Azalea Heights is the county seat of Shelby County which means we have the courthouse right in the middle of our square. It was built in 1885 and looked like an Irish castle, but we weren’t all that impressed. People didn’t talk a lot about this or stand around it pointing and taking pictures. It was pretty commonplace to us. Folks went there to get their marriage licenses and birth certificates, and if you ran afowl of the law and the Sheriff got involved, they would put you on trial upstairs in the big courtroom. Old men who were hard of hearing would sit around outside on benches and smoke, chew, spit, and pitch washers. You half expected Atticus Finch to come walking out at quitting time and find Scout and Jem waiting for him outside in their overalls.
But Ruth Ann Patterson knew a lot of things about the courthouse that most people, even grown people, didn’t know — probably because her mother worked at the county clerk’s office which was a smaller building right there in the shadow of the courthouse. I think when Dixie Ruth would go there after school to wait for her mother to get off work, she’d be sent off to entertain herself in the same way that my parents dropped me off at the Rio two or three nights a week, even if the same picture show was showing all three nights.
This was handy for them but not as easy as you might think because I couldn’t understand about two quarters or even a dollar bill or any denomination of money that would cause me to have to wait for change. I don’t remember being stubborn about most things (except not wanting to get my hair brushed), but about this I was absolutely adamant. If they were going to get me to go to the show and give them two or three nights off, they had to give me the following: three nickels in one hand to give to Dotty, the ticket lady, and five nickels in the other hand for popcorn, a coke, and a pickle. (I could on a good day be persuaded to take two dimes and a nickel in that hand.) I’d be among the wealthy today if I had just let them give me my show money in the form they wanted to, but about this procedure, I was religiously dedicated, and there was room for neither variance nor negotiation.
In all of Ruth Ann’s courthouse meanderings, she had made some discoveries, so one day after school she took me upstairs to the courtroom behind where the judge sits and reached down and pulled open a little door right there in the floor. Underneath that door was a narrow stairway that led down to a door in the hallway that nobody would ever guess was a real door. There is no other explanation as to why it was located right there where it was except for the judge to use to make his escape after he had given his sentencing. I had this motion picture running in my head about the judge pronouncing to somebody that looked like Boo Radley, “That will be seventy-six years in Huntsville with no parole!” and then snatching that door open, jumping down through it, slamming it shut, and boogeying on down those stairs to freedom just as Boo wrangled free from the bailiff and ran at the judge with a bowie knife he had concealed up his pants leg.
Then Ruth Ann took me to the back of the courtroom and opened another door that hid another stairway that went up to the a little room that sat right on top of the courthouse. It was just like something out of Nancy Drew. It turns out that this room was something called the Civil Air Patrol tower. This is one of the features that made our courthouse look like an old-timey castle from outside. This little room had windows on all sides, and somebody told me that people used to sit up there and look for airplanes. I never understood why since we had a perfectly good airport out on the Logansport Highway with runways a bunch better for an airplane to land on than the streets downtown.
Now you need to know that there were three drugstores on our square in Azalea Heights, and every one of them had a soda fountain where you could sit on round stools that spun around, even though every time a kid tried this, their parents hollered at them to quit, so since the spinning feature never got fully taken advantage of, the drugstores might as well have saved their money and bought the still kind. If you wanted a tuna fish sandwich or an ice cream cone, you’d go to Green’s. Once or twice a year the folks over at Azalea Drug had a special promotion where you could throw a dart at a balloon over the fountain area, and you could get a banana split for the price that fell out of the balloon. This was a good deal, and you never wanted to miss these times, not only because you could get a twenty cent banana split for a nickel or a penny, but also because it was the only time you were ever allowed to throw sharp objects in an Azalea Heights business establishment.
