A Short History of a Small Place

Table of Contents

 

 

Praise for T. R. Pearson’s
A Short History of a Small Place

“Neely is a speck on the map in North Carolina, and the narrator is Louis Benfield, a youth not a wry as Holden Caufield, but certainly as observant, and with a bigger, even sadder heart ... a remarkably funny book ... more than an impressive debut; it is an accomplishment.”

—
The New York Times

 

“T. R. Pearson’s charming, undauntable first novel is about human decency: the unrecognized variety that cures insomnia and occasionally insures a ticket to heaven.... There’s an archaic heartfelt element to
A Short Hutory-
disarmingly kind and unabashedly funny—that rings of the essence of the Southern tradition of literature.... But then the people of the town don’t die, they ‘succumb’; they have relations instead of sex; and they ’hold silent counsel’ when a less complicated soul would just sit and think a spell. It is this charming deference to language—to regional homilies and, consequently, to truth—that gives the novel its freedom and compassion: the sense of lying on a hot porch in the afternoon and listening to someone special and very, very wise. There are less levelheaded educations to be had in the world than sitting captive at this father’s Knee.”

 

“Pearson’s is a different and distinctive voice and a most welcome one. In this novel his talent shows sparks of genius.”

—
The Philadelphia Inquirer

 

“T. R. Pearson has a perfectly pitched comic voice that transforms the humblest daily activities into the zaniest and most significant events.”

 

“There are several enchanting characters: Benfield’s mother washes dishes whenever she is upset and gets so depressed in February that her husband has to take her out to dinner at the Holiday Inn. The first loud belly laugh hits on page 18, and funny stuff comes with great regularity after that.”

 

“Like an inspired organist barreling through the point and counterpoint of a baroque fugue, T R. Pearson of North Carolina pulls out the stops on this, his exuberant first novel. Looking for humor? Lordy, does he give you humor, the kind you want to read aloud to somebody. Interested in irony and a deft handling of regional vernacular? He gives you that also in satisfying proportion. ... So do yourself a favor and pack this one into your vacation bag.”

—
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

 

“Begs to be read aloud. It has that oral quality and ballad rhythm that winds and repeats refrains and rolls out like old hymns in a country church with a pump organ background.... It’s fun and funny and you’ll laugh aloud a lot. ... Pearson obviously is one of those writers on whom nothing is ever lost.”

—
The Columbra State
(South Carolina)

“Pull up a chair, pour yourself a tall drink, and take the phone off the hook—T. R. Pearson’s remarkable first novel will take you hostage for a day.... A triumph. Pearson takes the ordinary and makes it extraordinary, and in so doing establishes himself as a major new Southern novelist.”

—
The Rrchmond News Leader
(Virginia)

 

“As a Tarheel myself, I take warm, proud, and chuckling pleasure in welcoming Tom Pearson into the rambunctious mead hall of North Carolina writers. He is a young novelist of capacious gifts—a good ear, a large heart, and a tireless imagination. Like Lee Smith, he’s stepping into the venerable line of the best tall tale tellers of Southern oral history.
A Short History of a Small Place
is both outrageously funny and touching, as it reminds us, yes, you can go home again, and Lord, what a wonderfully peculiar place home is.”

—Michael Malone

 

“T. R. Pearson writes laugh-out-loud comedy with a poet’s touch. He is a master of the rhythms of Southern speech.... May well become one of this century’s superstars of fiction.”—Olive Ann Burns

 

“I adored
A Short History of a Small Place
and I am sure it will have a long history in a lot of places. Rich in character and strong of plot, Tom Pearson’s first novel is a glorious accomplishment. Even better, it’s fun to read.”

—Rita Mae Brown

 

“Tom Pearson has dealt a magnificent literary full house. What a voice! What a view! The whole book is a sort of austere riot. I loved it!”—Barry Hannah

 

“T. R. Pearson’s well-paced novel is a readable, off-hand, informal, unpretentious story of a likeable small town Southern family ingeniously told with keen insight and uncontrived humor. Good reading!”—Erskine Caldwell

 

“A Short History of a Small Place
is a rare reading experience—emotion and humor are stirred on almost every page. As long as T. R. Pearson is writing and I predict he will write and write, the fine art of Southern storytelling cannot die.”—Eugenia Price

 

“A Short History of a Small Place is Tristram Shandy
rediscovered In North Carolina, still chatting like Scheherazade. T. R. Pearson has built a machine of original sounds that is driven by passion and secrets.”

