The Smut Book

by Tito Perdue

  This county had better than a thousand souls in it, most of them having awakened, having sat about for a time, and having gone back to bed. He did see one elderly woman sitting on her porch in a stationary position, her gaze traveling out over the unfamiliar scenes of youth. Lee turned and bowed sweepingly to her. The windows of her home were hued, and, owing to the imperfect state of glass production in those days, offered an imperfect reflection of either herself or someone sitting on her porch. And was it really true those windows were thicker at the bottom, the material “running downhill,” as it were, over the course of years? She also owned a cat, providing her with another system for monitoring the comings and goings of people.

  The town was old, and the prevailing philosophy, which happened to be Leland’s too, was that death would come, and it behooved a person to await it with all the absolute indifference available. He knew, too, that it had been bruited among scientists that someday the entire world would end. Taking on a melancholy mien, he hobbled past a three-story home with a gazebo out front and a good-looking, though rural, sort of woman dithering with her flowers. There was no question but that he, descended from a long line of Celto-Teutonic types, was just such a one as to whom these gazebos and goldfish ponds most rightly appertained. And when he died, he wanted to die in a bed in a house in a county that had been settled by his grandfathers.

  It was supposed to be winter, but in fact the climate had pretty much come to a stop in October. He had not yet stepped on a single crack, and by the time he arrived at the drugstore, there were three people hovering over the merchandise in there. Expecting to be welcomed warmly, if not exuberantly, he entered recklessly, wearing an impatient face. The woman had aged a few months since last he had seen her, but had remained recognizable even so. She possessed some of the deepest bosoms in Alabama, soft ones that trembled when she spoke.

  “No!” she said. “That can’t be Lee!”

  He argued that he was.

  “Well, I declare. Why didn’t you come see us?”

  “I did.”

  “Well, that’s good. Did you bring your daddy?”

  “Aw, they have to go to Enterprise. But we’re going fishing tonight, Dana and me.”

  “No!”

  “Yes, ma’am. We are.”

  “Well, I’ll be.”

  In obedience to her posture, her left breast (his favorite) was raised a little bit higher than her right, and if he looked directly at it, he believed that he could discern the nozzle itself, a raspberry-size epiphenomenon that concluded the gland.

  “Could I have a vanilla milkshake?” he inquired uncertainly.

  “No, sweetie. But I’ll sell you one.”

  Lee grinned. Now it was the right one that was higher. That was when the proprietor, a man who had gone bald from staying indoors so much of the time, came up and poked him in the ribs. “Well, look who’s here!”

  Lee grinned.

  “Where’s Young Albert?”

  “Aw, he had to go to Enterprise. Dana and me are going fishing.”

  “Can I come too?”

  Lee said nothing. The boat was small enough, and if Dana’s negro and Lee’s own younger brother were also to come, there’d not be room for all of them. Suddenly he threw up his hand and waved to the pharmacist, glad of the distraction. This was a quiet sort of person who maintained what was perhaps the tidiest and best-organized array of chemicals and lotions that Lee was ever to see. Lee knew two things about this drugstore, about the woman, the pharmacist, and the rest, namely that the milkshake would have two (not one) scoops of ice cream in it and, secondly, that he would not be made to pay. This was chiefly the reason he had not counted the small supply of coins he carried in his vest.

  A person could live in a town like this and go fishing every day. Or, a person could grow up and marry a local girl. Of course there’d be no Cecil here, no Gwen nor Canteen nor marching band nor anything of that kind. On the other hand, this town was older and smaller, with no traffic lights, less congestion, and a smaller likelihood that he’d end up in jail.

  He finished his milkshake and waited to see if he’d be offered another. Just then his uncle marched past in front of the store with Leland’s brother riding on his shoulders. By this time there were at least five persons in town, and although it was an hour before lunchtime, already the place was stirring. Two mule teams were winking at each other across the courthouse square. Meantime the great Methodist bell had begun to toll, producing a noise that easily overwhelmed the other churches. Lee’s eye moved to the John Wilkes Booth memorial fountain, where two girls were wading up to their knees in the stuff, a thing not feasible were it truly winter.

