A Short History of a Small Place Read Online Free PDF Page A

of him. He picked up a pencil from the blotter and began to check off the names, which resulted in the document being momentarily voided when it was discovered that Daddy had signed it twice. But the sheriff, a sensible man, just scratched out one of Daddy’s signatures and put his own in place of it. The jubilation was general and immediate. Eustace, Cora, and Annie accepted our congratulations with extreme modesty and thankfulness, and a courthouse clerk along with Mr. Singletary from the five and dime helped Eustace up onto a chair from which she delivered a brief speech directed mostly towards Sheriff Browner without whose assistance, she said, none of this would have been possible. That unleashed a fearsome ovation in the sheriff’s honor and he moved away from his desk, still refusing to look entirely at anybody, and made his way out of the room without ever offering to say a word.
    Three days later, in the fat part of the morning, two men in a state-licensed station wagon followed the sheriff to the Epperson house. I suppose we knew they would come of that somebody like them would come since we all knew that the state would not allow two sisters and a cousin to parade around as triplets. Sheriff Browner assured us they were kind men, gentle and competent men. He promised they would treat the Eppersons with respect and dignity, and we were satisfied. Me and Momma watched them bring Eustace and Cora and Annie out from the house and load them and their luggage into the car, and it struck Momma as an odd thing to see. She said everybody was a little too happy, a little too quick to laugh, everybody but Sheriff Browner who just looked all around himself at the treetops and the sidewalk and the hubcaps on the state-licensed station wagon. His coloring was funny, Momma said, and he was slightly more hunch-shouldered than usual. She thought he might be ill and I thought he looked it myself, but then we’d never seen shame on Sheriff Browner before so there was no call for us to recognize it.
    The Epperson sisters were taken to the Dix Hill mental facility in Raleigh where they were tested for traces of sanity. We heard nothing from or about them for nearly a month until a very brief article appeared on the Statenews page of the Neely Chronicle. A committee of two doctors and a clinical psychologist had concluded that the Epperson sisters were “disoriented as to reality.” It seems they were a little more afflicted than we had imagined since the doctors judged them disoriented enough to have all three of them committed and their belongings auctioned off and their house put up for sale when a statewide search produced no heir. But nobody would buy the Epperson house. The realtor couldn’t even get anybody to look at it, and it was boarded up and sat empty for a year and a half. Then the roof collapsed in November, and people said it was a good thing the Epperson sisters had become triplets; otherwise they probably would have been crushed and mangled. In December the fire department burnt the remains in a training exercise and put on a less than encouraging show of firefighting; they managed to save the concrete footings.
    It got to Sheriff Browner, at least that’s what people would say when they would talk about him after he was gone, and they would hardly ever talk about him, but when they did, they would say it was the Epperson sisters that started it. Momma didn’t think so, and Daddy said no, it wasn’t them exactly. It was more than them, he said. I was seven years old when the Epperson sisters decided they were triplets. I was nine and a half when we got word of their transfer, which was the last we heard of them and which came to us in the form of a banner headline across the front of the Chronicle:

TRIPLETS FIND HOME AT BUTNER
    Momma wrote them letters and sent them cards but left off the practice when they began to return to her unopened. So by the time I was eleven we had not heard much worth hearing from