—John Calvin Batchelor

 

“T. R. Pearson spent time toiling as a house painter while working at his craft. On the evidence of his first novel, let me suggest that those who once hired him to paint their walls beseech him to hurry back and sign them.”

—Gordon Lish

PENGUIN BOOKS

A SHORT HISTORY OF A SMALL PLACE

T. R. Pearson’s eight widely acclaimed novels include
Cry Me a River, Blue Ridge, and Polar.
He lives in Virginia.

PENGUIN BOOKS
,Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

 

First published in the United States of America by Linden Press/Simon & Schuster, 1985

Published in Penguin Books 2003

Copyright © T.R. Pearson, 1985

All rights reserved

 

A portion of this book appeared previously in
The Virginia Quarterly Review

PUBLISHER’S NOTE This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED A PREVIOUS EDITION AS FOLLOWS: Pearson, T. R.

A short history of a small place : a novel / by T. R. Pearson.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-12693-6

1. City and town life—North Carolina—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3566.E235S-44264
813’.54—dc20

 

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For
Momma and Daddy
and
Beezy Boo

 

 

 

This edition is dedicated
to the memory of
Chris Cox

 

 

 

 

 

 

DADDY SAID it was a bedsheet, a fitted bedsheet, and he said she was wearing it up on her shoulders like a cape with two of the corners knotted around her neck. She was standing barefoot on an oak stump, he said, standing on the one nearest the front walk where there was ordinarily a clay pot of geraniums, and he said her hair was mostly braided and bunned up in the back but for some few squirrel-colored strands of it that had worked their way loose and hung kind of wild and scraggly down across her forehead and almost to her nose. She was talking, he said. Then he stopped himself and creased the newspaper twice and put it in his lap, and he changed it to ranting, full-fledged bad-planking-in-the-attic ranting. It was something about Creon, he said, something about Creon and the stink of corpses.

Momma came from out of the kitchen and stood there in the doorway of what Daddy called the sitting room where he had his chair, his magazine hamper and his RCA television, and where Momma kept her drop-leaf maple table which none of us had ever eaten from, not even at Christmas, and which was cluttered up with three shoe boxes, Grandma Yount’s crystal punch bowl, an assortment of odd-sized fliers from the A&P and the Big Apple, and a set of decorative scales that had mysteriously struck a balance between the one pan full of rubber grapes and waxed bananas and the other containing a forty-watt light bulb, eight cents in pennies, and three unrelated buttons. Momma crossed her arms over her apron bib and worked the small of her back against the edge of the doorframe. Daddy drew a Tareyton out of the pack in his shirtpocket and looked straight at me and talked straight at Momma and said, “Madness.”

Daddy was afflicted by what Momma called an involvement with tobacco, which seemed to mean that he was always either smoking, had just smoked, or was preparing to smoke a Tareyton. Momma considered smoking to be a grave liability and she tried to purge Daddy of the habit along with the rest of his vices, and even though she was greatly successful in preventing him from saying “goddam” on Sunday, the best she could do with his passion for Tareytons was to negotiate an agreement which prevented Daddy from carrying any means of making fire. So as he lay the filter end of the cigarette on his bottom lip with one hand, he searched between the arm and the cushion of his chair with two fingers of the other and shortly brought out a perfectly good pack of safety matches. Momma just kept scratching her back on the doorframe and didn’t even bother to sour up her face. Sheer and uncompromising necessity had made Daddy a wizard of a sort and she had seen him produce books and boxes of matches from most every seam and niche not just in our house but all over town, and more than once I myself had watched him turn over a rock at Tadlock’s pond and pluck a full, unweathered matchbox out from among the ants and the night-crawlers. As a courtesy to Momma, Daddy blew the smoke mostly across his chin and onto his shirtfront. He dropped the spent match into his cigarette pack.