A Short History of a Small Place (47 page)

 

 

 

 

 

 

MOMMA WORE the same black dress she had seen Grandmomma Yount off in and the same little round hat with feathers and a half-veil and she carried with her a big shiny black pocketbook with gold clasps that had nothing in it but one of Daddy’s handkerchiefs. Daddy wore his lightweight navy suit and his reversible vest blue side out and Momma selected for him a striped burgundy tie that she said highlighted and enhanced the natural flush in Daddy’s cheeks and accordingly Daddy selected for himself a pair of burgundy socks as a fitting complement but Momma put them back into the drawer for him and brought out some navy ones instead. I wore my green suit, which was at the time my only suit, and my shortsleeve white shirt with the inkstain in the bottom of the pocket and my green speckled necktie along with my green socks that were not exactly the same color as each other and my black oxford shoes which I did not put on until right when I had to since they tended to lay my toes all together in a kind of bouquet. So I stood on my heels in the living room while Daddy went to the kitchen and passed his hand over all the burners and Momma crouched in front of the vanity mirror and pinned Rhode Island to her dressfront. Then we were out the door and down the steps to the sidewalk and Mr. and Mrs. Phillip J. King, who had been waiting for us on their front porch, put her dog Itty Bit into the house and joined up with us as we went by.

Momma made me go in front and her and Mrs. Phillip J. King walked abreast behind me followed by Daddy and Mr. Phillip J. King, who were not in the leastways frantic about getting to the chapel and so fell off the pace directly and I would have been pleased to fall off some myself but Momma and Mrs. Phillip J. King drove me on ahead of them and it was all I could do to keep from getting trampled on what with my toes bunched up together and causing me some extraordinary discomfort. I suppose we got to the Heavenly Rest a full two blocks ahead of Daddy and Mr. Phillip J. King, who left off talking about whatever they had been talking about once they came into earshot, and when Mr. Phillip J. King got close enough to see the look on Mrs. Phillip J. King’s face he fairly much sprinted to us and left Daddy to lag in on his own which was a source of great irritation to Momma who could not ever seem to convince Daddy that there was any virtue at all in arriving early to anything. And even after Daddy got up with us he insisted on smoking a cigarette which he could not at first find a match for, and once he’d gotten it lit up and had smoked it and stamped it out, Momma directed him towards the chapel doorway where he stopped to pass the time of day with Mr. Tadlock who had come outside to spit. Consequently we did not enter the chapel itself until right on time and we made our way up the center aisle to where Mr. and Mrs. Phillip J. King had saved us a little slip of pew that was just big enough so that the three of us could not all sit down flush at once. Of course I was the one that got semi-levitated and while I was situating myself so as to keep any additional parts from getting pinched into disfigurement, Mrs. Phillip J. King turned her head and looked past me at Daddy with her face all puckered and drawn up like he was a slab of rancid meat and then Mr. Phillip J. King looked at him too but a little more longingly.

By the time we arrived the chapel was already packed tight everywhere with people snug up against each other in the pews and in folding chairs along the aisles and standing two and three deep against the walls in amongst the flowers and the leafy wreaths. There was not much relief on the altar either which was itself full up with clergymen and laypreachers and various other Godly individuals who had all volunteered to take part in the service once word got around that there were no specifications of the deceased to keep them from it. In fact the commander had been caught in the middle of a vigorous and hotly contested debate primarily between the Reverend Mr. Holroyd of the First Presbyterian Church and the Reverend Mr. Richard Crockett Shelton of the Lawsonville Avenue Methodist Church, both of whom laid claim to the eulogy on account of their prior dealings with Miss Pettigrew, who the Reverend Mr. Holroyd recollected as a devout Presbyterian while the Reverend Mr. Richard Crockett Shelton insisted otherwise, and the matter was complicated somewhat by the introduction of the Reverend Mr. W.B. “Red” Hamilton of the Gospel Light Chapel who was a eulogist of county-wide renown and considered himself the man for the job since sendoffs were his particular specialty. So the commander weighed the candidates each one against the other two and he decided to divvy up the eulogy between the Reverend Mr. Holroyd and the Reverend Mr. Richard Crockett Shelton and as consolation he awarded the Reverend Mr. W.B. Red Hamilton three minutes of fairly much unrestricted praying which the Reverend Hamilton agreed to carry out in one tongue only and with a minimum of stomping and gesticualtion. The Reverend Mr. Lynwood Wilkerson of the First Baptist Church was given the honor of reading the text, and Mr. Ames Gatewood, who ran the newsstand downtown but was notably pious nonetheless, was charged with telling the congregation when to stand up and when to sit down, and in addition the Mayor Mr. Simms and Sheriff Burton and Mr. Jeffrey Elwood Crawford sr. of the town council were distributed across the altar for what seemed to be purposes of adornment only and the three of them filled in any vacancies that might have otherwise been left between clergymen. So the altar itself was loaded with about as much Godliness as it could bear up under and the congregation was spilling out of the pews and into the aisles and roundabout the walls. The only part of the chapel that could have been considered uncrowded, unthronged, and otherwise very nearly vacant was up between the congregation and the altar where Miss Pettigrew’s casket had come out from behind its shut double doors and lay on the commander’s collapsible chrome trundle with its brass fittings catching the light. All around it on every side were several feet worth of emptiness which was a rare commodity in the chapel just then what with the rest of us packed in on top of each other like lizards, so Miss Pettigrew’s scant yard and a half of isolation seemed to leave her utterly and supremely secluded.