But if you wanted the best hambuger in Shelby County, everybody knew you’d go to the Avery T. Roberts’ Rexall Drugstore. There you would find Billie cooking up burgers that so good that Judy Rutger’s daddy said once it would make you slap your momma. All the kids from the elementary school would race in there at lunchtime and start hollering their orders to Billie as soon as they’d hit the door. Billie was as good at remembering as she was at cooking hamburgers, and pretty soon she got to where she could keep up with what all the regulars liked all the way from third through eighth grade. When I’d come in, she’d shout, “Hey, Little Crocker (Julie was “Big Crocker” even though she was only four- and-a- half feet tall) you want your regular?” This meant mustard everything, which is what I always wanted. Somehow she would manage to get all those orders right, each one charged to the right daddy, and have us out of there and back to school in forty-five minutes. Billie knew how to make you feel like a queen — always remembering just how it was you liked your hamburger, even though you were only ten years old. The funny thing was that even though she was the only one doing any work, and lots of it — bustling around throwing meat on the grill, cheese on the meat at just the right time, slapping on mustard, then piling lettuce and onions on with one hand and pickles with the other, while all the rest of us were just sitting there doing nothing — somehow, maybe because she always looked the same in her white uniform with her hair always the same length and the same style year after year, she managed to make herself seem kinda invisible. I don’t think we ever saw her as a real person with a specific gender who blew her nose and swallowed and wore a nightgown and had people at home that she loved and talked to about things that didn’t involve ground meat or even cooking. Maybe she had a kid or a husband, and brushed her teeth and yawned and stretched when she first woke up, but you’d have thought her whole life consisted of the person she was when she tied on her apron every morning at the Rexall drugstore.
One day in November, Ruth Ann and I made a plan to get Billie to fix our hamburgers to go. We kept quiet about this because we were on an adventure that was not going to be able to accommodate more than two, and we were pretty sure it wasn’t even legal for that many. We got our lunches and snuck across the street to the courthouse where we were careful to run from one bush to another so her mother wouldn’t spot us from the county clerk’s office. We made our way up the stairs to the civil air patrol tower and were just getting our hamburgers unwrapped when we heard heavy footsteps coming up the stairs. There is not much you can do in a situation like this but just brace yourself and your friend for trouble because you are definitely trapped with only one door in the floor with a sliding bolt lock located on the other side.
Well, the person that was coming up those stairs and who pushed open that trap door and forced his way in with me and Ruth Ann was none other than the dreaded Jesse Pugh, Mrs. Gravitts’ most mature male pupil, who was about twenty and had no business being in fifth grade. What we did next was as smooth as butter. Both of us grabbed our lunches, jumped down through that hole in the floor, pulled the door behind us, and slid that bolt into the locked position. All that took about nine seconds. We could hear Jesse hollering and banging on the floor all the way down those stairs, and we never could figure out why nobody else heard him and let him out, but they didn’t. Now if he had been some deranged chainsaw-lugging, blowtorch-wielding somebody, we would have probably been heroes, but since he was just a fifth grader, albeit an over aged fifth grader, we figured we better not go to any authorities and try to collect a bounty on Jesse’s hide.
Mrs. Gravitts didn’t seem to think much about the fact the Jesse didn’t come back after lunch since just coming to school half a day was a red-letter day for him, and neither did his brother Arnie. The way these boys acted made you wonder what their parents were thinking or if maybe they didn’t even have any parents at all and slept in the cotton gin at night with the drunks.
I don’t know what would have happened to Jesse if we had kept quiet. Maybe he would have starved to death, and someone would have finally smelled him up there when he got all rotten, or maybe he would have gotten desperate and busted out a window and tried to grab hold of a sycamore branch to climb down but instead have fallen to his death like Kim Novak in Vertigo. But we never found out, because we got scared of one of these things happening and wrote Arnie a note saying he had better go up to the courthouse after school and rescue his brother.
We kept expecting Jesse to come after us and knock us off our bikes and steal them or slit the tires on our parents’ cars, but when he finally showed up back at school again, shoot- he acted like nothing ever even happened. This just goes to show you that what we knew about being hoodlums was small potatoes compared to what Jesse knew; or maybe it was just that he got to thinking about it and decided spending the afternoon locked up and smothering in a 3x5 box was better than breathing all the free air he wanted in Mrs. Gravitts’ room.
