A Short History of a Small Place (49 page)

And that was the end of the funeral part of it but before Momma could get together with Mrs. Phillip J. King and discuss how we would get to the burial part of it, Mrs. Phillip J. King grabbed onto her husband’s arm and lit out down the center aisle and on through the chapel doors, and Momma was not able to find her again until her and me and Daddy got outside and she happened to glance into the family limousine, which was thoroughly loaded up with three negroes and two Vestals in the back seat and Mr. Dunn and Mr. and Mrs. Phillip J. King in the front seat. So Momma turned things entirely over to Daddy and presently Daddy got up with Mr. Russell Newberry and with his wife, Mrs. Coleen Ruth Hoots Newberry, who was known as Little Momma on account of how she only came up to Mr. Newberry’s armpit which was not itself at any lofty height. Mr. and Mrs. Newberry had come to the service in their green Pontiac and they were both most pleased at the prospect of passengers to the cemetery. Of course Mr. Newberry’s glaucoma kept him from driving and Little Momma had to sit on two sofa cushions and a Sears catalog just to get the point of her nose up overtop the steering wheel. Consequently Mrs. Newberry and Mr. Newberry too were always appreciative of any outside navigational advice since they themselves were somewhat afflicted and since their green Pontiac, with all of its sheer bulk and magnitude, was about the size of a modest cabin cruiser.

So me and Momma and Daddy climbed into the back seat and me and Momma took the windows and Daddy crossed his arms over the front seattop and talked Little Momma away from the curb. We got into the processional four cars back from the hearse which meant three cars back from the limousine which meant two cars back from the hardware store Eatons which meant one car back from an assortment of Oregon Hill Frenches and directly in front of the bald Jeeter Throckmorton and her daughter, little Ivy, with Mrs. and Mr. Estelle Singletary at their rear. And once Daddy had navigated Mrs. Newberry out onto the boulevard and had set her to tailgating the Frenches the tension gave way somewhat and Mr. Newberry leaned his back against the doorpanel and asked Daddy his opinion of the church service which apparently Daddy had anticipated since he answered straightaway that, as far as he was concerned, it was a good thing Miss Pettigrew was already dead. I believe Momma punched Daddy in the ribcage shortly thereafter though I’m not to any degree certain of it; however I do know that Mrs. Newberry reached across the frontseat and slapped at Mr. Newberry when he laughed through his teeth. Then her and Momma together came to the defense of the Reverend Hamilton and the Reverend Holroyd and the Reverend Shelton and they came to the defense of Mr. Ames Gatewood and Mr. Jeffrey Elwood Crawford sr. and they came to the defense of Miss Fay Dull and Miss Fay Dull’s interdenominational choir and they attempted to come to the defense of Mrs. Rollie Cobb also but Mrs. Rollie Cobb and her piano playing turned out to be fairly much indefensible. And on account of the way Little Momma kept wheeling around in her seat when she should have been intent on tailgating Frenches, Daddy and Mr. Newberry decided to leave off antagonizing the women for fear of their personal safety and as a change of pace Mr. Newberry said, “I do wish the casket had been opened up. I don’t believe I’ve seen Miss Pettigrew since she gave that Easter party back in 1972.”

“What Easter Party?” Daddy asked him.

“Why the one she gave back in 1972,” Mr, Newberry said.

“I don’t believe it was 1972, Russell,” Daddy told him.

“It was 1972,” Mrs. Newberry said, and crimped up half the Sears catalog in twisting herself around to look at Daddy, “but it was a Mayday party; didn’t have a thing in the world to do with Easter.”

“Mayday?” Mr. Newberry said.

“That’s right,” Mrs. Newberry told him.

“Well maybe it was,” Mr. Newberry said. “I don’t know.”

“Yes sir,” Daddy said, “maybe so.”

