A Short History of a Small Place (50 page)

Of course the refreshments provided part of the invitation ultimately did not get any more clarified than the get together part of it, and after nearly everybody had worn themselves out interpreting and speculating and soliloquizing on the two of them, the general interest temporarily got shifted over to the arrival and departure times which seemed clear and decisive enough to most people but spurred some discussion anyway when the sit-down meal society began to insist that three o’clock until six o’clock meant in actuality four o’clock until seven o’clock. Daddy said it was a kind of daylight savings time for the upper crust, but not Mrs. Phillip J. King or Mrs. Estelle Singletary or her old maid sister Miss Frazier either could convince much of anybody of the virtue in arriving at four o’clock since most people figured the best of the food would be gone by then. So the discussion migrated to about the only thing left it could migrate to which was very obviously Miss Pettigrew’s reason for throwing a get together in the first place. People were naturally curious as to why a woman who had not sought public company since Christmas of 1962 would suddenly, come July of 1970, up and invite half the town into her own house and offer to feed them on top of it. This was, on the whole, a matter of exceeding bafflement and most everybody expended some considerable energy in wondering at it. Of course right off a general alarm was raised by the sorts of people that tend to raise general alarms, and it was suggested around town that perhaps Miss Pettigrew no longer possessed the faculties to be entrusted with the preparation of safe and digestible food, that perhaps Aunt Willa had put her up to the party and intended to do some mischief to a whole bunch of white people at once, which some folks said was the way with negroes, who are a very wily breed, especially on the fourth of July. And a few people even insisted that the monkey had a part in it since monkeys are notoriously wily themselves. But the general alarm died off fairly quickly and Daddy says it is simply the sort of thing you have to expect when you share your city with ignoramuses. And once the notion of poisoning was dispensed with, some people took up with the idea that Miss Pettigrew had only lost a little of her senses while other people began to believe she had regained about as much, and then there was Momma, who thought something altogether different. So there were nearly as many opinions of Miss Pettigrew’s motives as there were readings of Miss Pettigrew’s firecracker-decked, sparkler-laden invitations, and only in their response on the afternoon of July the fourth 1970 did people show themselves to be generally and completely agreed about one thing since everybody who got invited went.

Of course Miss Pettigrew’s party being a get together, it was not considered the sort of thing suitable for children so only Mr. and Mrs. Cromer brought their little girl, Sally Anne, since at the time she was about the size of a breadloaf and could not get along on her own. The rest of us collected at the Franklin Street schoolyard, where four Y.M.C.A. volunteers attempted to do us some damage with a series of coordinated activities, and we had already suffered through the wheel-barrow race and the watermelon relay when time came for the greased pig chase. Now the previous July Mr. Tadlock had lent the Y.M.C.A. four of his pigs to be larded up and hounded all over the schoolyard and on up into June of 1970 the folks at the Y figured they would simply borrow Mr. Tadlock’s pigs again. But just prior to Independence Day when they finally bothered to get in touch with him, Mr. Tadlock told them he had made his pigs into some considerable sausage and sidemeat and shank hams which he believed had taken most of the pluck out of them. So on short notice the best the Y.M.C.A. volunteers could do was two piglets the size of housecats from Mr. Harland Lynch III and three of Mr. J. L. Graham’s Rhode Island hens. Mr. Harland Lynch himself, along with the only one of the volunteers who did not have any natural fear of barnyard animals, saw to the greasing of the pigs, and it was decided by Mr. J. L. Graham and the three remaining volunteers that the chickens were vicious already and so did not require any assistance from the lard bucket to be slippery also.

