I pointed out that next to his history, mine seemed uneventful. And there I was, rendering mine simpler still, moving from the urbane to the rural, or from the paved area surrounded by the circled wagons back out to the bush. But simplicity is a delusion. I suffered social fatigue; the place I came from was mannerly, polite, well groomed and alert.
I was a top-drawer representative of those things till they turned on me, or till I realized who I was, or maybe what I’d inherited, or the source of my discomfort or some such. It wasn’t the town’s fault. I’d made my own trouble, first in life, then in marriage. Then I closed the show with alcoholism. But I was done with drink surely as I was done with living in town. Eudora was a bump in the road ten miles back.
I knew what underscored my migration even as I would have denied my flight, even as the seed germinated, its threadlike roots cracking the foundations of my heart and mind, finding at last something to feed on. Maybe a man needs deconstruction down to rudiments.
I returned to my place on Queen Street to see what might draw me back or what had held me there or if any iota might inform the bond I’d so believed in for what had been my entire life to date. Those quiet rooms with their tall windows drafty as a sieve and ceilings high enough to accommodate a passing squall seemed to echo my wonder. I’d spent hours outdoors on Wadmalaw engaging in life itself, unmindful of the cold. Yet for two days back in town in the presumed security of the family abode, I chilled to the bone. My joints squeaked and creaked along with the floor joists, unless I stood still, looking out the windows to see if I hadn’t missed something. I gathered a change of clothes, some toiletries, my rubber boots, a hat and some odds and ends along with the rest of my booze, which was the ready reserve and not the private reserve, because the Mohicans rarely ever go away. I gave Fern a drink and headed back out.
Hauling the rest of the booze was only practical in my view, given the incremental productivity of the thing, and then the generosity verging on magnanimity too, but then selective perception was likely packed up and hauled along as well. After a few days on the island I was struck by the convenience available in my own bathroom and kitchen, so simple and clean. Yet relieved and sustained, I could only sense the greater difference between the rural and the civilized; one was set in stone while the other changed every day.
I would call my return to town rigorous and occasionally chilling during those two days. Wearing the hail-fellow happy face, if not the khaki suit, the wing tips and the sky-blue, button-down, oxford-cloth shirt, I assured friends and associates in passing that no, I had not “gone native on us,” explaining as necessary and then some that a man needs a reprieve now and then. I responded in the tentative bordering on affirmative when asked if I found what I was looking for at the judge’s funeral. Smug sonsabitches; as if they’d know once I told them.
Mr. Hughes Boyd Thomas asked if it was true, that I was staying out to Wadmalaw with the niggers, right in their damn houses and such. I hadn’t known Hughes Thomas other than to exchange gratuities at the club, but I filled my eyes with the stocky little man, taking him in slowly, head to foot. What could I do, be angry? He’d likely never burned a cross or thrown bricks through windows. I suppose he got an eyeful of me too, allowing, “Hey, man, you do whatever you want, don’t mean shit to me. I just … You know.”
So I told him, “Yes. It’s true.”
He served up one of those half-lit smiles to convey his mournful wonder, as if to say, Aw, bubba … Then he walked away. I wanted to call after him but couldn’t muster the energy or skill to summarize what I’d learned, that two shabby black boys in a jive car were in fact descendents of a survival saga to make your hair curl. He knew what they were and wouldn’t be told otherwise.
Little dramas played out, some calling for my opinion as if to challenge the point put forth for my own good. That is, my friends expressed concern that I seemed peculiar those days. Peculiarity is a catchall ailment in town, diagnosing them for whom eccentricity is innate as well as them who may swing precariously, on the verge of unhinging. But if a man of recordable background has a phase of doubt and confusion, he might ought to know that his friends are right there to call on in his time of need. I appreciated the sentiment and took the sincerity at face value, yet hearing this pledge of support, I wondered why I hadn’t called on them but instead found solace in the old black fellow who sold gleaned produce from his car out on Savannah Highway.
