In a Sweet Magnolia Time

by Wintner, Robert;

  Moreover, the cancelled debt and request to carry the casket went along with the pattern of contrition established back in those troubled days, which seemed to scratch the grain crossways from the former pattern established in prior days of extreme potential, when folks talked of Waties Waring as a political mover and shaker. Dem turkle egg time wid Mist Cotton Ed reflected the greatness of those days, if you factored in the sheer, raw presence of United States Senator Ellison Durant Smith, known in South Carolina as Cotton Ed. Waties and Cotton Ed snuck up on Jim, who’d snuck up on a raccoon, who’d snuck up on a sea turtle laying her eggs. Full moon in July, so you could see the players all right, her crying and plopping eggs in the hole, raccoon right there catching most of them and hiking them on back for collection later, except that Jim Cohen squatted back there like a bigger, smarter coon, catching eggs from the raccoon, till the judge and Cotton Ed spoiled the run by laughing so loud.

  That was the last time Jim saw the judge for years till the forty-four dollar loan, which confused hell out of Jim, because he never asked for the loan. It was simply offered so he could buy a new bateau for gathering oysters, which seemed a stretch from guffawing over the whole damn marsh at a nigger stealing eggs from an egg thief. Cotton Ed Smith was one of your highly powerful white men, most likely come on down to discuss the overall general management of the whole wide world, as it were.

  A casually spoken yet strident segregationist, Senator Smith hadn’t likely lent four cents to a musty hand and owed three of his six terms in the U.S. Senate to the campaign management of Waties Waring. Cotton Ed finally lost and then died, and the next time Jim Cohen saw Waties Waring was to get this fohty-fo dollah so’s he could git dem whitefoot selects’n carryum roun’ de house up to Rockville till e debt pay off.

  Jim took a bushel by and called it even, and that was that for another stretch of years, till he got invited to Judge Waring’s house in town for a sit-down dinner—strange world—with sheets on the table and glasses somehow welded on to these little glass stalks so skinny they like to break just sitting there, so nobody could even enjoy the sweetwine without worrying themselves sick over the dainty handling required by the setting and the occasion. And then you had all these folks talking soft as if somebody be lying up next to dead next door, all making with the fa fa de blah blah over dem brand new champeen ob dem simple right, de judge ’n e wife woman.

  Back to the old time, aw, me … Jim Cohen was houseboy for the Waring summer home near Rockville and couldn’t even take a samidge on de poach, not de front poach nuh de back poach too. And back to Mist Ned, e be’s de bestess white man. Ned Waring, Waties’ father, hired Jim Cohen the day they moved their summer things into the summer home on Ledinwah Creek, about the time of the war, meaning WWI, which should not be confused with The War.

  From there recollection was general and confusing but beneficent and providential too, like a eulogy exhuming the unsavory for exhortation and calling up the warmth and goodness too, lest they be forgotten. He told a good tale so a listener could follow easy as turning pages on a book that feels like it’ll end too soon. I listened over a faint buzz inside, which was the clamor of all the people over all the years who knew the crime I’d committed, even as they smiled and nodded at what I’d had to say. How secure I’d been in my little secret. I’d gotten away with it, don’t you know.

  Jim Cohen reached back as though for cause. We drank through To Tell the Truth and Hogan’s Heroes and two more sitcoms with canned laughter and applause, Jim sometimes joining in like a man who is part of the world, no matter what foolishness it engages in. Between dusk and twilight he stood slowly, measuring his strength and balance, and walked outside. From his porch steps he watched Bohicket Creek through an opening in the trees. “Slack’m’up,” he said, meaning slack tide, low water. He plucked a finished cast net from a nail and said, “Come on.” I said I’d walk down with him to stretch a bit, but then I’d be running along.

