Edisto

by Padgett Powell

  “What’s an envelope?” he asked.

  “It’s a thing you eat for breakfast,” I popped.

  This queer color went through everybody’s face like heat lightning, and I knew something was wrong. So I thought, in the way you can if you’re three years old and they’re scudgin’ you, very hard about my answer and the question, and it didn’t fit right, not quite, even though I thought they should have given me some points for speed. Very sharply I slapped my forehead and said, “What am I doing, failing!”

  And that reversed the heat lightning, calmed the waters of worry. No kid, master of the Boy Act at three, could, they figure, be retarded. So I was off. But it left an imprint. They didn’t trust me. I knew. Nor I them.

  I found out later it was the Doctor took me there, not the Progenitor. He thought I was regular for three, but she had to see if I could ever learn to read. Well, it’s true I couldn’t tie a shoe or stop wetting the bed, but those Golden Books never gave me a problem. And then it was on to all these award children’s books about contemplative rabbits, and llamas that talk and go both ways, which I didn’t know at the time was preparing me for faculty parties.

  And then it was on to the Library itself, my book-walled bassinet, and the great stuff. Now, some of it’s pretty good, but I spent a lot of misdirected energy being disappointed by titles, like I told you, things like The Screwtape Letters, which I thought was a transcript of tapes about you-know-whatting.

  Anyway, smelling the coast in that gently howling pagoda at 3 a.m. got me to thinking about things that were going on. In a way, the house would tell me how to study things. The surf said more at a distance than up close. I was governor of the rumrunners inside the house, at a remove from the action, but outside I was a kid getting wet from the spray of the waves. Still, it seemed that things were happening, but when I looked squarely at them, I wasn’t sure.

  Like I get to tear up the yard of a big house and notice this kid’s mother’s bazongas and suddenly my father is a new beast for it—that’s no event. And the faculty party is not exactly headlines—not even with me crouching under the sideboard to listen to the lushes and all of a sudden wondering about Taurus and the questions on the lushes’ minds—that is not finally an event either, but it seemed so. Well, things like this piled up on me, little nothings that seemed like somethings.

  One night in the playwright’s patented ozone, watching the wind lift the curtains, I got very progressive and wondered almost aloud why I had the feeling something finally was happening. I couldn’t have told Theenie nothing was happening then, because it was, something was. Then I knew that what I couldn’t tease Theenie about was Taurus, and not because she wasn’t there to tease, but because somehow he was much larger or worse or more significant than TV and the gubmen, and it wouldn’t have been teasing but something clearly unchildlike for me to bring him up. And I thought it would kind of profane him too, and somehow also the Doctor, who was going without her maid and holy folded linen and vacuumed floors to have him in the shack when she didn’t, I think, even see him two times for five minutes in a week. And somehow it would profane Daddy too—and the Doctor and Daddy, even though by public decree they had done that one up brown already—if I said two words to her about this alleged grandbaby. Seeing Daddy’s car parked a little crooked in the driveway and knowing not to hear what I heard was important too in this new kind of event which presents or contains no action. And even somehow Preston and Jinx and Jake and all the Negroes who ran up to me when I rolled into the oak tree like the low country’s own gold-medal gymnast, and looked at me in a way that was uneventful but magic, like I was not just a traffic casualty but a special thing to them, connected to this series. Somehow they would all be insulted if I went about trying to sift action out of what I considered actionless events. If I pursued this racial question on him any more than anyone else was, or insisted on knowing more than I knew, it would have been like charging into the marsh with a coffee can to catch the fiddlers, and they would have defended their secrets, waving their tiny ivory swords and backing into their holes, and you’d be sucking through the pluff mud like a fart machine. And you’d come out green with mud and oyster cut, and with an empty can.

  Maybe that’s why he gave me the assignment to check out the Diane Parkers of this world, so I would be occupied, but I doubt he knew how fast I’d get to something like the mayonnaise. God, I feel like you could hear one too many mayonnaise revelations too early and go back to thinking people should be like dolls between their legs if it was going to be so damned complicated, which I thought once in my childhood mode.

