Edisto - Padgett Powell Read online

  "Do you think she’s your grandmother?" I said.

  He had his liquor swirling in the jar on the table with some sand under it making a grinding noise.

  "I hope so," he said, grinning.

  “You hope so?"

  "Sure,” he said. "What about you?"

  What about me? I thought.

  "Yeah, me too," I said, not at all sure what I meant, but the answer was faster than motive, and it was honest, only I didn't know what I meant. We looked out the window we had cut in the wall of common sense. We did not see any sharks tearing electric mullet from the Atlantic, only ghosts of waves making large noise. He was going to leave. He would drive back up the hard road through those odd inland pockets of salt-smelling air, and the Hddlers would come out and wave their ivory swords and then duck quickly back into their mysterious holes.

  A Farewell to a Shack

  The next morning I found the ground moon-pocked by the night’s hard rain. Fiddlers were punchy, running dizzy. I got the mullet poles and took them to Theenie’s shack, even though I knew he’d be gone. I took them to fend off the future. From the beach I could see the green shutters were up and tight. The rain had made the air very cool and the sand squeak. Only my face felt greasy in this new world.

  He was gone. A note said, Louisiana. Took your advice. Present under bed. I found an old wooden stereo-viewer with a mahogany viewing hood and square glass lenses and a little wire rack on a sliding bridge for the cards, which you move like a trombone to focus. There was one card and I put it in. It was almost a headache while I slid the thing back and forth, then it was two separate pictures, each the same, of chickens in the air, and then suddenly they fell together and the scene was forty feet deep and the chickens were glorious multicolored cocks with brass spurs. These wild spectators were watching them, their eyes all the colors of the cocks’ feathers. I took the card out and looked at it. It was separate and simple again. It was something.

  I put the viewer in a box of Theenie’s things, what I guessed were her dearest things—a tobacco-colored Jesus on a felt base, and some funny little scarf things she folded up and left all over the place, and Reader's Digests with religious bookmarks in them. I had packed all that up right after she left.

  They were things would help her move in at Hilton Head. Not that she’d need much in the way of seed to take roots, because wherever we wound up in Hilton Head would be strictly uptown for her. She liked progress. A shack like hers was quaint only to people like me. To her it was acceptable for its time, and then it was something forever in the past, just like the W.P.A. was a neat time only for people who never saw the Depression.

  She gave me a lecture on brooms and vacuum cleaners once. She had a house full of hardwood floors to do, to sweep, and she would not use a broom, which was efficient over a vacuum designed for carpet.

  "I swep enough," she’d say. “All my life."

  "But Theenie, it’s faster with a broo—"

  "What choo know? I’m the one does it."

  So she’d plug up this Kirby made of chrome and this most wonderfully supple, flesh-like rubber—must have cost about a thousand dollars, and we didn’t buy it. It showed up the day she came.

  "Simons, you Simons?" she said, the first words she ever said to me. "If you was a good boy to your Theenie, you go up the road to the bush by the gate and get my valcum."

  It spaced me out. "Do what?" To my theeny?

  "Here.” She handed me a piece of cloth. "There’s a piece of this on the bush. Hurry up."

  That was our introduction. I was already six years old. But she takes credit for raising me, all the same. And I found the Kirby stashed in the bushes by the hard road.

  But back to the lecture. She'd plug up the Cadillac dirt sucker and I’d say, "Where’d you get that thing, anyway?"

  "I got it."

  "How?"

  "I got it, ain’t I?" A mock shriek.

  "Yeah, but how?”

  "You never mind.”

  "It’s a secret."

  "A secret?"

  "A secret"

  "What kind of secret?"

  "A milintary secret," she’d scream. "Now git on, I got work to do.”

  And she’d run that thing for two hours, when you could have swept the house in ten minutes.

  Well, it was like that, or would be, in Hilton Head. And she’d love it, as long as she got a fair shake on her room, if it wasn’t smaller or too much bigger than anyone else’s. She might have even forgotten the precious things I had in the box. Well, I toted it anyway, took it to the Cabana to be the first thing to go in that van.

