Mrs Hollingsworth's Men - Padgett Powell Read online

  * * *

  This was the best grocery list Mrs. Hollingsworth had ever conceived. There were things on it that obviously suggested you need not go to the store only to be disappointed over not getting them. She sat at her table marveling at the fun of such a grocery list. She was going to make a few of these. Yessireebob, she said to herself, slapping at a fly. This was a bit more like it. She studied for a moment her linoleum floor, which had a nice old agate speckle to it and made a sound like something breaking when you walked on it.

  Bluegill

  Mrs. Hollingsworth had read or heard some things about Nathan Bedford Forrest. She had to have. It was the name of the high school. Had she read of him as well? The idea had formed in her mind that he had been indomitable; he had been the War’s Achilles. Achilles with pinworms and slaves besmirching his heroic profile. Had she heard even that the South could ' have won had he been given broader command? He seemed listable.

  She put him on:

  A man who has seen Forrest catches two bluegills at one time on his hook, on his cane pole, noticing as he does, inexplicably, an exotic fish—parrotfish? yellowtail?—in the water. The fish is as odd as his vision of the Civil War figure: a strange waking dream of a man on a horse larger and louder than Hollywood, whom he somehow knew to be representing Nathan Bedford Forrest. In the same spirit of unblinking improbability he saw what looked like a pompano in the dark lake, now the two bluegills. He enters the dockhouse to show the improbable catch to his wife. In the dim shack he sees a leg in tight polyester shorts hanging awkwardly off a cot, and as the party wakes up he realizes the leg is not his wife’s. “Excuse me, sir—ma’am,” he says to a fogged woman who looks like his father’s sister a bit, but more bleached. He intends to explain everything, including how and why a man up to something, as it appears a man this close to a strange woman sleeping must be, would not loom over her like this with two fish on a pole. Only an honest bumbler would do that. Why this woman is where his wife should be, and in a drunken stupor, he cannot begin to decide. He says to her, holding forth the two fish as she begins to focus on him for an explanation of his intrusion, “The escapees of the hattism of dived-in-ness." By "hattism of dived-in-ness" he seems to mean regularity of conformity.

  The man was named Lonnie Sipple before he forgot who he was because of his broken heart.

  Forrest

  ——Do you see our leader with his hair on fire riding like——

  ——No.

  ——the wind?

  ——I didn’t even see that he was on a horse.

  ——You’d better get with it, then. If your leader rides by with his hair on fire slapping at you with the flat of his saber so as to inspire you or goad you or outright scare you to heroics beyond yourself, and taking up falterers by the collar and throwing them to constitute roadblocks before other falterers, and otherwise threatening them with sufficient otherworldly gesture that they become convinced simple mortality is less dreadful than what he promises them if they run, and so they decide to turn and fight, and thank him later, whether they are dead or alive—if you do not see this going on about you, you are in trouble.

  ——I did not see "my leader." I am not aware that I am being led. Or that I follow

  ——Then you are in deep, deep trouble, my friend. I should take this can of Ronson here—who bought this? for what? very pretty can—and set your hair on fire.

  —— Maybe you should.

  ——This can reminds me of a bad high school football uniform, the loud blue-and-yellow combo. Hard to win in that rig.

  ——Red-and-black beats that every time.

  ——There’s Forrest again!

  ——Where?

  ——Right there!

  ——I can’t see him.

  ——It is true, then. Some people see him, and some do not.

  ——I’d just as soon not.

  ——Frankly, I do not know that you are wrong. Because I do not know what to do with myself when I have seen him ride through a town square, horse and hair aflame, salt and leather and sweat and steel penetrating the trailing air, and a malaise of sadness and loss consuming all witness to him, leaving us diffident and afraid and idle in his wake.

  —— Maybe you should shoot him.

  ——The bullet would tink off him like a piece of errant solder. It would lie molten and deformed, splashed in the dirt. One side of it would shine and the other would be dulled by annealed dirt. It would be a symbol. Of something.

  ——Indeed. But what?

