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

they arrived at what is known as Southend, where people who can’t afford to live anywhere else live. Southenders are generally not exceptionally trashy, just poor. According to Daddy they are fairly proud, reasonably well-scrubbed people, and when Miss Pettigrew showed up in their part of town, everybody who knew what a Miss Pettigrew was (which was almost everybody) took her visit to be proof that Southend had finally arrived. Housewives mostly eased themselves out onto their front porches and then down to the street, where they collected in spirited little bands along the sidewalk and studied Miss Pettigrew’s progress, which was fairly steady and unswerving and took her dead towards Southend’s only park, a small plot of land that dwindles to a point where the boulevard and the Burlington highway run up on each other from more or less the same direction.
    There isn’t much in the way of recreation in the Southend park since the center of the property is occupied by a concrete slab that supports the Neely water tower. Daddy has always said that the Neely tower is a gem of its breed since it is not of the usual variety with legs and a basin atop but is instead a steel cylinder which rises about one hundred and fifty feet into the air and, according to Daddy, can be seen by motorists a good mile or mile and a half outside of town. The outer shell fairly much bristles with rivets, and at regular five-year intervals the city council comes to terms with the most daring paint crew it can run up on and the exterior gets silvered over afresh. Nobody remembers precisely how but somehow two faithful reproductions of the Lucky Strike emblem found their way onto the upper quarter of what are more or less the east and west faces. It is the general consensus that the American Tobacco Company, which lies midway between Neely and Danville, paid for the privilege of permanent advertisement by funding the construction of the tower, and only old Mr. Nettles ever objected to the theory: before he passed on he swore up and down that the likeness of a jar of brilliantine had once been located partway up the Burlington side. But then Mr. Nettles didn’t ever recollect his dead wife’s name the same way twice, so it was probably the case that the Lucky Strike emblems had always been where they were and would still be there when the steel finally gave way and the water ran out on the ground.
    Mr. Raymond Small told Sheriff Burton he was weighing a woman’s apples by the fruit bin out front of his grocery when he noticed Miss Pettigrew in the park across the street. He said he didn’t know her right off, since it would have been twenty-seven years in August that he had last seen her, but the monkey gave her away. He reported how he asked the woman beside him, “Isn’t that Miss Pettigrew there?” and he said she recognized the monkey too. Then all the women in the market came outside and Mr. Small said there were about a half dozen of them altogether and they watched Miss Pettigrew and Mr. Britches go in among the shrubbery at the base of the water tower.
    The Ladies Garden Society of Neely had seen to the planting of several rosebushes around the concrete slab and had supplied a few sections of splitrail fence for them to cling to, but they had never flourished and taken hold like the ones along the borders of the sewage plant, which were said to have produced some truly incredible blossoms, so Miss Pettigrew had to poke around for awhile before she came up with any rose worth having. Mr. Small said she finally decided on two, a red one and a white one, and she broke them off from the vines and put them into her purse. Then she pulled a bread sack out from her jacket pocket, he said, and dropped her purse into that before leading Mr. Britches around to the access ladder and sending him up it ahead of her.
    Mr. Small said he was astounded by her agility, and as far as he was concerned that monkey had nothing on her, though Mr. Small was