Mrs Hollingsworth's Men - Padgett Powell Read online

  On her lawn outside were some boys cheering the 0.J. Simpson verdict, skateboards aloft like swords.

  She wrote herself a note, as one does sometimes on a shopping list, a kind of rider reminder to the main reminder that is the list itself:

  Dear Love,

  How have you come to be a black-hearted woman with your come-and-go eyes? You is a storm of bad ideas. You will never be allowed to speak on National Public Radio.

  You enjoyed Flaubert when you were a girl, that is true. How have you become Celine? I love you anyway

  Love,

  Self

  Prevaricating & Procrastinating,

  Shuckin & Jivin

  ——Man don’t know what state he in!

  ——Say his map bad.

  ——Worses map I ever hoid of.

  ——In trouble you don’t know what state you in.

  ——I saw boy one time, cuhn put this six-pack beer in paper sack. I say, Boy, you fumble widda piece a pussy like you fumblin widdat sack, you in trouble!

  ——What he say?

  ——He ain say shit. Turn red as a baby, a crab moreso. Bout to cry right in that sto.

  ——You talks funny, Erasmus. Say “widdat” and “sto,” and I bet you say “ho,” what hell else you gone say, but even you is not gerng say “Ise gwyne down to duh ribber,” or maybe, if the lady here will cooperate, you is. She ain know what she doin. She done put you and all us on her grocery list.

  ——I believe, Satch, that the departures in my diction from the true path are justified given the trail of travail our tongue has trippingly took to be at dis point. They is, as I know you know, and it bruise me to point this out to you, procrastinating and prevaricating on the one hand, which would be the white hand, since I am being so crystal clear this morning, and shuckin and jivin on the other hand, and we all know out here on the courthouse lawn whose hand that is. Speaking of which, I feel a bad breeze blowing somewhere, do you?

  ——I smell a horse. I am askeert of a horse.

  ——Something like ammonia blow through here.

  ——What state he in!

  ——I been loss, but never like dat!

  ——Amenhotep to that.

  ——Who?

  ——Jesus, another name for Jesus.

  ——Is?

  ——Might as well be. Jesus hard.

  ——That he is. That he is for sho.

  The Land

  Forrest could never talk this way, so Mrs. Hollingsworth made him:

  Dark now only when the station wagon headlights do not illuminate it, rolling over its swell and slough, crushing what is left of its game, the urban-adapting coon, the strange-no-matter-where-you-put-him possum. The snakes are flattened to dust and blown away into herpetological archives. The alligator and the deer have received protection. All the rest have been allowed to perish.

  The trees are under cultivation, bristling like large weeds, rent this way and that and spindly, after a not thorough job of weeding by a hasty, mad hand getting out of the garden before sunstroke sets in.

  That is the land, the wilderness. The pristine tracts of the new wilderness are the fresh expanses of asphalt around the malls. A new petroleum air of virgin potential resides there, but only until the Volvos and the skateboards pull in. The Volvos discharge baby strollers and easy-listening FM, the skateboards the funk of boys, all taming the new wilderness.

  Queers and Cigars

  Forrest might talk like this, so she let him:

  Hard on the Negro? Jesus is hard on the Negro, buddyro. Negro hard on himself too, Still, I will tell you something. Given Davis and Bragg over me, playing keep-away with the ordnance and men, and Bobby Lee wrapping his battle orders around cigars and giving them to the enemy, if the Negro were in charge today we’d stand a sight better chance of winning this fight. The Negro has not cost me one empty saddle at the end of a fight. Them what talk for a living has. The Negro does not talk for a living. Not yet.

  Carp

  The golden-floored room fills with golden carp. The oak is as hard and clean as marble slabs for fish in a proper poissonerie. The carp do not resist flooding into a rented room in Holly Springs Mississippi. The river has not been kind to them for some time. They relax. On the cot a man and a woman relax. The carp say, “Psst!" and the woman props up on her elbow and beholds them. “Why, y’all are just a bunch of lonely boys,” she says, affecting some kind of drawl that pleases the carp. The carp affect drawls themselves, among fishes, and they wonder how the woman knows to play with them like this, if she does know how and is not just goofing. The carp do not have time to speculate or to question the woman about this. Their time on the floor is limited, a fact they sense without knowing the limit.

  “The floor is filled with fish, babe," the woman says to the man, who reclines on his back with his arm across his eyes.

  “What kind`?"

  “Redhorse suckers."

  “Hmm. Had me two bluegills at wunst on my onliest hook, saw a yellertail, din’t see no carp.” The man is doing put-on talk too. The carp are delighted with these people, their hosts. The carp flow out of the room by the drain of the window, leaving the floor cleaner than it was before their tour. When they are back in the river, the river is kinder to them. All day they say, Wunst we went to a room, and the river says, Sure you did, boys.

  Bream Bedding

  ——I smell fish. You smell fish?

  ——Smell like ... no.

  ——Like bream beddin! That a smell now, people say you cain smell no fish under water but you sure as—

  ——We know that, Erasmus. Save it for the tourists.

  ——Ain no tourist.

