Edisto - Padgett Powell

Edisto

Padgett Powell
1983

For my family

The Assignment

I’m in Bluffton on a truancy spree, cutting, we
call it, but all you do is walk off the unfenced yard during recess,
where three hundred hunched-over kids are shooting marbles. I can’t
shoot a marble with a slingshot, so I split and go into Dresser’s
Rexall for a Coke or something, expressly forbidden me by the Doctor
because it makes me hyper, she says, but should I drink milk all my
life instead or go on now to house bourbon? That is not the point.

Suddenly there she is on a counter stool between me
and a cherry Coke, or I’m even considering a suicide—sixteen
godoxious syrups in a thimble of soda—but I can handle this
disappointment. I could go to the Texaco and have a bottle and talk
to Vergil. They even have Tom’s peanuts for a goober-bottle rig—you
just pour in the peanuts and drink. But Clyde, his pumpman, will try
to take off his wooden leg on me. One day I got curious and he
unbuttoned his shirt and showed me the network of sweaty straps all
over his chest that holds the leg on, and I got closer, and he
loosened the straps and took down his overalls, and all of a sudden
the leg was off, a small cypress log, and he bounced his stump around
on the chair, pecan-colored and hard-looking, and I about fainted.
Now I have to beg him to leave it on. When I get pale, Vergil will
stop him. "Keep your leg on, Clyde." "Okeydoke,"
Clyde says, but he still fidgets with the straps and giggles.

But I don’t get out of the Rexall unnoticed. She
calls me over and introduces me to this gray-headed gent she’s
with. Now this is what gets me. She says to him, who turns out to be
a barrister working land in Hilton Head, she says, "I want you
to meet my protégé."

She never includes the detail I’m her son, so I put
my name into the dialogue so she might have to mention the
relationship. "Simons Everson Manigault," I say to him,
stepping up and pumping him a three-pump country shake, squeezing
harder than even the old man said to. You say it "Simmons."

I’m a rare one-m Simons.

So she hatches a "protégé" on the guy and
I think I see his face hitch to the floor a hint, as if he had a
doubt about her—remarkable, this, because the lawyers I have seen,
including my old man, have had better control of facial expression
than any actor in the land, and I figure either something twitched
him or he doesn’t work on his feet. The Doctor has a bit of a
reputation, you know, and a suitor outside the college where she
teaches can be right skittish. The Negroes call her the Duchess.
Anyway, next I look at them he is looking at her legs folded up under
her on the chrome swivel stool, bulges of calf flesh pressed out firm
as pull candy, so I just drift out of Dresser’s—no suicide, but
at least not recognized as skipping school either.

Truancy is no big deal to the Doctor anyway, because
it’s the "material" has her send me to public school,
podunkus Bluffton Elementary, when the old man would send me to
Cooper Boyd, college-prep academy for all future white doctors,
lawyers, and architects in the low country. But the old man cut out
some time ago. He gave me a Jack London book and coached me into the
best eight-year-old short-stop in the history of the world before the
book shit hit. "That kid’s supposed to read all that?" he
said. "I thought that was your library." He was shocked by
the Plan: the bassinet bound by books, which I virtually came home
from the hospital to sleep in the lee of, my toys. Like some kids
swat mobiles, I was to thumb pages. Some get to goo-goo, I had to
read.

It was something. He (the Progenitor) had actually
built the shelves that held the Doctor’s training tools, which took
me straight away from our after-work grounder clinic and his idea of
things. They got in it over this, one charged with sissifying and the
other with brutalizing.

I suppose I became my momma’s boy, at least she was
still there, and in fact all this scribbling is directly related to
her training program. It’s an assignment. I’m supposed to write.
I’m supposed to get good at it.

So the day I’m talking about, after leaving the
Rexall, I got out of Vergil’s without Clyde making me sick, got on
the school bus, as usual, and fell out of it racing down the road, as
not usual. I looked up from my surprise at not being dead and saw a
white face, calm as an ambulance driver, among a whole gawking throng
of Negroes. And reading the Doctor’s toys for boys is what got me
in the predicament.

That’s what being a "material" hound will
get you: little you who should be up in the front with the nice kids
but are in the back listening to Gullah and watching, say, an
eight-year-old smoke marijuana like a man in a cell block, eyes
squinting toward the driver with each hissing intake of what his
grandfather called hemp and took for granted, you trying to orate on
the menace of the invading Arabs—"They don’t ride camels and
carry scimitars, but they are coming all the same; they’ve bought
ten islands, we’ll all be camel tenders soon"—when the
emergency door flies open and it is not the Negroes nearest who go
out and do cartwheels after the bus, it is you who gets sucked out
into a fancy bit of tumbling on the macadam, spidering and rolling up
the gentle massive cradling roots of an oak tree that has probably
stopped many more cars with much less compassion. My tree just said
whoa. You must see the miraculous thing it is to have avoided death
by a perfect execution of cartwheels, rolling over a two-lane highway
and partway up a tree, to clump down then with only two cracked ribs
and no more for medicine than Empirin. The codeine kind not the
old-lady kind. I jumped up to tell them I was not dead: Negroes from
nowhere, peering at my sleeping little face framed by roots. As I
looked at them, before jumping up and losing my breath to the ribs, I
saw that one calm light face among them.

Anyway, that’s what sniffing out things will do for
you, and I was changed by discovering how close the end can be when
you don’t even think about your being alive, not at twelve, and
that same night the one calm face among my coterie of gawkers stepped
onto the porch like the process server he was, but with no papers to
serve, and I felt the porch sag.

