Edisto Revisited

by Padgett Powell

  It was only then that I got in the ballpark, or, more precisely, realized I’d been standing at the plate taking this brushback pitch. I got ready, now that I knew the count (0-2), for another pitch. Here it came.

  “And everybody’s shit stinks.”

  Ah yes. The sentiments of the civilized man. The man that Leakey found and Darwin propounded along his trail of betterment and NASA aided to take giant steps for mankind on the moon. I drank my drink. It was like being a teenager again: Let them have their godawful say and get out of their way. This had been called by my father in its day my “being Cochise.” Now, again, I sat there being Cochise. I was Cochise with a martini. I was Cochise with a red plastic sword through his olive, talking to the Great White Father, who was giving Cochise sage and worldly exempli that perhaps his own native gods would not know about. Cochise was probably only getting things like “All things are one” from his own godhead, so he needed “Everybody has their shit” from the Great White Father.

  Life is not prevailing. Life is letting those who insist on it prevail around you and preserving a measure of dignity for yourself on the fringe of the embarrassment. The meek shall inherit the earth if they can wait out the prodigious period of presumption.

  28

  MY PROWESS AS A coastal architect rests on certain indissoluble premises. These include but are not limited to the following: find a way to put the woman into a house that suggests to her she is the widow of a sailor (a cupola with widow’s walk may be too overt for a Southern woman, but not for one from Ohio—she will be pleasantly haunted by it); put the man into a house that suggests his main job in life is to be a good host and a good host’s main job is to see that everyone has a drink (for the Southern man, a big bar on the main floor reminiscent of a fraternity house; for the man from Ohio, a small bar on every floor, including the basement, for which a facsimile must be made by closing in the support pillars); convince both the man and the woman that the elevations of the house are intimately and uniquely in communion with the elevations of the lot on which it is to sit. This last is most easily accomplished by having no relationship whatsoever between elevations. If this is noticed, speak of “tension” and sweep your arm toward the roiling Atlantic.

  Any difficulties to this point can be resolved by attention to surface. Nothing so puts to rout a couple worrying about whether they are or are not to have, finally, their dream home as some somber revelations about surface—its texture, its color, its “integrity.” In the toughest of cases, those not stampeded by integrity of surface, I have used “degree of dimensional and cultural stability.” There is not a home buyer in this country in my experience who will fight with that. What is culturally stable of course is the pastel. They have seen the corresponding “earth tones” on the black shacks and jooks, and the garish neons on the roadhouses and motels that surround but do not include the pristine marsh they are colonizing, and none of that bold poor down-trod color will leak out here into the clean, salty, expensive air. Yet there are some sophisticates who resent what they recognize as the undemocratic pastel, typically objecting to “blandness.” For these hearty pioneers you must be ready with alternative pasteling. This is a snap, because alternative pasteling is historical, and if there is any stronger, finer irony than selling a brand-new house by claiming it historical, I do not know what it is. I stain the outside—before there was paint, all wood was treated with stains, usually involving blood (“rubricated with animal products”)—and I pickle the inside. Pickling is in fact my middle name. You can take a job away from an architect talking about faux marbling with paint and sponges if you walk up and pickle a piece of trim before their very eyes. Because it precedes paint (modern paint is corporate swagger, fruit of research & development, therefore undemocratic) and because it looks innocuous and yet is authentic, pickling will convince the most hard-to-sell egalitarian dream-home builder.

  I have good relations with framing carpenters. These are fellows holding useless advanced degrees and very useful 28-ounce Estwing rip hammers. They wear short pants and blond boots that they refuse to oil, and are sun-blond themselves and smoke pot well and frame well. They are what is left of the political ambition of the just post-Vietnam American hippie, if there is such a thing—political ambition in a hippie (and there is, if Dr. Bronner’s peppermint soap is soap). I like to show up about quitting time with a case of beer, when only the framers are still at a job, and sit in the open, upper rooms with them to ostensibly look over the plans, which I roll out on the plywood subfloor and pin down with beers and invite them to comment on—whether the headers are over- or underbuilt or how they feel about all these skylights. The post-’Nam hippie framer falls into two camps on skylights: those who did not go favor skylights, the more the better; those who went condemn them as dreamy invitations to perpetual roof leaks—if you want light, put in windows, real ones, and beyond that buy some light fixtures and pay to run them. You do not cheat the light of day by cutting holes in the roof. A framer who went will let a framer who did not go do all the skylights on a job.

