A Short History of a Small Place (29 page)

“What you want me to do with these roses?” the deputy wanted to know.

And Sheriff Burton asked him why didn’t he stick one in each ear and whistle Dixie.

 

 

 

 

 

 

SO NOW they all said it was a romance because she had died on account of it, or anyway most everybody who had ruminated over Miss Pettigrew’s half sheet of folded paper seemed to think it was a romance except for Daddy, who had ruminated over the half sheet along with everybody else and seemed to think it was not a romance at all. Even after the roses and the folded note Daddy still called it madness, but now that Miss Pettigrew had thrown herself off the water tower Momma came right out and insisted it was a matter of the heart which Daddy said was only proper coming from Momma since she had a natural leaning towards that sort of thing anyway. So Daddy let Momma tell him Romance outright, which she never would have done except for the roses and the folded note, and somehow or another he kept himself from telling her Madness back. Daddy said he figured he was obliged every once and again to let Momma exercise her leanings.

On the morning of the viewing, which was a Saturday and also the morning after the expiration, Momma called it, Mrs. Phillip J. King dropped by for a cup of coffee in the breakfast room and over a Sara Lee pecan twirl her and Momma together constructed what Daddy called the Miss Myra Angelique Pettigrew shrine and memorial. Daddy himself had started out in the breakfast room, but soon after the arrival of Mrs. Phillip J. King him and his newspaper had traveled by way of the sitting room to the front porch which was the only part of the house where Daddy could get far enough away from Mrs. Phillip J. King not to hear her and only then if he shut the aluminum storm door and paneled front door both, which he did immediately. Daddy did not have much stomach for Mrs. Phillip J. King. So by the time I got up, Daddy had already put both front doors between himself and the rest of the house and Momma and Mrs. Phillip J. King had already done away with near half the pecan twirl between them. Of course Mrs. Phillip J. King, being what she was, would not let me sit down at the table until I had kissed her on the cheek and had kissed Momma on the cheek and then she asked me if all my dreams had been sweet ones and I tried to tell her “yes ma’m” but she was already talking to Momma again before I could get it out. So I cut myself some pecan twirl and Momma brought me a glass of milk and I tried to dispatch with both of them as I watched Momma and Mrs. Phillip J. King talk about Miss Pettigrew, but I don’t guess I have much stomach for Mrs. Phillip J. King either since I couldn’t hardly get anything down. According to Momma, the trouble with Mrs. Phillip J. King is she doesn’t have to come but from next door and so most always looks as frightful in our house as she does at home, and Daddy says it is a rare day when any neighbor to the Phillip J. King house and grounds gets to see Mrs. Phillip J. King with her hair combed out and her clothes on since she most regularly shows herself in the world looking like something that’s just crawled out from the bedlinens.

Momma says Mrs. Phillip J. King is a handsome woman when she puts her face on, but I don’t believe Daddy would walk across the street to look at her and I can’t ever make myself say “handsome” and “Mrs. Phillip J. King” in the same breath, not that she’s a homely woman, or even a plain woman, but just that no amount of handsome on top could ever make me forget what the underneath was like. It just seems to me that Mrs. Phillip J. King is forever preparing to be handsome but never is. Most always when I see her she is punishing herself with some new and experimental variety of beauty treatment that she has read about in the back of a magazine or seen on t.v. and which usually calls for some manner of vegetable or tropical fruit, and every once and again the occasional crushed toadstool, to be mixed together with a specified moisturizer and a quantity of cold cream and then smeared from ear to ear just before bedtime.