I did not know the answer to the questions of peculiarity and certain friendly support, except that I’d failed to imagine what support might be offered in town that could be significantly different from what I’d experienced there in the prior fifty-eight years. I’d be a fool not to value assurance that I remained among kith and distant kin, despite my unannounced and indefinite removal to the marshlands. So turning the happy face inward, I resolved to keep that assurance in my pocket, in case I might need it sometime.
And in a mere matter of moments, I pulled it out, confiding in a chance encounter with Peter Maxwell, of the Greenville Maxwells, but still a sterling fellow in spite of his parents’ relocation to the Holy City only fifty years prior, that yes, I may appreciate very much the support of friends in this time of, shall we say, retreat. That is, Peter Maxwell was one of eight or twelve men who maintained the Wadmalaw Hunt Club, a wood structure painted green with a tin roof, twenty by twenty with a wood stove, four bunk beds, a sink and two electrical outlets.
Four or five times a year these men would spend a long weekend there staying drunk, smoking Cuban cigars and trying not to shoot each other in their staggering efforts to shoot Bambi’s mother, or, into the second night, Babar’s wife. But the cabin had remained unused since Orian Hale took his secretary there for what he called some private dictation. His wife Helen (a.k.a Helen of Coy) followed him, flat out picked up the scent a day in advance and sniffed him on out to the cabin and waited outside to de moment inflagránte, Yo Honah, then walked in snapping photographs, providing happy grist for the mill in town that grinded it out for weeks in juicy speculation of what Helen was thinking, taking pictures, which was better for Orian than shooting him with a gun, and whether her shots were vertical or horizontal format.
Orian lost everything in the divorce proceeding but was allowed to keep his print shop in town, which he called his job, claiming she’d never want that. What would she do with it? He rose in everyone’s esteem that Christmas, raising a toast to the already-toasted at a brimful Hibernian Hall, regretting he had but one wife to give for his country. Orian Hale proved that a man’s dexterity can turn the tide of public sentiment on a good one-liner. Moreover, the Hunt Club was tainted evermore as a trysting spot and therein became off limits to those members with a keen instinct for discretion, making it right for me.
So I asked Peter what he thought about me using the place, say for a month. He didn’t say a word but smiled warmly with a half nod as he reached into his pocket for his keys and removed a small one. He said it fit the Master Lock on the door, and don’t worry; he’d tell the fellows not to go out there without making some noise or something. I begged off as required, insisting that you can’t keep people from their place. He said, “Naaah! You make better use of it anyway. You might want a cooler. Don’t have a fridge.”
So I threw some sheets and blankets and a pillow in the car but went back in for some books and my house slippers and a few more shirts and my tennie pumps. I drove on down to the K Mart for a cooler but then realized I had no easy access to ice, so I sprang eighty dollars for a small fridge and set it up for a delivery, though I couldn’t really say how to get there other than go to Rockville, hang a left, a right and another left along the creek and look for a green cabin. I hoped the Hunt Club wouldn’t mind my contribution and doubted they would.
Back at my place for a final tally of needs and supplies, I had to pause over the finality of this purview. I was headed maybe forty minutes out of town. So why did I feel like tomorrow I’d cast off for parts unknown? I marveled onc
e more at my discomfort on the verandah with nothing to occupy my hands and mind, like a drink or some chit chat. So I had a beer.
You still get a beautiful sunset in town along with songbirds, though fewer in winter, and clean air, though nature’s blessings seem abruptly pre-empted by buildings and pavement and the man-made veneration that goes along with that sort of thing. I pondered chitchat and thanked my stars that day for the only dialogue audible on my own verandah, which was a friendly exchange in question-and-answer format between Fern and me. You want to go? It’s small and has a wood stove. I didn’t go so far as to hear him answer, but I figured his preference. Next thing you know it’s looking like the Wadmalaw hillbillies, save the rocker on top. I draped Fern around the rearview and damn near felt like the family was on the go together.
Maybe I had gone native. I wanted to get back out there, like something waited for the finding, but I wouldn’t find it unless I went. I stopped off for some candles and a lamp and some wood for the stove. And a sleeping bag, in case it was too cold. And a coffeemaker and some groceries.
