A Short History of a Small Place (11 page)

According to Mrs. Phillip J. King, who told Momma she had studied the matter from every conceivable angle, Aunt Willa and Miss Pettigrew probably decided to apply themselves in prayer directed towards the gums instead of the teeth because Miss Pettigrew had concluded that while the size of the teeth was pretty much set, the gums might be somehow divinely manipulated. Momma told Mrs. King yes, she supposed so, but actually Momma did not at all hold with the view that Aunt Willa’s dental troubles could draw Miss Pettigrew out of her daddy’s house after ten years of unbroken solitude. Momma said Aunt Willa’s gums were not good enough reason to send Miss Pettigrew to church but served as a fair excuse for getting her there, and Momma had her own theory as to why Miss Pettigrew might trade her daddy’s parlor for the Methodist sanctuary if only on one evening out of a decade’s worth of evenings. Momma’s theory did not reflect poorly on Miss Pettigrew’s faculties, did not reflect poorly on Miss Pettigrew at all, but then Daddy said Momma always thought better of Miss Pettigrew than most everybody else did.

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Winters in Neely can be most forlorn and desolate. By the time November arrives the trees have all gone bare and what leaves were not raked into ditches and burned lie under shrubbery and against the backsides of houses where they blacken and rot. There is always a particular day no closer to Halloween than Thanksgiving when Daddy sends me into the backyard with a rake and has me clean the last of the leaves and the rubbish out from the row of mock orange bushes that marks the far line of our lot. I’ve never tangled with anything so aggravating as a mock orange bush in November, and I suppose I lost all patience with them the first time I was big enough to hold a rake and Daddy turned me out into the backyard alone. Later Momma told me how he watched me from one of the windows of the breakfast room and just grinned. She said that was a golden day for Daddy; she said the mock orange bushes was why he wanted a son.

Of course you can’t hardly get leaves and rubbish out from a mock orange bush, but I didn’t know that then. And of course Daddy did not expect me to be any more effective at it than he had been, but I didn’t know that then either. Confronting the mock orange bushes had simply become what Daddy called a point of honor, a sort of obligation he had seen through until I could inherit it. So once a year in November I wake up on a Saturday with the sort of feeling that must come over birds just before they migrate, and I get straight out of bed into my playclothes and put on my carcoat and my workgloves and my green corduroy hat with the earflaps and I fetch the rake out of our cellar and set out for the bottom of the back lot, where I am condemned to thrash at the mock orange bushes for the balance of the day. And that is when it usually happens, not while I’m still trying to extract from the mock oranges everything that has blown or fallen into them in the course of the year, but after I have left off from the struggle for a spell and have sat down on the grass where I pluck at the rakehead to make the tines sing, and I listen to the sound of the sprung metal dying away sometimes mixed with the cry of a hound or the low, indecipherable noise of a voice on the air, and suddenly I am aware of the sort of chill I haven’t known in a year and I notice that the sky is very high and tufted and the color of ash in a grate, which is the color of my breath, which is the color of the afternoon, which is the color of the season; and I know it isn’t autumn anymore.

In our household we have never kept the seasons by a calendar. Spring commences with the buds on the apricot tree. When Momma lets me go barefoot it’s summer. The first chill night after Labor Day means autumn. And I bring winter in myself when I return the rake to the cellar and meet Momma in the breakfast room where I find her gazing out the back window. “My my, Louis,” she always tells me, “those mock oranges look a hundred percent better.” Daddy says that’s her part in the ritual.

Winter in Neely is a monotonous time of year and nothing much can really break the spell of the season except for a healthy snowfall, which tends to drive the good sense out of most people since very few of the natives have seen enough snow to have become indifferent to it. We are accustomed to sleet and to the sort of rain that freezes in treetops and downs powerlines, so even the rumor of flurries makes people’s eyes bright. I don’t suppose there is anyone in all of Neely or in the farthest reaches of the outlying areas around it who could not be called upon to tell how on the evening of January ninth, 1957, a storm set in which raged and blew for a day and a half and left behind it a six and three-quarter inch accumulation not counting drifts, a record for the area. According to Daddy, that was a time of general lunacy in Neely, but then Daddy has always said there’s nothing like a good snowfall to bring out the feeble-mindedness in people.

