A Short History of a Small Place (7 page)

He had been named Alton after his father and Daniel after his father’s brother, and Daddy said what people didn’t call him Mister knew him as A.D. or Addie Nance. He was what Daddy called a cookie magnate, or anyway his daddy had been a cookie magnate and he had inherited the rewards of his daddy’s ambition and perseverance, though he personally had no more of a hand in the manufacture of cookies than did the mayor in the construction of buildings. Daddy said he used his money to buy influence and used his influence to tinker with politicians, not dishonestly, Daddy said, since there was no official who could give him anything he couldn’t get for himself, but just as a means of whiling away the hours. So he helped get some folks into office and he helped get some folks out of office and he earned himself the title “Notable Democrat.” Daddy said he was a slimy individual. Momma didn’t know about that, but she was convinced he made the best shortbread cakes and cream-filled savannahs she’d ever tasted.

Mr. Alton Nance and rumors of the mayor’s candidacy arrived in Neely about the same time. The rumors came on the wind, Daddy said, but Mr. Nance was a little more stylish about it and hit town in a 1928 Ford Deluxe Phaeton with fender skirts. Daddy said it was in the most remarkable condition for a car of that vintage. According to Momma we were supposing governor or at least senator and were a shade disappointed when it turned out that the mayor was after nothing more than a seat in Congress; we’d just assumed he was no longer capable of modesty and caution, Daddy said.

As far as Momma was concerned, Mr. Nance was not a particularly handsome gentleman. She found him too squat and pasty-faced and said he did not look at all rich, just unhealthy. Daddy stuck with slimy, so he was a little more shocked than Momma when Mr. Nance and Miss Pettigrew began keeping company. Actually, it started out with the three of them climbing into Mr. Nance’s Phaeton and going to a show in Greensboro or to dinner in Winston-Salem or traveling all the way to Raleigh for some sort of political hubbub or another. Then the mayor merely withdrew his attendance, so it was really more that he left off with his company than they started keeping each other’s. But there was talk anyway, Momma said, talk that Miss Pettigrew was finally getting herself a husband who was as wealthy and as prominent as she was if only half as handsome, and talk of the mayor’s candidacy for one of the seventh-district seats, which he still had yet to officially announce but for which he had already begun to circulate lapel buttons and fliers.

Daddy said it all looked fine. It all looked proper. However, it was not fine and proper, he said, but rotten underneath like an apple that seems ripe and shiny enough on the outside but turns out to be brown and mealy when you bite into it. Daddy said Mr. Nance did not want to get married; he already was, to a woman who was paid astounding sums of money to remain what Daddy called invisible. That was the first problem, he said. The second was that the mayor alone knew it. Daddy said it was probably the appeal of glory and fame and power, touched with a little of boredom, that did away with the mayor’s good judgement, which was no excuse but was certainly a reason. So when Mr. Nance agreed to give the mayor a seat in Congress (which was, after all, what he was doing) and when he made the mistake of supposing that the mayor could give him in return something finally he could not purchase, Daddy said it was somewhat understandable that the mayor made the mistake of supposing so too.

And it was a mistake, Daddy said, a tremendous miscalculation on the mayor’s part, and it ruined him, ruined him altogether. The mayor’s end of the bargain came due on a very warm, still night in Neely, and Momma said half the town was out in shirtsleeves making aimless excursions along the boulevard or lounging on porches in the dark. She said the silence was amazing and had a kind of hum to it, and Momma imagined that if a town can seem secure and contented then that’s what Neely seemed. Daddy said both wings of the Pettigrew house were all lit up and Mr. Nance’s car was parked alongside the curbing out front, which Daddy said was natural and reassuring, him being considered a suitor and the object of Miss Pettigrew’s happiness. And he said folks were wandering back and forth in front of the Pettigrew house with some regularity, a few of them pausing to admire the inside of Mr. Nance’s car but the better part of them just lingering along the fence and seeing what they could of luxury and grandeur through the Pettigrews’ milky window sheers.