  But anyway, the Doctor has Taurus, or whomever if I hadn’t named him, in Theenie’s shack; Theenie’s probably weaving baskets again, on the q.t. for TV crews; Daddy’s trying these radically new-toned custody junkets on me; and I’m about lidding-out over several things that aren’t even things—like mayonnaise, secretary’s bazongas, motos, funny-parked cars.

  But the center of the storm, calm as it was, was Taurus.

  Chemistry Never Changes

  SO IT FOUNDLY OCCURRED to me plenty was happening. That’s a childhood thing I said, “foundly” for “finally.” The best language is then. I knew a kid that called noses “noogs” and knives “niges” and a term like “big deal” he shorthanded “bih-deel boing!”—very fast with a blow of his fist on something like your head at the terminal sound.

  Anyway, my little run of non-events suddenly was a veritable domino-phenomeno. What waked me up? Another crooked-parked car. There it was again, Friday, parked close up. I imagine six-inch angry skid marks just behind the tires. Daddy was early and inside again.

  A little bud told me not to try the trick of listening at the door and then stomping in on an innocent note. He said stick my head up into the intake duct.

  When we got the place from Eisenhower the Developer, it had a $5,500 Carrier cool-heat unit on a concrete pad under the house. The first season, the first hint of a hurricane, the first trickle of a high tide, that was it for Carrier. Gihhhjjjj POW—magnesium flares, house trying to hop up and run away on its stilts, transformer blown off the pole by the hard road (you could hear it), and no power for three days anywhere out here. Candlelight at the Grand! That was most pleasant. Jake said he’d never seen rowdy niggers so serene.

  So they yanked it—looked like a burned-out army tank. They gave the Doctor a replacement price and she gave them a drink of ice water and me a Girlhood speech: “Honey, when I was little, we didn’t have all this. Just consider we’re going back through Margaret Mitchell’s wind.”

  To get some of that wind, we spent half a day bruising our hands trying to crack windows loose from their paint, and the sliding doors had these miniature locks down in the runners that Theenie said to prize out. “Prize ’em out with a crowbar or call the lock man, because you ain’ gone get nare one out with this hammer.” She had a hammer with one claw left, like a kid with a front tooth knocked out. She held it in an attitude that looked like one of those Walker Evans photographs of sharecroppers.

  Theenie’s got the sharecropper patience that seems so sure of the world even in its humility that the Doctor, who I thought would take out glass and all before calling anybody, stopped and called Vergil at the Texaco station and told him to get a locksmith who didn’t have to have an arm and a leg and who might like a drink after a long day and bring him on out and to look at the Cadillac himself (Vergil), and she got them so well lubed there was no bill at all and we had those drapes standing out in the breeze in no time, like the capes of flying superheroes. And the roaring crowd of the surf was brought in—we had only heard the muffled rumble of it before.

  Well, they pulled the burned hull of the heat pump and left all the ductwork, thinking the Doctor would change her mind about ordering a new unit. They didn’t know she was one of these readers of Southern literature who talk about progressive light changes at dusk and how the air in the country is different than in the city, and how country crickets sing
a different, more authentic tune than city crickets, who just get in your woodwork and keep you awake. It was many things like this that earned her the Duchess status.

  So there was this square vent with silver insulation that came down to within four feet of the slab and I could stand on a block and go up in it to my shoulders. It was like putting your head in a speaker cabinet. You could hear the Doctor move on the wicker. It sounded like when a bad folksinger changes chords and the squeak on the frets is louder than the picking. You could hear the whole house, a giant conch shell and its internal sea. You could hear, believe me, voices.

  So this Friday in question I get on the block and go shoulder-high into the Voice of the Theater.

  “… cannot be h-wealthy forum,” Daddy was saying.

