Edisto

by Padgett Powell

  The shack was stifling, with mosquitoes. Someone left the door open. In those days it was bug-tight, relatively speaking. Here, where the greatest natural resource is a toss-up between sand flea and mosquito, a thing is bug-tight if you do not die of a fever.

  “Stand back,” I told our new livery man. “I got to gun these things.” I pulled the sprayer from under Theenie’s bed, one of those old underslung can types with a slide plunger you can aim like a rifle. He not only stepped back, he went out and got some whiskey from his car.

  Later we cut a hole in the windward side for the romantic view of the sea and perverted the genius of the builder. For this undoing there was no atonement. The original shack, by the grace of common sense, had faced inland, not romantically seaward, and when we got the boys’ club spirit, combined with my dreamy horseshit (“We need a Weltanschauung!” I said), and cut a four-by-four hole, we invited an unstoppable, hourly legion of stinging pests into the shack and there was no screening them then, they could just let the wind push them gently through the wire like little hungry Houdinis, so we only put up shutters, iron-hinged, green, warped things Taurus got from Charleston, for larger pestilence, like hurricane.

  But in those days if the door was shut it was all right. The stranger slapped himself a few times.

  “The Cook’s tour,” I said.

  “Wait.” He poured out four inches of his whiskey in a jelly glass and drank an ice-water gulp. “Okay.”

  “This is it,” I said, sweeping the room with my hand. It had the order of a Negro maid: things are not out of place but they are so crowded together that what is actually a tight bit of stacking at first looks random. The bed has four blankets, each turned down more than the one beneath and each a new color—blue and brown and yellow and red—giving a crowded, messy look to the neatness of a hospital-cornered bed. A small brown radio is at a perfect angle to the listener on the bed, but it struggles on the nightstand with a Mason jar and a Jesus, and shoeboxes full of folded papers are stacked on chests, doilies are everywhere, a religious velvet painting, on the windows see-through curtains, throw rugs on the floor. The room could be a museum exhibit obliged to have everything one old black woman could have or could be known to ever have had, a composite picture of the known habitat of the Negro maid. And smells like a washed dog. It was a mosaic, because if you stood too close it looked just stuffed together, odd pieces of all manner of cheap human conveniences glued into the room. But if you looked at it as a whole, the picture had an elegant form, was a spare machine of necessary items for a lone person to live in a single room.

  He pushed the jelly glass a half foot toward me on the enameled metal table, white with a cobalt trim. I sniffed at it and took a sip and wheezed. He smiled, reading the newspaper on the walls.

  I got the cake, still in its pan, and was ready to go when something made me slow down. The Doctor had engaged this man to chauffeur me, had easily granted him Theenie’s place on the assumption she was gone and he was responsible—what was going on? In their little compact it looked like they knew more than I did, a regular thing for the adults, but now I was being asked to comply with this common understanding that welcomes a process server into what passes for the family unit as the Doctor and I know it. The Boy Act is the best thing when in doubt. “You want to look through the telescope?” I said.

  “If you do,” he said.

  Curious bird, I thought, taking my leave. “Wait here.” I run down—time for another Empirin, the ribs are starting to creak again—and drop off the cake and get my telescope and go back. The Doctor got it to go with the old, varnished, cigar-brown globe she got me that you can’t see any particular country on, and the telescope does match; you can’t see anything particular with it either. It is brass and the old glass optics have something in them like cataracts, but for occasions like this one it serves fine. I pulled this number on one of the Doctor’s suitors once, a coroner named Cud, vulture of a fellow circled around for weeks before I got rid of him with a telescope stunt. It came very natural then. I was hiding in my room, mostly from him, because the Doctor was gone and I didn’t care to talk to him, but he’s there, waiting for her, and my door opens and I grab the first prop available, which is the scope. I hunk down on it out of reflex and the coroner says, “How’s the weather?” Again out of reflex, so I don’t reveal any idleness in my apparent absorption with the view, I hunk down as if glued to something fascinating. I am impervious, so great is the vision. I fix my eyeball airtight on the ocular lest he see a point to invite himself on in with.