  Edisto Was Over

  That van never came. We split. Left it all in place, like a museum. They were either serious about coming back for vacations, or they were real unsure about it working out, because not one drop of liquor left with us, or book, or toaster, curtain, camera, anything. Just some clothes. I found myself standing on the porch by the wringer waiting for the Doctor, hand on the tub rim as I’d seen Taurus that first night he came to the house. I listened to it, too, a big conch shell of enameled sounds. The old rubber rollers were yellow and hard and wrinkled like skin. I tried to push the washer into the kitchen but it got stuck. I couldn’t pull it out or push it through, and I could hear the Doctor rustling and knew she’d get mad, so one big shoulder-to and the rig squeezed in finally, lurching away on its caster wheels into the cabinets.

  The Doctor gave it a queer look as she came through, and me one too, so I went over and settled the thing in a corner, patted it a little, like I was in control, and we locked up and left.

  My mother and I rumbled by Jake’s in the Cadillac in the hot middle of the morning—the lot a damp gray plot of crushed cans and shells and the Baby Grand a crummy dive-looking joint you’d never go in if you didn’t know.

  We wound up the road from shack to shack, blasts of close sound coming from the woods in between, then whining open spaces where we passed the bare yards. The salt smells of the ocean thinning and falling off, too. We got into some big oaks finally and then I started seeing pruned trees. Yards with grass in them. Heavy post fences. Private drives. A Mercedes. Negro on a mowing machine cut a swath about eight feet wide. Hilton Head.

  As soon as we got there, I was handed over to Daddy like a baton in a relay. The next day he hurried me up to the eminent Cooper Boyd Academy for registration, which means they make sure your name can be found on certain genealogical pathways and you have the money.

  I aced a little test they gave me and there was talk of my skipping a grade or two. "What academy is this young man transferring from?" the head dude asks Daddy. He says: "Put him in the grade befits his age." That had an effect. No more gab.

  Daddy took me outside and said he’d be back, was going into town on "new business." I caught that odd modifier and noticed he was new. His suit was without wrinkles. Even his skin looked smoother. My idea of him all along was one of these modern store mannequins with stark wood-cut faces always too darkly stained and expressing some dire problem despite the perfect poise with which they model a new suit—he had been like that during the custody junkets. But now he looked more refined and natty, a genuine relaxed Brooks Brother.

  They took me to classes. One was a Latin class. I never had that before. Was very interesting. There was a photograph of Edith Hamilton herself on the wall, inscribed to the teacher, a heavy woman carrying on like some folk were cruising for a caning if they didn’t shape up.

  I said okay, I’ll take that class, like I had a choice, and they took me to geometry, where I knew what acute and obtuse were but not their corresponding meanings in that room, so I said that was fine too, sign me up. I had the picture. I was an anomaly in a regular soup of high-water khaki duck-asses, white-soled Top-Sidered gentry bound for college and careers suitable to family name, which is a hint odd if you remember ten days ago I was an anomaly in a backwater of blacks with the same family names, bound nowhere, but bound.

  Daddy retrieved me and we
whistled on back to the architect-conceived, Arab-financed, model railroader’s plot of paradise. I have this speechless nervous reaction when we pop out of the untended sticks of the scrub into suddenly pruned oaks, yellow flesh wounds where limbs were sawn, their moss all shorn. And miles become kilometers, shacks condominia, marsh marina, and I feel like one of those bullet-shaped birds in Audubon’s drawer.

  Doctor, Duchess, Soldier, Mother

  When I say she’s a good soldier I mean having a mother who’s ordinarily regarded as a Duchess or a Doctor by everyone you know, but who’s all right.