  “… cannot buttabean h-wealthy forum,” the Doctor said. I think I was too far up in the speaker.

  “… whoever evah hearded of a dearded child uvah twelvild runnnwellve vilding inilda nigger road nigoadhouse rrrouse!”

  “I havehv.”

  “You’re unfit tittit …”

  I stepped down and moved the block and just stood under the vent, maybe only my hair up in it.

  “Everson, frankly the place worried me too, before. But he has to have some life other than …” A small wicker squeak.

  “Than what?”

  “Than this.” A big wicker squeak. This was much clearer.

  “Well, what pray tell doesn’t worry you now? Before when?”

  “Before he had his new companion to—escort him.”

  “Companion. And not the first—”

  “Don’t start that tape—”

  “I’ll start it—”

  “You’re a boor.”

  A giant scraping and tinkling and gushing, pouring noise came down.

  “Here. The ice is gone,” Daddy said.

  “Thanks.”

  It was quiet for so long I got scared they might be sneaking down. I could see the stairs where their shoes would show up long before they could see me, but I went over to the stairs just in case. Then they started talking again. I tiptoed back over, missed a few words.

  “… think either one of us,” she said, and a pause like for a lecture notetaker, “has been chaste, has we, Iv?”

  “In my book discretion still beats valor.”

  “Quite,” she said. A scream of wicker. “So what sets us so far apart in this spectrum of morals, my lovely?” (Sounds weird, but that’s what I heard.)

  “That I don’t with every coroner, convict, drifter, and what’s more entrust a boy to—”

  “Who fucking left, Everson?” The volume nearly scalped me. I was weak. I can only think of one noise like that—a gun went off in a pawnshop on King Street and it was like the air itself was black for a moment, and we weren’t even inside the shop. I eased back up into the tube.

  “… if there’s a difference. One leaves, one doesn’t. You couldn’t, I could. Don’t make me out …”

  “I know.” An easy whine of wicker.

  “Same?” Another chinking and wash sound.

  “It’s none of your business, but I’ll tell you anyway. He came out here and found Theenie in her gin and she decided he’s her long-lost grandchild by her crazy daughter.” Still another punctuation of glass and liquid noise. “And I asked him to stay here. For Simons.”

  “You don’t know him from—”

  “Everson, did I know you? Did you know—”

  “That was just for marriage. This, you’ve got, he’s raising—”

  “Necessity of invention.” Then, quickly: “Okay, look. I liked the kid. At school the gossip mill has done about as hysterical a thing as you want to. God, this is strong. Look, Iv, we’re all coming down a bit, but I’m not addled yet. And the thing on Simons, the book thing …”

  “The book thing,” he said.

  “It’s no good without the baseball thing.” Then she adds: “That’s why the man’s here, known or not. He’s duty-free, cuts a figure, keeps him straight. That’s all there is.”

  I’d had enough. All I had to do was figure out how to model my face for going in the house. This was some of the strangest verbiage I ever heard. I don’t know why I thought so at the time. It looks reasonable now.

  But I was hypered out, so I walked all the way back up to the Grand. When I was almost an hour late I called them.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m up at Jake’s. I thought Daddy could pick me up here.”

  “It’s your weekend,” she said. “When he gets here I’ll tell him.”

  “Okay. Thanks.” Thanks for mendacity, I should have said—mendacity and lies.

  Well, I got a cold one. For the first time I needed one, I thought. I rolled it on my forehead. It felt like a new kind of ironing, heavy cold metal to smooth things out.

  Jake came up and shook the can and put another one up without asking, like I was a real regular customer. “Drink dis slow. Your momma called, said sit tight.”

  I sat tight. After that one I didn’t need to iron my head anymore.

  I thought of a joke, for some reason, that Margaret Pinckney told during the last party. Bill and Jim interfered with her but she got it out, talking like a harelip. The hero’s a harelip. Selling peaches, he knocks on a lady’s door. She answers in “something comfortable—very,” Margaret said.

