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

obliged to add that Mr. Britches was slightly handicapped by his sneakers which were giving him fits. He said she climbed steadily, nudging the monkey on ahead of her when she caught up with him, and the two of them didn’t stop until they were along about as high as the Lucky Strike emblems, not so far up as the words “Lucky Strike,” he said, but pretty much on a line with “It’s toasted.” And even then she didn’t take a breath, he said, but set in tying the neck of the breadsack to a ladder rung. And she never looked down, as far as Mr. Small could recollect, and he said she never jumped at all, just let go and fell over backwards. He said the ladies screamed and hid their faces but he just watched the hem of her skirt flap in the wind and never even blinked when she splintered a section of splitrail fence and landed in the scraggly heart of a rose bush. Mr. Small said the most miraculous part of the whole business was that her hat never came off, never even got batted askew.
    Me and Momma didn’t know a thing about it, didn’t hear the sirens trailing off Southend way, didn’t get a word by phone or otherwise, just didn’t know anything at all until Daddy came home to tell us, and you’d have thought he would come sailing down the sidewalk screaming blood and murder, but it wasn’t like that, not in the least. He simply appeared, not on the walkway or the front porch, but inside the house, right there in the sitting room where I was lolling in his chair with my legs over the armrest. I never heard him coming and I don’t know how long he’d been standing beside me when I saw him, but I must have yelped like death. Anyway, Momma said that’s what brought her out of the kitchen, and she took one look at Daddy and said, “Louis?”
    He didn’t have any color to speak of or much of any expression on his face, and without ever seeming to move at all he dropped his suitcoat, his satchel, his lunchbag, and his afternoon paper in a pile on the floor.
    “Louis, are you alright?” Momma asked him. But Daddy just looked over her head to the far wall or maybe on into the kitchen and Momma reached out and touched his forearm with the tipends of her fingers.

Momma

     
     
     
     
     
     
    DADDY SAID it was better than the madhouse. He recalled how he’d been to a madhouse once to see his mother’s brother, Uncle Warren Lanier, and he said anything at all was better than the madhouse. Daddy was twenty-five then and Uncle Warren was already an old man who had failed to marry, who had failed to settle into an occupation, and whose own mother held him directly accountable for Great-granddaddy Lanier’s untimely death at the age of fifty-seven. She said he had been galled into an early grave. However, Daddy said Great-granddaddy Lanier had died of angina complicated by regular and ungentlemanly drafts of the local mash; acute disappointment had nothing to do with it. According to Daddy that was Great-grandmomma Lanier’s affliction. She was ravenous for grandbabies, he said, and she was convinced that Uncle Warren’s bachelorhood was at the least inexcusably inconsiderate and otherwise very possibly unlawful. Daddy supposed Great-grandmomma Lanier would have taken Uncle Warren into litigation if she’d thought she could get a favorable judgement by it. But since there were no laws on the books specifically against bachelorhood or celibacy, Daddy called it, she vented herself by raging at Uncle Warren when he was at hand and just generally despising him in his absence. Daddy said she talked about him like maybe he’d helped the Romans crucify Christ, like maybe she thought he’d driven a nail or two. Yes, Daddy said, Uncle Warren was the one that was committed.
    Daddy did not hold Great-grandmomma Lanier exclusively responsible for Uncle Warren’s deterioration; he imagined she merely contributed to it and hurried it along some. It seems Uncle Warren had always been a solitary individual who sought out no