So I set aside my milk and my portion of pecan twirl since they both smelled like Mrs. Phillip J. King’s present beauty treatment, which seemed to me to have some banana in it along with maybe a touch of sweet onion, and I listened to Mrs. Phillip J. King and Momma tell each other how what Daddy called Madness was actually Romance. Mrs. Phillip J. King said he had been dashing, but Momma would not go along with dashing and said to her mind he had been not unattractive, but Mrs. Phillip J. King couldn’t see fit to drop all the way from dashing to not unattractive, so her and Momma negotiated a description and arrived at reasonably good-looking, which was mutually agreeable though it seemed for a minute or two that Mrs. Phillip J. King might hold out to have the reasonably struck from the official version. But Momma went on to tell her how she thought his nose had a fanciful bend to it which distracted Mrs. Phillip J. King away from the reasonably because, as she told Momma back, she had always thought his nose had a fanciful bend to it herself. Mrs. Phillip J. King called it a Roman nose and she said there wasn’t anything uppity or snotty about it but it was purely a sign of nobility. And Momma said he certainly carried himself like a Roman, which sparked Mrs. Phillip J. King to wonder if maybe he hadn’t come from Romans, if maybe that wasn’t why he was a Republican. But Momma said she recalled he was a notable Democrat. And Mrs. Phillip J. King said, “Maybe he was.” And Momma said she believed so. And Mrs. Phillip J. King said, “Maybe he was” again.

Mrs. Phillip J. King is what Daddy calls a legwagger so it is near impossible to watch her talk without getting yourself hypnotized or half agitated or maybe a little dizzy and nauseous, and of course I got hit with the dizzy and nauseous part of it once the legwagging and eau de garden salad aroma took up together and came at me. What few bites of pecan twirl I had managed to get down were organizing to come back out for an airing, so I excused myself to Mrs. Phillip J. King and Momma and went off to the bathroom to hang my head over the toilet.

Consequently I was not present when Mrs. Phillip J. King decided she could not let reasonably good looking rest peacefully and resurrected the whole business with the argument that a moustache under that fancifully bent nose would have most certainly made for dashing. But Momma could not see clear to allow for a moustache since there had not been one actually; however, Mrs. Phillip J. King insisted that if Momma could just imagine a finely manicured and dignified Douglas Fairbanksstyle moustache under that Roman nose then all of the rest of the features would surely come together and pretty much scream Dashing at her. But even with a moustache thrown in Momma could not sit still for any degree of dashing though Mrs. Phillip J. King campaigned rather fiercely for Considerably Dashing and then Somewhat Dashing and then A Touch Dashing, so Momma for her part felt obliged to retreat some from reasonably good looking and her and Mrs. Phillip J. King settled on passably handsome with Mrs. Phillip J. King supplying the handsome and Momma of course supplying the passably. As a result what had been reasonably good-looking when I left for the bathroom, where I splashed my face with water and managed to recover without giving up any pecan twirl, had already become passably handsome before I could get down the back hallway and into the breakfast room again, so I did not have much of any idea who Mrs. Phillip J. King was talking about when she leaned in towards Momma on her elbow and said, “Pepsi-Cola.”

And I looked at Mrs. Phillip J. King and then looked at Momma, who was herself looking at Mrs. Phillip J. King, before I took the chair opposite to the one I’d been in previously so as to put the tabletop between me and any legwagging I might otherwise be tempted to watch, and before I got settled in good Momma laid both her hands flat out in front of her and said, “Pepsi-Cola?” for herself.

I could tell by the way Mrs. Phillip J. King’s shoulders jumped back and forth that she was wagging one or the other of her legs to bring the cows home so I set in to counting the rubber grapes in Momma’s centerpiece as a kind of digestive diversion and after I’d gone through all seventeen of them I started over again and counted the teethmarks on each separate grape, all of them mine of course since Momma and Daddy do not chew on rubber grapes and do not care for me to, but as for myself I’ve never found anything more entertaining to chew on than a rubber grape since you can squeeze all the air out of it with your teeth and then attach it by the stemhole straight out from the end of your tongue. Understandably, then, there was at least a half dozen clear and utterly distinguishable teethmarks for every grape, so I hadn’t hardly gotten well into the bunch with my calculations before Mrs. Phillip J. King was going on about Pepsi-Cola again. “Pepsi-Cola,” she said. “Yes I believe it was Pepsi-Cola because I’m near certain it was Mr. Womble that ran the Nehi outfit.”

