A Short History of a Small Place (44 page)

Jack’s momma and daddy did not get home until well past 9:00 in the evening and six hours of uninterrupted grieving had left the both of them unduly irritable, so Jack did not tell his momma about the lettuce crisper right away and he did not tell her how Marcus Bowles spilt orange juice on the bathroom floor and for the moment he did not attempt to explain to her why the little glass Chinaman in the living room was missing all of his right elbow. Jack just sat at the kitchen table gnawing on a chicken thigh his momma had brought home to him in her pocketbook and listened to her and his daddy exchange examples of Mr. Zeno Stiers’s goodliness. And apparently Mr. Zeno Stiers had been an utterly goodly man because every few minutes Jack expected his mother to temper and besmirch the virtues some with an assortment of vices, as was her practice, but every few minutes he was disappointed with more pure goodliness. “Saintly,” his daddy said. “Yes indeed, truly saintly,” his momma said, and Jack sucked on his thighbone and ruminated over the destiny of a saintly man.

He did not actually decide to dig up Artemus Gordon until the following afternoon, though he did consider it off and on throughout the night and tended towards it during the course of the school day, but he did not actually decide to dig up Artemus Gordon until after his mother had carried him down to Walgreen’s where she bought for him Mr. Singletary’s last guinea pig which was an albino of the uncowlicked variety. However, Jack could not bring himself to accept a white, uncowlicked guinea pig straightaway, what with his recent bereavement, and it took upwards of an hour and a half before he could get used to a pet whose hair did not stand up in clumps all over its body. But after he’d fed it several stalks of celery and a chunk of purple cabbage and after it had wet on him once, which Jack took to be a show of affection, he named it Napoleon Solo and finally decided outright he would dig up Artemus Gordon, finally concluded he could bring himself to give up Artemus Gordon’s earthly remains in the hope of securing a place of glory for Artemus Gordon’s everlasting soul. So Jack exhumed the lettuce crisper and removed Artemus Gordon from it and wrapped him in a handkerchief, and when his parents commenced to dress for the viewing at Commander Avery’s Heavenly Rest, Jack commenced to dress also which inspired Miss Kimberly Ann, who got all squealy around dead things, to slip into a frock herself since she did not want to be left at home alone. And at seven o’clock sharp all of the Vestals, except for the newest albino Vestal, left the house and took to the sidewalk two abreast on their way to the commander’s and in the company of one deceased guinea pig Vestal, shrouded in a handkerchief and hidden in a coatpocket, who was on his way to the streets of gold.

Daddy says it was partly the fault of the commander himself though of course the commander has never assumed any degree of the blame for it, but Daddy insists that if the commander had not gone on so about his capacious caskets he would not have found himself with the rodent problem that he eventually found himself with. However, Daddy says the commander is the sort of man who believes it requires more than a rivet to get ahead in the mortuarial game, so he is ever taking to the airwaves of WNEQ—Radio Neely—to advertise his business and aside from the individual reposing rooms and the air-cooled sanctuary and the complete limousine service for the bereaved, the commander invariably includes an assurance of capacious caskets and in a very significant and prominent way as if it is his moral obligation to provide the deceased ample room to sit up on their elbows or play the violin. And Daddy says it was the capacious caskets part of it that stuck with Jack Vestal and worked in combination with Mr. Zeno Stiers’s unbesmirched virtue to give him an idea he would not have gotten otherwise. As Jack figured it, Mr. Stiers was unquestionably bound for glory while Artemus Gordon’s destination was a little less certain, so as long as Mr. Zeno was going to his reward anyway why not let Artemus Gordon occupy a guinea pig’s worth of capaciousness and go to Mr. Zeno’s reward along with him. Beatitude by association, Daddy called it.

But even with the great wealth of capaciousness that surrounded Mr. Zeno in his repose, Jack Vestal could not at first find the opportunity to slip Artemus Gordon into his slight share of it, mostly on account of the tremendous assortment of mourners who continuously filed by the casket to pay tribute. Daddy says there is nothing like utter goodliness for drawing a crowd at a viewing. So Jack had to be content with loitering around the coffin for awhile, which Kimberly Ann told him was just the most gruesome thing she’d ever witnessed but which rather gratified Mrs. Vestal who was made proud to see Jack developing an acute interest in an activity so dear to her. And as Daddy tells it, Jack probably gratified his momma to the excess before the night was out since he was not able to transfer Artemus Gordon out of the limbo of his jacket pocket and into the relative security of Mr. Zeno’s saintly capaciousness until near about the tail end of the viewing, and even then the best Jack could manage was a blind backhanded toss that landed Artemus Gordon only slightly beyond Mr. Stiers’s elbow.