  He made his tour of the square, sometimes stopping to peer into one or another of the shops, especially Charles Creamer’s hardware store. Above, two hawks flew over before then grinding down to a halt in midair, intrigued, apparently, by the activity taking place ten thousand feet below. He moved past the three weird negroes sitting on a bench in front of the dry goods store. These people shared a single pair of glasses which they passed back and forth. Lee stopped and stood, waiting with considerable patience to be recognized. The glasses were smudged and one of the lenses was broken. “Well, blow me down! Looks like Poor Albert’s boy!”

  Lee grinned. The glasses had ended up with the man called “Blue,” an aged individual with a history of wives.

  “Where you been?”

  “Aw, I’ve been up in ———.” (He gave here the name of the town in which he had passed the last eleven years.)

  “Have?”

  “Yeah. We’re going fishing tonight, Dana and me.”

  “Are?”

  “Yeah.” He reached for a dime and gave it over to the man, aware that two other hands were outstretched as well. “We’re going to set out a trotline.”

  “Well, I’ll be.”

  But already they were getting bored with him. Lee retrieved the glasses, which had fallen to the ground, and awarded them to the albino called “Half-and-Half.” He observed that his uncle had completed his own tour of town and had turned homeward, followed by Leland’s smaller brother. Apart from these, Lee perceived a white woman—he knew her—doing her Friday marketing in a gingham dress.

  “Leman Pefley!” she exclaimed as he continued toward her with a boyish smile. “My lands!”

  He took off his cap and held it there.

  “And so you finally decided to come see us after all!”

  “Yes, ma’am. It was my daddy’s idea.”

  “But not yours?”

  “Anyway, we brought some presents.”

  “Ah. But Christmas is over, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, ma’am. But we needed to pick up my grandmother’s presents.”

  She laughed. She had put in place a certain amount of bridgework on her teeth. Lee judged her as between 30 and 70 years into her age, a typical representative of his parents’ generation.

  “We’re going fishing, Dana and me.”

  “So I heard! You be careful now, you hear?”

  Already she was getting bored with him. She appeared to have seen someone of her own age moving toward her. “You be careful now.”

  Again, Lee agreed to do so. Dana was gone; his brother, too, and in their place a farm boy had come to town riding on a mule.

  By 2:30, Lee had finished with his visitations and was trundling homeward, tired but happy, when one of the local youths suddenly stepped out in front of him and submitted a question. “Now just where in hell do you think you’re going?”

  Immediately Lee went into a tough facial expression that expressed everything one needed to know about his underlying character. “What’s it to you?”

  “What’d you say? No, I want to know what you said just now.”

  “Home. If it’s any of your beeswax.” He tried to get past, but was unable to do so owing to the second and third boys standing on both sides of the first. And where now, pray, was Cecil when he most was needed? Riding with Marg
aret, Lee expected, in an old Ford car.

  “Anyway, what’s that shit you got there in your pocket?”

  Lee showed it, a licorice stick given him by one of the downtown clerks. “Aw, it’s just a . . . She gave it to me.”

  “He don’t even know what it is!” the third boy said.

  “Where’re you from? And don’t tell me you’re from here, ’cause I know you ain’t.”

  Lee pointed to his corner of the state, a far region known for its geologic formations. He was ready to hand over his licorice stick, if that would get him home again. And in any case, given his small size, he had always considered courtesy the better part of recklessness. But mostly it was the second boy who worried him, an older sort of person of some twelve or thirteen years, if Lee wasn’t mistaken.

  “Besides, you and Dana ain’t going to catch nothing tonight. Waste of time.”

  “We might.”

  “Naw, shit, you might get an ell or catfish, a real small one, but that’s about it.”

  “You’re probably right,” said Lee, going into a different tack.

  “Well, hell yeah, we’re right! Besides, you don’t have any business down here, anyway.”

  “I know it. I never wanted to come in the first place. Shoot, you probably won’t ever see me again. Not really.”

  “Well, all right. That’s a whole lot better, what you just said.”

  They shook. Already, the first and third boys were getting bored with him, whileas for the second, he had gone off and left them several moments earlier.