  ——I would not know. I failed Symbol.

  ——I failed Meta-everything.

  ——High five to that! But still, I can see Forrest, and you cannot.

  ——You have not failed Forrest.

  ——No, I have not. I will not fail Forrest. Forrest was made so that a man, even a confused one, a little afraid, or a lot, might not fail him, and thereby might not fail himself.

  ——He sounds like Jesus, sort of. But I failed Jesus too.

  Let’s not get into that. This is enough: a man whose head and horse are on fire storms through town squares under my minute inspection. He is either there, invisible to the townsfolk his passing would otherwise knock down or blow down, or only there in my perhaps specially tuned vision. To me it does not matter how he exists, or why. I see him, he leads, I follow. Sometimes that means I go into the closest café on the square and have coffee. But I do what I can do. Even the terms of society are clear in a café after Forrest passes. The waitress in white or light green is tired but polite. The drunk is at the counter. The regulars are at their table, sclerotic and suspendered, gouty and flushed and content. And I am I, on my Mars, dithered even by the choices on a country breakfast menu, so all I have is coffee. But I have seen Forrest. I am not doing badly.

  Room

  The man who has seen Forrest takes a room over the café. How long he will want the room he does not know. It is white. The floor is oak, with a gymnasium certainty to it, clean and hard. He wants nothing on it. He has one chair, by the window. There is a radio. It is black and on, but silent. A red stereo-indicator light shows, and a comforting green luminescent tuning band. The man is unsure whether he has found this appliance (improbable) or brought it (improbable). The tuning band shows the same comforting green light that originally issued from radium in such an application. He considers, not seriously, throwing the radio out the window.

  Out the window, on the courthouse lawn, wearing blazing white shirts and loose herringbone trousers held up by handsome suspenders, are three or four or five or six or seven black men who appear to be ancient. Realistically—a word or notion that rolls saltily and oddly in the man’s head, like an olive—they are probably seventy years old, but the impression they give is that they were alive when the great minié-ball debate over their fate took place. Like the radio, they too are on and silent and improbably placed. What they are discussing the man has no idea, in their immaculate clothes, consummately sober and peaceful and wise-looking, immutable agreeable whiskate.

  The man turns and looks at his four plain walls and regards them as an invitation to rest.

  Down on the courthouse lawn, he makes four plain mistakes.

  ——Gentlemen (#1), what town is this? I mean (#2), I’ve been driving and enjoying the scenery (#3), and my map is torn right where I think this is, I can't read where I am, I think.

  ——Where your map?

  ——In my car.

  ——Where your car?

  The man waves vaguely behind himself (#4). He looks up at the window of his new room. He sees himself smiling and smirking at his intelligence-gathering mission among the seated sages.

  ——Holly Spring.

  ——Holly Spring what?

  ——Holly Spring what what?

  ——Which Holly Spring?

  ——This Holly Spring.

  ——Which state Holly Spring?

  ——State?

  ——He say his map bad.

  �
�—His map real bad.

  ——Missippi.

  ——Mississippi?

  ——Missippi.

  The man waves to himself in his window, not concealing his waving to no one from the dark sages, which is not mistake #5. It says to them, Lost? Maybe loster than you think, gentlemen.

  He claims his room for his rest.

  The bed is as loose in its springs as a hammock. The sheet is a coarse, clean muslin that is very agreeable, as is his near engulfment into the slung posture of the mattress. He hears a noise, probably under the floor, probably a rat.

  What he would like it to be is a woman. He thinks: tunneling her way to me. Let her emerge from this clean, hard floor, splintering it with her desire for me, and let me bathe her and place her on a pallet on the floor and behold her. Let us eat. Let us have each other in a fresh way in a fresh start and keep it fresh, keep it starting. To have a woman in perpetual start!

  Woman

  Emerging from the floor, she is gauzy, dark, as if seen through frosted glass, full red lips prominent. At this moment, before the ruination can begin, the man is happy. He has been a Gila monster and is now a puppy The woman has strong hands and does not fidget with them. This, the man says, let us keep it to this. His lips are numb.