But nevertheless nobody noticed right away the spotted and partially cowlicked infringement on Mr. Zeno Stiers’s duly guaranteed and highly regarded capaciousness, nobody noticed it at all—not the unattached mourners and not the immediately bereaved and not the commander and not the commander’s platoon of funeral home attendants who were far too busy maintaining a suitable gravity to notice much of anything. So it probably seemed to Jack Vestal, after a full evening of casket lingering and anxiety, that Artemus Gordon was reasonably assured of at least some portion of saintliness, and on the following morning just prior to the service in the commander’s air-cooled chapel when Mrs. Anne Elizabeth Bailey Stiers approached the earthly remains of Mr. Zeno for one final glimpse and did not screech or yelp or roll her eyes or attempt to leap up onto the family pew, Jack figured Artemus Gordon’s destiny was certain and secure at last. And it very nearly was except for a Mr. Dunn from Spray who earned his living wearing a three-piece blue suit and driving the commander’s hearse. In addition Mr. Dunn was in charge of tucking the loose ends of the satin liner into the casket prior to shutting the lid for all eternity, which he generally managed to pull off with a sort of quiet and somber efficiency that made him seem as good as invisible. But just after he had approached Mr. Zeno and had commenced to vanish a little, he stuck his hand down into the casket and felt something stiff and furry at Mr. Zeno’s elbow, so he dropped his head sideways and peered back into the casket which did not do very much at all for Mr. Dunn’s invisibility. Of course everybody else became instantly eager to know what it was he was looking at and consequently nobody in the entire air-cooled sanctuary failed to see Mr. Dunn, who took hold of Artemus Gordon by his stubby tail, draw out from Mr. Zeno’s casket what looked to be a plump, festive-colored, and poorly groomed rat. Daddy says it was just the sort of thing to run converse to the spirit of the occasion and nobody much knew whether they should be horrified or not, except for the commander, who was most openly horrified and except for Mrs. Ann Elizabeth Bailey Stiers, who was most openly horrified also and except for Mrs. Virginia Ann Crutchfield Vestal, who appeared to be in some danger of fainting.

Fortunately Mr. Dunn was not particularly frightened of rats, especially dead ones that were guinea pigs anyway, so he stuck Artemus Gordon in his coat pocket and carried through with the business at hand in a reasonably inconspicuous manner. The service itself got underway presently and all throughout the course of it Mrs. Stiers grieved demonstratively, Daddy called it, while Mrs. Vestal fanned herself with a hymnal while the commander began to formulate his unlugubrious child policy even before he knew for certain an unlugubrious child was the responsible party. The rest of the congregation still toyed with the idea of being horrified, and as far as Daddy could tell, the Methodist Reverend Mr. Richard Crockett Shelton who delivered the eulogy did the majority of the listening to it also. In between the funeral and the burial service when most everybody was waiting outside the church doors for the casket to find its way into the hearse, word got out about Artemus Gordon, primarily by way of Mrs. Bowles and Mrs. Ridley, and the news caused the congregation to decide it would not be horrified after all but would most probably be amused instead. Of course the commander was not much amused and persisted in his open horrification, but Mrs. Anne Elizabeth Bailey Stiers seemed to have improved during the course of the service and apparently had reverted to simple bereavement by the time she left the church. Mrs. Vestal, however, had doggedly managed to remain horrified all throughout the eulogy and all throughout Miss Fay Dull’s solo performance of “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” and all throughout the Reverend Mr. Shelton’s thoroughly exhaustive benediction and when she stepped through the big church doorway onto the portico and saw people looking at her the way they were looking at her, her condition escalated into what Mr. Jackson P. Eaton of the hardware Eatons called a traumatized crisis; he said he had seen one before in the big WW. It was about all Mr. Vestal could do to get his wife and Kimberly Ann into the car and then he had to go back and fetch Jack bodily off the church steps since Jack did not much care to leave his guinea pig in the coatpocket of a man he didn’t even know. So when he finally did proceed to the cemetery, Mr. Zeno Stiers in his capacious casket did not bring with him a solitary Vestal in tow which proved to distinguish Mr. Stiers in death by having not been pelted with one of Mrs. Vestal’s good linen handkerchiefs and the accompanying salute. As everybody figured it, Jack Vestal absorbed most all of the pelting for him.