  We walked down another dirt road through another oak stand out to the clearing and parking lot at Cherry Point Landing. The gray dusk darkened softly over the river at low water with a breezeless twilight coming on. The clouds dissipated, and the air warmed a bit, bringing on the night and teasing us with fading warmth. Jim Cohen wound up like a tired spring and unwound just as slowly, but the net fanned open, hit the water and sank flat till he jerked it gently in. A single mullet, maybe a pound, squirmed among a dozen mud minnows. He let them fall out three steps back where they’d flip around and die or else lie calm and breathe easy till the flood came in. He cast again, moving down the bank for three more casts and three more mullet. He laid them in the center of the net, folded things neatly, and we headed back up. The dozens of mud minnows flashed silver in the light that lingered from the long day and moonrise. They calmed down and waited for death or flood tide, whichever might come first. The tide turned and crept up slow as a watched clock.

  Jim Cohen gutted his mullet under a naked bulb at the end of the porch where the planks were hacked and dark and sparkled with scales. Inside the child tended the iron pot of lard on the fire. In my jacket again, straightened, combed and wondering how the evening might fill in, I strolled out to the cleaning station on the porch in the next phase of departure, which commonly runs in phases in this part of the world.

  Jim Cohen scaled and beheaded the fish and cut the guts out and put the heads and guts in a lidded plastic bucket on the ground. I watched him and asked if he was still setting crab pots. He asked back why a man on a creek would not set crab pots. He cut the fish into three sections each and set them on a plate delivered by the child. A car pulled up, a Buick Electra with fender skirts, curb feelers, a fur trimmed mirror and a mat woven from six-pack plastics in the rear window deck. On the woven mat sat a fuzzy little dog whose eyes lit up red with the brake lights as the dog nodded continuing approval. Two boys in shabby sweaters and stiff denim pants with the cuffs rolled up got out, one carrying a load of greens, the other with another bottle of the same sherry.

  “Ey,” one said, passing me on his way inside.

  “Ey,” said the other, following the first.

  Jim Cohen followed both with his plate of fish. I followed him to complete my farewell ablutions. At the sink he rinsed and floured each piece. I watched him, ruminating on the simple pleasures lost to me but then reminding myself that such things go away naturally and must be recaptured by free will and intention. Finally I said, “I want to thank you for your hospitality, Jim. I hope I can repay it sometime.”

  The idea of him coming to my place socially felt foolish as the mess I’d worn on my face all those years, maybe not so outlandish as a formal sit-down at a federal judge’s table, but we both knew the odds on him coming to town for drinks and a visit. I felt like the fox inviting the stork over for some soup but had no alternative but to issue the empty invite anyway, because I felt a rare gratitude for his confidence and hospitality, and there wasn’t a thing else for it. I hoped he understood that.

  He turned my way and shuffled past. “Come on. Be’s good.” He moved to the stove, leaving my sincerity and me in his wake. Maybe I recognized a simple pleasure in range for the taking then, seeing where Jim Cohen lived and how he managed to stay there. I was no stranger to casual life at home but felt like a stranger in that home, because it was strange, as close to the earth as I’d ever been and then some, feeling an inch or two below the surface often as not. I walked back out to the porch to watch the sky darken and the first stars twinkle then went back in, not for curiosity or insight.

  I knew how they lived. Primitive and poorly spoken was how, often dirty and maybe less ignorant than they put on but still ignorant of what holds a society together. Unschooled and unknowing, they seemed to stay that way by choice, not because anyone kept them from anything. They didn’t pursue self-improvement but just settled in and stayed like water at its own level. But like I say, I knew that and went back in through the freshly acrid sweetness and disparaging gazes of two boys
whose doubt now infected the girl child too. She stared with them at the sorry-looking white man.

  The nightly news came on. Jim Cohen turned it off and turned his radio on, covering the knobs with flour. “Dem green!” He instructed the boy with the greens on preparation and cooking. “Fush,” he handed the fish to the other boy and took the bottle. He opened and poured so we could get on with cocktails and more talk. I think he knew why I came back in and why I’d stay for dinner, because some things speak the same in any dialect, because I was confused, lonely and hungry.

  V

  Now How’n a Hell D’at Happen?

  The wine had yet to ferment that would have cheered me into staying the night. The mullet filled my belly with a warmth and hospitality that fairly fended off the congealing lard soon settling on my chest. I focused on sustenance and the good cheer of the thing to take my mind off the discomforts, chief among them the painful challenges of the long day behind us. The greens had been boiled lifeless with onions, pepper, ham hocks and garlic to a soulful fulfillment of food groups. The sherry could only improve, and Jim Cohen’s hospitality was Southern as any I’d seen.