  ——Wait until you get a load of Forrest.

  The woman posts herself on the chair by the window, and p the man watches her watch for Forrest. Her red lips are blued with the pressure of her determination.

  ——Were you Lonnie?

  ——Were you Sally?

  ——Shh.

  Mother of Father; Flat of Knife

  Fist, skull, stomp, gouge, ride! Forrest says, when you are the fustest with the mostest until you are the leastest with the lastest. (Mrs. Hollingsworth thought Forrest actually said some of this.) He is through the gentlemen of ebony tribal regalness and elegant white shirts in an unseen unfelt blast of oilcloth and horse lather and unsmelt tang of silver spur, the flat of his saber in abeyance.

  The man who can see him recalls that the mother of his father would slap his father with the flat of her carving knife. She was a great proud carver, which women seldom are, of ham and tongue, and she did not like pickers picking at her work. Her knife was red-handled and pitted, a blackened steel that showed a shiny edge. She slapped the hands of children regularly with it. She could tell a child a lie.

  Forrest is a ghostly trail of dust and sweat and malice, a struck chord of straining tack and sheathed weapon and purpose. His lips are set in a line not unlike the new woman’s, but they do not show the blue of the pressure of determination, as hers do. Forrest’s lips are easy, deliberate without deliberation, exactly like a horse’s lips. He is an animal, all right, the man says. Did you see him?

  ——I saw him. I thought him wizened. I read that he declined.

  ——Declined what?

  ——No, declined. Fell off some. Withered. At the end.

  ——If he declined, Lord let him not incline.

  ——No.

  First Breast Not of One’s Mother

  When his grandmother, who could tell a child a lie, with pleasure, pursing her lips after it in a satisfied way, as if savoring a chocolate, died, Lonnie Sipple cried. The look on his grandmother’s face when she told him a lie was the same as the look on her face when she played poker.

  When he met Sally Palmer and with his lips lifted her breast by a gentle pursing of the flesh just below her nipple, and felt the orangelike weight of her breast, it was the last clear moment of sanity and purpose on earth he would know. It was possibly the first such moment, but he cannot remember anything before the moment, and cannot precisely recall the moment it self, and all since has been a sloppiness in his head and his heart.

  He did not die of a pitchfork tine to the heart. That was romantic palaver of the burning-mule stripe, and far too easy. He did in fact once find a tine, isolated and alone, in a field, but it did not touch his heart. It had about it a roughened, pitted quality not unlike his grandmothers carving knife. All steel, he thinks, was more or less alike in those days.

  Ride, Slide

  “Most times Forrest rides,” Mrs. Hollingsworth began her list one day, thinking of the way the teenagers in the neighborhood talk and slink around, or slump around. Most time Mist Forrest ride but sometime he slide.

  Sometime he take off his butternut duster look like Peterman catalogue, and his Victoria Secret garter belt and all, and grease hisself up naked as a jaybird and say, Okay, I fight all you, black white blue gray I don’t care. Y’all come on. And people being dumb as shit, they come on, and they get they ass whup.

  He so good he go to a wrassling tournament in Turkey once, during a time when he spose be recovering from a ball to the hip, which is how you say he got shot in them days. Never heard that about no Vietnam: my buddy he took dis ball to the hip, but he rode on! Shit. Em all saying, Found my buddy wid his balls in his mouf! Everybody drunk and all, going to the VA get pills. But back in Forrest time, it was ball to the hip, like soccer, and you went on, and went back later and kilt mo Yankee. One time I say to this honky on his bicycle, Clean up America, kill a redneck today! and it kind of surprise him. I guess since I look white and all. I’own know why he surprise, actually. Near everything surprise the white boy, that why he so white. He surprise all the time.

