In a Sweet Magnolia Time

by Wintner, Robert;

  Jim Cohen wagged his head like a pendulum, regretting that time so long gone. But he went to a nod on the rhythm and swing of Fayreva, call her Fay, the only girl recalled by name from those years, his fuyst tays o’ de tang, you know. I suspected her thirty-fifth taste and an insatiable appetite, even as she skewered his heart with the power.

  We guzzled again for Fayreva and the power; mm mm! I did not ask where she is now. Better to let him savor what he’d dredged from the years. The memory seemed rare, possibly hearkened for my benefit, so I stayed mum, passed the bottle and let the show unfold in Jim and the sky above. A few gamboling clouds, six egrets winging home at five oh two and a first twinkle of the evening star, one more facet of the invisible gem Jim and I cut there on the flats.

  I mean, you got to love the sauce for the good it does sometimes, like infusing brotherly love between a stodgy white lawyer and a fat old black—sure we were tipsy, not quite seeing double but feeling single and moreover numb to the parasites passing on the bottle—hell, the liquor’d likely kill them or me first. As for sharing a bottle with that black man, it raised no more compunction than double dipping in the punch bowl on the way to knee-walking downtown with your so-called “professional types.” That is, Jim Cohen was my friend, not that we weren’t friends before, but it changed with stories and meals, the binding behaviors of most species. Not sex; sex is divergent, not binding, so procreation enhances the gene pool, avoiding the inbreed.

  We had so many stories to tell, and it didn’t mean squat who shared a bed or a bottle. More important were the souls that touched in the most unlikely ways in this veil of tears. I’m not sentimental and never considered what motivated Jim Cohen to go gather his meals one at a time. So I stepped up that bank for firmer footing and asked man to man: “First taste? You mean you ate de watahmelon?”

  I laughed so he’d know the question was merely playful, but he scanned the river, squinting at a break or a rip, then smacking his lips my way. “Wouldn’ you?”

  Well, hesitation can give a man away and lose ground on the masculinity issue, depending of course on the venue of the cross-examination. I didn’t believe I’d eat the local watermelon on account of the hygiene issue, though my set response of the last few decades was not based on hygienic practicality but rather on the hazards of a man touching his tongue to ice cold steel.

  Hell no! I would have spewed forth in great good humor in the professional crowd I ran in, men ruled by practicality, men who feared ridicule and so declined such notions altogether. Not that the wives seemed unsavory once you wrapped some duct tape over the talk hole, but that was unlikely as unconstrained passion. Eating Eudora seemed inappropriate, because she wasn’t that sort of woman. Look who she married: a fellow with a questionable pulse, much less a yen for crotch pie. I think she’d scream bloody murder, demanding to know where such vile behavior came from that would sure as the devil lead to expectations of reciprocity, and then how could she look her friends in the eye? He waited for my answer. I finally lawyered out with equivocation. “There was a time …”

  “Mmm …” he said, waiting to hear when and what, finally nodding and allowing, “Might yet be.”

  I let it go, uncertain of his meaning, though I speculated, because all species are slave to hormones, and I had a few stragglers. Perhaps it’s only our species that contemplates individuals. I ruled out the white women I knew since most seemed similar to Eudora, and the black ones for obvious reasons. The young of either color were easier, flaunting their wares, daring the hazards of house arrest.

  I’d hungered for sex the last few years, till Meredith Montague got divorced about the same time I did and was still fairly preserved. She presented herself one cocktail hour with a suggestion of some private time together and a body accent to boot. I suggested a date for the following day, just before lunch, when I really am at my best. She never came by and maybe that’s why I still think of her as my last chance for a last taste.

  Maybe that pall on the marsh marked my rebirth after so many small deaths. I hoped so, but another depression arose, first symptom of another death, small or otherwise. I wondered if I’d ever get laid again and shrugged it off as anxiety typical to a man in the wilderness. I felt good with nature abounding, except for the lack of the you-know-what. Then I wondered if I ought to head up to Rockville and call Meredith Montague on the pay phone there, see if she might want to come out to the Hunt Club. Then I laughed, certain I’d never get laid again and hoping the nature abounding could tide me over. Maybe I should call Meredith. This far out of town would be discreet.