Sometimes I’d get to wondering what Jesus was doing. I thought about how every week Mr. Pete would tell our Sunday school class about how Jesus saves, but He sure didn’t seem to be doing much to save me or my sister or our mother and daddy or Jesse and Arnie Pugh.
But Ruth Ann Patterson knew a lot of things about the courthouse that most people, even grown people, didn’t know — probably because her mother worked at the county clerk’s office which was a smaller building right there in the shadow of the courthouse. I think when Dixie Ruth would go there after school to wait for her mother to get off work, she’d be sent off to entertain herself in the same way that my parents dropped me off at the Rio two or three nights a week, even if the same picture show was showing all three nights.
This was handy for them but not as easy as you might think because I couldn’t understand about two quarters or even a dollar bill or any denomination of money that would cause me to have to wait for change. I don’t remember being stubborn about most things (except not wanting to get my hair brushed), but about this I was absolutely adamant. If they were going to get me to go to the show and give them two or three nights off, they had to give me the following: three nickels in one hand to give to Dotty, the ticket lady, and five nickels in the other hand for popcorn, a coke, and a pickle. (I could on a good day be persuaded to take two dimes and a nickel in that hand.) I’d be among the wealthy today if I had just let them give me my show money in the form they wanted to, but about this procedure, I was religiously dedicated, and there was room for neither variance nor negotiation.
In all of Ruth Ann’s courthouse meanderings, she had made some discoveries, so one day after school she took me upstairs to the courtroom behind where the judge sits and reached down and pulled open a little door right there in the floor. Underneath that door was a narrow stairway that led down to a door in the hallway that nobody would ever guess was a real door. There is no other explanation as to why it was located right there where it was except for the judge to use to make his escape after he had given his sentencing. I had this motion picture running in my head about the judge pronouncing to somebody that looked like Boo Radley, “That will be seventy-six years in Huntsville with no parole!” and then snatching that door open, jumping down through it, slamming it shut, and boogeying on down those stairs to freedom just as Boo wrangled free from the bailiff and ran at the judge with a bowie knife he had concealed up his pants leg.
Then Ruth Ann took me to the back of the courtroom and opened another door that hid another stairway that went up to the a little room that sat right on top of the courthouse. It was just like something out of Nancy Drew. It turns out that this room was something called the Civil Air Patrol tower. This is one of the features that made our courthouse look like an old-timey castle from outside. This little room had windows on all sides, and somebody told me that people used to sit up there and look for airplanes. I never understood why since we had a perfectly good airport out on the Logansport Highway with runways a bunch better for an airplane to land on than the streets downtown.
Now you need to know that there were three drugstores on our square in Azalea Heights, and every one of them had a soda fountain where you could sit on round stools that spun around, even though every time a kid tried this, their parents hollered at them to quit, so since the spinning feature never got fully taken advantage of, the drugstores might as well have saved their money and bought the still kind. If you wanted a tuna fish sandwich or an ice cream cone, you’d go to Green’s. Once or twice a year the folks over at Azalea Drug had a special promotion where you could throw a dart at a balloon over the fountain area, and you could get a banana split for the price that fell out of the balloon. This was a good deal, and you never wanted to miss these times, not only because you could get a twenty cent banana split for a nickel or a penny, but also because it was the only time you were ever allowed to throw sharp objects in an Azalea Heights business establishment.
