In a Sweet Magnolia Time

by Wintner, Robert;

  “Hell, Jim. You like a little oyster with your mustard?”

  “Yessuh, Mist Aht. I b’lieve I do.” He slurped it down and went for another round and then took a moment to savor the taste and maybe the golden afternoon, looking up and down the road, nodding and assuring, yes, a man got to get even. I didn’t ask even for what. He had a burr in his shorts and wanted me to guess what, but I had irritations of my own, and frankly, it’d been a long damn day and wasn’t even over. Jim Cohen watched my assessment and cracked a smile so slight you couldn’t be certain what good feeling it reflected or how much there was of it; maybe I only thought it was an indication of contentment. I didn’t need to see a stereotype country black showing me some of his eternal happiness but wouldn’t have minded some of the old goodwill.

  Jim Cohen smiled often as not. He wasn’t old and feeble like the judge had been but showed his age like a soul fermented to spirits rather than vinegar. His smile stretched then, and he said today was his boifday. He laughed, as if his revenge was secure after all, and there we were, celebrating the day on which his survival began. He shucked another oyster, squeezed a tablespoon of mustard on top, ate it and shook his head. “Shoowee! Dem moh bettah.”

  Moh bettah den what was conjectural. He drank again and handed me the flask, confiding it was the same flask his grandfather Luzon stole from John Allston a hundred twenty years ago. I took a drink, to make peace, as it were. “Dem sweetwine,” he said.

  The flask was monogrammed on the convex side in the center of intricate filigree that had been rubbed smooth where fat fingers had squeezed it so many times. I laughed and asked what the W stood for. “Allston,” he said.

  A car with New Jersey plates and sunburned faces pulled in, headed north from Florida but detouring for local color in this place they never heard of, or never thought much about at any rate. The father asked for watermelon. Jim Cohen sprang four quarters from his change maker and told me to run down the road to Yolanda’s and fetch us a couple of grape sodas. Then he turned to the driver from New Jersey. “No melon,” he said. “It too late fuh melon.”

  He further directed the man to peruse the Jerusalem artichokes, since datuh be’s wha’ we mos’ famous here, fuh true. Then he signaled the wife to get out and come on over too for a quick primer on root relish preparation, no rush, these ones’ll be good till you get home and then some.

  I left to run my errand. When I got back the New Jersey family was making final selections on corn and Jerusalem artichokes, and Jim told me to fetch a bag from the front seat of the produce Cadillac and then go ahead and bag up dat corn and dem chokes. The family paid, took Jim Cohen’s picture and left. He laughed, as if to say that making money was just that easy, but you did have to put yourself out some if you wanted to make a go of it.

  All of which painted an amusing picture that continued to be humorous and entertaining, but I’d had enough. Yet like a seasoned boxer measuring punches, biding his time and letting his own ring wisdom dictate the pace, he measured my need and me. “Da right. A man got to get eben.” I still wondered what he sought from me that he thought was his when I told him it looked about time to head back up the road. He told me to sit down a spell further, opened the grape sodas and handed me one, and he reached back once more as the judge had done. But Jim Cohen reached further back and farther down the river, back before Luzon and Julya to Edisto Island.

  A car from Massachusetts pulled in and asked for yams. Jim said no and sold them artichokes instead. I bagged and then went down the road again for coffee, black for me, black with three sugars for Jim.

  Business slacked off and mid afternoon turned to four, with the sun falling faster and the chill gaining. He showed me then how to reload the produce, careful now, so’s you don’t bruise it up, and then you gently shove it all forward with one foot, up to where the back seat used to be so they wouldn’t fall out on the way home. I didn’t remind him that we were home, or he was home at any rate. He asked if I’d go ahead and give him a lift on up to the house.

  I would have said no, it’s good for a man to walk a hundred yards, and maybe I stood there a might too long thinking it over, but he stood there too, staring back at me like he would have done, I believe, if I’d stood there staring all night. So I said, “Yes, sir, Mister Jim. Get in the car.” He laughed and got in and said I’d done right fine there on my first day of work, adapting right away to being the nigger while he did the talking.

