A Short History of a Small Place (59 page)

With the rescue of Mr. Gresham behind them, the firemen decided they’d best go ahead and put some water on the house since it had become all wrapped up in what Daddy called a full-fledged conflagration. I recollect everything was on fire but the brick chimneys and the concrete front steps by the time Mr. Bridger and Mr. Myrick took ahold of a hose together and ran on into the front yard with it. And though they yelled and hollered and hooted and said they were ready for the water, I guess they
weren’t
actually ready for it when it finally came because Mr. Myrick slipped down in the grass and the hose got away from Mr. Bridger and went off across the lawn by itself. It bolted and squirmed and darted throughout the whole of the front yard and then jumped nozzle-first all over the cotton mill Ott’s Chevrolet and nobody managed to close down the hydrant until that hose had squirted near about every squirtable item in the vicinity except for the house, which was roasting away in a most glorious fashion. In fact, the fire was such a success that Chief Pipkin gave up on Miss Pettigrew’s house almost before his men could douse it down any, and instead he directed water to be concentrated on the surrounding trees and onto the roof of Mrs. Tullock’s outbuilding across the alleyway as a precautionary measure, and Daddy said it was his experience that if the fire department could get to a thing before it started burning they could usually put it out. So Miss Pettigrew’s trees got saved and Mrs. Tullock’s outbuilding survived also, but Miss Pettigrew’s newly painted, freshly rented house burnt to the ground, and we all watched it go, watched it late into the night and with some melancholy and regret I suppose, but the most of us marveled at the smoke and the flames like maybe we had set the thing ourselves. And in the morning we came to watch it smoulder a little, though there was not much left to smoulder but for a pile of ashes and charred wood which the chimneys had collapsed onto. There was not much else to see really. The tenants’ cars had been moved out into the alleyway and the tenants themselves had gone wherever it is those sorts of people go while the trucks and firemen and firefighting paraphernalia had returned to the stationhouse. Only Mr. Pipkin and Sheriff Burton had remained behind to poke around in the rubble, so we watched them do their poking and then even they left and we had nothing to look at but the blackened wood and the jagged hunks of chimney and the miraculous concrete front steps which had remained uncluttered and unbroken and led up off the front walk to nowhere at all.

 

 

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The ladies of the Neely Garden Society desired to purchase the property, not straightaway but once the city had cleared it of all the rubbish and cinders, everything that is except for the concrete front steps which nobody seemed to have the means to lift or the truck to put it on. The ladies intended to erect, build, and cultivate a Pettigrew memorial park complete with a wide and exotic assortment of trumpet flowers, a selection of blossoming bushes, a vine-covered lattice arbor, and a gazebo, and since they meant to pay dearly for what they called the accoutrements of the place, they did not wish to pay dearly at all for the place itself and so in a formal letter they petitioned Mr. P. Merriman Bledsoe of Stokesdale to seek out the charitable corner of his heart and let the property go for what Daddy said was not even a song but more like two stanzas and a refrain. I suppose Mr. P. Merriman Bledsoe sought and sought, but he came up empty in the end and gave the ladies what amounted to a symphonic price which they simply could not begin to pay. So the Garden Society went back to tending its rose bushes at the water tower and the sewage plant and Mr. P. Merriman Bledsoe let it be known through Mr. Ellersby that he would entertain most any reasonable offer, would even consider negotiating with the garden club ladies if they would seek out the sensible corner of their hearts.

