A Short History of a Small Place (55 page)

“What’s in that suitcase?” he said.

“Clothes,” Aunt Willa told him.

“Monkey’s clothes?” he said.

And Aunt Willa moved her head just enough to indicate yes.

“Ma’m, our animals don’t wear clothes,” he said.

And Aunt Willa did not move her head any and did not open her mouth any but just stood where she was about as animated as a treestump.

“They don’t wear anything,” he said.

And Aunt Willa watched him with one of her most accomplished bloodless expressions.

“Nothing at all,” he said.

And Aunt Willa continued to exhibit all the liveliness of a cinder-block.

“Not anything,” he said. “Nada. Zilch. You got me?”

And he glared at Aunt Willa who watched him watch her but did not move her head and did not open her mouth.

“Lady,” he said, “we’re running a zoo, not a supper club. Now get this monkey naked and bring him out to the car.”

So Aunt Willa set the valise down on the sidewalk and helped Mr. Britches out of his sneakers and out of his blazer and out from under his porkpie hat and then carried him through the gateway to the back of the station wagon, where she attempted to give him over to the man from the zoo ’who did not show any more of a natural inclination towards monkeys than he had previously, and consequently Aunt Willa herself deposited Mr. Britches in the steel hound cage and latched the door and shut the tailgate, and I do not believe much of anybody saw him off except for her and except for Jump Garrison who gassed up the station wagon and then stood by the pumps holding the nozzle as he watched Mr. Britches go away down the street with his little hairy fingers around the bars of his cage.

And that was about all of Miss Pettigrew except for the odds and ends and she had lived sufficiently long enough to accumulate a vast assortment of them which Mr. Conrad Rackley and the two chinless Masseys had not even begun to deplete, so Aunt Willa contracted with Mr. Ellis Spainhour of Yanceyville who primarily handled cattle and tobacco but took on estate work when it came his way. The announcement arrived a week and a day after Mr. Britches’s departure and it was addressed Occupant so was mine to open since Daddy got all the Mr. Louis W. Benfield sr. mail and Momma got all the Mrs. Inez Yount Benfield mail and since Aunt Sadie did not ever send me five dollars on my birthday anymore which excluded me from any sort of postal involvement except for a monthly Boy’s Life and that wasn’t even in an envelope. So Momma set aside all the Occupant mail for me along with the occasional Resident flier from the grocery store and in the evenings just before supper me and Daddy would sit down in front of the television and open our mail together. He generally got the significant items like bills and bank statements and requests for donations to the Waccamaw Boy’s Home while I generally got pizza coupons and sample boxes of catfood, but a week and a day after Mr. Britches’s departure I opened up the auction announcement and read it out loud to Daddy, who called Momma in from the kitchen and had me read it out loud to her. It was surely the most vital piece of Occupant correspondence I had ever received.

We do not get too many auctions in Neely. We do not even have a regular flea market, and most usually furniture out on a front lawn means an eviction and not a yard sale. Consequently news of the Pettigrew auction touched off some noticeable local fervor, and even those folks who cannot hardly make the mortgage from month to month began to discuss and debate and speculate over just precisely what portion of the estate they would purchase. Of course there was not a tremendous amount of estate left since a goodly part of it had already been hauled off to the West Virginia end of Kentucky, but there was a sufficient assortment of furniture, kitchen utensils, and personal effects for people to get venomous over. The auction itself was held about noon on the Saturday of the Labor Day weekend which gave everybody a full ten days to tap their noses and tug at their ears and scratch their topnotches and just generally brush up on various bidding techniques, and Mr. Spainhour and his assistants had arrived early enough to haul the auctionable items outside so by the time a crowd began to collect in earnest it looked like the house had gotten sick and thrown up all over the front yard. There were little bits and pieces of the estate everywhere, loose and in boxfuls and stacked on top of each other and strewn across tabletops and draped over shrubbery and canted up against treetrunks and piled all roundabout the wrought iron fence, and people swarmed in through the gate and covered over the yard and they picked up this and poked at that and fiddled with one thing and studied another. I’ll be the first to tell you there were certainly some grand items to be had. I recollect an upright piano in passable condition and a brass coatrack with all sorts of colorful bends and twists to it and an oversized pitcher and wash basin—what Momma called exquisite spongeware—and some kind of mahogany monstrosity with lion’s feet that I could not purely decipher a purpose for but which was entertaining to look at nonetheless and a solid silver fruit bowl and a handsome mantel clock with a clipper ship etched into the glass of it and a table lamp made from a wagon wheel hub and a velvet upholstered divan, Daddy called it, which was pretty enough to look at but did not seem the sort of thing you could watch t.v. from. However, most everything else was not grand and was not especially appealing but was just old and mildewed and dusty and termite-eaten, and all the books and dishes and clothes and framed pictures and tables and chairs and boxfuls of bric-a-brac lay scattered across the front lawn like they had been turned up with a grubbing hoe. There was not anything that did not have some grime to it, and since there was not anything that did not get touched or picked up or otherwise handled somehow the grime circulated freely onto fingers and palms and subsequently onto shirtfronts and necks and faces and pantlegs. So by the time Mr. Ellis Spainhour called for the auction to commence and drove us into a corner of the front yard, we carried a good part of the available filth with us and looked for all the world like a band of refugees.