There is a tendency among Neelyites to panic in the face of poor weather, and the reaction to snow is no less frantic, just a little more lightheaded. Before the first few flakes have had time to settle in and melt, every school in the county closes down and any merchant who does not specifically deal in provisions, what are usually called groceries, has locked up his shop and gone home. When we children arrive from school, the mothers and housewives of Neely begin to expect the worst and busy themselves making shopping lists for such indispensable items as dish-powder and confectioner’s sugar and institutional-sized cans of ravioli, just the sorts of things no family can be snowbound without. Since it is us children who will make the trip to the store, we set ourselves to rooting around in the bottoms of the closets looking for boots, which most of us usually find only one of and that one made to go on last year’s foot. About the only citizens of Neely with boots that fit are the garbage men, who have to stomp trash all day and who, of course, don’t work when it snows. So we settle for Baggies over our sneakers, and while our mothers finish up their grocery lists, we go into the cellar after our sleds which have usually had a full year to rust and deteriorate but which require only a little candle wax on the runners to be operational again. I don’t imagine very many of us ever get away without the sort of sendoff that is a mixture of warnings, instructions, and outright threats and that, Daddy says, is probably just the kind of thing Commander Scott heard from his mother before he weighed anchor for the antarctic. Momma usually tells me not to dally unless I want to catch pneumonia or get frostbit or become disoriented in the snow and lose my way, which would be a sheer impossibility since most everybody under voting age is either going to or coming from the Big Apple and making enough racket for ten people in dragging their sleds over pavement that is considerably wetted down but far from icy. Daddy says the idiocy falls with the snow and sometimes Momma manages to avoid it and sometimes she doesn’t.

On the evening after a two or three inch snowfall Daddy and me take our supper in the breakfast room where we can look out the window to where the floodlights shine through the limbs of our apricot and our elm and play off the peaks and drifts against the carshed and just generally make a spectacle of even our backyard. Of course by dinnertime Momma has been cooking in vatfuls all afternoon and has amassed an ambitious selection of stews and sauces and puddings along with a gracious plenty of garbage, which she insists has to go to the can in the yard before the night is out. So me and Daddy eye each other gravely since even the least little errand has become an expedition, and then Daddy usually bows out to me saying something like, “You take it admiral, I’m faint of heart.” And I go after my Baggies and my coat and when I get to the door with two armfuls of trash, Daddy sometimes toasts me with his coffee cup. “Safe return,” he says.

Sometime after midnight and before sunrise it is not at all uncommon for the clouds to blow off leaving the moon to break through and put a glow on things. Daddy says because the light is extraordinary and unnatural, it inflicts a kind of madness on some people while they sleep and they wake up in the morning wanting to drive their cars. Daddy says he cannot explain it otherwise since there’s no reason at all for a townful of people with absolutely nowhere to go to wheel their Buicks and Pontiacs and oversized Fords out into the streets of Neely where they pass the day veering off into ditches or phone poles or just running up onto the fenders of people going nowhere in the opposite direction. Folks only learn enough to use chains about the time the snow has begun to seep off into the ground and slush up in the gutters, and for at least an afternoon and most of an evening Neely sounds for all the world like a town under armored attack. Daddy holds with the notion that there’s nothing for a sane man to do on the day after a snowfall but plant himself in the northeast corner of his cellar and hope for the best. He’s always said that if Washington had kept company with Southerners at Valley Forge the whole group of them could have passed the winter making snow angels and igloos and generally having a high time of it.

But a hardy blizzard is a rarity in Neely and cannot be expected to arrive with any sort of regularity, cannot even be counted on for a yearly showing. Winters in Neely are mostly sadly predictable and barren and colorless and genuinely forlorn. Momma is the one of us who tends to suffer most through the season. She holds up well enough until Christmas and on into the New Year, but by the first week in February Momma is a lost woman. On February afternoons Momma turns on all the lamps in the house and sits in the livingroom in one of Grandma Yount’s burgandy boudoir chairs where she applies herself to the same novel she has been reading off and on for six years now, the one that starts out “Save when it happened to rain Vanderbank always walked home.” From year to year Momma forgets where she left off, so she sets in at page one and makes a kind of erratic go of it until March. Momma tells me she keeps expecting it to get lively and is annually disappointed. Daddy has tried that book himself; he says Momma is a woman of infinite hope.

