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

to piddle, Daddy said, but made himself conspicuous at it. He said Wallace Amory could squat on his lawn grubbing weeds for three days running, or drag a mattock and a shovel out of his cellar and tell every passerby how he was digging a drainage ditch off from the house, or announce to his carpenters how he planned to help them hang doors or lay shingles. And Daddy said his lawn was always as ragged with weeds as it ever was, and he said a little ground might get cut up but the ditch was never dug, and the carpenters told how Mr. Pettigrew would get him a hammer and a nail apron and then occasionally finger a door hinge and sometimes set foot on the roof. But he waltzed divinely, Momma said, and made delightful conversation. And Daddy said it was a good thing.
    Then the war came and everything stopped. Daddy was twenty in 1941 and he wanted to be an air cadet, but he said when he was standing outside the induction center in Texas, he saw a fighter plane and a B-17 collide over the airstrip and fall to the ground in a fiery heap. So when the sergeant called him in and said, “Air corps?” Daddy said, “No sir. Infantry,” and Daddy said that’s how he got to tour Europe clinging onto the outside of a tank. He saw action in France and Belgium and got wounded in Paris when a buddy dropped his rifle and it went off and creased Daddy’s calf. Daddy loved to tell that story and he would just cackle, but Momma lost a cousin at Corregidor and a neighbor of hers got drowned coming off a troop transport at Sicily, so she never laughed when Daddy talked about the war.
    Momma said that in the war years Neely was full of little boys and granddaddies and old worn-out women and young worn-out women, and she said there was nothing in the world to do but wait for the mailman to come and pray that he wouldn’t. Momma said the postmen in Neely had never worn neckties until the war, had never worn their grey wool uniforms with stripes down the trouser legs, had never worn their postal issue caps, had never been so severe and proper until the war came along to make them extraordinarily significant. They would knock on doors, Momma said, and out would come mothers and wives and sisters already on the raw edge of agony, and the postman would extend the notice towards them and he would not say, “I’m sorry,” or “Forgive me,” or “If there’s anything I can do,” but simply “Ma’m.” And Momma said nobody who got one ever opened it right off, but clutched it and bent it and worked it through their fingers and never neglected to say, “Thank you.” Kissing the axe, Daddy called it.
    Daddy said Wallace Amory jr. didn’t go to war but went only as far as Georgia where he got attached to the personal staff of a colonel at Fort Benning. He was charged with the responsibility of being handsome and diverting at formal functions, and Daddy said Mr. Pettigrew built himself a reputation as a man with a rarified knowledge of the intricacies of the German mind. But after the war was over and everybody had either come home for good or not come home at all, Mr. Pettigrew told Daddy that everything he knew about Germany he had gotten from a man he’d once shared a table with in a restaurant, including the only two sentences he could utter in the language: “The weather is pleasant though cool” and “Bismarck was a remarkable fellow.”
    Momma said he came home to Neely about once every six weeks, and he and Myra Angelique (Sister, he called her) would stroll arm in arm down the boulevard, Wallace Amory in his snappy dress uniform and Miss Pettigrew done up in a simple frock and hair ribbons so as to seem, Momma said, almost inadvertently lovely. They would chat with people on the sidewalk and stop into the shops and businesses, and Momma said Mr. Pettigrew would talk in the most lighthearted and careless way about “our little European engagement,” or “our little continental flare-up,” or just “our little skirmish.” And he