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

her out and had failed at it. They both agreed the whole episode was sad and unnecessary since the mayor did not need Mr. Nance to win his seat in Congress and certainly could not have lost it without him. And although Momma would not admit it, Daddy said Miss Pettigrew herself became somewhat tainted on account of the circumstances, not that she had engaged in anything unseemly but because her brother had supposed that she might. So when the Pettigrews became what Momma called retiring, Neely let loose of them and watched them fade almost completely from sight. The mayor took to walking only in the dusk of the day and rarely was Miss Myra Angelique at his elbow anymore. Momma said she had become the victim of sick headaches which were so severe as to send her to her bed for days at a time. The mayor hired Aunt Willa Bristow to see to his sister and she would sit at Miss Pettigrew’s bedside and do nothing but steep Miss Myra Angelique’s lace handkerchiefs in a bowl of vinegar and apply them to her forehead. Charge of Mr. Britches also fell to Aunt Willa, and Daddy said anymore when folks stopped at the fence to watch him scuttle up his flagpole and squat on the knob at the top of it, they got just the monkey, or maybe just the monkey and the amusement of seeing Aunt Willa fetch it in by yanking stiffly on the tether and saying, “Come on h’yer you ape” until Mr. Britches relented since she never would. And Momma said there was nothing sadder than to watch the lights in both wings of the Pettigrew house go out one by one early on in the evening while the rest of Neely was still lively and bright.
    Then the mayor up and went on a cruise, or anyway Daddy said it seemed that he up and went since nobody knew he was leaving until he left or got wind of where he was going until he had already come back. He took a train out of Greensboro for Miami and from there he embarked on a ship called the Island Beauty which was scheduled for a stop at the Yucatan peninsula before heading on to points in the Caribbean. According to the ship’s captain, the mayor had been having a wonderful time of it, and he enclosed in his letter a snapshot of Wallace Amory jr. in the company of an Inca chief which, in a scrawled note on the back, was said to have been taken at a sacred burial ground at a cost to the mayor of one dollar and seventy-five cents. They had tried, the captain said, they had all tried to dislodge the radish from the mayor’s throat—the ship’s doctor had even attempted a tracheotomy with a carving knife—but he had suffocated anyway and the captain was very sorry, very sorry, and would see to the transportation of the body himself as soon as the ship redocked in Miami, which was nine days off when the mayor died and still six days off when Miss Pettigrew got the captain’s letter by way of a company representative.
    In the meantime the mayor was put in the meatlocker for safekeeping and Daddy said the freezer was either too cold or not cold enough and caused Wallace Amory jr. to turn an unspeakable color. So there was no viewing, no family hours at the funeral home, and by Miss Pettigrew’s request, the service was brief and private, so private in fact that she herself did not attend, leaving the preacher to carry on with God as his witness and under the passing scrutiny of a couple of funeral parlor attendants who wandered into the chapel to discover what in the world was going on there. When the mayor was finally laid to rest with his head at his daddy’s feet, Momma said that was in fact the end, but Daddy said that Wallace Amory had been more or less dead for a considerable spell already and this was just the official confirmation.
    So Miss Pettigrew was left alone in the world except for her monkey and her negro woman, and Momma said she closed herself up in her daddy’s house and did not interrupt her solitude but twice—once of a Sunday prior to Christmas of 1962 when she attended the Methodist Church, and