 

 

ii

 

 

They were all three wrong. It was July the fourth of 1970 and we got that from Momma who never forgets a date. She said Miss Pettigrew had not shown herself since the evening of the 1962 Methodist Christmas pageant and so had allowed near about seven years worth of holidays to come and go unobserved when Aunt Willa carried the shoebox full of envelopes across the boulevard and up the post office steps. Local history has it that the Neely postal department had never before and has never since moved any correspondence with the sort of breakneck expediency that Miss Pettigrew’s invitations inspired. Nobody even bothered to cancel the stamps, and the entire shoebox which Aunt Willa had given direct to Mr. Gillespie at the counter was in turn given direct to Mr. Eugene Ashburn, who had only recently come in from his appointed round and thereby happened to be handy enough to get made into a special courier. Mr. Ashburn was offered the use of a white jeep with a little special courier billboard on the roof, but six months previous Sherifi Burton had taken away Mr. Ashburn’s driving license on account of what Daddy called habitual vehicular stupidity, and Mr. Ashburn figured if he could not be vehicularly stupid in his own car he’d best not risk it in a government jeep. So Mr. Ashburn situated the shoebox full of invitations into the bottom of his leather mailbag and lit out from the post office with regular wingéd feet, Daddy said.

But according to Momma even wingéd feet could not outdistance the index finger, and before the second invitation hit the bottom of Mrs. Royce Venable’s mailbox, one of the Mrs. Petrees, Momma could not remember precisely which one, had Mrs. Royce Venable herself on the phone to tell her just what it was she was about to step out her front door and fetch in. And whichever particular Mrs. Petree this was read off her invitation item by item and so stole some of the thrill of it for Mrs. Venable, who fished out her invitation once she got off the line with Mrs. Petree but did not bother to open it until she had made a few calls herself. And Momma said Mrs. Petree and Mrs. Venable together with their furious index fingers thoroughly passed up Mr. Ashburn, notwithstanding his temporary wingédness Daddy called it, and successfully prevented him from putting any more invitations into any more mailboxes. Instead the addressees intercepted him before he could get well off the sidewalk and took the deliveries directly into their hands, everybody that is except Mrs. Phillip J. King, who had miscalculated the progress of Mr. Ashburn since his feet were not usually winged at all. Mrs. Phillip J. King figured Mr. Ashburn was still on Lawsonville Avenue when in actuality he had mercuriated himself partway down our street, Daddy said, so Mrs. Phillip J. King was preoccupied in exercising the phone dial when Mr. Ashburn dropped her invitation in through the mail slot and Itty Bit snatched it up off the carpet and very nearly chewed it to pieces. Soon afterwards me and Momma stood at the breakfast room window and watched Mrs. Phillip J. King and her terrier compete in a footrace around the perimeters of the King’s back yard. I do believe the dog won in the end, but it was a hotly contested event nonetheless.

Apparently Miss Pettigrew had not taken up a pen for some considerable years when she set about making out invitations to her July the fourth party of 1970, and even Momma was somewhat distressed by Miss Pettigrew’s penmanship. She had hoped for something a little more graceful and proper and for a time she seemed inclined to hold with Mrs. Estelle Singletary and Mrs. Treva Jane Boyd McKinney, of the block and mortar McKinneys, who insisted that Aunt Willa had filled out and addressed the invitations and so was responsible for the scrawl. But all of the available evidence, including testimony by several esteemed witnesses, indicated that Aunt Willa had never learned to write and could not read either. So eventually Momma had to bring herself to accept the fact that there were just some things about Miss Pettigrew that were not utterly elegant, and when she had grown accustomed to the idea, Momma decided that penmanship was certainly an expendable item.

On the front of each of Miss Pettigrew’s invitations was a big red firecracker just prior to blowing up, and on the inside spelled out in sparklers was LET’S HAVE A PARTY! which seemed to me about as elegant as the penmanship, but Momma did not allow it to strike a nerve with her, probably on account of her previous disappointment and probably on account of how Miss Pettigrew did not persist in calling it a capitalized, exclamation-marked, sparkler-spelled party herself but called it instead a “get together” which seemed to Momma a far more agreeable and civilized sort of thing. Miss Pettigrew’s get together was to commence at three o’clock on the afternoon of the fourth of July and proceed on to six in the evening with “refreshments provided.” Suggested dress was given as “leisurely” and on the line marked “Location” Miss Pettigrew had taken some obvious care in writing out her address as if she actually needed to. And at the very bottom of the card, behind the firecracker and underneath the sparklers and down below all of the pertinent information, and in thick, clumsy, headlong letters Miss Pettigrew had written “Please do come” which most everybody rubbed their eyes and looked at twice before they even began to speculate as to why it was there.