  Sure, it was a funny thing for him to say, but it was my turn not to laugh. He had no more place nor manner calling me a nigger than I would have had calling him one, which I didn’t. I was none too pleased and let it show, and he said, “Da right. Da right,” as we eased up the pot-holed drive a hundred yards through the trees.

  Houses began where the trees stopped, with walls touching the walls of forbears that stood empty, windswept through broken windows and no doors. Smoke wisped from most stovepipes, and a vague avenue ran down the center of the housing cluster, littered with rusty bicycles and broken swing sets. A red Pontiac Bonneville, ’63 model, sat near one house with cinder blocks under the wheel hubs, the roof caved in and the windshield smashed. Beside it, a grassless patch marked parking.

  Chauffeuring Jim Cohen twenty miles to his house on Wadmalaw Island struck a chord in harmony with that sad day and got us warmly removed from the funeral and resurrection so far away. Jim Cohen worked himself free of my car and onto his feet. Surveying the ramshackle dwellings that appeared adequately complacent if not secure in self-esteem, he swayed side to side till his footing stabilized.

  That morning I would have thought cocktails and dinner with Jim Cohen as remote as Cinderella turning out to be a dark-skinned beauty. But he leaned into the car window with his own survey, maybe seeing the sorry matrix of that soggy day, or maybe needing a bigger load off his chest, or I was merely, egregiously visible. At any rate he said, “I beviting you in fuh yidda bit moh dem sweetwine’n some dem muystad awshtuh too.” We stared too long a second time, and I said all right.

  Who knows where penance comes from or why we seek it, or if we’re even slightly cognizant of our drive to reach it, to feel it and have it any time we need it?

  A half-spun cast net hung on the porch rail with little lead weights dangling from its bottom hem. A spool of nylon line had unwound from one weight and rolled ten feet down the porch to the ground, where it had sat for hours or weeks. In town such items would appear quaint, a display reflecting our heritage, our colorful marshland, our blah, blah, blah. I asked if the net was being mended and how long it would take and how he came to know net weaving, and if he planned to teach it to his kids or knew the importance of passing on such legacy, and if nylon was so different from cotton.

  He laughed short, huffed himself to the door and said, “Shit. Don’ know nuffin,” and walked inside. The acrid sweetness of hot lard rushed out as he went in. It enveloped every sense, the coarser along with the finer ones, covering every square inch of essence surely as the mud on the pig it came from. I acclimated with a few deep breaths, adjusting, as we sometimes must. A girl child in overalls and a stained T-shirt passed from the front room with an iron skillet of hot lard in one hand and a steaming bowl of periwinkle snails in the other. She hurried when Jim said, “Shoo!” looking over her shoulder at the white man, making me wonder when last such a breed apart walked here. Her stiff black hair was plastered down her neck, and she grinned, the darning needle used for snail picking and dipping clenched in her teeth.

  Jim Cohen pulled a bottle of low-end sherry from the shelf mumbling sweetwine. Holding it in one hand, he brushed crumbs and periwinkle shells off the table with the other. He went back for tumblers and bade me sit. So I sat, loosening my tie and then on second thought taking it off and putting it in my jacket pocket, and then on third thought wishing I’d left my jacket in the car. Jim poured and waddled off again to turn on his TV and turn the channel till he found what he wanted: To Tell the Truth. Catching Gary Moore on the tail end of a
joke, he joined the audience laughter. When he sat down across from me I raised my glass. “Here’s to better times.” We drank.

  “Moh bettah den what?” he asked, tilting his glass again.

  “Better than funerals, I suppose.”

  “Bettah?” he asked, pouring again. “Dem be’s bout de bestess fune-ruh binna rounchea I eb did see.” He said he’d never seen a casket so fine, his hands forming the scrollwork inlay of maple on mahogany with all the arabesques down to the curlicues, then showing me on a slow motion grasp how that casket handle had actually been shaped by somebody to match the natural contours of his hand. No doubt about it, he said the judge must have been as great as everybody said he was, to have a casket like that. Of course the downpour was unfortunate—dinna bode no good—cutting the preacher short and leaving no time for working up a good sing.

  I agreed that the casket looked fine but assured Jim that an expensive casket has no bearing on a man’s virtue. “I’m certain he wasn’t as great as everybody thought. Or as vile as everybody else thought.”