  “Do you think this house messes up the beach too much?”

  “What?” the framer who went will say. “Mess up the beach?”

  “You’ve been as considerate as you could be, I think,” the framer who did not go will interrupt, prompting a long look from the framer who went.

  That’s about as far as you want to go into the issue of beach hugging with framers whose livelihood depends on beach mauling, whether they went or didn’t. But this is a nice moment in your dubious occupation, drinking beer and smelling the faint ammonia of the plans and the good salt air and the perennial whiff of pot on these guys who do the actual, honest, hands-on beach mauling, driving their twelvepenny nails into your white, white spruce all the livelong day, sitting with you a moment in your respective philosophical reposes. You are not such a bad guy for a suit, and they of course are not such bad guys for grunts. A sunset under these conditions, glassy waves catching the last pink light, a green marsh catching a sudden chill and stopping even its fiddler ticking, and turning gray, can be a most agreeable thing.

  29

  WE HAVE BEEN KNOWN to spend an evening up at Jake’s. The first of these was memorable, because no one else was there and Jake was free to romp with us in racial set pieces, and because I learned that my friend Jinx had died. Patricia and I went in, feeling smart and secure in each other, as we are wont to do, to have a drink and to establish her as a credit customer there should we ever need it. The place was bone empty, 9:30 on a Monday night.

  “Damn, Jake. Where is everybody?”

  “Everybody here.”

  “Where’s … where’s Jinx?” I hadn’t seen Jinx, or thought of him, in years.

  “Who?”

  “Jinx.”

  “Know no Jinx.”

  “You know, skinny guy. Quiet dude. Played—”

  “He dead.”

  “Dead?” I looked at Patricia—she was looking at me with a kind of told-you-so raised eyebrow, her purse still on her shoulder. I took it and gave it to Jake, and he buried it somewhere behind the bar as if he had hundreds of purses to keep track of. It was funny. He took about three minutes, bent over and unseen behind the bar. Then he popped up, freshened by duty, and said, “Sickle cell.”

  “Sickle cell what?”

  “Sickle cell Jinx. He gone.”

  “No.”

  “In the hole.”

  “How old was he?”

  “How I know how old is he?”

  “Give us the baddest malt liquor there is, Jake. Treat us like brothers.”

  Jake regarded Patricia. “He like this when he little, too. You in trouble.”

  “I know it,” Patricia said.

  Jake was complying. He gave us two tall, totally undrinkable things in gold cans with pictures of cobras on them, and we drank them. The place empty like that—a long flat-back hall with the feel of fine glass underfoot on the concrete floor—was austere, stark, frightening.
I could recall this friend of mine Jinx playing pinball by himself, drinking alone, smiling at anyone who interrupted him. I recalled, too, how neat he was. He had a kind of preppie air to him: pressed, or permanently pressed, polyester shirts and slacks, and dress shoes, the effect of it skewed when you noticed he wore no socks. I remember that. His ankles were nearly the same color as the black shoes into which they fit, and they looked hard and worn and slick as the shoe leather itself. It was like a hoof and a shoe; there was no place for a soft sock in this arrangement. I looked closely at these feet one night, sitting on a stool under the pinball machine. In the days of my childhood celebrity at the Grand, sitting under the pinball machine would prevent people from asking ad nauseam if I had mice in my ears. I now noticed the pinball machine was gone.