Then Miss Myra Angelique screamed, Daddy said, and the people on the sidewalk out front of the Pettigrew house gaped at each other and the people on nearby avenues and porches caught up their breath and looked out into the darkness. And then Miss Pettigrew screamed again. Daddy said it was not the sort of wild and frantic screeching you’d expect from a woman but more along the lines of a high-pitched moan. It was wordless, he said, and brief and despairing. Momma said folks dashed for the boulevard from all over Neely since even those who hadn’t heard the outcry firsthand had already heard about it, and she imagined there were two or three dozen in attendance along the fence when Miss Pettigrew said, “I will not!” in a voice that was still high-pitched and somewhat mournful but a little more wild and a little more frantic. Daddy said the mayor tried to calm her down, or anyway that’s what people supposed since they could hear the drone of the mayor’s voice but could not exactly decipher any sense from it. Then Miss Pettigrew said, “NO!” and she was howling, Daddy said, and he said the mayor’s voice came in again right behind hers, not soothing now but what Daddy called plaintive and more than a little frantic itself. But the mayor left off, Daddy said, when Miss Pettigrew broke in and wailed at him, “NO NO NO NO NO!” in a most frightful and wholly uncontained way.

That’s when Mr. Nance snuck away, Momma said, or at least that’s when folks first noticed him coming out from around the backside of the house and making for his car. Momma said he didn’t speak to anyone, didn’t even look anybody in the face, but just slipped into the frontseat and drove off. She said he was nearly four blocks from the house before he finally cut the headlights on. And then the Pettigrews’ front door flew open, Daddy said, and the mayor came backing out onto the porch with his forearms drawn up in front of his face and Miss Myra Angelique flailing and slapping at him with her open hands and driving him across the planking and onto the concrete steps. She was sobbing, Daddy said, and making noises like words but not words themselves, and he said that Mr. Britches came through the doorway behind them, turned his gums pinkside out, hooted once, and then bolted across the porch on his knuckles, cleared the bannister, and slipped off into the night.

Then Miss Myra Angelique went back inside, shut the door, and latched it behind her, and Daddy said the mayor stood on the walkway with his hands in his pockets and looked up at the stars and at a little piece of moon overhead. Daddy didn’t imagine the mayor knew he’d collected a regular gallery against the fence, but he said Wallace Amory didn’t even twitch when somebody called out from the crowd and said, “Mayor, your monkey’s done run off.”

The mayor just looked at the moon and the stars and he rattled a set of keys in his pocket and said, “Oh?”

Momma said that was the beginning of the end. Daddy said that was the end. And I suppose Daddy was onto it this time since nothing much else came along to advance the drama any. Miss Pettigrew, of course, did not marry Mr. Nance and, to the best of Momma’s knowledge, did not ever speak of him again—not even in derision. The mayor, of course, did not run for Congress and, to the best of Daddy’s knowledge, did not ever again speak of having intended to run—not even to folks wearing his likeness on lapel buttons. And Mr. Britches, of course, did not know enough about chickens to stay out of a henhouse and the chickens did not care to know enough about a sportcoated monkey to tolerate the visit agreeably, so he was thrilled to be rescued and returned home.

Momma said the mayor had been guilty of indelicacy with Miss Pettigrew’s emotions. Daddy said he had simply tried to farm her out and had failed at it. They both agreed the whole episode was sad and unnecessary since the mayor did not need Mr. Nance to win his seat in Congress and certainly could not have lost it without him. And although Momma would not admit it, Daddy said Miss Pettigrew herself became somewhat tainted on account of the circumstances, not that she had engaged in anything unseemly but because her brother had supposed that she might. So when the Pettigrews became what Momma called retiring, Neely let loose of them and watched them fade almost completely from sight. The mayor took to walking only in the dusk of the day and rarely was Miss Myra Angelique at his elbow anymore. Momma said she had become the victim of sick headaches which were so severe as to send her to her bed for days at a time. The mayor hired Aunt Willa Bristow to see to his sister and she would sit at Miss Pettigrew’s bedside and do nothing but steep Miss Myra Angelique’s lace handkerchiefs in a bowl of vinegar and apply them to her forehead. Charge of Mr. Britches also fell to Aunt Willa, and Daddy said anymore when folks stopped at the fence to watch him scuttle up his flagpole and squat on the knob at the top of it, they got just the monkey, or maybe just the monkey and the amusement of seeing Aunt Willa fetch it in by yanking stiffly on the tether and saying, “Come on h’yer you ape” until Mr. Britches relented since she never would. And Momma said there was nothing sadder than to watch the lights in both wings of the Pettigrew house go out one by one early on in the evening while the rest of Neely was still lively and bright.