And Momma set straight up and said, “Helen?” which was what Momma called Mrs. Phillip J. King to her face while I called her Mrs. King and Daddy called her Mrs. Phillip J. King until she got out the door and partway down the sidewalk when he called her the bride of the beast.

But Mrs. Phillip J. King just went straight on ahead and said, “Yes it had to be Pepsi-Cola. He owned the bottling plant you know in Burlington. I mean his daddy, now I don’t think he ever owned it himself, but his daddy did and made a killing putting out Pepsi-Cola until he sold the whole business and made another killing doing that. Momma said it was just a ton of money that changed hands. She was brought up in Burlington you know.”

“But Helen,” Momma said.

“Lord they were filthy with it, just absolutely gloriously rich.” And Mrs. Phillip J. King pointed her finger at Momma. “Now you talk about dashing,” she said, “his daddy was the picture of it. Momma used to say he had cheekbones up to the hairline and teeth like pickets. And wear a suit, Lord I guess he could. Now of course I never saw him in life and it was many a time I thought Momma was just going on when she had no need to be, but my Aunt Mary, Momma’s sister, had kept a picture of him she’d clipped from the Burlington
Courier
and even though Uncle Roy had set a glass on it and left a ring right direct through the center of his face I knew him for a dashing gentleman just from the way he held himself. Momma always said he had the shoulders of a sailor.”

“But Helen I thought that ...” Momma said.

“And they tell me his wife was just a gorgeous woman but not from around here of course. Between you and me, Inez, I’d as soon scour this countryside for hen’s teeth as gorgeous women, so Momma said he went out and got one all the way from Delaware or Ohio, she couldn’t ever remember exactly which, but I imagine it was Delaware since P.J. tells me,” P.J. being Mr. Phillip J. King, “that Delaware is one of your urban states, lying like it does snug up against New York City, and P. J. says it takes an urban state to bring out the gorgeous in women since urban states are where all the money is, and P. J, says there is plenty of money in Delaware mostly on account of the Duponts, and she might have even been a Dupont herself, anyway I don’t know that she wasn’t and she was probably from Delaware I imagine, which is where they all come from. And lets you and me face it, Inez, money and a proper upbringing can make almost any woman gorgeous. I mean, after all you don’t hardly ever see a Loretta Young come popping out from the cotton mill.”

I guess Momma had begun to think it would never happen, but finally Mrs. Phillip J. King was forced to take a breath. However, even after what seemed near five minutes of pure exhalation all she did to replenish herself was sip at the air, so Momma must have prepared ahead because the very second Mrs. Phillip J. King switched over from outflow to inflow Momma managed to say, “Cookies,” one time fast.

“Now you take a gorgeous woman and you marry her up to a dashing man,” Mrs. Phillip J. King went on to say, “and you throw in near about a million dollars just to make things stylish and proper and you can pretty much count on any number of children along about as gorgeous and dashing as they are. They didn’t have but two as far as I know, and the first to come along was the girl who Momma said was named Ashley Marian or Marian Ashley or some such and I do believe she got into the last five of the Miss Alamance County pageant that year it was won by the godchild of a friend of one of the judges and so was not ever considered a square contest. And of course me and you know her brother Alton was a handsome man, passably handsome anyway, and I recall Momma telling how he’d been outright dashing in his youth. Cheekbones, Momma said, he was all cheekbones and she said he had this dimple right in the middle of his chin that worked on the women like a bullet, mean killed them dead.”

“But Helen,” Momma said, “I thought it was cookies, and I don’t recall any dimple.”

“Momma told me he grew out of it when his bone structure settled,” Mrs. Phillip J. King said. “And he’d already lost all the fine lines to his face don’t you know by the time him and Miss Pettigrew struck it up together, so I guess the dimple had just filled in before he ever hit Neely. Momma said it was a fine dimple, a deep and noble dimple. She said you could probably lose your thumb in it.”