But if you wanted the best hambuger in Shelby County, everybody knew you’d go to the Avery T. Roberts’ Rexall Drugstore. There you would find Billie cooking up burgers that so good that Judy Rutger’s daddy said once it would make you slap your momma. All the kids from the elementary school would race in there at lunchtime and start hollering their orders to Billie as soon as they’d hit the door. Billie was as good at remembering as she was at cooking hamburgers, and pretty soon she got to where she could keep up with what all the regulars liked all the way from third through eighth grade. When I’d come in, she’d shout, “Hey, Little Crocker (Julie was “Big Crocker” even though she was only four- and-a- half feet tall) you want your regular?” This meant mustard everything, which is what I always wanted. Somehow she would manage to get all those orders right, each one charged to the right daddy, and have us out of there and back to school in forty-five minutes. Billie knew how to make you feel like a queen — always remembering just how it was you liked your hamburger, even though you were only ten years old. The funny thing was that even though she was the only one doing any work, and lots of it — bustling around throwing meat on the grill, cheese on the meat at just the right time, slapping on mustard, then piling lettuce and onions on with one hand and pickles with the other, while all the rest of us were just sitting there doing nothing — somehow, maybe because she always looked the same in her white uniform with her hair always the same length and the same style year after year, she managed to make herself seem kinda invisible. I don’t think we ever saw her as a real person with a specific gender who blew her nose and swallowed and wore a nightgown and had people at home that she loved and talked to about things that didn’t involve ground meat or even cooking. Maybe she had a kid or a husband, and brushed her teeth and yawned and stretched when she first woke up, but you’d have thought her whole life consisted of the person she was when she tied on her apron every morning at the Rexall drugstore.
One day in November, Ruth Ann and I made a plan to get Billie to fix our hamburgers to go. We kept quiet about this because we were on an adventure that was not going to be able to accommodate more than two, and we were pretty sure it wasn’t even legal for that many. We got our lunches and snuck across the street to the courthouse where we were careful to run from one bush to another so her mother wouldn’t spot us from the county clerk’s office. We made our way up the stairs to the civil air patrol tower and were just getting our hamburgers unwrapped when we heard heavy footsteps coming up the stairs. There is not much you can do in a situation like this but just brace yourself and your friend for trouble because you are definitely trapped with only one door in the floor with a sliding bolt lock located on the other side.
Well, the person that was coming up those stairs and who pushed open that trap door and forced his way in with me and Ruth Ann was none other than the dreaded Jesse Pugh, Mrs. Gravitts’ most mature male pupil, who was about twenty and had no business being in fifth grade. What we did next was as smooth as butter. Both of us grabbed our lunches, jumped down through that hole in the floor, pulled the door behind us, and slid that bolt into the locked position. All that took about nine seconds. We could hear Jesse hollering and banging on the floor all the way down those stairs, and we never could figure out why nobody else heard him and let him out, but they didn’t. Now if he had been some deranged chainsaw-lugging, blowtorch-wielding somebody, we would have probably been heroes, but since he was just a fifth grader, albeit an over aged fifth grader, we figured we better not go to any authorities and try to collect a bounty on Jesse’s hide.
Mrs. Gravitts didn’t seem to think much about the fact the Jesse didn’t come back after lunch since just coming to school half a day was a red-letter day for him, and neither did his brother Arnie. The way these boys acted made you wonder what their parents were thinking or if maybe they didn’t even have any parents at all and slept in the cotton gin at night with the drunks.
I don’t know what would have happened to Jesse if we had kept quiet. Maybe he would have starved to death, and someone would have finally smelled him up there when he got all rotten, or maybe he would have gotten desperate and busted out a window and tried to grab hold of a sycamore branch to climb down but instead have fallen to his death like Kim Novak in Vertigo. But we never found out, because we got scared of one of these things happening and wrote Arnie a note saying he had better go up to the courthouse after school and rescue his brother.
We kept expecting Jesse to come after us and knock us off our bikes and steal them or slit the tires on our parents’ cars, but when he finally showed up back at school again, shoot- he acted like nothing ever even happened. This just goes to show you that what we knew about being hoodlums was small potatoes compared to what Jesse knew; or maybe it was just that he got to thinking about it and decided spending the afternoon locked up and smothering in a 3x5 box was better than breathing all the free air he wanted in Mrs. Gravitts’ room.
Sometimes I’d get to wondering what Jesus was doing. I thought about how every week Mr. Pete would tell our Sunday school class about how Jesus saves, but He sure didn’t seem to be doing much to save me or my sister or our mother and daddy or Jesse and Arnie Pugh.
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