A Short History of a Small Place by T. R. Pearson Read Free Book Online

and the electrician and the masons and their mortar boy—when they all came tearing around the house and found Mr. Pettigrew in a heap with a plank athwart him. One of the carpenters leaned over him and patted him on the cheek and said, “Mr. Pettigrew. Mr. Pettigrew. Say something, Mr. Pettigrew.”
    And Daddy said Mr. Pettigrew popped straight up from the waist and said, “You no count sons-of-bitches,” and he picked up a handy scrap of board, Daddy said, and clubbed that carpenter on the crown of the head with it. Then he flung it at the rest of them, and scooped up some dirt and threw that, and picked up some rocks and threw them and Daddy said he was so unbelievably accurate that the whole bunch of them—the remaining carpenter and the electrician and the mason and the mortar boy—all went tearing back around the house. And Daddy said Mr. Pettigrew took hold of the collar of that man he’d clubbed on the head and shook him awake so he could tell him what a jackass he was.
    That episode was Mr. Pettigrew’s last hurrah, Daddy said. His arm and ribs mended fine, but the doctors couldn’t do much of anything for his hip, and the same negro woman who’d raised his children was engaged to take care of him. Daddy said Mr. Pettigrew bought himself a fine wicker-bottomed wheelchair, and his hired woman, Mrs. Broadnax, would wrap him in an afghan and wheel him up and down the sidewalks of Neely. But he wasn’t right anymore and when folks would meet him out on the walkway he’d grab any part of them he could get hold of and look at them all wild and fiery-eyed, and sometimes he’d say, “Them sons-of-bitches nearly killed me,” and sometimes he wouldn’t say anything at all.
    After Mr. Pettigrew had wasted away sufficiently, he contracted a virulent infection, Momma said, and succumbed also. Mr. Wallace Amory Pettigrew jr. and Miss Myra Angelique Pettigrew returned to Neely for the services and were said to have blossomed into an extremely handsome and graceful couple, and although they were in town for only a week before they returned to school, their show of culture and refinement inspired among the ladies of Neely the frenzied conviction that the town could not possibly thrive and flourish without a finishing school of its own. The ladies organized and held conferences and debates and handed out fliers on the steps of the courthouse and went door-to-door for donations, but they couldn’t seem to stir up any sort of widespread cultural anxiety. So when a gentleman who claimed to hail from New York but was actually from Winston-Salem arrived in Neely and opened up a tapdancing school in the basement of the hardware store, the ladies counted themselves victorious, having decided that even if tapdancing was not exactly culture it wasn’t very far from it. A kind of refinement for the feet, Daddy said.
    Momma said it was the fall of 1935 when Wallace Amory and Myra Angelique Pettigrew came home to Neely for good. The care of the Pettigrew mansion had been left to Mr. and Mrs. Broadnax, who saw to the upkeep of the house and grounds for two years after Mr. Pettigrew’s death up until July 4, 1927, when they were dismissed from their duties after Sheriff Browner, who was Deputy Browner then, investigated a complaint from a neighbor and discovered the Broadnaxes and twenty-seven of their negro friends sprawled throughout Mr. Pettigrew’s parlor waiting for some sort of creature to finish roasting in the fireplace. Daddy said it was very possibly a goat. So the Pettigrew house had been closed up for a little over eight years when Wallace Amory jr. and his sister moved back into it, and Momma said they revived it entirely. Wallace Amory had the exterior of the house painted a sparkling white and Miss Myra Angelique planted a blue million trumpet flowers in among the shrubbery and along all four runs of the iron fence. The Rescue Mission hauled off two truckloads of old chairs, sofas, endtables and the like, and Momma