  Jinx was gone, his flashy distraction was gone, I was going somewhere myself. Patricia and Jake were talking, which was what I’d brought her for—if Jake could talk to you, he could give you credit. She could handle herself. I thought of her as an attractive Margaret Thatcher, perverse as that may be. Jinx dead. Of a specifically black menace. There was a day in which I would have been inclined to see that as somehow my fault. I am less inclined to see it that way today. Something I couldn’t (or wouldn’t) prevent got Jinx, and something he couldn’t (or wouldn’t) prevent would get me. I had been a pure accommodation of race and racial difference when I sat under a pinball machine and watched Jinx’s unsocked feet in their plainness. Now it was as if I were a (self-appointed) representative of the very lowest arm of the State Department trying to head off the very largest war it would ever have, and the last one it wanted to have. I was a chump. Jake knew that and put up with me anyway. I was a paying customer.

  Patricia Hod went to the bathroom and Jake interrupted me in these my stately ruminations by settling a new can of Cobra at my place. He shook his head and gave a long whistle in the direction Patricia Hod had gone.

  “Shoe fly,” he said.

  “Amen,” I said. I had no idea what “shoe fly” meant. It seemed to be plenty positive.

  “The new Duchess,” he said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. I recalled the high-heeled shoes and dildo and wondered if I ought be saying something like that, so I said it again. “Yes, ma’am, Jake. I am in some cotton now.”

  “You in some cotton.”

  “I am in cotton like … like a pistol in a Crown Royal bag.” This was how Jake kept—and operated—his bar pistol.

  “You got cheetah on your side,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Say you got cheetah, man.”

  “Okay.” I had no idea what this meant, either, and Jake knew that, but that was partly his point. It was a compliment that was better for my not entirely getting it. In my current intellectualizing mode, I was ironically less a chump if I let it go and did not dig for it, white topical anthropologist. I tried one out myself: “All the snow in the world won’t change the color of the pine needles.”

  “Heard that.”

  Cheetah came back from the bathroom and we had no more time for our racial minuet. Patricia Hod looked better to me than any single person or thing or idea or place or car or horse or church or God or sandbox or sentry or sentiment or—I kissed her full on the mouth right there, and she liked it, looking even as she had to at Jake to apologize, and Jake walked, chuckling, lightly, away.

  30

  PATRICIA HOD AND I are dancing on the beach. It has rained and there is a steady, firm inshore wind, about twenty knots, and with it regular waves marching in like redcoats. It looks very much like a hurricane, but I have not bothered to check a radio or anything else. Should there be one, and bad, Jake’s is far enough inland to not drown and there is always a serious hurricane party there and I can use it to introduce Patricia to the island. Patricia Hod is, as Jake notes, heiress to the Duchess, my mother. I will withhold that she is my cousin. It is the kind of thing I expect will be known, somehow, and tolerated, in fact will have a happy life on the drums. This culture here—it is being called “the culture of indigenous peoples” by the preservationists who have arrived more often than not from Washington, D.C. (inexplicably, because they are not with the government, in fact oppose government), to help preserve it—this culture, whatever it is, is a very patient, modest, let-others-alone thing that changes, I think, from day to day in its levels of violence, but beyond that is steady. It steadily gets tired is the other thing I’ve noticed.

  The indigenous are tired, the non-indigenous not. The white, here before the tired black but seen as non-indigenous because they would develop what has not been developed before, are not tired. In fiduciary straits since Sherman scared the pee wine out of them, they now have the condo dollar to revive, in a manner of speaking, the rice and indigo and cotton dollar and raise their heads above the erstwhile worthless ancestral marsh.

  Patricia and I go to all manner of Southern Living tableaux—to jobs (I make the post-and-beam; Patricia can sell them); to families (we are a bedrock of dire breath-holding for the normal folk in our clan: some look to see that she is not pregnant, some to confirm, I-told-you-so, the slouching toward them of our purblind issue); and to the ordinary nexuses on this our bourgeois earth, offices and lobbies and malls. We inhabit the marauding, vigorous, non-indigenous mainland world by day.

