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

once in the summer of 1970 when she gave a July 4th luncheon out of the clear blue and distributed little colonial flags as favors. Otherwise she confined herself to her bedroom and her parlor while Aunt Willa cleaned for her and cooked for her and tended to her monkey for her and generally allowed Miss Myra Angelique to become an old woman in the privacy of her family home. It was no wonder then, Daddy said, that Neely was electrified by the appearance of Miss Pettigrew in her frontyard after nearly a decade of just a monkey on a flagpole and a sullen negro woman in the shadows under the porch awning. And ranting no less, and wearing a fitted bedsheet up on her shoulders for a cape. And though Momma assured us that it was probably good linen, maybe even Irish, Daddy said it was still madness and that was all that mattered.
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    Miss Pettigrew first jigged on her lawn in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon and Daddy said folks lingered and dallied along the fence well on into twilight and were out early Wednesday morning so that they might happen by the Pettigrew house before midday came when they would commit themselves to casing it in earnest. But the doors stayed closed up and the yard remained vacant throughout the day, even to the top of the flagpole, and on Thursday only the most tenacious and otherwise unoccupied citizens of Neely haunted the Pettigrew end of the boulevard until they eventually went home unrewarded.
    Then Friday came and nobody expected anything at all from Miss Pettigrew in the way of entertainment, so just the few folks with genuine business in the area saw her strike out from the house and turn south on the walkway in the direction of downtown. She was in the company of Mr. Britches, who, aside from his usual blazer and porkpie hat, was wearing black sneakers for the occasion; Miss Pettigrew kept him in check on a jewel-studded dog lead. Momma said Miss Myra Angelique was rather stylishly dressed for a woman who had hardly seen sunlight in almost a decade. She was wearing a navy skirt and matching jacket along with a white ruffly blouse and some sort of neckerchief that Momma said was certainly silk. Miss Pettigrew’s gloves buttoned at the wrist and were as startlingly white as her clutch purse, which was extremely elegant and sheathed in pearls. Momma had her reservations only as to Miss Pettigrew’s choice of hats. The one she had decided on set up on her head like a jarlid and was not quite as purely white as her gloves or her purse. It had put forth feathers in the back and was hung in front with a partial veil that stopped just short of Miss Myra Angelique’s eyebrows. Momma considered this sort of headwear a bit severe for a weekday afternoon. Otherwise, though, she said Miss Pettigrew was at the height of fashion and taste; Daddy said she had just managed to leave the bedsheets on the bed.
    Daddy called it outright gawking. He said the mere sight of Miss Pettigrew on the street blasted folks into a kind of instant idiocy and faces fell slack and people went silent wherever she passed. Mr. Britches didn’t get the least little attention, not even when he climbed up atop a parking meter and relieved himself onto the curbing out front of the Guilford Dairy Bar. Daddy said you’d have thought the gutters of Neely were intended to run with monkey urine. Nobody greeted Miss Pettigrew, he said, and nobody was greeted by her, though she looked pleasant enough and did not seem to be in any sort of hurry. And the only people who showed any noticeable signs of consciousness in the presence of her and her monkey were two salesmen in the doorway of the Ford dealership. One of them howled and pounded the jamb with his fist while the other just leered at him; he was dressed for all the world exactly like Mr. Britches except for the sneakers.
    Miss Pettigrew and her monkey walked all the way from the Pettigrew house at municipal square, through town, past the cotton mill, and didn’t stop until