  “See any pirate ships out there?” he says (vomit) and I screw down so hard that the surf I’m aimed at is falling slow and fast and is gray and another gray, then becomes, like, colors, tumbling corpuscles of TV snow, which become blue and yellow and then purple and red, and then shapes begin to appear within a field of the tumbling colors.

  Anyway, these cloud shapes start moving around in the view, irregular and flowing, about like when you press your eyelids. And one of them looks like a clipper ship, so I tell the coroner named Cud: “I see clipper ships at 0-9-2.” Then go purple in my descriptions. Well, it worked like a charm. He was gone, as I recall, before the Doctor returned. And it occurred to me after that that it was a nifty little adult gauge, a feeler, that telescope.

  But this night was a hint different. The Empirin had my tongue like a grit of sand in an oyster of nonsense, and this stranger was no Cud going to hightail because of a little imagination in the family.

  I set it up outside, where the mosquitoes were less dense, and addressed the view like a mariner, legs wider than the brass tripod. I give it the old hunk, then a little juke one way, another hunk. “Oooo,” I let out, a little cat moan over the surf, choirboy. Then I start tracking. “Clippers.” He just stands there and looks out at the Atlantic.

  “Some fetching old Yankee Doodles, yessiree.” He has not flinched. “Here. You look.” I stepped back, careful to hold the telescope on line, nodded to it. “Come on, hurry, they’re at good speed.”

  The stranger took the scope. “I don’t see them.”

  I figured the test about over, but I threw in one more thing. “More south. They’re not called clippers for nothing.”

  “No,” he said, “not clippers for nothing.”

  “Tell me what you see.”

  He sighed, and then he jerked the scope a half inch to the right and froze it. Looking back on it, this is where I place his biggest gamble, his shrewdest moment. “Tell me, what should I see?”

  “Clippers!” I exhaled. “Wooden laminate masted rolling regular clippers!”

  He grunted and shuffled his feet.

  “The canvases are coarse,” I say. “Shredded and hemp-flogged, wet, salt-stained, grand pieces of cotton representing the lost fields who bore them!”

  “Yes,” the stranger said.

  “Muslin!” I nearly shout. Who was testing who? “Great flying manila, popping in the breath of Neptune. And the wood. Varnished hard and sleek, teak and oak. The grains are a study.”

  “A what?”

  “Check the hulls!” He just looked on, patient as ever. “Well?” I had him.

  He blurted, “The hulls. Yes,” He got away with something again! This really set me up. I turned the vertical-hold knob.

  “And the paints, marine paints, coat on coat, voyage on voyage, haul, haul, dry haul diurnal and long. The colors are myriad and embattled, layered soldiers on the land it is their end to protect: blues, yellows, marine greens, and reds barnacled all over each other in their hopeless flaking mission. They’ve had it, bleached christenings of some jack-leg lubber in …” I was spent. Where had my boats been painted?

  “Savannah,” he said, still looking.

  We looked over the water where the pattern of infinite shatterings forming the bright, glassy triangle from the moon was unbroken by boat or bird.

  “I’m Simons,” I said. We shook hands.

  “When it’s school time you’d better come get me,
” he said.

  “All right. You want to tell me about this Theenie thing?”

  We went in the shack and he poured himself another jelly glass of liquor and my own little wheeze of it and told me what happened. And a few other things I wanted to know, and more in the morning and afternoon, and we began our association thenceforth.

  A Summons at Edisto

  THE PROCESS SERVER TOLD me he took the coastal highway south and the small road off to the left at a sign marked Edisto Beach. For twenty miles he drove in the dark to the steady sound of his automobile. Then he began to hit the marsh pockets.

  He could not see the beginning marshes but could hear them. The cruising fullness of sound made by his car noises bouncing back from the close oaks and country houses would suddenly stop; a hollow, retreating, new quiet air. He looked out and saw nothing and then house and brush and trees blasted back close and full of sound. It was like running through an old wooden house, rooms opening off a narrow hall, hollows of sound breaking the noise of your running.

