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

Author:T. R. Pearson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.

ii

Mr. Russell Newberry told me and Daddy he believed it was a Louisiana tag, but he’d hardly closed his mouth good when Mr. L.T. Chamblee and Mr. Raford Britt’s eldest boy, Coley, said it was not any such thing. Mr. Chamblee recollected the outline of a palmetto tree behind the numbers and so insisted it was a South Carolina plate, while Coley Britt, who could not recall any specific vegetation, said he’d been reading ever since he was nine and guessed he ought to know the words West Virginia when he saw them. Along about then Mr. Covington came out through one of the service bay doors wiping his hands on a rag, and before he could even tell me and Daddy how do you do, Mr. Newberry and Mr. Chamblee and Coley Britt were all over him wanting to know was it Louisiana or was it South Carolina and especially was it West Virginia since Coley Britt had fairly much put his education on the line. But Mr. Covington just looked at the three of them as he finished wiping his hands and then stuck the rag partway into his back pocket and said, “Whut?”

“Where was it they come from?” Mr. Chamblee asked him.

“Who?” Mr. Covington said.

“That man and his wife,” Coley Britt told him. “Just where was it they come from?”

“Up that way,” Mr. Covington said and flung his arm in a direction the road didn’t go exactly.

“What sort of plates did they have, Bill?” Mr. Newberry wanted to know.

“Jump got his gas for him,” Mr. Covington said. “I didn’t ever see the plates.”

So while Mr. L.T. Chamblee set in to bellowing for Jump to come out from wherever it was he’d gotten off to, Coley Britt told Mr. Newberry, “West Virginia’s up that way.”

And Mr. Newberry told him back, “So’s Alaska.”

“Well they couldn’t have driven down from Alaska in a Pontiac,” Coley Britt said.

And Mr. Chamblee broke off his bellowing right in the middle of it and told Coley Britt, “Hadn’t no Pontiac been in here all day. It was a Chevrolet as big as life.”

“For God sakes, L.T.,” Coley shot back at him, “that thing was a Bonneville pure and plain.”

“Tell him Russell,” Mr. Chamblee said, “tell him what it was.”

But Mr. Newberry said he didn’t know one car from another and all he could recollect for certain, aside from the license plate, was the color, which he remembered as a dull green all over.

And Mr. Chamblee conceded that it did look a little green to him at first also. “But it turned out to be blue,” he said, “turned out to be a blue Caprice Classic.”

Then Daddy asked Coley Britt if, in his estimation, a man could drive a blue Chevrolet Caprice Classic down from Alaska, and Coley looked at Daddy out from the side of his face like maybe he was sizing him up for a tire-iron necktie. “How about from Michigan?” Daddy said, and Coley spat twice on the asphalt and appeared to

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