Of course, since Mr. P. Merriman Bledsoe did not live in Neely he did not much care who bought the property or what he put on it be it an exotic memorial garden or a stagnant pond. If Mr. P. Merriman Bledsoe showed any preference whatsoever I guess it was towards franchises, especially franchised restaurants, and when word got out from Mr. Ellersby the city council immediately commenced to search all local ordinances and find out if the Pettigrew property wasn’t somehow or another zoned against hamburgers and batter-dipped chicken. We did not suspect it was however, but refused to panic nonetheless since we already had a Burger Chef three blocks south and a fairly new Hardee’s just below the Holiday Inn on the bypass. Now the Burger Chef had not ever done anything in the way of steady business because it had not ever served anything in the way of edible food, and as for the Hardee’s, it seemed to us in town that the bypass was a considerable distance to go for a hamburger, even a charco-broiled one. But that was before Mr. Ellersby let it be known what Mr. Bledsoe intended to do with Miss Pettigrew’s property. The news altered our outlook extravagantly. We had never before realized the true extent of our loyalty to the Burger Chef and whenever we had a prominent opportunity we took to praising their hamburgers and cheeseburgers and fish filet sandwiches and we were outright rapturous over the french fries. We could hardly ever contain ourselves when Mr. Ellersby was around and some people even went so far as to eat at the Burger Chef by way of active illustration. Of course the Hardee’s became exceedingly convenient for us, and of a sudden we discovered it was on the way to everywhere and we could not begin to prevent ourselves from stopping in for a biscuit or a milkshake or a turnover or especially one of those delicious broiled hamburgers. We had discovered nothing was so satisfying as grilled meat. And our patronage to the Hardee’s was as utterly unshakable as our patronage to the Burger Chef and we told Mr. Ellersby as much, told him he’d best leave off fishing for a franchise buyer, told him we could not even contemplate the purchase of a competing burger. So Mr. Ellersby suggested chicken and we found we had some very strong and near about violent opinions on assorted pieces in buckets and dinners in boxes also. The very idea seemed a profanation to us.

The surveyor from McDonald’s came to town in the middle of November and sized up the Pettigrew property with his surveyor’s contraption, but somehow or another the lot did not suit him and did not suit his employers, so Mr. Ellersby turned to the Burger King instead but they did not seem much interested in the place either. He negotiated with two representatives from a chicken outfit for awhile but could not entice them into a deal and he had some contact with the manager of Captain Mulligan’s Fish House in Greensboro where the waitresses wore black patches over their eyes and red bandannas around their heads and looked for all the world to be a cross between Blackbeard and Aunt Jemima. But the manager complained that the Pettigrew lot was a little scant to the leeward and considerably shy to the windward also which made him reluctant to drop anchor on it, so he shoved off and took his excessively nautical self on back to Greensboro on the wings of a southeaster. Consequently, come Christmastime of 1980, which was this past Christmastime, Mr. P. Merriman Bledsoe had not succeeded in relieving himself of the Pettigrew property and Mr. Ellersby had not succeeded in disposing of it for him, so throughout the holiday season the mayor and Miss Pettigrew’s grassy lot sat unbought and unlocked at and entirely unoccupied except for the concrete front steps, which the city was apparently attempting to move through the sheer force of good intentions. The holidays themselves were unexceptional enough. I do not recollect that the fire department got Santa and his sleigh and his reindeer onto the courthouse roof with any sort of remarkable velocity, and I do believe the Methodist Christmas pageant was fairly much of an unblemished success except for a brief interruption when one of the shepherds tending his flock by night got tangled up in the hem of his raiments and fell onto the crooked end of his staff which took his breath temporarily but did not cause any lasting injury. On Christmas morning I gave Momma a new sugar bowl and gave Daddy a hat and Daddy gave Momma a green skirt and a new book to read in February and Momma and Daddy gave me a wristwatch and a pair of shoes and then Momma gave Daddy a little box wrapped in foil paper with a ribbon around it and Daddy untied the ribbon and tore off the paper and opened the box to find a clear plastic Zippo lighter with an orange baitfly in the tank of it. I expected him to be delighted and I suppose Momma expected him to be delighted also but Daddy was not delighted, could not even bring himself to pretend to be delighted, and I do believe at the very moment he flipped open the top and touched off the first flame Daddy’s enthusiasm for tobacco began to wear away.

By the second week in January there was talk all roundabout town of a branch bank on the Pettigrew property. Some people said it would be First Citizen’s and some people said it would be Northwestern and most people said it would be Wachovia, but in February when the two men came in the green pickup truck they erected just inside the wrought iron fence a sizeable wooden sign which announced that the property that had gone from Pettigrew to Pettigrew to Bledsoe had subsequently come into the hands of the South Atlantic Finance Corporation, which Daddy said was not the same thing as a bank exactly, was not the same thing as a bank at all. So we waited for the South Atlantic Finance Corporation to stake out their office and pour their footings, but construction did not commence in February or March or April or May or June or all throughout the rest of the summer and on into September, and the city kept the property up from month to month, mowed the lawn, trimmed around the sign, sheered the shrubbery, and continued to intend to move the concrete front steps.