Anymore Artemus Gordon is the only thing people talk about when they talk about Mr. Stiers. Nobody ever says a word about virtue. Nobody ever says a word about saintliness. People just wonder out loud if they were as muddle-headed as Jack Vestal when they were his age. But Daddy always says when he dies and is lying stiff in his casket he hopes there are enough muddle-headed children in Neely sufficiently convinced of his destination to pack all of his capaciousness full up with housepets. However, what with the commander’s pointed and specific policy, Daddy will probably have to face eternity alone whether he wants to or not since nobody much under four feet tall ever gets into the Heavenly Rest anymore except for Miss Mottsinger who is a midget but has become too old and infirm to see her friends off like she used to. And whenever the children of mourners from out of town, who have no verifiable history of muddle-headedness, get themselves banned from the parlor amid the sometimes vehement and indignant protests of their parents, the commander defends himself with a few words about serpent’s teeth, and when the parents say, “What?” the commander replies, “Bridger,” who had whistled much too loudly for his own good, and when the parents say, “Who?” the commander simply tells them, “Artemus Gordon,” who as it turned out was successfully flushed down a toilet with hardly any ceremony to speak of.

So Momma and Daddy went to view Miss Myra Angelique without me since I was not yet sixteen and consequently posed a threat to Miss Pettigrew’s capaciousness. But Daddy said by the time him and Momma got to the Heavenly Rest there wasn’t enough room in the parlor to accommodate even the smallest of unlugubrious children and they had to wait on the porch for the crowd to condense some. Momma said as far as she could tell nearly everybody able to come had come. Mr. and Mrs. Phillip J. King were there ahead of them along with little Buford Needham and his son, Paul, and his daughter-in-law, Mary Margaret Vance Needham, and the bald Jeeter Throckmorton was there with her daughter, Ivy, who had married an insurance agent from Greensboro and was six months gone with their third child but had been allowed to pass anyway since the commander figured a fetus would be sufficiently bound up not to cause much of any mischief. Sheriff Burton had run the knot in his tie clear up to his neck for the occasion and had come in the company of a ladyfriend from Leaksville who Daddy said Mrs. Phillip J. King insisted was a slut even before she met the woman. She said she could sniff out that sort of thing, said it was a gift. Two of the hardware Eatons were there and one of the body shop Eatons and three pair of unrelated Wattses, two from Ruffin and one from Rosemont Hills out by the golf course. Both sets of Singletarys had come, Mr. Billy Singletary from the five and dime along with his wife, Elise, and Mrs. Estelle Singletary of the autumn harvest brunch and her husband, Patrick, who did not ever talk much except to say, “Yes, dear.” Most of the rest of the crowd was made up by a contingent of people from down off the Richardson Road whose names Momma could not call along with a party from Southend which included Mr. and Mrs. Small and Mrs. Small’s sister and her husband, Mr. and Mrs. Richard Dabb, who had brought with them a neighbor that worked as a welder at the cigarette plant. And Daddy said Mrs. Phillip J. King told him a funeral home was hardly a fit place for such lowlife as that.

There were, then, plenty of people to see what there was to see but as it turned out there wasn’t anything much to see—no Miss Pettigrew, no casket, not even any Rackleys who had turned around and gone home and had probably reached the West Virginia end of Kentucky by the time the viewing got underway. So even when the viewing did get underway nothing got viewed right off except the commander who announced to everybody that there was in fact a body and there was in fact a casket but that there was also some specifications of the deceased, he called them, which prevented any sort of public display of the aforementioned items. Then the commander indicated a pair of shut double doors across the parlor behind which, he said, was an individual reposing room within which, he said, was Miss Pettigrew’s personal capacious casket which itself, he said, held the earthly remains of Miss Myra Angelique Pettigrew in satin-upholstered and eternal comfort. So the shut double doors got viewed with some interest until the commander held up over his head a handsome leather-bound album that he announced was the family register and should be signed into, and Daddy said the introduction of the leather-bound album threw the assembly of mourners into noticeable disarray since most people were torn between watching the shut double doors and getting their names onto the first page of the register. Daddy said some of them had even gone back to viewing the commander who they figured to be responsible for their disappointment and confusion. As for the commander himself, Daddy guessed he thought people would just get along home once they had inked their names into the ledger to prove they had gone to the trouble to come in the first place; after all, there was no visible corpse and no visible casket but just two visible doorknobs attached to two visible doors. However, even after everybody had signed in Daddy said it was all he could do to get across the room to the sideboard where the commander kept the complimentary matches. He did not notice that anybody had left except for the sheriff and his ladyfriend, who went outside to take the air and even before they could get through the door good a station wagon load of Frenches came in to replace them.