But no matter the lamps and the distractions, the last two weeks in February tend to take Momma under and occasionally she frets and cries and tells Daddy how she has to get away from Neely, how she has to get away from February, how she’d nearly be willing to die for a spring day. And Daddy puts his arms around Momma and rocks with her to hush her up, and sometimes he’ll drive us out to the Holiday Inn on the by-pass where he treats Momma to a meal she doesn’t have to cook or wash up after, and Daddy talks to the waitresses and talks to the other customers and tells me and Momma how he’s been considering pulling up roots and moving to Buffalo where he says Momma can have her own caldron to stew in and I can go to the store with actual ice under my sled runners and Daddy tells how he’ll buy us a fleet of Buicks to run off into gullies and just generally slosh around in. Wouldn’t that be grand? Daddy says. Wouldn’t that be the life? And Momma abides him with a smile.

It was February that gave Momma the chance to think about Miss Pettigrew, and her theory as to why Miss Pettigrew showed up at the Methodist Christmas pageant after nearly ten years of not showing up much of anywhere else was probably born of Momma’s long, slow hours in Grandma Yount’s boudoir chair where she held the book about Mr. Vanderbank and pondered the somber February afternoons out the side window. Momma did not for a minute think Miss Myra Angelique could bring herself to pray for a set of dentures. But then Momma assumed what very few people in Neely cared to assume: she was of the opinion that Miss Pettigrew might be as human as everybody else. Momma said it must have been the winter or anyway the accumulation of winters that finally drove Miss Pettigrew out of the empty chambers and hallways of her daddy’s mansion and into the company of more or less regular people. Momma simply could not believe that a woman like Miss Pettigrew would go to church and pray for the gums of her colored help. That would be madness, and Momma did not think Miss Pettigrew was mad. She thought she was lonely.

Everything Momma could not know herself came by way of Mrs. Phillip J. King and her negro grapevine. Of course Mrs. King kept to her dental perspective and Momma said she spent a solid half hour discussing the sorry state of Aunt Willa’s gums and then told how Aunt Willa could not even get down her creamed corn without making faces like she might be working over a mouthful of carpet tacks. Mrs. King said the poor woman was in agony and she wanted a doctor and some painkiller but Miss Myra Angelique decided they would call on the Almighty instead. Everything else Momma knew for herself, since she never missed a Christmas pageant.

Momma had not started out as a Methodist but was raised a Baptist and converted when she married Daddy whose parents made him join the Methodist church when he was twelve and had forced him to attend Sunday services and revivals until he outgrew Granddaddy Benfield and took it upon himself to lapse into what he calls the ease of sinful living. Every week me and Momma go to the eight o’clock service and Sunday school after, and usually Momma takes me with her Wednesday nights to prayer meeting and ships me off to most every church retreat that comes along. Momma is considerably worrisome and bull-headed about my religious training since she knows I don’t have anybody to outgrow but her. She is ever trying to get Daddy on her side, and on Sundays just before lunch Momma tells him how she has prayed that God might reach down His hand from heaven and touch Daddy’s soul with His splendor. But Daddy says God knows better.

At Christmastime of 1962 Momma still had a wait of nearly a year and a half before she’d have me to drag to the sanctuary with her, so she attended the annual pageant in the company of Miss Mattie Gunn, a local spinster woman who Daddy said was normally a High Baptist but took pleasure in seeing what Methodists looked like from year to year. Late in 1961 the regular Methodist preacher, Mr. Miller, got rotated to Mt. Airy and was replaced by the Reverend Mr. Richard Crockett Shelton who was not even a half-dozen years out of divinity school when he took charge of the church. Mr. Miller had been good for nothing in that way that preachers have of being good for nothing, or good for hardly anything anyway, as they seem to figure getting paid to be holy is enough. Mr. Miller could be holy every now and again and could be quite successfully profane every once in awhile too, so naturally people had an affection for him since he seemed entirely capable of as much turpitude as they were.