  The afternoon and evening recalled the severe paucity of rural interludes in my life. We didn’t go out to the country like this but rather engaged in a more formal, staged format, in what we called country outings. Like, say, the annual pilgrimage to Camden, for The Cup. That was more typical of our contact with nature, partaking of a continuous tailgate formed of vehicles surrounding the entire track, start to finish, including the clubhouse turn and the stretch. We flowed on around along with the drinks, good cheer and buffet to beat the band. I use the nominal “we,” though I’d have been hard pressed to fill in the blanks just then with names. The faces too seem to blend on a common bliss, as if this happiness would never end, eternal as the life ever after, as we, the chosen few, had died, and this was it, walking round the track just up from the River Styx. Oh, I could have easily enough filled in the names and other festive details, but it was as I say, a grim, gray day of reckoning.

  Even considering The Cup, I realized its foolishness. It was outdoors and involved horses racing around a track, so many people attending wore riding boots and jodhpurs, for the spirit of the thing. Some carried crops, perhaps to demonstrate their own spirit, willing in an instant to straddle a beast and bound for glory. And a great good time was had by all. So maybe the greens stuck in my teeth weren’t so noticeable to my own ilk.

  This and other reassessments accompanied the drive north from Jim Cohen’s, along with my new view of what a country outing should be, as well as a new measure of Jim’s merits. He and I both presented new profiles that evening, historically speaking. In objective terms, which are euphemistic for highbrow intellectual terms, I could have profiled myself as realizing an equally rich history of Charleston’s other landed gentry, the dark cousins of similar name who live yonder in the marsh flats. The problem was, I did not see myself or them in that light just yet. Like sibling rivals deign to see virtue in each other, so too was I still removed from perception yet to come. Besides, I was too taken with self-loathing.

  Overriding my headlights gave credence to the phantoms following me up that long black alley through the boughs. What was ahead came on way too fast, showing itself only when I was already in it. I could have slowed down but didn’t for fear of getting stuck in the shuffle I hoped to step free of. Or maybe I feared losing a momentum verging on insight that would, for once in my godforsaken life, stick. All day developing to a crest of truth or meaning meant to liberate my sorry soul, my wave of knowing was easily imagined as fanciful, as gone tomorrow, when reality would resume. Or maybe I goosed the pedal with resignation to what seemed inevitable, that I wanted to get home, where I’d sort things out, or I wouldn’t.

  A certain decrepitude didn’t exactly slow my gate or stoop my shoulders but depressed my mind and body like fatigue. It slurred my confidence. A new lesson had begun, and seemed as elusive as it was difficult. However grateful and warm I was, driving home half drunk and fully doubtful, I could not fathom the notion of bedding down in that place. The smell and blackness were beyond comfort, whether from chronic prejudice or personal weakness or both; I couldn’t tell. I suppose prejudice is a weakness, but a man who doesn’t know what he likes and dislikes is a fool. Even as I bathed safely and hygienically back on Queen Street, I laughed and cringed at the great liberal I’d become since morning. I hadn’t supped with them since infancy, and then it was one-on-one in the old, Southern direct feed, like many of my generation did but didn’t dwell on it. The bountiful black breast was not allegorical but practical; the black women were so pregnant, the white women so busy.

  Directly to bed, I wanted sleep before the warmth and dullness wore off, before the evening’s population gained density and kept me up with their difficult questions. The old house seemed particularly aggravated in its creaking rafters and shifting foundation, or maybe that was the wind, turned up a notch to fitful gusts, perhaps realigning the old house so its chronic lean and slump could reconcile to its earthquake rods and melting windows.