I got back out there with an hour of daylight left, in time to see that the marshland stays busy as a boulevard in rush hour, if you gear down and see it. Soon enough you look up to something more in a weather pattern than the basis for prognostication at street level as prelude to cocktails. Out yonder, free of interruption, I could watch the clouds cleave in deference to an overbearing squall line with presumptuous thunderheads moving in. That felt refreshing, once I learned patience and stillness, country style—and wake up to the ion charge in the hair on my arms followed straight away by a chill popping head to toe. It was only stray static charging up a conductivity conduit but felt more like myself changing, molting, bursting forth and shedding the old carapace. I wondered if a soul can outgrow itself, but I couldn’t sit there still for as long as I wanted to because of the greater want to feather the nest and get comfortable. Didn’t take long.
Amazed again at the expedience of a man’s change in life, I took to the flats the very next day, sipping a tumbler of Teacher’s for the prerequisite expedience, which was getting rid of the last of the liquor so it would be gone forever and new times could begin in earnest. I told Jim Cohen I was an alcoholic in recovery, explaining that the nature of the ailment is that the alcoholic diagnosis has no cure, because nobody ever found one, so recovery lasts as long as the alcoholic lasts. But I’d decided with a clear mind to accept this brief regression to facilitate the current transition, so I could sort out what else ailed me besides getting rid of the liquor.
Jim Cohen assured me that if a mind was clear, it was already sorted, clarity in this case defaulting to his dictate. I enumerated the variable complexity between mud grubbing on the one hand and more evolved social, political and career matrices on the other. I mean, one may be clear, so to speak, for sorting and the other not. Of course that analysis echoed the sophistry I’d suffered for decades in equal measure to the sauce. Still, his superiority in our mutual understanding could be a bone of contention. I tried not to be generous as antidote to my own superiority (not to be confused with supremacy, though deriving from similar distortion). Then again, why shouldn’t I challenge his sophistry, if all things were equal? I frankly wished him a clear view of his insistence: dey ain’ no two way bout ’um. And I told him so. Oh, but he knew about recovering alcoholics; they were only recovering as long as they laid off the sauce; otherwise dey be’s relaxing.
“You mean relapsing.”
“Yeah.”
Make no mistake, Jim Cohen could tell the difference between screw-top sherry and Teacher’s scotch, and therein he recognized a phase of his own, in which top-drawer liquor was pouring for the drinking hardly a step and a stumble from his porch. He joined me often as not but could not hold pace with a conditioned toddy tipper such as myself. No shame in that; a novice needs time and practice to achieve journeyman skills—this glib assessment was more accurate than might be perceived from afar. The age of realization brings certain tastes, commonly called acquired tastes, though they seem to compensate life’s general demeanor so concisely that the acquisition may be automatic to many. You age; you drink. The reason our Lowcountry region is historically so absorbent is conjectural. Some hold with the alcoholic gene theory; others say the sultry air and slow pace demand fortification if not courage. Others pshaw all theories, saying that a place so social will drink more. Jim Cohen disproved this theory no less social than the next man, but his society was that of a country man bearing warm tidings to the next man he met. He was thirsty outside the daily flow in town. One more theory I felt held water was that of abundant beauty; with such a high baseline of aesthetic pleasure, a person needs external stimulation to get higher. Whether this was merely alcoholic rationale doesn’t matter; it worked. But the real cause for so much drinking was a blend of all these theories plus any others you’d care to conjure. The place is sultry, egregiously social and aggressively hospitable, with so many house-and-garden showplaces open on a regular basis to show what the habitants have done, that you get drawn in and handed a generous libation as part of the show, with audience participation required. With such beauty abounding, a man could take his leave, go home and drink alone on his own veranda, because solitude was never so warm and friendly as nestled there among the live oaks and Spanish moss with the scent of wisteria turning the mind to sweetness.