  “Yes?”

  “Ma’am, want thum peacheth?”

  “It would depend.”

  “Depend on what?” said the harelip.

  “Are they firm?”

  “Oh yeth, ma’am, they’re firm.”

  “Do they have a very light fuzz on them?”

  “Oh yeth, ma’am, they have a very light futh on them.”

  “Come in,” the lady said, and he did.

  “Are they as firm as these?” she asked, showing him her titties. Margaret said boobs.

  “I couldn’t thay.”

  She made him feel them. “Oh yeth, ma’am, they’re ath firm ath theeth.”

  “Well, is the fuzz on them as light as this fuzz?” Margaret said: “She revealed herself totally to the harelip door-to-door peach salesman.”

  “I—I—I couldn’t th-thay that either,” he said.

  “Give me your hand and we’ll find out,” she said, and then, jumping, said, “Quick, I hear someone coming! Under the sofa!”

  The salesman rolled under the sofa and the lady dressed. It was a false alarm. When the heat blew off she got the salesman out.

  “Whew.”

  “I’ll thay.” They settled down.

  Then the lady said: “I’ll buy all your fruit if you’ll tell me what part of my body you think is the sharpest.”

  “The tharpetht?”

  “Yes. And I’ll take it all.”

  “Well, ma’am, I believe it’th your eerth.”

  “My ears?”

  “Yeth, ma’am.”

  “But why my ears?”

  “Well, you know when you thaid you thought you heard thomeone coming?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well”—he hesitated—“It wath me.”

  It wath a houthe rocker that night. Even Bill and Jim were giggling. Why did I remember that, sitting in the Grand working on my second cold one? My first true second beer in my life.

  Daddy came in.

  “Mist’Iv,” people said. “Mist’Iv!” I guess they knew him from their troubles. Daddy took their cases on time, I thought. Or they just knew he was the Duchess’s old man. But anyway, he came in and had Jake’s attention before he got to the bar and handed Jake a bottle in a sack.

  “Do you have soda?”

  “Got Coke soda,” Jake said.

  “Water then, Jacob.”

  Jacob. I had the feeling he’d been there before, or knew him somehow, which was a hard sensation to accept, like believing that sexy things are not your own private province of knowledge, that your parents must know too. Here I thought Jake and the Grand were all mine, and Daddy’s call
ing Jake Jacob, like they go back years into a formal history together.

  “Hi. Sorry if I’m in trouble,” I said to cut him off, in case I was. “You know Jake?”

  Jake handed up a jigger of whiskey and a jelly glass with tap water in it. Daddy nodded down. Jake nodded up.

  “His father.” Daddy was about titrated out. His lips were under control except they sort of looked like he’d been to the dentist. His eyes were mullety. “This place is just a juke joint now, son. In my day, it was the biggest whorehouse-casino-bootleg operation we knew of. Do you know what a whorehouse is?”

  “Well, I know what one is. I don’t know what you do, though.”

  He chased the jigger.

  “Me either.” He laughed.

  We sat there a while.

  I had a bunch of questions about the joint before, under Jake’s daddy, but they seemed like too much effort. I could just put it together myself, with a hint or two.

  “Daddy, was it what they call a class operation?”

  “What?”

  “Jake’s joint in the good old days.”

  “Class operation is right!” He got excited. “That’s exactly what it was. Everything was clear. They had the fun and we had the money. Buyers, sellers.”

  “Refined vice?” I said.

  “What?”

  “Like Chicago and things. Was it refined vice with a code of manners—”

  “Son, do you believe in God?”

  “What?”

  “Do you believe in God?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Well, okay. I guess it was refined vice.”

  I motioned to Jake and got my first true third cold one in my life. Daddy had said something I couldn’t figure out. Today I sort of know. And I sort of don’t.

  Anyway, we left together and drove home to the Cabana. And he stayed there that night. I didn’t need any air ducts to know that.