But of course the speculation did commence eventually, and once folks had done some extensive wondering about the “Please do come” they shifted over and began to wonder about most everything else also. Daddy said he had never before encountered a piece of greeting card literature that was open to such widespread and varied interpretation. At length people generally agreed that the “Please do come” did in fact mean please do come, but the unity broke down entirely when it came to “get together.” Nobody much had ever attended a get together before so nobody much was familiar with the genuine characteristics and qualities of a get together as a phenomenon, Daddy called it. Now several people had attended what they considered to be get together-like functions, but even the handful of them could not agree as to exactly what constituted a get together since no one of their get together-like functions had been like any of the others. Mrs. Mary Margaret Vance Needham had attended her get together in a hay barn in Rutherford County where all of the get togetherees had eaten barbecue and square danced, while Mr. Wyatt Benbow, sole surviving Benbow of the Big Apple Benbows, had attended his get together on a tour boat in the Cape Fear River off Wilmington. He recalled that drinks were served and he recollected food also, but to the best of his memory the mosquitoes had done most of the eating. One of the Mrs. Browns, Daddy said it was the one that lived on the ninth fairway but Momma insisted it was not, had gone with her husband to a Christmas get together at a Moose Lodge east of Greensboro and she held forth that a get together was nothing but a party with a holiday to back it up. However Mrs. Phillip J. King disagreed with her most harshly and told everybody how she herself had attended an authentic get together in our nation’s capital during the course of which she had been personally introduced to the sister-in-law of President Johnson’s daughter. The women, Mrs. Phillip J. King said, wore stunning gowns, the men wore dinner jackets, and everybody ate off crystal plates. And it seemed very apparent to Mrs. Phillip J. King that this was just the sort of thing to which Miss Pettigrew would be accustomed, and in fact Mrs. Phillip J. King was successful in convincing a portion of people that this was exactly the sort of thing to which Miss Pettigrew would be accustomed, but Daddy said fortunately it was only that portion of people who were as foolish as Mrs. Phillip J. King was which did not make for any sizeable number of converts.

As a group, then, folks did not ever exactly puzzle out just what a get together was and instead they turned their attention to the pertinent information so as to haggle about it for awhile. First there was the problem of leisurely dress. Daddy said to him leisurely meant just one thing: green polyester. But that was only one man’s view of it, and folks generally felt that their leisurely and Miss Pettigrew’s leisurely could not carry anything near the same meaning. So some of the people who had spearheaded the movement to describe a get together set about developing a workable definition of Miss Pettigrew’s leisurely, and after several extensive discussions and any number of unofficial and thoroughly unscientific opinion polls, it was concluded that Miss Pettigrew’s leisurely was the same thing as everybody else’s semi-formal, which was a very agreeable finding as far as the women were concerned but the men did not much relish the prospect of wearing coats and ties on the afternoon of the fourth of July and they all objected to it with as much of an unpleasant uproar as they could muster, most all of them anyway except for Mr. Phillip J. King and Mr. Estelle Singletary who had been broken of their spunk previously and so did not make much fuss.

As a diversion from the coats and ties, the women proceeded to focus attention on the “refreshments provided” which was the sort of thing that would naturally lend itself to extensive speculation. Loosely, there were three separate and distinct camps on the refreshment issue and the largest of them was jointly headed up by Mrs. Phillip J. King and Mrs. Estelle Singletary and Mrs. Estelle Singletary’s old maid sister, Miss Bernice Fay Frazier. These women along with all of their supporters backed the notion that since Miss Pettigrew’s leisurely was the same thing as everybody else’s semi-formal then it would follow that Miss Pettigrew’s refreshments provided would probably be the same thing as everybody else’s sit-down meal. Now there was some dissent and disagreement as to exactly what sort of sit-down meal it might be—Mrs. Phillip J. King held with a late dinner served on crystal while Miss Frazier and Mrs. Estelle Singletary were more inclined towards an early supper on stoneware but otherwise they were all thoroughly unified and solid. Momma took the moderate position that Miss Pettigrew would probably offer up a mixed buffet of meats and vegetables and cheeses and fruits and desserts complemented by some sort of lightly alcoholic punch cooler and she believed the whole affair would be pretty much like a wedding reception without the wedding. And as for Daddy, he lent his support to a very small, undignified, and almost entirely indifferent group of people who figured on peanuts and pretzels and potato chips and possibly a tray of pigs in a blanket with Pepsi-Cola on ice for a chaser.