A Short History of a Small Place Read Online Free PDF

the Epperson sisters in over three years, and Momma said it wasn’t them, and Daddy said no it wasn’t them exactly. He said three and a half years was a long time. Momma said it was a very long time.
    I was only midway through my eleventh year when Sheriff Browner killed himself. Momma said the shock of it was in not knowing it was going to happen, was in not even suspecting that it might. But Daddy said we should have known, we should have suspected. Sheriff Browner had always been different. We would have called him peculiar except that he was sheriff and we couldn’t put our faith in a man who suffered from peculiarities, so we said he was different and left it at that. Momma said he was a painfully shy man, but Daddy just called it pensive, and when we found out he was dead Momma said something must have snapped, but Daddy said no that wasn’t it exactly. He said when the sheriff went to the well he drank too deep, and Daddy said the world became so burdensome for him that he eventually went down under the weight of it.
    I don’t recall that Sheriff Browner ever shot a man. I don’t remember ever hearing of him firing his revolver except one Fourth of July when it was raining and the town councilmen couldn’t get the fireworks lit. I don’t think he ever clubbed anyone with his nightstick; I don’t think he ever used it except to crack walnuts. And I’m sure he never hit anybody with his fists, though I imagine he spent half his life wanting to. Mostly Sheriff Browner whittled, carved on hunks of oak and beech-wood, spat occasionally, and pondered, I suppose. There’s never been much crime in Neely. Sometimes men get drunk and beat up their wives or try to beat up their friends. Sometimes people get their t.v. stolen or their grandmama’s silver or a little money they were too lazy or ignorant to put in the bank. And every now and again a vagrant will break into the laundromat to keep warm, but from week to week that’s about all we ever get. Then there’s the less frequent sensational cases that rate a quarter column on the inside of the Greensboro Daily News. Sheriff Browner had two of those right near the end and Momma said they were the straws that broke the camel’s back. Daddy said yes, he imagined that was pretty much the truth of it.
    We had not had a murder in Neely in well over four years when the widow Mrs. Doris Lancaster was beaten to death with a chairleg on a Tuesday evening. She lived outside of town on the 48 highway in a house her husband had drawn up and built himself during their courtship. It was stuck back off the road in a maple grove and was separated from the nearest neighbor by a sprawling kudzu thicket that had once been a regular wood but was since reduced to mostly vines and rotting treetrunks. Nobody missed her for nearly a week until Mrs. Spencer came from the other side of the thicket and failed to get anybody to the door. She called Sheriff Browner who jimmied his way in and found Mrs. Lancaster in a heap on the livingroom throw rug.
    When they heard in Greensboro that something grisly had happened in Neely, the Daily News dispatched a correspondent, who caught up with Sheriff Browner in his office and asked for a few details of the murder. The sheriff told him it wasn’t a murder; it was a slaughter.
    And the correspondent made a few notes and said, “Yes sir.”
    And Sheriff Browner asked the correspondent if he knew what he meant.
    And the correspondent said, “Yes sir, it was a savage murder.”
    And Sheriff Browner told him it was no murder at all; it was a slaughter and slaughter is what happens to a cow when the man puts its head on a block and breaks it open with a sledgehammer.
    And the correspondent thought that was extremely clever and said, “Can I use that?”
    Sheriff Burton was deputy then and he’s the one that told everybody how, as near as they could reconstruct it, the victim had been surprised by the assailant in her bedroom, had struggled with him