  The day I took the bulldog by the ears was the first day I heard her called Duchess. I have found at the Grand that you can manage to hear Negroes say stuff under their breath in ways that sound like these whispery devil noises in exorcist movies. She was getting the bootlegged liquor for the party I had jeopardized by dropping the real liquor that time, and she was getting such a load that the early Grand drinkers came up to watch. She turned from Jake to, I think, Preston ( I hadn’t met anyone then) and told him to load it, which he did, even though he didn’t work there. Manigault will pay you for this Monday,” she told Jake, and walked out. As far as I know, it was the only instance of credit at the Grand in history. And I would guess the liquor was over $200. Well, all around this scene you could hear on the edges of talk this whispered rodent-like sound, the Duchess. Jake looked surprised by her abrupt credit maneuver but not upset. I waited until she had cleared the front door and ran after her. But I don’t think that’s when she was named Duchess. I put that earlier. It’s another time I now know more about than when it happened. All I knew then was that Theenie was staying at the house at night late sometimes, and the Doctor and Progenitor would come in later. Now I know that only one of them would come in later. The other stayed gone. I also knew then that they were driving cars like Cale Yarborough on the last lap, you could hear them burning the hard road sometimes, and crushing palmettos on the way in. That, I now know, was just her. He’ll do that ratchet noise with the transmission, and the six-inch skid, and that’s all, while she’ll paint a Darlington stripe from here to Savannah. Anyway, all this business was during the salad days of the breakup, I figure, and they were in a sleeping-out duel, and generally furious.

  One thing that helps date all this is my teeth. I was having trouble collecting from the tooth fairy, and said something about it, and one morning a twenty-dollar bill showed up under my pillow. Probably the Progenitor was on home duty, came in, released Theenie, got in bed, remembered his parental fairy duties, couldn’t find any change (couldn’t find any teeth either, as far as I recall. They were in a jar because I had lost hope in the irregular fairy), and puts twenty dollars under my pillow. I believed all over again. And there was no effort made to recover the excessive grant, which you would rightly expect if they had been having regular home-style man-wife times, instead of the bust-up contest. Anyway, one day during this time, I got off the bus at the hard road and just as I turned into our road one of the trees we have painted white to mark the curve moved. And smoked a cigarette. It was the Doctor, in white.

  She had about twenty cigarettes crushed all around her, and was looking down the road. "I’ll be in in a little while" is all she said. When I got home the phone was off the hook. I hung it up. And she came back in. Even today I don’t know what all that meant.

  But I do think that’s when she became the Duchess. Some dude rounding the curve in a low deuce-and-a-quarter, thinking about nothing except getting up to the Grand, saw just what I did—a tree smoke a cigarette. Whoever it was figured out it was the white lady who bought the only beach house in this part of the world (which makes it a rich man’s house), and somebody else said, "What she doin’ out there?" "Yeah.” "Standing out there." And somebody like Jinx would say, "Man, like a, like a duchess or something." And everybody would agree, like a duchess or something, no one the least bit curious to know what was like a duchess in it, and the name would fix. So that’s the day. If it wasn’t, it was merely another day, another eccentricity. "She drive that car like she a duchess or something.” And she did.

  Well, you can live with a Duchess easy, it’s the Doctor part can get you. But she can be a good soldier right along. This good-soldier stuff shows up all kinds of ways once you’re ready to see it. Like the formal sign-off in Howard Johnson’s that day, when she said it was all Jack London and baseball from here on in. But do you know what? About three weeks into my Cooper Boyd Latin tour, she casually asked to see the Commentaries, which the class was doing, Gallia est omnis divisa, etc.

  I gave it to her and she tossed through it for about half a drink and then put it back with my other schoolbooks in their neat stack. And the very next day, in that same stack, under those Commentaries, was Horace on the bees! Leather-bound, dusty, and I know it’s fifth-year Latin stuff. Well, I don’t say anything, and she doesn’t either, because she’s bound by the code of the good soldier to keep her word about Rogering out and turning me over to the Dodgers.

