A Short History of a Small Place (56 page)

Of course I had not intended to sell any toothbrushes to Miss Pettigrew ; it seemed to me Momma and Daddy and Mr. and Mrs. Russell Newberry were good for four or five more between them. But Momma suggested I drop by her house, and when I resisted the first suggestion she made another one and when I resisted that one too she gave me two bottles of damson preserves in a basket and showed me the door. I guess I circled Miss Pettigrew’s lot for forty-five minutes trying to convince myself that Miss Pettigrew was as regular and ordinary as Momma believed her to be. I’d heard at school she’d cut off your feet and stew them in a pot, which had seemed ridiculous at the time but was commencing to weigh somewhat heavily on my imagination as I passed around the house from the frontside to the backside to the frontside again. However, at length I reasoned it was best to risk my feet, the danger seeming altogether remote and improbable, than to return home with the damson preserves and surrender up my backside. So I went in through the gateway, along the sidewalk, up the front steps, and onto the porch, where I beat on the door with the fleshy part of my hand and then put my ear to one of the panels and heard the flooring in the foyer creak and pop. Straightaway the deadbolt shot back, the doorknob jiggled, and the heavy front door swung open to reveal Aunt Willa in her usual smock and scowl ensemble, and she invited me on into the house if you can call a jerk of the head an invitation. “Hello,” I said once the door shut tight behind me, “my name is Louis Benfield and I’m selling toothbrushes for the baseball team at James K. Polk middle school,” and then I raised up and sought out some eye contact. Coach Mangum told us eye contact was an essential facet of good salesmanship. But my pupils were still fluctuating on account of the sudden and general gloom so I could not find Aunt Willa’s eyes or any other part of her to focus in on which turned out to be understandable since I was by myself in the foyer except for an umbrella jug that did not seem in the leastways interested in toothbrushes. And me and the umbrella jug had not hardly struck up a meaningful acquaintance when Aunt Willa came back and led me out of the foyer before I could even begin to tell her I was Louis Benfield from the James K. Polk middle school.

I followed her down a short, dark hallway, across two broad, dark sitting rooms, and to the door of what looked to be a closet which when opened gave onto a tiny den where Miss Pettigrew sat by the lone window with a book in her lap.

“Hello,” I said.

“You are Louis Benfield,” Miss Pettigrew told me, “Inez Benfield’s boy, and you’ve come bearing gifts and toothbrushes.”

I forgot myself momentarily and put the inside of my mouth on exhibition.

“You see,” Miss Pettigrew said and smiled at me in the most delightful sort of way.

And I told her, “Yes ma’m” out of sheer reflex and politeness though actually I did not see much of anything at the time.

“Please sit down, Louis Benfield,” Miss Pettigrew said, motioning me to a chair, and I closed my mouth and took it. “You have something for me?” she asked.

“Yes ma’m,” I said and leaned forward to give her the basket and the preserves.

“How nice, how very nice.” Miss Pettigrew held one of the bottles up to the window and looked through it. “Lovely. Tell your mother they are simply lovely.”

“Yes ma’m,” I said.

“Beautiful preserves,” Miss Pettigrew added.

“Yes ma’m,” I said.

And as Miss Pettigrew rearranged the preserves in the basket prior to setting it on the rug beside her chair, a great surge of vigorous activity commenced on the floorboards overhead. It sounded to me like a herd of squirrels in a footrace and had set in so suddenly I near about leapt straight out the window without so much as a goodbye.

Apparently Miss Pettigrew noticed my anxiety because she put her hand to my wrist and told me, “It’s just him,” and then she rolled her eyes upwards the way apostles used to.

“Yes ma’m,” I said, “just him,” and I tried to sit back and be comfortable.

Miss Pettigrew soothed me somewhat with a few very bland and harmless remarks of the sort adults are generally prone to, and by the time she got around to exhaling a pair of well-well’s, which is what they all get around to eventually, I was feeling sufficiently bold to seek out some eye contact. But I had just barely set in on the crisis at James K. Polk middle school when Miss Pettigrew held up her hand and stopped me. “No need for that,” she told me.