When the ambulance does get there, the Negroes tell
the driver, "That the Duchess boy." So he takes me, not
that I’m hurt or anything—though I am, sort of, because it hurts
when I try to breathe—he takes me to Dr. Carlton back in Bluffton
instead of the clinic in Beaufort, and Carlton gives me a ride home.
My maternal Doctor has not missed me and has the evening set up.

It gets dark so very gradually it seems pure dark
will never descend and I get moody in my new, good-as-dead outlook,
walk around the place trying to savor the sudden news that I don’t
have to be alive, even, and turn on a few lamps. The Doctor clears up
the dinner problem by assigning me leftovers, fine with me, and gets
a drink and takes up on the wicker sofa, sitting on her folded legs,
and drinks her drink.

These are the times that are best: when she is
distracted and I am left to whatever I can manage on my own,
basically provided for but maybe burning meat loaf or something
without a peep from her. These are times when we are least protégé
and master. I can feel each drink she pours, each necessary bite of
the sour bourbon on her mouth, feel it in a neutral way without any
kind of judgment, I am aware is all, by the sounds of glass and
wicker, of her evening and she must be as aware that I am going to
bed without reading any assignments, just listening to the palmetto
and waves and going to sleep.

We are well into that kind of dance this evening when
Taurus shows up. Elbows on the drain counter, I am keeping my weight
off my ribs and watching the food cook when I see him. You do not
know what in hell may be out here on a hoodoo coast and I do not make
a move. What follows is not nearly so ominous as I would sound. He
don’t ax-murder us or anything like that. Yet there is something
arresting about this dude the moment you see him. He is shimmery as
an islander's god and solid as a butcher. I consider him to be the
thing that the Negroes are afraid of when they paint the doors and
windows of their shacks purple or yellow. His head is cocked, his
hand on the washtub of the Doctor’s old wringer, its old manila
rolling pins swung out to the side. When he comes up to the screen, I
know I have seen his face before.

That's the assignment. To tell what has been going on
since this fellow came trying to serve a subpoena to we think
Athenia’s daughter and scared Theenie so bad it about blued her
hair. Before he came I spent most of my time at the Baby
Grand—Marvin’s R.O. Sweet Shop and Baby Grand, where I am a
celebrity because I’m white, not even teenage yet, and possess the
partial aura of the Duchess ("The Duchess boy heah!"). And
I look like I hold I my liquor ("Ain’t he somp’m.").
The trick there is to accept a new can when anybody offers and let
your
old one get drunk by somebody else.

And besides playing the freak I can jive a little,
too, like the Arab alarum I like to ring. “If it wasn’t for the
Marines down the road, these Arabs’d do more than buy this place!”
"Shih! Boy crazy!" And the dudes there play a tune back, a
constant message: Life is a time when you get pleasure until somebody
get your ass. And one of the ways to prolong pleasure is to not chop
up time with syllables. They go for something larger than words, but
no essays. This way nothing large is inaccurate, presumptuous. "Bitch
look heavy." “Tell
me.
"  Like these James
Brown guitar riffs of five notes that run twenty minutes, and then
one of the five notes goes sharp and a statement is made. A whole
evening hums, and then there’s a new note—razor out. I still hit
the Grand, but less now with Taurus and me doing things.

That night when he stepped on the porch and I was
trying to breathe, the Doctor came to the door and stopped short of
pushing it open as she would have for an ordinary visitor—he had
his hand inside the rim of the wringer tub and his head was slightly
cocked off at it as if he were listening to a large conch shell. I
noticed then a stack of linen folded—not folded anymore, thrown—by
the sink. Some kind of nut is on the porch and I take time out to
notice this because now I know something is up.

Because when your Southern barony is reduced as ours
is to a tract of clay roads cut in a feathery herbaceous jungle of
deerfly for stock and scrub oak for crop, and the great house is a
model beach house resembling a pagoda, and the planter’s wife is
abandoned by the planter, as ours has been, and she has only one
servant left (Theenie, who for quarters has only one 10' x 12' shack
insulated by newspaper and flour on a cold Atlantic bluff), well,
that vestigial baroness insists that vestigial slave do her one duty
right—"the linen," all that remains of cotton finery.
Theenie vacuums the house too, but that doesn’t signify as
Preserving the South. And the laundry was not in the hall closet
(successor to armoire) but flung all over the kitchen counter, which
was not right.

If I had not rolled sixty feet at forty miles an hour
into an oak tree just hours before, I might have thought nothing of
that laundry. But there it was, flopped forlorn on the drainboard,
looking a bit like I might have before I stood up to disassociate
myself from the dead in that sudden ring of gawkers. There was
somehow a connection in all this: my suddenly seeing the linen in the
new good-as-dead way of seeing, the linen an embodiment of Theenie
and the Doctor’s old order and of, somehow, the someone cocking an
ear to a sound on our porch, whose discovery stopped the Doctor
mid-track and knocked her into her classroom style, so that she
suddenly stood three feet inside the door, straightened up, and spoke
as if there were an invisible podium between her and her audience.

“
Won’t you please come in and let us talk,"
said the Doctor heavily, as though scanning the line for a student,
and she stepped forward and slowly swung open the screen door to a
total stranger, who looked young enough and strong enough to be the
ax murderer. (Man, several years ago I was all-hours victim to
accounts of boogeymen on this wind-riddled spit of remote earth, one
thing that did encourage me to read: you keep reading to stay awake
and so get a good jump if the Hook Man breaks in.)

He stepped in. She stepped back. "In the name,
it would seem, of paralegal service," she said, and turned and
walked away and crossed the living room and sat on the creaking
wicker sofa on her legs, "you have done me a grave disservice."
She said this in her explicatory, cadenced style, punctuated and
metered so no idiot could fail to record it in his notebook. The
stranger, who had not followed her, then looked at me, evenly and
without expression. He came in.