  It was too late to serve a paper. He stopped and stayed in a motel that sat in a halo of its own pink-and-green neon lights. In the small wooden room, he went to sleep listening to the hypnotizing hum of cars down the road.

  In the morning all he had to go on was an account of a set of roads near the beach beyond the paved road. There were miles of them, and on one of them, near the beach, was what was described to him as a rich man’s house. Near it was a small shack. There his trail ended. He had a summons for a woman someone said had something to do with that shack.

  Coming around a curve in the road where oak trees were painted white, he had to stop because of people in the road. He parked his car and got out and walked toward a tree they were surrounding. “Law,” one of them said. Looking through them, he saw at the foot of the tree a boy, as if asleep, suddenly open his eyes and jump up, as if awakened. Then the boy sat down.

  He shouldered back through the crowd past a school bus and continued. The air was salty as he reached the end of the hard road and began nosing down a graded road through heavy palmetto. The palmetto grew fuller, became a virtual tunnel of scabbling palms. He passed a wooden sign, SAVANNAH CABANA, and then saw the rich man’s house. He got out and climbed its stairs and knocked and looked in. In the main room were wicker sofas and chairs, a bamboo bar, a ceiling fan, metal tumblers, and glass decanters. The long curtains suspended over the floor-to-ceiling windows kept billowing out with the breezes, dusting the hardwood floors. The place was lit by the ocean’s bright upward glare. He went down the stairs and saw, beside a rusted-out Carrier compressor, a heap of carpets housing sea roaches and sand crabs.

  He pulled up to the other, smaller house up the beach. The door opened and an old Negro woman said, “Sim, your momma was’n spose—” and stopped, eyes lowering. “What you wont?”

  “I’m looking for Louester Samuels.”

  She looked at him in wonder. She managed to say, “What you wont wid her?”

  “It’s a legal paper for her.”

  “I know what you wont,” she then said, and fell back into the small house and grabbed a shawl and a stack of linen and nearly knocked the process server down with her charge out the door. Then she turned and circled him and went back in and pulled a bundt pan from the oven bare-handed and charged him again. Then she stopped and dropped the cake on a table and made a final charge past him and down and out and trundled to the first tunnel of palms husking in the wind and stopped and turned and she fixed him with an incredulous look. Then was gone into the queer, muffling, constantly moving trees. The process server stood on the porch under an overhang of tin roof, its wood hot and dry from the long afternoon sun, the tin going tic, tic.

  He went inside and smelled the hot cake and looked the room over. What took his attention was the walls, covered with yellowed newspapers. He read them, kneeling on the bed to get closer—stories about the Work Projects Administration. He felt the bed, soft in its heavy blanketing, and lay down and crossed his feet and put his hands back under his head and took a nap.

  He woke a little after dark and left the house for the husking tunnel of palms and palmettos the Negress had taken. At its end was the other house, the Savannah Cabana. He climbed the stairs again and stood on the porch beside a wringer washing machine until a woman came to the door.

  That’s the bare bones of how he scared Theenie out of the county. What took me some time to figure out was why. She thought he was her grandson. That’s what the Doctor said, anyway. It sounds crazy, because he looks as white as a regular coroner to me. But you know how that works.

  I remembered then that Theenie used to complain about her daughter being in trouble. In Theenie’s book you can be dead broke, sick, jobless, no place to stay, and still be doing all right provided the law is not after you. She calls it the gubmen. The gubmen is like God: all-powerful and merciless. The hardest thing in the world for her to do is call the social security office about a late check. If she had one stolen from her mailbox, I’m not sure she’d call anybody. “Life hard, Sim” is about what she’d say. And hire someone to watch for the postman next time.

  And the Doctor said she thought this process server was her grandson by her daughter who went to New York, which is Gomorrah to people here. Well, one look at him and you knew he was not all black, and that meant white people were involved, and one look at his blue summons and she knew the gubmen was involved, so it’s major.