  Also, she stole it. How soldier can you get? Nothing new there, she’s done that before, from this old library at her college that has been replaced by a modern one of glass and elevators and photomagnetic krypton turnstiles. There are all these old books that she says will be sold for a quarter in a basement sale one day that she takes as she needs—now, not wholesale, but at need, like Indians and buffalo, which is strictly soldier. Anybody on the outside wouldn’t notice good soldiering in this, he would just see a stage mother in overdrive shoplifting, etc. For that matter, no one would see that she did me a favor going to the Grand for a trunkload of unstamped liquor when she could have called Vergil and had the authentic stuff delivered. She made the contact for us (for me) at the Grand with that planter’s wife act. That’s what got me in there later, with no questions, by myself. That’s what—her soldiering all along—got Taurus for me. All through the liquor and leftovers and coroners and mendacity is this other string—pulling shadowy maneuvering of things, mostly for me. So don’t get down on your mother if she’s drunk a lot, demanding, promiscuous, imperious, or anything. Because you might be wrong, you might not see the good soldier marching all along down in the trenches, for you. And you might be an igno, after all.

  One time I remember she raised up out of the dark trench and squeezed off a round right in the open. It was at the party where Margaret Pinckney told the joke, and Bill called Taurus a thesis, and Margaret said some people had regular hopes still, and the Doctor told Jim to shut up. Well, I left the next part out because of the assignment. But I’m in a clear censor mode now so I’ll add it on. After Margaret said the girls still had regular hopes, I saw the Doctor do the most amazing thing.

  She kissed Margaret Pinckney full on the lips, like a man, lipstick and everything. Well, Margaret started crying and hugging her like they were long-lost relatives, one of whom had been missing in action and given up for dead, which was not amazing, not for Margaret, still holding her tumbler of bourbon plumb over the Doctor’s shoulder and calling for Kleenex with her free hand. Bill of course turns beet-red and runs for the bathroom and comes back recomposed but trailing unbroken toilet paper because he forgot to break it off. ‘“That’ll do fine right there, Bill," the Doctor says, and there’s a laugh all around, and the women separate, and immediately the regular party hum-drum cranks up again—a gentle, assuring din that says everything’s fine. Except the Doctor has a hard, clear pair of eyes deliberately looking nowhere, which she does to conceal purpose. That’s what got me, that look. And that smooching was a doozie. That, as they’d say in the Grand, was most definitely jam up.

  And I know this, too—soldiering once got her a purple heart. Because once upon a time she was a regular polite heroine in the small-town world of young virgins, as described by the most famous playwright. She went to a small college and was engaged to a handsome dude with papers and everything was set. Here the playwright always turns the screws with something like the girl catching her dude in another
man’s arms. Well, our soldier doesn’t catch the fiancé in bed with a man, he just comes out and announces it, and the wedding is off, of course, and the rest of the play proceeds. She doesn’t blame herself for the next two acts because the gent shoots himself, or screw an entire army base, but she does set-to on the nearest law school. She doesn’t get crazier, she gets saner, with a vengeance. Lawyers, she figures, can’t be that duplicitous, at least not with their bound commitment to uphold the law and all these unnatural-act statutes staring them in the face, so it’s a much safer bet, getting one of these guys. The other guy was a poet, whose job, by comparison, was to challenge laws like that, anyway. So she wised up. That’s why I’m half Republican and in Cooper Boyd instead of altogether socialist and taking dancing or piano lessons. It’s like an outcross in dogs or horses. If she’d got that first dude, it would have been severe ideological inbreeding, and I might be shy or vicious or something. This way, the way Vergil tells it anyway (he breeds bird dogs), I can be a "good athlete,” which means not baseball but just a solid individual partaking of two separate strengths and not two compounded weaknesses, I hope.

  I realize now I sort of trusted her as the commander all along, the man in charge, like at Parris Island, where they say that even though what they do to you and ask you to do looks bad, if not insane, you won’t get hurt if you do what they tell you. If you trust the man in charge. And on top of that, you’ll thank them for making you let sand fleas burrow a quarter inch into your hide and for breaking your nose if you scratch at one. So I sort of knew or trusted, in this way at least, the principle of the man in charge, and she was him, and I believe it did not hurt, and I’ll do that thanking in the end.