The animals were turned out for a five minute head start on the crowd of us, but since they did not know what we were about to put them through they did not go hardly anywhere in their five minutes and still were fairly much underfoot when we got the signal to have at them. But it didn’t take long for the piglets and the chickens too to come to a thorough understanding of their predicament, and almost before the first two or three of us could manage any sort of proper lunges at them the chickens took off in one direction and the piglets lit out in another. Naturally we broke up into two units and the piglet pursuit squad drove their quarry on down towards the far corner of the schoolyard while the rest of us chased all three of the chickens up into the top of a crabapple tree. Of course crabapple trees are generally dense and brambly and difficult to climb and the one in the Franklin Street schoolyard is near about the same thing as an upright thicket, so we decided to send Trudy Tally up into it after the chickens since at the time she was far and away the slightest and wispiest Tally available. And all of her slight wispiness and wispy slightness together enabled her to slip up through the limbs to where the chickens were, but slightness and wispiness even in concentrated combination are not in the leastways sufficient to dislodge terrorized chickens from the top of a crabapple tree, and every time Trudy Tally took a swat at the birds they would all three peck and claw at her in a most fierce and savage sort of way. Understandably we figured that a slight and wispy male would probably be more effective than a slight and wispy female, so we selected from our unit a couple of scrawny boys, though by no means as scrawny as a Tally, and lifted them up into the crabapple tree. But even when Trudy Tally and the two scrawny boys pooled their energies the chickens still got the best of them, so we sent two regular-sized people up as reinforcements but the chickens brutalized them as well, and shortly afterwards there was a general evacuation from the crabapple tree of everything that was not a chicken, and once we had pondered over the input from Trudy Tally and from the two scrawny boys and from the pair of regular-sized people also, we decided as a unit that we’d just as soon chase Egyptian cobras as Rhode Island hens.

Naturally we abandoned the chickens and struck out after the piglets, which looked to be hemmed up in the corner of the schoolyard. But when we arrived at the scene the only thing left in the corner of the schoolyard was the piglet pursuit unit with no readily perceptible piglets to pursue. Instead some considerable attention was being paid to a square of chickenwire patching at the bottom of the chainlink fence that runs entirely roundabout the school property. Directly in the center of the chickenwire was a very round, cleanly made hole which a sizeable number of witnesses claimed to be a miraculous product of piglet engineering. They said they drove the pigs into the corner and once they had begun to close in on them the pigs themselves grew somewhat wild and desperate looking and seemed a little frothy on account of the lard, and when they could not find an alternate means of escape the larger of the two got a running start at the chickenwire and hurled himself straight through it like a little pork bullet. The second one slipped on through behind him and the last anybody saw of them they were rooting around in the jonquil patch back of Mr. Dupree’s house. So we formed ourselves into several distinct squads and fanned out across the neighborhood squealing in what we imagined to be a most appealing way.

Now while we were off chasing pigs and suffering the viciousness of chickens, Momma and Daddy and half of the rest of the town were enjoying the privilege of gaping at Miss Pettigrew for the first time in eight years. Daddy said folks began to congregate across the boulevard from Miss Pettigrew’s house along about 2:30 and commenced to gaping at the house itself as a preamble to gaping at the occupant. Daddy said even those people who had intended to arrive fashionably late ended up coming early enough to get in some prefatory gaping themselves. And Momma said somehow or another Mr. Louis Benfield sr. had managed to convince himself that there was in fact a grain of virtue in arriving somewhere early, so him and Momma got in on the tailend of the preamble too and were right in the thick of things when 3:00 hit and the whole crowd went tearing across the street, through the iron gateway, up along the sidewalk, and onto the front porch.

Daddy said Mrs. Estelle Singletary rang the bell which apparently was broken since it didn’t bring anybody to the door, and after everybody who could see it had studied the knob sufficiently to convince themselves that it had not wiggled and was not about to Mr. Estelle Singletary made an uncharacteristically gallant attempt at reaching for Miss Pettigrew’s brass doorknocker but his wife headed him off and took it upon herself to do the rapping which at length did in fact cause the doorknob to wiggle and the whole door itself to swing open. Momma said the foyer was so dimly lit it was somewhat difficult to focus in on Aunt Willa at first what with the acute shortage of suitable backlight, and even Mrs. Estelle Singletary, who very nearly had her feet on the doorsill, put her face partway into the house and called out “Hello Hello” loud enough to be heard in the basement and she was nearly set to wail away again when Aunt Willa reached out from the shadows and general murkiness and touched her on the shoulder. Daddy said from the way Mrs. Estelle Singletary sucked air it appeared to him there would be some need for an ambulance, but after several minutes of regular breathing she began to look rather lifelike once more and told everybody she was perfectly alright notwithstanding some exceedingly serious palpitations of the heart.