“Yes ma’m,” I said, “no need for that,” and of a sudden the eye contact seemed to me an incredibly bad idea so I made some contact with the floor instead and that was when I first noticed Miss Pettigrew’s upholstered footstool. It was sitting flush in the middle of the only patch of sunlight that fell across the rug. There wasn’t anything extraordinary about it and I don’t imagine I would have even recollected it if not for Miss Pettigrew’s feet atop it though more truly on account of Miss Pettigrew’s ankles, which were connected to Miss Pettigrew’s feet which were resting atop the upholstered footstool. I had never before seen and never hope to see again such astoundingly white skin on a living human. It was not your regular old folks white skin all pale and waxy and eat up with blood vessels, but was more in the line of your stately princesses white skin, what people call fair, and best as I could determine it was about the color of fatback. I don’t imagine there was anything whiter anywhere else in the house and I do not even suppose there was another patch of skin so pure and unfreckled for three city blocks roundabout. I tell you they were the most unpuckered, ungathered, unbesmirched ankles I’ve ever been witness to and were a matter of considerable wonderment to me, considerable wonderment, and I’m generally not the sort to get worked up over girls and such, especially over old women, especially over old women’s ankles. Occasionally I’ll find myself hypnotized and somewhat nauseous on account of a fuzzy open-toed slipper, but usually it is the vitality of it that affects me, and Miss Pettigrew’s ankles did not possess any vitality to speak of. They were altogether stationary and lifeless. I just suppose in a place where everything else is scarred and spotted and interrupted all over it’s pleasing to find even two ankles’ worth of purity and perfection.

So I watched Miss Pettigrew’s ankles in a highly discourteous and unforgivable sort of way, and I do believe Miss Pettigrew thoroughly wore out her stock of polite observations before she finally resorted to addressing me directly. “Louis?” she said.

“Yes ma’m?” And I drew off from the footstool to look Miss Pettigrew in the face which was hardly so striking a thing as her ankles and seemed worn and ancient and inhumanly weary everywhere but the eyes. Miss Pettigrew’s eyes were not in the leastways antiques.

“Louis, tell me,” she said, “do you ever look at the stars?”

“Ma’m?”

“Do you ever go out in the summertime and lie on you back in the grass and look up at the sky?” Miss Pettigrew said, and turned her head towards the lone window, which gave onto a very slight portion of the backyard.

“Yes ma’m,” I told her, “sometimes. I mean I used to, I used to when I was little but I don’t much anymore.”

“When you were little?” Miss Pettigrew said, and of a sudden pondered me straight on until I could not look at her any longer.

“Yes ma’m,” I said.

“And how old are you now, Louis?” she asked me.

“Thirteen, ma’m. But I’ll be fourteen in June.”

“Ah,” Miss Pettigrew said, “my apologies.”

She watched me with those eyes of hers until I wanted to seep off into the cellar through a crack in the floor, and only after a prodigious and excruciating silence did she fetch up a little brass bell off the windowsill and ring it sharply. “Good day, Louis Benfield,” Miss Pettigrew told me. “Do give my regards to your people.” And I bowed at the waist for some reason I have yet to decipher since it is not and has never been my habit to bow at the waist, after which I followed Aunt Willa into the foyer where she paid me cash money for a half dozen toothbrushes, mostly blue ones.

I left that place in an excessive hurry. I don’t know precisely why now, but at the time it seemed the circumstances called for an excessive hurry so I provided one. I did not bother with the front steps but left the porch for the sidewalk and exited through the iron gateway at the height of my stride. As I recollect it now, I ran hard for three blocks, trotted two more, and then walked the rest of the way home, where Momma was waiting for me on the glider in Daddy’s grey sweater and with her arms wrapped around herself.

“Did you see her?” she asked me almost before I could get into the front yard.

“Yes ma’m,” I said.

“How did she look?” Momma wanted to know, and she got up off the glider and met me on the top step.

“She looked old, Momma. She looked old and tired.”

“Well, did you talk to her?” Momma asked me.

“Yes ma’m. I talked to her.”

“And what did she say?” Momma wanted to know.

“She asked me did I ever lie on my back in the grass and look up at the stars.”

“Did she?” Momma said.