  “Who he? Dat vile?”

  “Vile. Wicked … bad.”

  “Nah! Da man wan’t bad! E binna tink aw de damn time on dem wotah melum. Da man gawt e mind onum like e do n’en e don’ know nuffin fuh save e own soul fuh true. Da man wan’t bad. Aw ways e lu-u-u-uv dem wotah melum. Me too.” Jim bet that I loved a nice fresh slice every bit as much as the next man, even dem black watermelon; it good too, fuh true. I poured us again, assuring him I didn’t know. We drank.

  “Jmetta!” he yelled, chilling me with visions of ultimate hospitality. “Jmetta!” The child returned. “Git dem awshtuh, child.” The child brought two oyster knives from the counter along with two paper napkins and set one of each before us. She fetched two foul damp rags from nails over the hearth and began to set them too, but Jim Cohen snatched and tossed them on the floor with a scowl.

  She moved forlornly to the shelf and served two fresh rags, stealing another grin at me from behind his back. Jim poured another round as she rummaged crocus sacks on the back porch and yelled for guidance on which sack was right for the white man. She fetched two before getting the right one. “Da right, child,” Jim Cohen finally approved, emptying the sack of large, select oysters onto the table and smiling proud. The child left.

  “These are some handsome beasts,” I allowed, drawing another look of puzzlement on his face for the strange way some white folks talk.

  “Jmetta!” She returned. “Dem French!”

  “Oh,” she squeaked, reaching under the counter for a jumbo jar of French’s Mustard with a push-button squirter on top. Jim Cohen held an oyster in his spatulate palm and shucked it clean as another man might halve a tomato. Setting his oyster knife aside, he leaned toward the squirter. “No,” Jmetta said, having fetched another clean rag to swab the squirter free of yellow crust and congealed goo, then swabbing again and again to prove her point and soak up a few moments more of undivided attention.

  “Stay with us,” Gary Moore said. “We’ll be right back to see who is telling the truth, but first …” The audience clapped.

  Jim Cohen laughed. “Da right, child.” She grinned and left. He severed the bottom muscle, reached and squirted and let it slide. “Mmm. Dem moh bettah.”

  I laughed too, still wondering more better than what, feeling oddly distant from the gray and mournful funk up the road that had felt far from laughter. I took off my jacket, rolled my sleeves and shucked. I tried a squirt of French’s and ate, then chased it with sweetwine, hurrying through two more shucks and drinks so these tastes would lose their disparate tang with immersion, I hoped, and so I too could sink into the apparent contentment Jim Cohen wallowed in. I asked, “Why do you suppose you were a designated pallbearer?”

  He smiled that knowing smile, unrelated to humor but kin to incongruous truth. Harkening back, he recalled how things had a pattern, and the patterns held, starting way back when the judge got in the habit of having Jim Cohen row him from one hole to the next while he trolled or jigged for spottails and weakfish. That was forty, fifty years ago and not at all the same as rowing a man on to the last fishing hole, “which ain’ zacly like binna bestess man at e weddin’ too, you know, but den it is, you know, moh less monumentous, so to speak.” Still and all, when he got right down to it, “Don’ know.”

  “Did you know Anne well?”

  “No. I know d’uddah two, dem wife womens.” Elaborating briefly on the pratfalls of watermelon out of season, he said it was demanding enough for a man to have some without it being bitter watermelon, which the judge had a strange taste for.

  “I grew up with the family, practically part of it, probably the closest thing to a son the judge ever knew. I wasn’t asked to be a pallbearer.”

  Now he laughed heartily, up next to humor with a double squirt of incongruity and some anomalous sprinkles on top, saying, “All dat son bidness go fly out de window jus soon de brickbats come flyin’ on in; cain’t ’spec a man to have you carry him out aftah dat.”

  “How in the hell did you know that?”