Along about the middle of October, with the Pettigrew property still uncultivated and unerected and unbuilt upon our anticipation had died away to a considerable degree and so we were easily distracted by the news of a package that the depot was holding for a Mrs. Willa Ross Bristow. It had arrived in the underbelly of a Greyhound bus out of Charlotte, and according to Mr. Lancaster Petree of the Lawsonville Avenue Petrees who had gone to the terminal to fetch his wife’s sister’s husband off the same bus and who had seen the item for himself, it was not one of your regular negro to negro packages but was instead a stenciled crate that appeared to have originated with some official arm of the very governing body of these United States, Mr. Lancaster Petree put it. But before we could even commence any sort of earnest calculations as to just what official arm of the very governing body of these United States, we found out for certain from a fat hairy Simpson who went by A.E. or O.I. or U.A., two vowels anyway, and who had driven Aunt Willa to the Heavenly Rest in his Blue Bird cab. The double-voweled Simpson said it was a zoo box, said he had read the stencil and figured out it was a zoo box for himself even though it did not say zoo or box either anywhere on it but said instead zoological park from which the double-voweled Simpson had precipitated and distillated zoo box. Daddy said you could hardly hope to put anything past a Simpson.

At first, the double-voweled Simpson had not especially objected to carrying a zoo box to wherever it was a negro might want to carry one, but he had planned upon carrying it in the trunk of his Blue Bird cab and not in the backseat, which is where he ended up carrying it, and he did not object straightaway because he did not smell anything straightaway but presently the aroma of the zoo box impressed itself upon the double-voweled Simpson and he attempted utterly unsuccessfully to get shed of Aunt Willa and get shed of her boxed up aroma, but at length wisdom came to him and he drove Aunt Willa to the Heavenly Rest with the most of his head laying out the side window which itself attracted some considerable attention even before anybody discovered it was Aunt Willa in the backseat with the late Mr. Britches in a crate beside her.

The commander had agreed to a burial, had been paid for a burial, had actually been paid for a burial and a chapel service, but psychologically he was not prepared to receive a monkey corpse only a scant two years after he’d agreed to receive one. After all, the commander had figured the zoo would not send it to him anyway, had figured they would throw it in a hole down around Ashboro and cover it up, but they did send it to him inside of a plastic bag inside of a wooden crate and even then the aroma drove the commander and Mr. Tally and Mr. Dunn and the double-voweled Simpson and Aunt Willa out of the parlor and onto the shaded front porch and Mrs. Ida Joyce Hinkle, who stayed behind for a viewing, would probably have been killed by the stench if she had not been dead already. Of course the commander was bound and obligated to see to the monkey’s disposal; he had made an agreement and Aunt Willa still owned the receipt. And though not eager, the commander was willing to hold up his end of the bargain and would have too if not for the local uproar which set in once folks found out what manner of creature the commander was intending to hold services for. People generally did not want a chimpanzee eulogized where their mommas and daddies had been eulogized and where they themselves expected to be eulogized in the distant future. Of course the commander held that his was a nondenominational air-cooled chapel, but most people felt strongly that a monkey did not even qualify for nondenominationality, especially this monkey since it had not been in any way a Christian creature but had instead been a vile and excessively urinary animal, had in fact been a Hat out pagan beast, Mrs. Phillip J. King called it, and there was serious talk that a chimpanzee service in the nondenominational air-cooled chapel would probably be the final service ever held there. So the commander found himself in a tight spot with some specifications of the deceased on the one hand and a gracious degree of public outrage on the other, and after only a brief period of consultation and review, since the aroma was not in any way diminishing, the commander went ahead and yielded to the public outrage. The deceased had been dead near about two years, so her specifications did not hold the sway they had previously.