Edisto - Padgett Powell (16 page)

"No, you did all right." You couldn’t
blame her for hedging the progeny gamble. I only held the shrink trip
at three against her.

“
No hard feelings?"

"Naaah."

"Give me a hug, then." She stood up right
there and I had to follow suit and we hugged. I did like her. She was
what they call a good soldier.

We sat back down and I glared at all the people
looking at us' and she smiled through more blue smoke.

This was heavy news. Taurus was good as gone. That
didn’t really bother me, especially because of the yet confusing
whiskey revelation, but I knew I’d get over that and like him the
same for showing me all he did, in the end. But I hadn’t figured
leaving the neighborhood—accessible mullet and the Baby Grand, the
sporting life, being the Duchess’s boy, and all that. That would be
tough. I just figured I’d be tough, something was finally happening
good or bad for damn sure, and if the good old days were on a
respirator, I’d do them the service of going around and pulling the
plug.

"All set?" she said, collecting her purse
and keys.

We left Savannah and cruised north through the
curiously hot, still quality of late Sunday mornings when your church
clothes need to be taken off.
 

Taking Leave

Monday night I went up to Jake’s expecting to
engineer a big he’s-a-good-fellow send-off, to collect a few
condolences about leaving, etc. Yet I get there and stool up and
order and swing around a couple of times making the joint blur,
making the pool-table green send rocket trails of ball colors into
the players. I don’t feel bad a bit. More like snappy, I somehow
feel.

They don’t want me in there claiming hardship,
carrying my howitzer can around for them to drop a tearful memento in
and us to embrace like Boy leaving the jungle for Civilization and
stiff British lips. All that's about as uncouth if not unethical as I
could get. I’m supposed to be one of them. They’ll know as soon
as the first stick of furniture walks into that van what happened to
me, it don’t need no news conference.

Jinx comes up. His eyes are brilliant. We knuckle
bump. He looks off for Jake and says to me, looking away for Jake,
“Where you been?"

“
I been around.”

"Man, ain’ seen you in a long time."

I shrug. "Just happens.”

"Look so."

He got a beer and drank some of it. Nothing came to
us to say. Then he says, "So take care yourself, man."

“
You too, Jinx." He walks off. I notice he’s
dressed up. He dresses funny for a country Negro in the Grand. He
wears cardigan sweaters and nice dark slacks—pushes up the sweater
sleeves over his forearms—with matching socks or sometimes no
socks. He looks like a college golfer. He goes over to the jukebox
and studies it.

Jake’s down at the other end, occupied with
himself. He’s got one foot up on a beer box, leaning on his knee,
smoking, looking off at the wall. It’s a slow night.

"Jake, what’s the weather sposed to do?"
I say.

"Might be sposed to rain."

We figure on that a bit. I had heard a rumble. Then
he says, "You ready?”

"Nah," I tell him, setting my can back down
in circles of water. "Not yet." He keeps smoking, looking
at the wall.

I slip out.

Outside, it’s thunder and purple dusk. I hustle. A
black pickup about forty years old with hog-slop buckets in the back
stops. An old guy squints at me. He’s sixty to a hundred. No teeth.
Gumming something. I get in. He nods. I did the right thing. We
drive, a little slower than I was running, to the Cabana road, where
he lets me out. I wonder about the hog business—if he gets the slop
free from restaurants, etc.—but don’t ask him anything. The
palmettos sound like a stampede, crackling and brushing and popping.
They’re bristling around like fur, in waves and counterwaves. Jake
sent me out the back door once at the Grand. I was all set to go out
the front when his girl said, "Jake! You gone let that chile go
out there?"

"Why not?” Jake said.

"It ain’t nothing but a bunch of rowdy niggers
out there. You, come on the back."

I went with her. I saw Jake call his momma to chain
the dog. I went by the worms and a trail that let out down the road.
I remembered all this walking in the whipping dark. The Cabana was
lit up like a chandelier, crystal prism wobbling in the wind. At the
shack Taurus was snifting Old Setter with the window open on the
beach side, watching the ghostly waves chomp. When it’s dark you
hear everything but only see a white roughness at the water’s edge
and sometimes a glassy curl out farther, enough to place the wave for
you and let you count toward its break. Once like this I saw a shark
tearing light out of the water, blasting loads of mullet in
phosphorous fires in all directions, like the shark was a bomb and
the mullet hot shrapnel.

But that night it was simpler. We just whiled it 
away. I should have known from the tone it was the end of us, like
they say on a soap opera. Taurus asked me out of the blue, across the
white enamel table and over our two amber oyster-jar snifters, which
we held like cups of mission soup, what were Georgia and Alabama and
Louisiana like.

I said Georgia was convicts and palmetto, but my
uncle built a lot of roads in the obscure parts, which they said were
good roads still, old-concrete-slab-type roads with weeds in the
expansion joints and not all this asphalt-lobby shit on them. I said
Alabama was a place the Doctor said the air was different, but it
sounded like the famous Bear Bryant had one half and the famous
George Wallace the other and you took your choice. I’d also heard
there were large shellcracker in Birmingham, somehow, but who could
say if they were the coach’s or the governor’s? But Louisiana I
said was It. I heard an old Mississippi lady tell of it once as
"rich, old Louisiana." She said, "There’s a lot of
money in that state. She’s very rich." And she wasn’t
talking about new money, or old money, or even money itself, but some
other richness about a place that is not necessarily all tied up in
the bank. And then I told him how the books seemed to bear this out.
You had the Kingfish book with that bodacious beginning, all dug up
right there at Baton Rouge—it must be the place, if there’s one
left.

"Why do you ask?" I said after a while.

"Why not?"

We thought this one over.

"Well . . .” I said, highly articulate.

"Well, yes," he said. He looked around the
room and back at his jar of liquor.

He meant Theenie was coming back, which meant Order,
Restoration, including in its ramifications the Progenltor’s
reclamation of the Barony and Penelope, and my riding a school bus
regularly, and he meant swept floors at the house again, an end to
custody junkets, an end to surrogate daddies, a beginning of
baseball. I guess he hadn’t heard we would go to Hilton Head.

"I’m thirteen years old in eight months,"
I told him. He nodded.

"Little League already has stars," I said.

"Flashes in the pan," he said. I guess I
had told him before about my baseball training, before Daddy left.
The Doctor takes me to a child psychiatrist at three to see why I
can’t read, and when we get home, Daddy puts me between third and
second to see why I can’t stop grounders. I failed the first test
because I saw a relationship between an envelope and a cantaloupe and
I failed the second because I saw a relationship between a crisply
peppered grounder and a smashed face.

"Baseball," I said. "I see too much.”

"It’ll come in handy."

I think he meant the girl stuff. Even I knew that
Diane Parker wasn’t going to have much truck with worms and
weenie-arms.

I wasn’t really all that reserved about it, about
grounders and girls and the end of coroners. That would put an end to
listening to snout-first intrusions by the Doctor’s suitors, to the
suitors themselves, to the requisite Boy Act to get rid of them, and
I could hear the sweet groaning rocks of the nuptial bower restored,
and Theenie would be back and we could have talks, and she could do
linen and run the vacuum and worry about the gubmen and make more
pound cakes, and maybe get over her fear.

"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.