Then the mayor up and went on a cruise, or anyway Daddy said it seemed that he up and went since nobody knew he was leaving until he left or got wind of where he was going until he had already come back. He took a train out of Greensboro for Miami and from there he embarked on a ship called the
Island Beauty
which was scheduled for a stop at the Yucatan peninsula before heading on to points in the Caribbean. According to the ship’s captain, the mayor had been having a wonderful time of it, and he enclosed in his letter a snapshot of Wallace Amory jr. in the company of an Inca chief which, in a scrawled note on the back, was said to have been taken at a sacred burial ground at a cost to the mayor of one dollar and seventy-five cents. They had tried, the captain said, they had all tried to dislodge the radish from the mayor’s throat—the ship’s doctor had even attempted a tracheotomy with a carving knife—but he had suffocated anyway and the captain was very sorry, very sorry, and would see to the transportation of the body himself as soon as the ship redocked in Miami, which was nine days off when the mayor died and still six days off when Miss Pettigrew got the captain’s letter by way of a company representative.

In the meantime the mayor was put in the meatlocker for safekeeping and Daddy said the freezer was either too cold or not cold enough and caused Wallace Amory jr. to turn an unspeakable color. So there was no viewing, no family hours at the funeral home, and by Miss Pettigrew’s request, the service was brief and private, so private in fact that she herself did not attend, leaving the preacher to carry on with God as his witness and under the passing scrutiny of a couple of funeral parlor attendants who wandered into the chapel to discover what in the world was going on there. When the mayor was finally laid to rest with his head at his daddy’s feet, Momma said that was in fact the end, but Daddy said that Wallace Amory had been more or less dead for a considerable spell already and this was just the official confirmation.

So Miss Pettigrew was left alone in the world except for her monkey and her negro woman, and Momma said she closed herself up in her daddy’s house and did not interrupt her solitude but twice—once of a Sunday prior to Christmas of 1962 when she attended the Methodist Church, and once in the summer of 1970 when she gave a July 4th luncheon out of the clear blue and distributed little colonial flags as favors. Otherwise she confined herself to her bedroom and her parlor while Aunt Willa cleaned for her and cooked for her and tended to her monkey for her and generally allowed Miss Myra Angelique to become an old woman in the privacy of her family home. It was no wonder then, Daddy said, that Neely was electrified by the appearance of Miss Pettigrew in her frontyard after nearly a decade of just a monkey on a flagpole and a sullen negro woman in the shadows under the porch awning. And ranting no less, and wearing a fitted bedsheet up on her shoulders for a cape. And though Momma assured us that it was probably good linen, maybe even Irish, Daddy said it was still madness and that was all that mattered.

iv

 

 

Miss Pettigrew first jigged on her lawn in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon and Daddy said folks lingered and dallied along the fence well on into twilight and were out early Wednesday morning so that they might happen by the Pettigrew house before midday came when they would commit themselves to casing it in earnest. But the doors stayed closed up and the yard remained vacant throughout the day, even to the top of the flagpole, and on Thursday only the most tenacious and otherwise unoccupied citizens of Neely haunted the Pettigrew end of the boulevard until they eventually went home unrewarded.

Then Friday came and nobody expected anything at all from Miss Pettigrew in the way of entertainment, so just the few folks with genuine business in the area saw her strike out from the house and turn south on the walkway in the direction of downtown. She was in the company of Mr. Britches, who, aside from his usual blazer and porkpie hat, was wearing black sneakers for the occasion; Miss Pettigrew kept him in check on a jewel-studded dog lead. Momma said Miss Myra Angelique was rather stylishly dressed for a woman who had hardly seen sunlight in almost a decade. She was wearing a navy skirt and matching jacket along with a white ruffly blouse and some sort of neckerchief that Momma said was certainly silk. Miss Pettigrew’s gloves buttoned at the wrist and were as startlingly white as her clutch purse, which was extremely elegant and sheathed in pearls. Momma had her reservations only as to Miss Pettigrew’s choice of hats. The one she had decided on set up on her head like a jarlid and was not quite as purely white as her gloves or her purse. It had put forth feathers in the back and was hung in front with a partial veil that stopped just short of Miss Myra Angelique’s eyebrows. Momma considered this sort of headwear a bit severe for a weekday afternoon. Otherwise, though, she said Miss Pettigrew was at the height of fashion and taste; Daddy said she had just managed to leave the bedsheets on the bed.