Apparently Aunt Willa had not been much inspired by the holiday or the get together either, because Momma said she did not look any different than she normally looked and had not dressed any different than she normally dressed. She seemed to Momma as sour as ever and she was wearing her usual floweredy smock with most all the color bled out of it and her black button-up sweater and her nylons rolled down around the knee and her blue Keds sneakers. However, she was not wearing Mr. Shep Bristow’s fedora, which her head most generally did not ever go around without, and Momma theorized that perhaps Aunt Willa had left the hat off as a means of marking the occasion, but Daddy did not ever think too highly of Momma’s opinion on the matter. He said it was not one of your sounder theories; he said it was not the sort of thing Mr. Einstein would be proud of. Momma did not seem to have much faith in it either but she simply did not want to believe that Aunt Willa was entirely indifferent to everything although there was not any substantial evidence to the contrary. So it was Momma who said Aunt Willa invited the whole crowd of get togetherees into Miss Pettigrew’s house, and it was Daddy who said she only opened the door and stayed clear of the doorway, which was not his idea of a gracious welcome and did not even begin to constitute an invitation.

Everybody did get into the house, however, which was exactly where everybody had been burning to get ever since the opportunity had presented itself. But Daddy said there was not much to see right off on account of the general gloom in the foyer and though the ladies made a great variety of astounding faces and Daddy himself undertook some experimental sniffing, he said nobody knew for certain that the local aroma was monkey until considerably later when Mr. Rackley cleared it up for them. At the time, and primarily out of respect for Miss Pettigrew, most people suspected it was Mr. Emmet Dabb who was not locally famous for his hygiene and had a well-documented history of unsavory fragrances. Daddy said Aunt Willa did not bother to lead the get togetherees into the ballroom but instead allowed Mrs. Estelle Singletary to take several people on into a coat closet by mistake and partway into a half bath before she finally hit on the short front hallway that led directly to the get together itself. And Daddy said he could tell right off it was one of your hybrid get togethers that wasn’t purely a sit-down dinner and wasn’t purely a plain buffet and wasn’t exactly a pig-in-a-blanket affair either. There were plates of course, Daddy said, but they were paper with a picture of the constitution in the middle where the food went, and there was a punch bowl full of some sort of champagne concoction, but there was Pepsi-Cola and cracked ice too. Miss Pettigrew, or somebody anyway, had prepared some chicken and had baked a ham and had cooked up a couple of good-sized pork tenderloins along with several other full-fledged repast entrees, Daddy called them, but they were accompanied by a gracious plenty of cucumber finger sandwiches and two cheese balls, one entirely nutted over and one not, and a considerable bulk of raddish rosettes and celery stalks and carrot slivers. And Daddy said there were potato chips also and American cheese slices and little hunks of liver pudding on Townhouse crackers and a platter heaped up with apple dumplings dipped in confectioner’s sugar. However, there was not any legitimate table to sit at as Daddy recollected and instead Miss Pettigrew, or Aunt Willa most probably, had backed up several dozen chairs to the front wall so as to keep the best part of the floor clear and unobstructed for dancing, which Daddy said seemed to be Miss Pettigrew’s intention judging from the presence of her portable record player with the lid up and the plug in the socket.

Of course nobody ate anything right off and nobody danced anywhere and nobody even attempted to sit down. Daddy said everybody just stood all bunched up together in anxious expectation of the hostess’s arrival and Daddy said it was an extended period of anxious expectation and left him near about dying for a piece of tenderloin by the time Miss Pettigrew finally entered through a swinging door at the remotest end of the ballroom. Naturally everybody gaped at her straightaway since everybody had warmed up their gaping muscles previously, and Daddy said the harnessed energy of all those jaws dropping open at once could have electrocuted an elephant. But Momma said she was well worth gaping at. Momma said she was radiant. She said even from all the way across the ballroom Miss Pettigrew was very obviously radiant and handsome still. Momma said she was wearing a light, stylish cotton knit the color of the driven snow though Daddy could not verify anything but the light and stylish part of it since the driven snow did not ring a bell with him. However they both clearly recollected that Miss Pettigrew carried in front of her a copper tea kettle full of tiny cloth flags on dowel sticks, and Momma said from where she was the flags looked to be a bouquet and Miss Pettigrew herself, in her white dress and with her squirrel-colored hair drawn back into a proper and distinguished bun, appeared somewhat bridely which Daddy could verify since the entire scene had also struck him as highly matrimonial notwithstanding his resistance to the driven snow.