The auction got underway promptly at noon and Mr. Spainhour started things off with the upright piano. Mr. Rollie Cobb pinched his nose, pulled at both his ears, and snapped his fingers twice in an attempt to bid ten dollars for it, but Mr. Spainhour told him the bidding would start at two hundred and fifty dollars instead and Mr. Rollie Cobb put his hands in his pockets so as to avoid any sort of temporary bankruptcy. For a spell afterwards there was not any pinching or pulling or snapping to be seen from anybody, but once Mr. Spainhour had provided us with an extremely flattering and altogether fictitious description of the instrument followed by a second and then a third request for two hundred and fifty dollars, a man on the sidewalk outside the fence waved his arm at Mr. Spainhour, a man in a floppy tennis hat and sunglasses and green plaid pants, a man from somewhere else who obviously had a far more refined understanding of pianos than any of us did. But just as soon as Mr. Spainhour had his two hundred and fifty dollars, he wanted two hundred and seventy-five and straightaway he got that from a woman midway back in the crowd who looked like some sort of exotic variety of Oregon Hill French but turned out to be a High Point Pembroke. So the man from somewhere else was pressed to three hundred dollars and then to three hundred and twenty dollars and when it looked like he would own a piano at last Mr. Wiley Gant scratched underneath his hat and drove the price up higher which I do not believe he intended or was ever aware of and which seemed an extraordinary thing for him to do seeing as how he had no right arm after the elbow. The High Point Pembroke got back in at three hundred and thirty-five and her and the man from somewhere else were joined by a distinguished grey-haired gentleman in a blue suit who Mrs. Phillip J. King said was a senator. The three of them together were responsible for all of the rest of the bidding except for a brief interruption by Mr. Wyatt Benbow who wrestled most mercilessly with his chin until he got recognized at $372.50, but much to his apparent relief he was immediately passed by the senator who gave way to the High Point Pembroke, who was vanquished at length by the man from somewhere else. The whole business grew a little tedious at the end so we were all pleased to see the piano going, going, and then finally gone though Mr. Wyatt Benbow shook his head and tried to look sick about it.

The lion-footed mahogany monstrosity got dispatched with next. It went to the High Point Pembroke after some furious bidding, and I think she was fairly pleased to have purchased it although it did not seem to me she had any clearer conception of exactly what it was than the rest of us did, so I suppose by way of consolation she bought the mantel clock also since its purpose was not in any way mysterious or indecipherable. The senator made off with the silver fruit bowl and the wagon hub table lamp while Mr. Estelle Singletary succeeded in buying the exquisite spongeware under what appeared to be a threat of death. Mrs. Mary Margaret Vance Needham got the brass coatrack, and in an exhilarating display of financial abandonment and serious chinyanking, Mr. Wyatt Benbow came away with the velvet upholstered divan. Daddy said it was just the thing for a grocery store magnate to rest his hams upon. And that was the last of the truly grand items though a few marginally grand items did show up here and there in the midst of the innumerable ordinary odds and ends that remained, but after the divan went to Mr. Benbow all the nose pulling and ear tugging and head scratching seemed to lose some of its novelty. So I did not pay much attention to the auction for a time and instead retired to the wrought iron fence with Daddy and Mr. Russell Newberry and Mr. Phillip J. King and Mr. Bobby Ligon of Draper, who all smoked together and spat and then launched directly into a vigorous discussion of the higher sciences. What touched it off was Mr. Phillip J. King’s terrier, Itty Bit. Mr. Phillip J. King had her with him on a leash and, being the nervous and thoroughly idiotic creature that she was, Itty Bit passed the time in barking fairly persistently at nothing much in particular. We’d all grown somewhat accustomed to the aggravation of it, so nobody paid any attention to Itty Bit except for Mr. Bobby Ligon, who was sitting on his heels just to her backside, and he spent a full minute and a half in devoted contemplation of Itty Bit’s rearend, tilting his head first towards one shoulder and then towards the other.