  ——We know that too. What we do not know is why not. The Negro woman can hold a fond court among her handicrafts upon the roadside, or wrap her head and sell pancakes or God

  knows what else, baskets, you name it, and be blinded by flash-bulbs. But I have yet to see a council of elders such as ourselves holding court on the courthouse lawn all the live-long day, as we do, with so much as one person interested in us at all.

  ——Cept if he don’t know what state he in.

  ——Exception duly noted. Short of that, the white man has no use for us. Why is this?

  ——Is we got any use for us?

  ——Erasmus, that is entirely beside the point, existentially speaking.

  ——Well scuse the doowop out of me. I smell fish, an I tell you something: they come out that winder up there bout a half-hour ago, a funk parade to beat the band.

  ——You saw them—what, fish po out that window?

  —— Shet up wid yo po. No, Satohmo, they disnt not po out, I disnt not eben see em, I done smelt em, as I told you in a straightforward reportorial manner innocent of shuck, jive, prevaricate, and procrastinate. If you were not so concerned with the want of a gaggle of tourists who you somehow fantasize could be interested in us and the anachronistic reminder of the pox on their land that we represent, you would perhaps be in a position to listen to someone. When, ah mean, he speak to you. Bout something impotent.

  ——Fish.

  ——Right on. Come out dat winder up yonder. Girl up in deah too, lookin good.

  ——With Mr. Whatstate?

  ——Yessiree. You tell me, existentially speaking, how a man don’t know what state he in get a woman like that in his bed—you tell me that, existentially speaking, you be tellin me something.

  Differently Different

  You could get cigars and even guys at the grocery store, though not by fiat, Mrs. Hollingsworth reflected, but you could not get carp, or bluegill, or bream. She was getting stranger in her shopping wants. She was getting further from what was available. The meal she was assembling was going to satisfy only a hungrier, larger fool than the kind of fool she had originally thought she might invite to dinner.

  This getting stranger did not bother her. It had been coming on for some time. She had felt restless, of course, in specific and vague ways, all her
life, as have, she figured, all people paying sufficient attention to their lives to admit that their lives are utter mysteries. But lately there had been an agreeable yawning in her heart, a surmising of new hollow She was trying to draw a breath of something with nothing visible or prudent in it, just other air. When she breathed this air, or tried to, or pretended to, or merely hoped to, she fancied that she was trying to breathe an air that no one near her cared or knew anything about. Her daughters, for example: they had makeup, men, ambition or not, they were fatigued or not, with the world or with her or not. Her husband was . . . well, himself. Men did not entertain the vapors, or if they did, which she allowed might happen, they went off the edge entire and wound up in institutions of either a gentle or a cruel kind. But there was a safe zone for women to lose their minds and remain among the zombies who had not, and to not be recognized as having lost their minds. The zombies, after all, were pretty slow to appreciate someone other than themselves, and they had been schooled not to denigrate the different. They were attending just now, in fact, a large adult-education academy, studying a curriculum that insisted there was no such thing as difference at all. The harbinger for this had been, she supposed, handicapped-person legislation. It had come from somewhere, and it had received a great activating boost of philosophically underpinning energy from the American academy, which had invented political correctness, a new language, to shore up the shaky proposition that there were no differences among people. Mrs. Hollingsworth discovered this when she went to the local university to take a night course in Coleridge and found instead, in the scheduled room at the scheduled time, a course entitled “Theorizing Diaspora, Adjudicating Hybridity."

  On the blackboard, on a paper handout, and on individual CRT screens in front of each seat in the room was a statement:

  The primary requirements are a strong commitment to visually expressing support for all students within our community. By displaying the provided sign or button, a Friend can send a message of acceptance or encouragement.

  We encourage proposals on the rhetorical intersections of gender with race, class, age, sexuality, and ability; interpreting the academy, disciplinarity, and professional identities from a feminist perspective; reclaiming the lost or marginalized voices of women (e.g., rhetors, writers, teachers, artists, workers); analyzing the rhetoric of historical depictions of women; the rhetoric of the feminist movement and the feminist backlash; males and mens studies and scholarship in relation to feminism; extrapolations of theory from the everyday (e.g., etiquette manuals, cookbooks, diaries)

  Mrs. Hollingsworth was dazed by this, but snapped to at “cookbooks”: was she perhaps, she wondered, already extrapolating theory from a grocery list? Maybe she had finally written her paper for the course, if she could induce the professor to include grocery lists in the catalogue of extrapolatable genres. That odd phrase rolled in her brain a moment until she became aware that there was a man in sandals and socks speaking very softly and very self-assuredly at the head of the long table that they—she and some much younger students—were sitting at. He was saying, " .. the interactions of discourse and ideology—that is, how the work of the poet operates within a variety of prevalent romantic cultural discourses—e.g., romantic, amatory religious, hedonist, colonialist—in order to collaborate with, challenge, oppose, or, in rare cases, subvert them." Here, at “subvert,” the professor raised his eyebrows several times until everyone at the table chuckled, which it seemed to Mrs. Hollingsworth was the actual requirement so far of the course. She had failed to chuckle. At the same moment that she perceived everyone in the room to be staring at her very politely, she noticed in her hand a button of the pin—on political variety that said on it FRIEND.