“Yes ma’m,” I told her, “she did.”

ii

 

 

We were expecting Astors or Morgans or maybe even some sort of diluted Rockefeller. I mean it was a grand and prestigious property, a fine old local landmark, and folks roundabout the countryside figured not Astors or Morgans or Rockefellers either would object to owning what a Pettigrew had owned and living where a Pettigrew had lived. So Momma watched for the Astors and Daddy watched for the Morgans and I watched for the Rockefellers though I don’t believe I would have known a Rockefeller if he knocked me down in the street, especially an impure and diluted one. But none of it made any difference in the end since no Astors came and no Morgans came and not even the square root of a Rockefeller showed up to take a look see. In fact, nobody at all came for a full month after Mr. Grant and Mr. Owen and Mr. Ellersby, Realtors Inc., planted their sign in Miss Pettigrew’s front yard. Then in the second week of October Mr. Grant showed the house to a middle-aged gentleman who Mrs. Phillip J. King insisted was a Watlington—she said she had been looking for Watlingtons all along—but who turned out to be a Gill from Madison-Mayodan. By all reports Mr. Gill was enchanted with the lot, was intrigued with the house, and was supported solely by disability benefits. House-hunting was Mr. Gill’s passion; house-buying did not much interest him, however. Towards the beginning of November Mr. Ellersby showed the property to a young couple from Greensboro who toured the house and walked all throughout the yard on a Tuesday and then returned on a Thursday with a little black notebook in which they proceeded to record all variety of observations and on the Monday following they came back yet again along with an older woman who bore an acute resemblance to the younger woman but turned out to be her husband’s mother. The three of them together along with Mr. Ellersby toured the house and walked all throughout the yard admiring the scenery and consulting the little black notebook. Then they held a series of lengthy and earnest confabs on the front porch and along the walkway and in the sideyard and every now and again behind some shrubbery, after which the older woman who resembled her daughter-in-law but was actually her son’s mother got into her son’s car along with her son and her son’s wife and they all three departed from Neely forever. Of course we were disappointed even though they had not been Astors or Morgans or hybrid Rockefellers but we were not entirely unoptimistic and expected Mr. Owen to succeed where Mr. Grant and Mr. Ellersby had failed. But Mr. Russell Newberry found out from his wife’s sister, who moved some property herself, that Mr. Owen had departed from the firm of Grant, Owen and Ellersby, Realtors Inc. on account of heart failure and so no longer handled much real estate but occupied some instead. The news did not crush us altogether but did serve to render us a little more entirely unoptimistic than we had been previously.

Nobody came to look at Miss Pettigrew’s house for the rest of November and it sat vacant and untoured and unwandered around throughout December and on into January. Mr. Ellersby showed it one Saturday towards the middle of the month and along about the thirtieth or the thirty-first Mr. Grant waited on the front porch for an hour and a half but nobody ever joined him there. By the first of February there was a sizeable faction of local people who were noticeably annoyed with Mr. Grant and Mr. Ellersby for not having unloaded the property with a little more haste and dispatch. They feared the house might get rundown and the yard might get grown over, and they wanted Mr. Grant and Mr. Ellersby or Mr. Grant and Mr. Ellersby together to contact Mr. Conrad Rackley in the West Virginia end of Kentucky and negotiate the price some. But Mr. Grant and Mr. Ellersby too said the trouble was not with the price. They said the trouble was with the house, or more specifically with the ruinous condition and general dilapidation of the structure and environs. And Mr. Grant pointed out some of the missing shutters and some of the missing louvers in the shutters that were not yet missing, and the aforementioned section of pathetically sagging dental molding, and great stretches of paint that were sitting off from the cedar siding like treebark, and an assortment of shattered window lights and pulverized orange terra cotta tiles, and a crack in one of the chimneys big enough to put your arm through, and three or four yellow pine sills that termites had fairly thoroughly reduced to the consistency of talcum powder. Then Mr. Ellersby set in to ridiculing the living area and called it foul and filthy and excessively odoriferous, after which him and Mr. Grant together slandered the lawn and reviled the shrubbery. At first it was almost more than any of us could bear and there was some vicious talk about realtors for a day or two following the meeting with Mr. Grant and Mr. Ellersby, but once we commenced to look around for ourselves we discovered the conditions were in fact ruinous and the dilapidation was indeed general, all of which proved immeasurably surprising to us.