  Or maybe the shifting foundation was in me, calling for a bicarbonate to move the pork fat off my chest. I pondered the first of the month, only three days hence, at which time the risk of forgetting to water the fern compounded, or, as I presumptively called it, Fern. Fern, of the asparagus ferns, came as an infant and got hung by a macramé hanger in the same pot of its germination. Too much water; Fern drooped and spotted. Not enough water; Fern browned. Just the right absorption; Fern stretched, reached, angled and cajoled its way around the entire perimeter of the living room with a side trip to the foyer, following the picture molding gracefully as a stroke of nature, hung there with care every foot or two by tasteful hooks screwed discreetly into the wood, and all on the encouragement of short, well-timed drink. Perhaps I identified with Fern. At any rate, I poured the drink, a single, though Fern most often liked company. Better a bit premature, I reasoned, than no drink at all. Or maybe this task too was an attempt to displace niggling thoughts. Hard to say; I was fond of Fern.

  Back in bed I followed the standard procedure, eyes closed, breathing slowly on a sea of easy patterns, drifting off like a happy plant reaching for more. Yet I drifted into rapids where Anne the child scurried to tend amorphous, dream needs, scrambling too many eggs and over-watering the plants. Her mother called out meekly, incessant and inane, until those images too joined the pattern and faded into a single movement.

  Up early, I sidestepped the khaki suit and button-down, blue oxford cloth shirt that more or less made up our uniform. The rest of the world had hair down to its ass, beads and gypsy vests and bell-bottom trousers like the carnival was in town to stay. All that oddball, hippie stuff seemed to sanction our casual formality as a fundamental defense of our way of life. We stayed behind the times by choice, don’t you know, as if three decades back marked us as keen, incisive, independent and sure.

  And penny loafers. I stepped instead into my tennies and dungarees and a flannel shirt that felt more like home. Of course country clothing feels better, but this time it itched with apprehension on the questions inevitably forthcoming down on the sidewalk. Taking the day off? Going fishing? Playing hooky again? Ad infinitum they’d ask, pointedly avoiding the old man’s funeral that they all knew good and well I’d attended, till it made you wonder where in hell the brains came from, till you knew it was from the same spigot that sired the fools just north.

  Not that a lawyer can’t take a day off and go fishing, but he can’t go without everybody knowing. Besides, I wasn’t going fishing or anywhere. It just seemed like time to stop and change some of the things I did every damn day without knowing why but conformed because I did the same thing yesterday and hoped to repeat tomorrow. Stop it, I thought; move to something else. I needed time to hearken myself, back to a young man riled to the point of throwing bricks through his friend’s window, because his friend wouldn’t be able to deliver a judgeship.
I remembered that rash impulse like it was minutes ago, like I just now banged my thumb with a hammer and felt it throb and smart. Waties Waring embarrassed me. But I was my own fool; I didn’t even want to be a judge and didn’t know that till a few decades after I lost my chance. I had friends all over town who did want it and some who made it and maybe one or two who sat on the bench instead of me, by the Grace of God and Waties Waring’s fall from Grace.

  All I felt beside regret that morning after supper at Jim Cohen’s was gratitude. Every lawyer I knew either repressed the repetition and drudgery of life or honestly recognized boredom so stiff and deep, it was no wonder they gravitated to the health supplement of the area, Vitamin S, which is local jargon for scotch, poured right out of the bottle if it’s the good stuff or poured from an heirloom crystal decanter cut when dollars blossomed like cotton balls if it’s cheap.

  Genteel company wouldn’t delve in ugly talk with words like cheap but preferred calling it second drawer, which wasn’t near harsh as non-white, and those families only two or three generations landed who yearned for the high view might decant to an empty bottle with a good label, said bottle at one time actually containing the good stuff, which must be worth something. This practice was common, discreet and not discussed, because there was no point or purpose in discussing something sensitive when that something was deemed acceptable by virtue of non-discussion. What else could you do but recycle the bottles with the good labels when a whole damn nation of Yankees comes in and steals what you had? Practicality in a polite presentation was the point yet again; that and the status of scotch, not as a habit nor (Mercy, me! My Lord! Did you ever?) an addiction but rather as a tradition of, shall we say, historical stature. But I digress. The greater point sticking in my shorts that rueful and perhaps fateful day was syllogistic, arrived at via a minor and major premise on the way to a conclusion. All lawyers in Charleston were alcoholic. I was a lawyer in Charleston. Voilà.