  Jim Cohen scanned for weather or recollection. I scanned him, fearful yet curious. I am man. It be’s darkness coming on.

  “Oh, man, dat Fayreeva; si’teen yeah ole ’n like to ruint me fuh walkin on dem feets uh dem knee eida one.” So they danced and drank to optimal aerobic range out to the periphery among the older folks and on out toward the trees, where she led him by the hand up the path to a lie-down he realized later she’d used often. But ignorance was bliss; so too Fayreeva, sweetly tapping the vein to free the mother lode.

  Proud as a cock six days running, he sought a second taste and found her on a casual stroll in the trees with Henry Seabrook, an older, taller boy who worked maintenance with his father and had money in his pocket for sweetwine, granting Jim Cohen greater insight on the tough row to hoe for a fellow with more oats to sow than fields lying fallow.

  As I say, this sodden recall of youthful romance into twilight was a bonding, and I marveled at the scene of us reviewing vaginal vicissitudes over a guzzled bottle on the flats. I hadn’t questioned his motivation on friendship; hell, I was a novelty. Besides that, he led the way with facility and soul baring; nothing was left to question. Until he said, “A niece be’s same’s a daughta to me, though she ain’ but Mose grandaughta. Tek care like she do. You know? Fohty yeah ole. Ha ha. She fine.”

  Accent notwithstanding, I pieced together this obscure detour to his niece, whom he cared for like a daughter, who turned out to be forty-one and (oh, no) fine. Jim Cohen a matchmaker? “Wait a minute. Mose’s granddaughter?”

  “Mm hmm.”

  “Mose was your father’s brother?”

  “Mm hmm. E sail ob de Guadeloupe, in de French Windies.”

  “Then she’s your cousin.”

  “May be she a cuz too.”

  “You said your niece.”

  “She Aníse. Her name Aníse.”

  “Like the spice?”

  “Da right. She de licrich stick.”

  “I see.”

  “Hmph. Don’ see nuffin. Gimme dat bottah.”

  “Jiss whatchou gittin at, Mista Jim?”

  “Ain gittin a nuffin. Jis spec a man oughta see what e see fo e go sayin e see wha’d is.”

  “So you want me to see her?”

  “Don’ wan nuffin.” He guzzled too long for comfort, like he needed the extra time to think and the extra sauce for courage. Lowering the bottle with a gasp, “Ahhh,” he put it back on me. “How bout’chu? Wha’chou fittin a want?”

  “Aw, man.”

  “It good.”

  XII

  The Fulgent Light of Knowing

  Robert F. Kennedy got shot the second week of June that year. Or maybe it was the first week or the third. Didn’t matter hereabouts, since we were predisposed to the Hump anyway without much need for review. RFK got shot in the head winning the California primary, so maybe he’d have beaten Humphrey. I suppose we’d have backed Bobby too back then when the South was solid. Seemed odd, after they killed Martin Luther King in Memphis two months earlier. Not that he mattered around here either, but for looking like Jim Cohen fifty pounds lighter with a different articulation.

  Jim knew Cirry Seabrook since childhood but saw her only when her daddy brought up a load of greens from Seabrook Island, namesake of the emancipated Seabrooks. Jim paused at the telling, still struggling with her absence ten years after her passing. Or maybe he only took a moment to bring her
up from indifference, such as I strove to feel for Eudora. I actually savored the image of her under her new husband and would have paid plenty to be the fly on that wall, watching her anxiety for the continuing pulse of the man inserted into her.

  But I digress. Jim’s wife Cirry died ten years prior, influenza. They had three boys and two girls, all but one grown and gone down to the south end, closer to Seabrook, where Cirry’s family had land. The two boys staying near Jim’s house were Jim’s grandsons, cousins to each other. They wanted to start a salvage yard and garage, inspired by so many cars here and there jacked up on cinder blocks and left for dead, most wanting no more than a belt or a generator, regulator or battery. That and new points and condensers; hell, a fellow’d hardly bust his knuckles billing forty bucks on an easy fix, and the folks would pay it gladly to get a car running. A new distributor or even just the cap; you talking pure gravy, and that’s on parts in inventory and didn’t even count the salvage parts in the yard!

