalk with both her noseholes at full flare. “Bugs! Bugs!” she screeched, “look what I got,” and she arrived at the fence cradling in her hands a small porcelain figure of a hobo sitting on a stump.

“Get in the car, Momma,” Mr. Rackley told her.

“Ain’t this the most divine thing,” she said. “Ain’t this just about the most divine thing you’ve ever seen.”

“Surely,” Mr. Rackley told her. “Now get in the car.”

And Mrs. T. Fay Rackley along with her noseholes and along with her porcelain hobo and his porcelain stump underneath him slid into the front seat of the green Buick while Mr. Conrad Rackley circled round to the far side where he managed to get hold of the doorhandle before Coley Britt came up behind him and said, “Excuse me, but wherebouts you from in Kentucky, the West Virginia end?”

And as Mr. Conrad Rackley turned to answer, Daddy put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Louis.”

“Yes sir,” I said back.

“I want you to take a good hard look at that man there,” he told me. “That’s what we call an asshole.”

So I paid some considerable attention to Mr. Conrad Rackley, who had laid his backside against the car door, and to Mr. Coley Britt, who was once again talking about spitting into West Virginia, and then I looked back at Daddy and asked him, “Which one?”

“Pick,” he said.

 

 

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Momma wore her navy dress with the little white speckles all over it and her blue scullcap, the one with the veils and the plumage, and on account of the seriousness and sheer gravity of the occasion she. fished out from her jewelbox the diamond broach Grandmomma Benfield had presented her with on her wedding day and pinned it to the left side of her collar. This was by no means a frivolous bauble studded all over as it was with precious and semi-precious stones in no readily describable design, though Daddy was given to insist it put him in mind of Rhode Island, a likeness which Momma did not particularly hold with. She said it was one of your free-form abstract broaches with some considerable substance to it which made it an appropriate item for particularly weighty occasions like viewings and funerals and Mrs. Estelle Singletary’s autumn harvest brunch. So Momma pinned the broach to the left side of the collar of her speckled navy dress and it hung there about as light and dainty as a railroad spike. As for Daddy he started out in his brown slacks and his green and brown striped necktie and his gold poplin sportcoat that was not pure gold exactly but was nearer to the color of butterscotch candy, and he wore the entire ensemble out of the bedroom, up the back hallway, and into the living room, where Momma met him and sent him to the bedroom again on account of the combination of brown and green and butterscotch which she found wholly inappropriate for the occasion. Momma said this sort of thing called for a dark suit, so Daddy changed into his grey one and came out of the bedroom, up the back hallway, and once more into the living room, where Momma complimented him on the improvement before she took him by the arm and escorted him down the back hallway and on into the bedroom again so as to personally relieve him of his brown and green striped necktie, his gold socks, and his oxblood wingtips.

They finally got off at near about 7:30 after Momma had kissed me on the cheek and told me not to turn on the oven or strike any matches and after Daddy had. shook my hand and told me not to run off and join the circus or enlist in the navy until they got back. Of course Momma would not leave the porch until I had latched the screen door behind her, but almost before I could get the hook through the eyelet she grabbed ahold of Daddy’s elbow and lit out for the commander’s with Daddy trailing in her wake like a grey flannel pennant. Time was I could have gone along with them and seen for myself whether or not Miss Pettigrew was as dead as everybody claimed her to be, but two years previous Commander Tuttle, who would be Commander Avery Tuttle in this case, had drawn up and instigated a very pointed and specific policy against children under the age of sixteen attending any sort of open casket proceedings prior to the funeral itself. Of course the commander’s policy excluded what he called siblings of the immediately bereaved since, as Commander Avery figured it, they would be sufficiently saddled and bound up with lugubriousness as to be incapable of much mischief. But children of most anybody else had to get left at home since, as Commander Avery saw it, the siblings of friends and acquaintances of the deceased were too far removed from any sort of direct line of bereavement to be weighted down or sobered or saddled or even the least bit bound up by much of any degree of lugubriousness themselves, and if there was one thing Commander Avery simply could not bring himself to tolerate it was a lighthearted sibling in a funeral parlor. So the commander had drawn up and instigated his very pointed and specific policy and had drawn up and broadcast a very pointed and specific motto to go along with it. “More sharper than a serpent’s tooth,” the commander would say, “is it to have an unlugubrious child near the deceased.” And armed with his policy and armed with his motto the commander seemed satisfied that he could avoid the sort of trouble that had beset him once in the past, trouble which nobody much held against the commander except for the commander himself, and trouble which had involved the earthly remains of the saintly Mr. Zeno Stiers, the carcass of one heathen guinea pig named Artemus Gordon, and, of course, one relatively unlugubrious child.

Most everybody called it the Bridger Mishap though there was not much mishap to it and what mishap there was sent Mr. Zeno Stiers all the way to his eternal reward while dispatching Mr. Derwood Bridger only so far as Mrs. Stiers’s forsythia bush which was not nearly so glorious a place to wind up. But it was the Bridger Mishap anyway, probably because Mr. Stiers, having sailed off to the everlasting, was not available for subsequent comment which left Mr. Bridger with a monopoly on the facts and circumstances of the matter, a monopoly he made some considerable use of from the very moment he crawled out of the forsythia bush since it was his pelvis that had been fractured while his tongue had come through the ordeal fairly much unimpaired.

Mr. Bridger was a fireman by occupation. He drove the rear section of the hook and ladder unit which meant he did not do much of anything but hold a hose for the majority of the year except at Christmastime, when Mr. Pipkin himself would take the front wheel and Mr. Bridger would take the back wheel and the hook and ladder would come screaming out of the Omega firehouse making a great variety of clamorous, riotous, and outrageously offensive noises and carting along with it, aside from Mr. Pipkin and aside from Mr. Bridger, a full complement of slickered but hatless firefighters who clung all around the perimeters of the truck like so many cockleburs. Up the boulevard they would fly with the siren wailing and the bell clanging and the airhorn on top of the cab bellowing periodically in a flat, utterly unmusical baritone that you could feel in your molars, and together Mr. Pipkin and Mr. Bridger would manuever the rig into the square and bring it to a lurching halt in front of the courthouse, where a crowd would have already collected on the far side of the street, and the whole assortment of slickered, hatless firefighters would simultaneously disengage themselves from the truck and bolt up the courthouse steps and in through the open doorway while Mr. Bridger commenced to raise the ladder. Then in a flash they were all back outside again and down the steps and onto the truck once more, each of them hauling a cardboard packing crate on his shoulder, and the point man was usually halfway up the ladder before Mr. Bridger could get it set full well against the cornice and then the rest of the squad was hard up behind him and all of them running in as much as anybody can run up a ladder hauling a packing crate, and by the time the last man could step over the cornice and onto the portico roof Mr. Bridger would have already manned his position just inside the courthouse doors and Mr. Pipkin would have already joined Sheriff Burton and Coach Littlehohn at the forefront of the crowd, which would by now be fairly much breathless with anxiety and anticipation.