  A Question of Heredity

  IT DIDN’T TAKE A genius to know it was big, not after I knew Theenie had been at the house and thrown down the laundry and wasn’t back at her shack and had left my cake out there without her wax paper sealed to it like peritoneum—you know, she has a thing about freshness. She can sit down with some chicken she found in tin foil about two weeks old and heat it up by letting it sit on the table while she irons and then eat it with a Co’-Cola, bouncing the bones in her hand to check for meat she hadn’t sucked off, and be perfectly happy. And she could cook mullet brought in head down in a pickle bucket of pink fish slime and worm goo, fry them, and bounce those bones a little too, but when it comes to making something like a cake, which, considering its components (like water and flour and other powders), can’t be too foul, at least not like mullet in a bucket sat on by a fat lady in the sun until they stopped biting—it comes to making a bakery-clean white thing like a cake and she’s got to have fresh eggs, fresh real butter, sweet milk, and you can’t even walk around the house while it cooks lest it fall, and she won’t run the vacuum cleaner while it’s in there either. She can only sit down with another Co’-Cola and a Stanback powder to virtually pray for it, and then it’s out, it will have to cool, and nine times out of ten, before you can touch it, she has grafted to it wax paper set into the hot buttery sugary crust of the cake and welded there by a fusion of wax and cake, and that cake you could throw in the ocean and it would float like a crab-pot marker for years, and the day it washed up on a beach and was found by an islander he could take it to his hut and with great-eyed delight peel off the wax paper with his skinning knife and devour the rich, golden flesh inside. And as soon as you slice up this memorial, this baby, and make your smacky fuss about how good it is, she starts making her fuss about how much trouble it is, and she’s not making any more, she’s too old, you’re too old, too old for her to have to work that hard, why, she raised you. (She raised two other sets of white kids before me. And she’s not through until she hears they got married.) You smile and smack and smile away, she sitting at the kitchen table in her white uniform, hair bluing and legs swollen, fingering an aspirin onto a toothache, complaining and complaining before rising and completing without another idle breath the rest of the cleaning or ironing or bed-making or whatever kind of tracking after the mess of white folks that afternoon presents, and she shows up the next morning with a silent assault on the breakfast detail, fresh and renewed somehow against a thousand cigarette butts in amber dregs of whiskey, and strewn clothes, and cra
p, crap from the high life.

  So I knew it didn’t take no genius to know something big was about, and from the way the Doctor took in Taurus like the bright kid they’d heard had decided to be an English major, from the way she toyed with him, the crap about servants, his hanging around, an obvious bid for a surrogate father for me—it isn’t the first time she has solicited the attentions of your notably masculine types, at least partly I am sure for some father image around the house—and from what Taurus told me about her (Theenie) bolting out of the shack with jets of terror into the palms waving around like big testifying arms at a revival, from this I knew something was up, particularly for Theenie, old Theenie, who says to me, “Sim, you ain’t got to do but two things. One is die, and thuther is live till you die.” I turn my head like a beagle at the novelty of this suggestion coming from her. “Ain’ I right?” she says. “I guess you are,” I say. “You believe it, then.”

  And I suppose you begin to. You certainly have to think she must believe it, odd as it seems at first that she can believe she has freedom, but then it looks like that belief might be her support in her heavy old world. She must say deep down somewhere very quietly while standing on those swelling brown-scaled legs ironing again and again the brocade this, the fancy that, that she can stand it, stand the steam rising off the board into her face, hot fingers manipulating the coverlets and slip-cases just out of range of the iron, steam rising to her sweaty face before the fan turns and blows it off her, because she doesn’t have to, she likes Simons, he all right, but I ain’ got to do it for him neither, I will is all. I only got to do two things. Die and live till.

  So what makes her pour out of her house and job like water downhill because a man who might be a simple bill collector, some fool, interrupts her at cake baking?