  By island night it is another matter. I am feeling very good, dancing with my illicit bride (for which I understand African shades would hound us to the grave and beyond). Patricia Hod and I do well in our tribal tabooey, and my mother I think of as the shaman who cast the spell that guarantees the tabooey will go unremarked and unmolested. I worry about my mother’s health—the absence of baking potato portends worse—but that is what you do with parents after they’ve quit worrying about yours. Life seems unpractically practical in the calm, medium view.

  I am dancing with firm, cool Patricia Hod on the firm, cool beach. The sand is packed hard as an infield and breaks when you turn a foot in it with a clean squeak. A damp low wedge of sand marks the turn. The wind is full of salt.

  There is the delicious contrast between Patricia Hod’s cotton blouse and her smooth, swelling chest, and soon we’ve marked up the entire beach with this our clumsy waltz, to no music but our own. We will go inside and shower in the slightly rusty water, redolent of iron and sulfur, and emerge smelling as good as a boiled egg (Patricia Hod does to me), and fall on each other like … breakfast. I bloom into some kind of monster of happiness in her arms, in her neck, not knowing my name. Beached up on Patricia Hod like this these days, if I were asked for ID I could only pat my pockets, shrug, and go to sleep.

  Then start awake—hounded by the old fear: the big picture. I have no idea what the big picture is. Life is a giant proposition put you in terms so elusive and slick and fast that you can but stand before the barker and chuckle, Here’s my dollar, I’ll play, I must, and I will lose. Some days, some nights, you childishly want to see the rigging, the magnets or the strings, behind the board, under the table, on the wheel. Life is missing things, not getting them.

  But I hold Patricia Hod. Her neck is a quarter inch from my nose, which seems to be the instrument with which I record all this wisdom and distribute it to my brain. Her neck is a hollow of tasty hope.

  Patricia Hod has a way of stepping out of her bath and confronting you, in her white robe, smelling of soap, with her arms at her sides and standing there as if to say, What are you going to do about this? She’ll stand there until you do something about it, which for me is to put my mouth into a little spot above her collarbone like a bee going in for pollen. Contact is enough; I don’t need to do anything, and Patricia doesn’t seem to want anything done, particularly. We stand there in this attitude of carnal handshake. This moment does not want lips, which by contrast are messy and have their agenda and force you both into business that gets complicated, and it does not want breast, which gets things accelerated and infantile and motherly and hysterical. This moment wants a quiet hollow in dark, taut f
lesh, just my lips, closed, on it, breathing deeply, and looking over her shoulder if the robe falls off I can see down the valley of her back to the rising mountain of serious flesh down there, and things will be serious soon enough. But for the moment, no. Just this succor in this shoulder. Just this kiss, this meat, this pulse beside bone, this cool lonely wind, this me and this you. I am not supposed to even taste.

  And it comes, does it, to this? To hiding with the (wrong) little woman? Hiding from what? From “greatness”? From saying something? The things my mother had in mind for me? Do not all our mothers have them in mind for all of us?

  In Patricia Hod I am hiding, then. I am seeking refuge, moreover, from no persecution. That was the bane, the only irritant in the pleasant oyster of my days. From nothing I flee, into less nothing. You save us, and let your mother know you’ve done it. I have saved myself, and I have saved myself the saving.

  “Jake,” I’m going to say some night shortly, “save us. I’m not going to save us.”

  “Who?”

  “Any of us.”

  “We save,” he’ll say.

  “Hilton Head’s coming, man. Buy you out. Cut your trees. That cash register be a computer. Washington, D.C., coming, man. People be in here knock you in the head.”

  “Got that now.” He produces the Crown Royal bag. He smiles broadly.

  “The Wawer!” I say. “The Wawer!”

  Jake looks at his pistol in its purple velvet bag. He does not investigate, at all, this thing I’m saying. What can he think I’m saying?

  I am saying that either I gave up before the battle began or there was no war to fight, I cannot tell. If there was a war—even if it is but the war of human potential, which today looks, militarily speaking, less winnable than ever before—and one chooses not to fight it, it seems to me that that relieves you from having to mutter and weep in your musty study in twenty or forty years about how close you came to winning.