The service commenced when Mrs. Rollie Cobb, who was the pianist at the Seventh Day Adventist Church and who played entirely by ear and mostly in ragtime, stood up from her place on the front pew and approached the commander’s upright piano, which was situated just shy of the altar and somewhat to the left of it. Mrs. Cobb was probably nearly four feet tall from the bottoms of her feet to the tops of her shoulders and then was another two feet taller from the base of her neck up to where the heap of hair on her head reached its highest altitude. Understandably, then, she was not a woman of any appreciable velocity since balance was a matter of some consequence with her, so once Mrs. Cobb stood up to approach the piano she was in the process of approaching it for a measurable spell before she finally succeeded in setting herself down on the stool, and when she stabilized her head where it would sit properly upright she launched into a lively prefatory melody that gradually degenerated into “Onward Christian Soldiers” as Mrs. Cobb got her bearings on the tempo.

The choir was under the direction of Miss Fay Dull of the Methodist Church and was composed partly of Methodists and partly of Baptists with a smattering of Episcopalians and Presbyterians along with one Jewish tenor, and the plan was for the choir to enter through the main doorway and then separate with the sopranos proceeding up the middle aisle, the altos proceeding up the left one, and the baritones proceeding up the right one. But the aisles were unexpectedly filled up with chairs which were themselves filled up with mourners, so when the sopranos and the altos filed in through the main doorway they scuttled the original plan and improvised themselves across the back of the chapel which was not nearly spacious enough to allow for the baritones, who remained outside on the landing, where along with the rest of the choir they sang the processional without proceeding anywhere. And what with the piano up in front of us and the sopranos and altos all jumbled up back behind us and the baritones not even under the roof, it was not a very stirring rendition.

After Mrs. Cobb had hammered out an Amen, the Mayor Mr. Simms crossed over to the pulpit and grabbed onto the edges of it like a natural evangelist. He greeted us all, told us what a lovely turnout we were, and then reminded us just who it was that had died which seemed to be his primary function and after he had seen it through successfully he crossed back over to his chair and sat down in it. Almost immediately the Reverend Lynwood Wilkerson got up and went to the podium which he grabbed onto also and after he had announced to us the text for the day he planted his glasses onto the end of his nose and set in to reading. Daddy recollected it as Ephesians or Galatians or Phillipians or Thessolonians, he couldn’t decipher which, and I thought the reverend had said Corinthians, but Momma told us it was Revelations and it was indeed some highly potent material all about angels with trumpets and angels with sharp sickles and portents in the heavens and plagues and fires and bowls full up with the wrath of God along with some sort of blood-red creature that had near about as many heads as horns. And the more the reverend read the more he appeared to enjoy hearing himself do it, and the congregation as a whole was beginning to seem a little fearful that he might persevere on through to the end of this book and start in on another one when Reverend Wilkerson finally closed his Bible, took it up in his right hand, and shook it at us.

“Yes beloved,” he said, “a call, a CAWL for the endurance of the saints.”

And as the reverend was lifting his glasses from his nose and preparing to surrender the pulpit, Daddy leaned across me and said to Momma, “A regular ray of sunshine,” which Mr. Phillip J. King heard and snorted at but which did not seem to give much pleasure to Momma, who cut her eyes sideways and let it out that she was annoyed.