So we drank the last of the good stuff, Jim and I, sitting out by the flats, enjoying what we loved in equal measure, meaning the hooch, the sea and sky and all the creatures in between, among whom we played our part. The sauces loosened him up, I thought. I didn’t then suspect ulterior motive in his relentless tale, yet perceived the yarn spinning out and piling up at our feet, as it were, till I could only wonder: What in a hell he fixin’ a weave?
On just such a social afternoon maybe two weeks or two months into my Wadmalaw sojourn, we neared the end of the booze with a handful of bottles remaining. It wasn’t a binge but a diversion in those days of pleasant survival. I would have thought it barbaric and wasteful to guzzle this stuff straight from the bottle—in other places, at other times, that is. But there never was a meal so good as one taken in the rough, over the fire, and we’d arrived at that same natural goodness.
Jim was jumping around, narratively speaking, moving to major world events and their impact on those people who seemed to summarize the evolutionary process in a generation or two, crawling out of the mud like they did in ’66, but instead of taking the Pleistocene or Neanderthal ages to invent wheels and discover fire, they were forming up the Gullah Air Force hardly fifty years down the road, around ’18 or ’19.
I suppose the military has always imagined efficiency, succeeding about as much as the ugly step sisters squeezing them bunion dogs into some dainty glass slippers. The Gullah Air Force was designed by the U.S. military via the South Carolina Militia to utilize resources, meaning the blacks, on the islands south of town. A couple of trainer biplanes got painted up camouflage, except for the stars and bars predominant on the fuselages, which was meant as a joke, don’t you know, sending a special signature gift from way down here up to what was still called the Union Army.
Oh, we knew we could count on the island boys to send our sweet revenge airborne on that moth-eaten fleet of swayback nags. It would have been a laugh for the ages too, had not those nappy-headed pilots turned revenge back on us, crashing both planes in Church Creek after one lap around the pylons. Jim Cohen laughed softly telling the story, maybe underscoring his appreciation of the resources available south of town.
Hardly a cynical man, he turned quickly to happier days, circa WWI, or maybe it was a time before that, on account of his being only fourteen when he first hung out at his aunt’s piccalo. You give two or more blacks something to drink and eat and a fire to stand around or a radio to jive to or some gossip to chew on, you got the basic rudiments for a piccalo. It’s a place of social gathering, more or less, devolved now to gas, beer, Moonpies, R
C Cola, Slim Jims, bicarbonate, Goody’s Powder, combs, rubbers and breath mints and maybe some hubbub in the parking lot on the weekends. But back then those places could swing, most often the only places for miles around with a radio, meaning music, which was the meaning of swing, or bop or rag, which was to music in town what cursing was to polite company; you plain didn’t do it in town, so sometimes the town blacks would come out too.
A piccalo gave a pulse to what needed ventilating in the social wilderness. Jim Cohen’s aunt was Tyra Bohne, though he never called her Auntie, maybe because she facilitated the good times available then to a healthy young buck. That is, she got him his first taste, meaning she knew whom among the teenage females was willing but not too willing, who she liked or considered unhealthy, whether from poorly chosen partners or unmanaged proclivity or otherwise ominous indicators. It was a Saturday night Jim Cohen said he’d remembered fifty-five years already and believed the imprint leastways good enough for another fifty. Tyra Bohne came out to the house the week prior and encouraged her nephew to come out to Bohne’s Piccalo on Saturday, because she had something for him.
He went. He’d been before but had yet to penetrate the periphery, passing through the observers and otherwise constrained folk who mull outside any social gathering like flotsam whirling near an eddy without ever easing into the whorl. Again he lingered on the periphery, until she spied him and came out and took his hand and led him into the rhythm. He knew right off something was up; his aunt Tyra looked so different, disheveled like she’d slept in her clothes or danced to abandon in them. Sweaty and fanning her blouse, she grinned in that crazy way of women who throw the reins aside and let the spirit run.
He knew such things took place and remembered his apprehension, approaching the mysterious pulse. The radio supplanted his own heartbeat with a downbeat through loops and dips, swirls and dives, joining every person there through the plaintive sax, piano and bass of Jellyroll Morton, Lester Young and Robert Johnson.
In a Sweet Magnolia Time Page 16