  “Ev’body know dat, Mist Aht.” He said the same Mary Green who found the bloodstained sheets was the Warings’ last housemaid before they swore off housemaids as dehumanizing. Any ways, Mary Green happened to be in the alley between the Waring house and de nexdoe neighba house. Mary Green was scrubbing a pot or beating a rug or dressing a fish or some such when she heard voices and saw flames flare up. She hugged the wall, knowing it be’s de debil and fearing fuh her own life, fuh true. She saw. Dinna wan no such view, but she saw. Afterward, when the commotion died down, and the sheriff left, and the federal marshals were on the way but hadn’t yet arrived, Mary Green told what she saw, which was four men, three unknown to her and Mister Arthur Covingdale. The judge said she was wrong about that, practically yelled at her, so she cried, describing Mist Aht’s mash boots, the ones he got fum de judge fuh Christmas on special order fum the Applecrumbie & Fetch in New York, New York. She described Mist Aht’s hat too and the thin moustache he wore at the time—till the judge broke in, pulling a Bible from the shelf and urging all hands on it, including his own, the new wife’s, Mary Green’s and Anne’s. The judge swore an oath by God that they’d never tell who burned that cross and threw those bricks and made all three them womens swear it too.

  I never doubted the efficacy of the prevailing theory over the years, that it was rednecks from North Charleston who burned that cross and threw those bricks. The redneck theory went well with the notion that our outrage had nothing to do with segregation; we weren’t racist but incensed over such a breakdown of common decency. Yes, that fit and suited me; you just can’t tell what those rednecks will do.

  But then my whole life as it had been lived felt like a doubt, like I’d spent the last twenty years with a huge woolly booger out my nose for everyone to see and talk about, but nobody would clue me in on. I felt worse than foolish, like a murderer who beat the rap but then couldn’t beat consensus.

  I felt low as the dregs, watching that old black man practically squeeze his bottle for a few more drops of cheap sherry, telling me I was the redneck, known for mortally wronging those close as family and forgiven by them even as they winced from the sting.

  “If everybody knew, then the oath wasn’t kept.”

  “D’oat wan’t kep, not in de sparit ob d’oat,” Jim Cohen commiserated, pouring from a fresh bottle, explaining that Mary Green never was treated that way before, putting her hand on the Bible and all, like God and oaths and such were applicable to her too. So when she told the story to every maid on the circuit, she included the part about the oath like it was just one more part of the story, and she happened to be in the same house the story occurred in, like the tables and chairs were in there too and would tell that story like she did, except that everybody knows tables and chairs can’t talk, not like a nigger maid. But oh, if they could. Maids can, and in turn they told the story to every husband, child, parent, cousin and friend on the mai
d circuit and in the maid sphere of influence, or at least the maid sphere of gossip. With sparse consolation, Jim Cohen assured me that only everybody knew, and not everybody else, meaning the help and not the gentry, leastways not for a year or so.

  I drank. He poured again with a decent silence for a blessed minute or two while I reviewed once again every damn day of the last twenty years lived in smug conviction. I broke the silence with the tough question, “How could you ask me in here? Sit at your table? Drink your wine, after I did a thing like that?”

  He said I gave him a ride home, and some sweetwine and oysters were the least he could offer. He looked down as if watching his thoughts line up. When he looked back up, his face was drawn between resignation and hard knocks; far as he could tell, nobody cared; nobody outcheah anyway. He couldn’t tell about the town blacks anymore, not since they been claiming what the judge told them was theirs. He laughed again; he didn’t much care about all that too, couldn’t see where a man with more rights would put food on the table any easier than a man free to run the river and bring home what he could. The judge made a bad time for white people, and that’s all there was to it. Besides, he said, “Here be Mist Aht Coventon, drank dem sweetwine and shuck dem awshtuh wid a ole fat nigga afta-all.”

  A long guzzle couldn’t douse my discomfort. I wished he wouldn’t use that word.

  “Covingdale,” I corrected. He poured, reminiscing deeper in the Sea Island patois, in and out of the gibberish it can become as if offering distraction as first aid to what ailed me. I watched his words as I might watch fish in a bucket, following the slow, fat ones. Dem fotey fo dollah was an apparent debt Jim owed the judge, forgiven suddenly in the recent telegram asking Jim to be a pallbearer. He’d taken awhile to figure where forgiveness came into the picture; he’d forgot about the debt long ago, minutes after the judge wrote it down so it wouldn’t be forgotten. Jim still couldn’t see where he’d harmed the judge by borrowing forty-four dollars, but if the new wife saw fit to forgive him, he’d forgive her right back.