  But Forrest he go to Turkey one time on hip-ball furlough and get in a wrassling tournament to hep speed his recovery and he line up and grap holt em boys all grease up and naked and he a natural. He just as good as thern what done this all they life, and then they seeit gerng be more to it than that. He git worked up and start slobbering on they ass. He slobber so much he win; they think he sick or got rabies or something. They start call him Deve, mean camel, he slobber so much like a camel slobber when it wrestle a camel. Deve win entire damn show. The Camel is very good, they say, Deve cok iyi Then Forrest take his trophy and have a beer with them and come home and don’t win the rest of the war cause Prez Davis homo for Genel Bragg, who don’t like Forrest and won’t give him no guns and shit. Which it is maybe good for us on skateboards and in these humongoid pants and all today, because Forrest they say hard on the nigga, so he ain’t gone cut no wigga no slack either, and we be in it too if he’d a won, but I don’t know if he so hard on the black man as all that, cause one time a man say to Forrest, Hey Genel, how come you so hard on the Negro`?

  I ain’t hard on the Negro, Genel Forrest say. Jesus hard on the Negro, buddyro.

  * * *

  Mrs. Hollingsworth was pretty pleased with that, and she knew that no raphead dufus rebel on a skateboard could come up with it (and she wondered how she knew of Braxton Bragg’s vendetta for Forrest), or sound like that if he did. It was her grocery list. She was no longer shopping for the mundane.

  She sat her days at her kitchen table with a pot of something cooking slowly on the stove, a small blue flame and a small gurgle in the room with her. Anyone who saw her making this prodigious, preposterous list saw nothing awry. Her indistinct husband remained indistinct. She was beginning to enjoy a new kind of freedom, one that she hadn't suspected existed. She was shopping in heaven, and hell.

  Eternity, Epiphany

  Sally and Lonnie, after this weighing of her left orange by Lonnie’s lips, locked up their eyebeams, intertwixt and gratifying, for about a tenth of a second, which is all people can stand when there is the real intertwixtment and which seems like, or more like, about a eternity, which is the time required, or about the time allotted, for a epiphany.

  They would neither of them again enjoy the intertwixtment, the crackle of iris to iris, the hope of pupil pooling pupil. Fried marbles and deep holes of loneliness suddenly alive, and answered prayers they had not known they were praying—not again. They would fancy it again, of course; they would have to, or they would die of despair. But it would never happen, the true spoiling of the film of their hearts, again.

  Blues

  The woman sits at the window, her vanilla flesh
smart on the black-lacquered straight chair. Her breast catches an odd orange light glaring from the sill of the window. She sees Forrest blow through the square, his duster like a robe behind him, the jangle of tack and weapon like a badly reproduced music of some sort, or heard from far away Like, she thinks, country blues played over a plywood floor, amplified in weird imbalance balancing well with the congruently weird acoustics of the cheap tired joint the music is played in, heard from outside in the swamp near the roadhouse. A thumping is prominent, not unsexual, and a tinny kind of sweet but wounded melody plays over it, from strings that are stretched by callused fingers that picked cotton in ancestoryear—

  ——Do you always think elaborate hoohah like that? the man says.

  ——You can read my mind?

  ——I might as well. It’l1 save blather, don’t you think?

  ——Don’t look me in the eye like that. Look at my body. It is what I give you.

  ——I can accept that. Give it to me, then.

  ——Because if I was Sally, I am not now.

  ——Shh.

  ——We are skeletons with meat on them.

  ——You have godly meat.

  ——Thank you.

  ——Your godly meated skeleton can think Forrest a music heard in a swamp, though. A music that will not quit, or a thinking of it that can’t quit, even when the skeleton and the meat have quit.

  ——Do you always think hoohah like that?

  ——Only under force of circumstances.

  ——Such as?

  ——These. Don’t look me in the eye either.

  Love, Self

  If Mrs. Hollingsworth were to go to the store with this list, she was aware, it would not feed anyone in whatever combination she assembled the ingredients on it. There was not a satisfying meal to be made of it. There was in some rarefied sense a meal to the second or third power, perhaps what you could call a meal prime, which would satisfy only a hungry fool. That, she decided, was who, other than herself, she was shopping for. There was a hungry fool in the world with whom she had some’ thing in common, and maybe for whom she had something.