Edisto - Padgett Powell (17 page)

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.