  One daughter died of the influenza with her mother, leaving an infant daughter, Jmetta, who was sent up to Jim’s when her aunt fell into the bottle, exposing Jim to alcoholic consequence with a child to care for as well. I assured him that older parents have more mature children. Jmetta seemed normal and was easy company. She watched TV to the point of numbness, but her manner was to please. Supper with the Cohens had become a habit, not so much for the black-and-white-together issue but rather from two men striking up a friendship. Maybe that’s what integration advocates had in mind short of browbeat the thing till it had little chance of surviving beyond conceptual analysis.

  I set hygienic anxiety aside. I washed my hands enough to draw stares from Jim Cohen and Jmetta. And I kept a bottle of Pepto Bismol at home along with the physic of those days, which was mostly vinegar. I retired to my cabin afterward to stoke the fire so we (the fire, Fern and I) could ponder and shed light on the situation. In a half-hour the cabin flickered. I put a pot of water on the firebox for Fern, who loved the extra humidity. I’d brought a few books out with me; most I’d read years ago in school with no reflection. With no distraction, I could see a common rhythm and that nothing is free of purpose in the great scheme. I wasn’t so naïve to assume that life held the same sense but knew that it could, with some luck.

  I gravitated to the so-called classics, mixing what I loved with what was good for me. Lord Jim and The Beast in the Jungle were like chocolate cake awarded for finishing my beets. Or a few hours of adventure on the high seas after a long spell of navel watching, down to a hair’s interaction with each hair to the north, south, east and west of it as well as the collective hairs’ potential realm of feeling as it related to the lint living in the mid to deep recess of that navel, all casually yet acutely aware of the wrinkles surrounding the rim and possible residual trauma to those wrinkles from what may well have been a less-than-delicate excision at birthing, with remnant trauma lurking in the ever-present form of umbilical wraiths, who drift still, sustaining their torment as stoically as the downtrodden ever did, even as a careless, non-thinking finger might ream out the entire cavity with no care whatsoever but to scratch an itch.

  I’d usually save Henry James for last, so we could savor his gifted cure for insomnia. I could rarely finish a James novel, though I was taken by The Beast in the Jungle at nineteen when it was force-fed and again at fifty-eight, when I sipped at it leisurely. That John Marcher knew his life was marked for something extraordinary seemed to me no different than the society I’d aged in, whose collective ego knew damn well it was something else. James touched a nerve when he killed May Bartram and let old John have it right between the eyes, and then John dives on to her grave, his face in the dirt as he realizes she’s gone forever, and he’d missed the greatest love a man ever missed. And so a bigger, fatter zero than a man ever came to was the extraordinary summary of John Marcher’s life, pouncing on him like a beast in the jungle with the realization that he was special insofar as his gray life in a vacuum. Finis. Roll credits.

  Zero ain’t an easy number to reach after years of endeavor but is a thing that must be nurtured just so with the devil’s help till the days add up to a huge, life-devouring beast. It was enough to make me wonder what I’d missed. Not Eudora, certainly, nor did any woman enter the review, so I was safe on romantic love. I’d had none, which wasn’t as bad as losing foolishly. Yet I read parts of The Beast over and over, looking for what I sensed as missing right before my eyes.

  Lord Jim was no walk in the park but got me way out of town to a world attainable to a lawyer only through books. The exposed nerve was young Jim’s act of cowardice in light of all the breeding, training and career advantage a fellow could want; in a single moment, jumping from a vessel of helpless refugees when it looked like the Patna was going down, his own honor sank. Conrad shored him up with an overdose of guilt, which can’t be healthy but seems redemptive in the endless task of comprehending the sin committed.

  I went way past midnight on that note; guilt gnawed at young Jim and redeemed him marginally, which wasn’t enough to absolve his cowardice. So he gave his life in order to erase it, to rejoin the history of men and honor. It seemed rash, but I got stuck on the logic. What was I doing hanging out in the boonies? Waiting for something to go away? No; I was merely enjoying life, recalling now and then something that wouldn’t go away. Maybe I was truly lazy, but Tuan Jim wandered the South Pacific in my mind as I drifted the creeks and oyster flats, his compulsion lingering, drawing me round the next bend, even as I knew what waited there, which was more of the same.