  Into the silence that apparently awaited something from her, Mrs. Hollingsworth said, “Are we going to read ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”P”

  “You mean theorize diaspora, adjudicate hybridity?” the professor asked, with more of the eyebrow hydraulics.

  She could not respond, so the professor, whose role seemed to be that of helping out the obtuse, went on: “We will focus on the ways in which diasporan subjectivity complicates and problematizes the relationship between theory and identity, on the one hand, and representation and collectivity, on the other.”

  This remark had the effect of liberating the other students from staring politely at her. When they resumed their fond gaze at the professor, Mrs. Hollingsworth left the room. In her one hand was the FRIEND button, in her other hand her purse. She had a headache and was breathing hard.

  Now she understood a few things: that the American academy, which one might have thought the place to defend freedom of speech, had been the seat and soul of abrogating freedom of speech, if the first assault on its freedom can be said to be restricting, or handcuffing, speech. The day she heard “redneck” on NPR, she turned NPR off, not because broadcasters were still using the term, but because she knew one day they would not be. In fact, she had a vision of the quiet moment backstage at a Boston studio when a good, surprised correspondent was let go for saying “redneck” the last time it would be said.

  Her getting stranger had something to do with this truly getting stranger the nation was about. She wanted to be somewhere else, so she was making her list.

  Forrest and Bobby Lee

  ——Bobby Lee, let me ast you, friend, what you boys upair in the high cotton wrapping up cigars in you battle orders and droppin em behind enemy lines for? I find fightin hard enough without that.

  ——That? That warnt but a thang.

  ——Warn’t but a thang? Put some boy bones in the ground, din't it?

  ——Yeah. Yeah it did.

  ——Well then it warn’t just no thang, Bobby E. Lee. I got outright queers on my back down here and it cost me boy bones all day long and it ain’t just a thang. We ain’t got no cigars down here. And it ain’t just a thang down here.

  ——You do go on, Genel.

  ——Do I, Genel? Where boy bones is concerned, I don’t hold with the luxury of cigars.

  ——I take your point, Genel. I take your point.

  ——You keep on takin it, Genel.

  Mrs. Hollingsworth wondered if this item were not too obscure for even a hungry fool to understand. That is probably because it is real, she thought. Few people could credit that the War might have been over had not battle orders from Lee been found wrapped around cigars and given to McClellan in time to avert Lee’s annihilation of him in the Valley campaign. That was harder to believe, she thought, than that, say, a media mogul might try to produce a species of media baby and fight the War again. She was having these vague visions of television technology and Forrest and a new soldier, a New Southerner. All of this, she thought, more probable than battle orders wrapping up cigars in enemy territory, a sad and ineluctable fact of history. She liked the day that allowed you to say “ineluctable,” and also “eponymous."

  Funeral

  The man who could see Forrest and who would see a yellowtail in a lake and who had known love when he was Lonnie and saw Sally, and who had not known it later, wont to the funerals, one hard upon another, of his mother and his lather. Both of them were held in desertlike heat.

  At the funeral of his father, to which he was late he had to have them open the coffin at the cemetery so he could see him. He had never seen a dead man before. He said to his father, “Hey, bud,” a thing his father had said to him, which he had never himself said. He held his hand. He kissed him on the cold meat of his forehead. No one at the cemetery saw this. In the heat they were now concentrating on trying to leave. Deer flies and sportcoats and good cars and some women who had liked his handsome father were by the cars, ready to leave. He could have joined his father in the expensive box that was designed to turn his father into slime and for which he felt most sorry for his father, and they would not have seen this either,

  At the funeral of his mother, he was not late, and he did not have to have the coffin opened because it had not y
et been closed. He said, "Hey, Mom." He did not touch her. If he did, he cannot remember, but he can remember thinking he was probably not going to want to, and he does not remember any change of emotion when he saw her, so his memory that he did not touch her is probably correct.

  Inside the funeral home at his father’s affair, where he discovered his father already removed to the cemetery, was a vulgar employee whom he should have assaulted but did not. The man said, "Y’all come back tomorrow, y’heah?" and got away with it.

  He walked out into the heat then, and saw Forrest for the first time. Forrest slapped at a prickly pear cactus with the flat of his saber, and the man might have thought of his father’s mother slapping his father with the flat of her carving knife, but he did not. It was too hot to think. He then saw Sally at the grave and did not remember her. She introduced herself, and he said, “Oh, yes. Of course.”

  Gizmo

  The woman with taut vanilla flesh sits on the black chair and regards the courthouse lawn. I don’t see them, she says.

  ——Who?

  ——The redhorse suckers.

  ——Why should you?

  ——They went out this window.

  ——Oh.

  She watches the square. Something odd catches her eye in the shadows. She looks at the black men, who see her. She looks back to the odd thing, under a store awning.

  ——There are two men watching this window.

  ——The sages?

  ——No. These are criminals of some sort. White. Looking at us with a gizmo.

  ——What kind of gizmo?

  ——High-tech gizmo.

  ——I am not worried about no high-tech gizmo.