“You know,” he said at last, “I wish you’d just look how that little dog’s shithole opens up every time he barks.”

And Daddy looked at Mr. Russell Newberry and Mr. Russell Newberry looked back at Daddy and then the two of them together looked at Mr. Phillip J. King who said, “What?”

“I said,” Mr. Bobby Ligon told him, “I wish you’d look how that little dog’s shithole opens up every time he barks.”

“Every time she barks,” Mr. Phillip J. King replied.

“Yes sir,” Mr. Bobby Ligon said, “every time.”

Naturally we all looked at Itty Bit’s shithole, and sure enough every time she barked it popped open which was a matter of great wonderment to all of us until Daddy commenced to explain it away. He said the activity at Itty Bit’s rear section was simply an illustration of one of Mr. Newton’s laws of nature, a law that had not been formulated specifically for terrier’s shitholes but would work there as well as anyplace else. According to Daddy it was all a matter of balanced thrust. The barking tended to knock the dog backwards and the shithole kicked her forwards so the both of them served to cancel each other out. “Now if Itty Bit could just work her shithole without working her mouth,” Daddy said, “why then she could skim along the ground like a jet.”

“No!” Mr. Bobby Ligon exclaimed.

“Yes,” Daddy replied, and Mr. Russell Newberry and Mr. Phillip J. King shook their heads yes also.

“Ain’t that astounding,” Mr. Bobby Ligon said.

“It truly is,” Daddy told him.

And I do believe it was sometime during the course of what Daddy called his shithole disquisition that Momma made her purchase since not me or him either saw her make it, blinded as we were by the marvels of nature. She bought an oval hand mirror, not a very fashionable little implement but useful enough. The glass was noticeably aged and discolored around the edges but otherwise highly reflective, and the casing and stem were done up in tiny silver-plated rosettes that ran roundabout the whole business on a vine and were joined opposite the glass by Miss Pettigrew’s initials, or most of them anyway since the A had fallen off which left a little M beside a big P beside a brass rivet. So Momma had bought a nice enough item, but she did not seem inclined to show it off and carried it under her arm when she came back to the fence hunting me and Daddy, and when Daddy asked her what she had Momma just said, “A mirror,” and did not bring it out for us to see. She had come to tell us she was through with auctions for a spell and would be going home directly, and Mr. Phillip J. King asked her would his wife be going home directly with her, but Momma told him Mrs. Phillip J. King was waiting to bid on the naked sabre and so would possibly be awhile. “Very possibly,” Daddy added.

So Momma left us for home and me and Daddy and Mr. Phillip J. King and Mr. Russell Newberry leaned backwards against the wrought iron fence with our elbows through the palings while Mr. Bobby Ligon squatted unsupported on his heels beside us. They all smoked and spat and told stories and made terrier shithole jokes and I spat some myself and partway listened and partway watched the mayor and Miss Pettigrew’s belongings get sold off piece by ragged piece. Now that all the grand items had been dispensed with and all the marginally grand items had been taken as well, there was not much of anything left but the shabby, mildewed, termite-eaten stuff, so naturally I was not expecting to see anything of interest when Mr. Spainhour took up by the leg a small upholstered footstool and held it high over his head. Just the sight of it made my ears tingle and straight off I could not figure why my ears should tingle on account of an upholstered footstool; I couldn’t exactly figure what tingling ears meant anyway. But shortly I recollected an acquaintance with that footstool which I myself had seen under Miss Pettigrew’s very feet in the month of March I am certain of 1977 I do believe. We were selling toothbrushes for the James K. Polk middle school baseball team with the money to go for new uniforms. The old uniforms had developed holes in all the crotches and Coach Mangum did not think it seemly to turn a squad loose in them, so we were attempting to generate funds with Pepsodent toothbrushes in an extraordinary assortment of colors. The coach reasoned they would be easier to move than magazine subscriptions or seventy-five-cent nut clusters, and as it turned out they were fairly easy to move. I sold two to Daddy and three to Momma. Mr. Phillip J. King bought a red one as a gift for Mrs. Phillip J. King. The Reverend Richard Crockett Shelton purchased a pair following one of Momma’s sleepy meatloaf dinners. My barber Mr. Lacy went in halves on one with his partner. I inflicted two yellow ones and a blue one on Mr. Russell Newberry, who soaks his teeth at night in a dish. And Miss Pettigrew bought up the remaining half dozen, which is precisely where the footstool comes in.