  Jim Cohen rattled on with tales of the judge’s alliances prior to his epiphany. Jim was comfortable in his presence, though others were made to feel like children in the principal’s office. He felt protected too in the company of renowned segregationists like United States Senator Cotton Ed Smith, who regarded Jim or any black as he might regard an umbrella stand or a hat rack. Cotton Ed’s private rant was a notch down from the public version. He might tell a darky to go fetch him some more tea. But he wouldn’t yell like he did for the crowds. He flat didn’t see the coloreds nor care what they might see or hear. Cotton Ed’s travel valet was Franklin Hines, who had one cardigan sweater, moth-eaten, and who chewed on a stogie till it looked like swamp pulp, because he wasn’t allowed to smoke indoors. Franklin’s brand was El Estanco, known for economy and Cotton Ed’s summary: Them El Stanko’s like to kill a white man to death soon as not.

  Franklin’s father was bought from a red hills farmer who liked the idea of slavery but honestly needed to free up his capital and get clear of the maintenance, which often seemed extreme next to kindred critters. The father came to Tanglewood, the Smith Plantation near Lynchburg, where he married Franklin’s mother, and they had a child, Franklin Hines, born like Ellison Durant Smith in ’64 as the Great Confusion wound down. Both would spend their days, save their trips to Washington as U.S. Senator and personal valet, at Tanglewood Plantation. While the one learned farming and politics for eighty years, the other worked the fields, a-laughing and a-singing with his needs met. Franklin Hines and Ed Smith grew old at Tanglewood, peas in two pods, spitting distance but worlds apart. Ed Smith swore on Franklin’s durability. Franklin mumbled ablutions to the affirmative. I met Ed Smith once and heard him: “Look at that old sonofabitch. He could outwork the lot of the young ones. Here, Mr. Hines …”

  Jim said the Senator’s habit was to pull a bankroll from his pocket and peel off a single for Franklin Hines, who’d say, Yahsuh, as a Pavlovian pooch might drool on cue. Franklin’s accent derived from the Piedmont, free of Gullah inflection, making communication between himself and Jim Cohen idiomatic, deriving from common experience. For example, Franklin would stand there nodding and mumbling so anyone could see his admirable traits. He’d tug on his sweater and more or less reorder his general dishevelment for anyone’s further insight and amusement. One particular dollar was granted in the third week of May, 1940, when Cotton Ed came to the coast to lay low or hobnob with the B
ourbons. That was the week Time Magazine called him grumpy, walrusy, tobacco spitting, the senate’s No. 1 mossback and, worst of all, a conscientious objector to the twentieth century. He had a bone to pick, contending that all his political opponents to date were far more vociferous on white supremacy, and he pointed out the dire need for segregation, if a race war was indeed to be prevented.

  Maybe Franklin Hines understood that his mentor’s stand on the racial issue was merely expedient and not personal. Franklin took the dollar and headed outside to smoke his cigar with Waties Waring and Jim Cohen in audience. Jim watched Franklin shuffle to the wood stove on his way out, open it and reach in for a hot coal, barehanded and casual, turning it for the best angle to light his cheap stogie, demonstrating the Senator’s professed durability and showing as well what a man could bear up to. Franklin Hines set the coal back in the hopper with a nod of another understanding and smiled Yahsuh yet again. Who knows? Maybe old Franklin didn’t know shit.

  Jim Cohen said Franklin’s fingers didn’t burn because of cotton picking, because the bolls fluff over the thorns, and you can’t pick a boll without hooking some flesh, which hurts like the devil a season or two then calluses over like anything will. But a man with fire fingers picked his share and then some, and you won’t see any but the old stock of cotton pickers handle coals like Franklin did, fingertips hard as wood. They’d burn in time like anything will, but not in the time he needed to light his cigar. I’d met Franklin Hines, so maybe I pictured him more easily than others Jim told me about. I considered Franklin Hines late one night, when I tried to feel what he’d endured. Ember handling seemed easy, compared to old age as a valet to a master of questionable imagination. My own imagination was fertilized that night with the last few pages of Lord Jim, in which every character set the stage for resolution. I was never so wide awake in town as out in the boonies past midnight alone in that cabin, when the great Tuan stepped up to face hatred, revenge and death, grateful for a chance to right his wrong and end his torment—stepped up to the evil and weakness of human behavior with no fear. Lord Jim had grown free of fear, clear in his heart and mind at last.