We were treated to a minute or two of coughing, sneezing, noseblowing, and general uneasiness among the congregation once Reverend Wilkerson had returned to his chair, and following some elaborate arm waving between Mrs. Rollie Cobb at the front of the chapel and Miss Fay Dull at the back of it Mrs. Cobb got herself properly set and anchored at the piano and then assaulted the keyboard but with such a limited success that she had to break off and start in again and the second time around she got underway in fairly good form. However, Mrs. Cobb commenced to put a little pace on the melody directly and it became so frantic with embellishments and excesses that Miss Fay Dull had a difficult time cueing the sopranos and the altos, which was all she could cue since the baritones were still outside on the landing and could not quite see her from there. So the sopranos and the altos simply jumped aboard at the first available chink in the tune and the baritones waded in shortly thereafter and they all managed to draw together presently into what sounded very much like singing. This particular selection called for a solo and Miss Fay Dull had nominated herself, so once she choked off the competition to her satisfaction she made a fine entrance into the melody and brawled with it all the way to the refrain where the rest of the choir showed up to help her vanquish it entirely. Then they all sang together for a couple of bars before things got a little uptown in the middle and called for the baritones and sopranos to bark back and forth at each other while Miss Dull trilled away between and underneath them and Mrs. Rollie Cobb bludgeoned the whole business with some rather ponderous fingerwork. We were entertained in this fashion for what seemed an inconsiderately lengthy spell and by the time the melody began to shut down, the whole business had turned into a kind of slugfest for soprano, choir, and Seventh Day Adventist and we were all pretty much relieved to see the animosities brought to a close, especially Daddy whose ears had become as red as firecoals.

Mr. Ames Gatewood rose from his chair once Mrs. Rollie Cobb had left off torturing the commander’s piano and he indicated to us that we should rise also, which of course we did, but even before all the coughing and sneezing and noseblowing had a legitimate opportunity to fade away, the Reverend W.B. Red Hamilton went into consultation with Mr. Gatewood and apparently convinced him that he had indicated somewhat prematurely and consequently had brought to their feet a congregation that had no call to be on them, so Mr. Gatewood overturned his previous indication and about the time we all got used to standing up we all sat down again amid a great flurry of additional coughing and sneezing and noseblowing. Trouble was Mr. Gatewood had overlooked the Reverend W.B. Red Hamilton’s three minutes worth of partially restricted prayer and had skipped directly past it to “The Old Rugged Cross” which we were scheduled to sing about thirty-eight verses of, but Reverend Red caught the slipup and after he had announced his intentions we all hunched up and bent over and prepared to get prayed at. However, once the Reverend Hamilton shut his eyes and raised his hands over his head and addressed himself in holy communication to Almighty Gawd and his son the savior Geezus Christuh, he did not say anything else for what appeared to be his full three minutes and so caused to mount up a very real threat of some general uneasiness along with prospect of more coughing and sneezing and noseblowing. But at length the Reverend Mr. Hamilton reminded God just who it was that had died, which seemed to be his primary function, and then he set in to talking in a very colorful way about nothing much in particular and in a voice that was considerably more melodic than anything the choir had managed to come up with so far. The reverend said life is like a beauty rose that blossoms in the spring, and while some buds perish in their infancy others will thrive and bloom and linger on into the summer. But even among these, the reverend said, even among the thrivers and the bloomers and the lingerers, a great number will be cut from the vine early on and will perish in nosegays at the height of their blush and a greater number still will become tainted and blighted with the rosemold and die leaving only a handful of blossoms to greet the autumn and be taken by the frost. And the idea of all this extensive carnage among the rose population seemed to sink the Reverend W.B. Red Hamilton into a temporary funk and he did not talk to us or Gawd or Geezus either until he had recovered himself somewhat and then he said, “However, they are all roses nonetheless. They are all the fruit of the same vine be they bud or blossom, be they beautious or blighted, and brethren, after that ultimate autumn, after that final freeze they will all burst into magnificent bloom in the Ming vase of eternity.” And that was when Daddy chortled, though I did not know it was chortling until later on at the supper table when Daddy explained to me exactly what constituted a chortle which sounds very much like a self-inflicted tonsillectomy and which is hardly the sort of thing Momma would approve of under any circumstances, especially under the circumstances that Daddy committed one and especially since Daddy’s full-fledged robust chortle inspired in Mr. Phillip J. King a kind of lame, wheezing variation, and the full chortle and the half chortle together served to get the attention of the Reverend W.B. Red Hamilton who did not seem to feel that the Ming vase of eternity was anything to chortle at. So Reverend Hamilton left off praying momentarily and appeared to engage himself in wishing a little hellfire on our pew, and then he said, “Yes brethern,” and repeated most everything he’d told us before about life being like a beauty rose and death being like a bowl full of water.