  The levee was steep, and by the time he had climbed to the top, lo, he could see approximately the whole distance to his own hometown. He saw a field with cattle in it, and beyond that, bright blue segments of the river that wormed its way in and out of the pine forest that entailed the town. He thought again of all those beautiful old women and girls we know nothing of anymore. Such a great deal of history had taken part here, a story also of reptiles, rotifers, and brachiopods dating back to when warm seas had covered much of Alabama itself.

  But primarily it were the negro cabins that enchanted the boy, slave dwellings at one time now leaning up against one another for support. He saw a man sleeping on one of the porches, never mind that the weather was too chilly for that. Saw smoke rising from the chimneys, a broken wagon, a yard pot and grindstone lying in the yard. Surveying everything, he detected a child and two hens skulking in the field. Someone had owned a fine new automobile at one period that today was but a burned-out shell lying on its head. He heard gospel music from somewhere, hogs grunting, an airplane moving overhead.

  He was being followed by a ramshackle dog with a foot-long tongue. Getting down on one knee, Slade smoothed him down and tried, vainlessly, to look into the creature’s eyes which, however, he kept averted at all times. The dog had some history behind him, judging from the damage to his left paw and the abbreviations to his ears and residual tail. What things had he not seen, what midnight adventures, what meals? Two minutes having gone past in this manner, the animal relented finally and permitted Lee to look into his eyes.

  He had intended, Sloan, to circumambulate the entire village, an idea that came to nothing when he happened upon that break in the levee where, on a certain bad day in 1928, the rising river had pushed everything aside and come rushing into town. He could still hear the screams, it seemed to him, of negroes and children drowning in the tide, the courthouse flooded up to its elbows in the stuff, the ruined letters with missing ink, destroyed photographs, precious stamps, bills of lading, cash money disgorged from bank vaults, etc., etc. And his own family, too, his grandparents floating up to the ceiling in flooded rooms—he remembered all of it. Inspired by this, he tried to dredge up recollections of an even earlier time, when once again the levee had failed to ward off yet another flood pouring down upon them from out of the stinking North.

  The land was doomed, and everywhere he looked, change was going forward, the first cause of human unhappiness on Earth. Dialing into the future, he envisioned this whole vista full of a giant city staffed with low-grade individuals, a noisy people striding back and forth to no good purpose. No dogs, no crickets, no midnight fishing with moonlight peeping through the pines. Is that what they wanted?

  Yes, and by the time he had returned to the house, his grandmother had prepared an urn of homemade ice cream for him alone. Both boys, his brother included, consumed a great part of it, and then drifted off to widely-separated stations to get some rest. Himself, he preferred the bed in which his grandfather had died. It was an interesting piece of furniture—long and narrow and, like the man himself, so high off the floor that he must use a little staircase to arrive at the surface. Further, the bed had a quilt embroidered with a bible story having to do with Lot’s wife and her transformation into salt. The linens smelt of kerosene, mildew, pine oil, and other good things. The curtain was almost transparent, and he could fix upon the Sun deteriorating hurriedly as day wore on.

  He loved to come awake at night when most people were tired, but he was at his best. The adult people had meantime gathered in the adjoining room, where Lee could hear them speaking sadly about relationships and business affairs. Life was difficult, and things were hard, and a person had to earn a living in the world. They were also playing dominoes, as Lee could gather from the sound of the quoits. Save for his grandmother, who needed a full minute or more, they played at high speed.

  “Dern!” his uncle said. “Pretty much leaves me sucking the hind teat!”

  There were other sounds, including the noise of ice cubes clashing in goblets of sweet tea. And then, finally, the smaller sound of his uncle whittling at his nails with the sharpest knife in Alabama. The man went on speaking: “Maybe if he was living down here with us instead of up there with y’all, maybe he wouldn’t get into so much trouble all the time.”

  Lee now came fully awake. It was perhaps seven o’clock in the evening, time to go fishing; instead, the people in the next room were talking about employment, relocation, and about himself. He heard words relating to the town of Enterprise, a sizeable place where the economy was good and new industry was coming to town. But Lee had heard these stories before and knew his father was not likely ever to leave his good position, never mind that it might bring him back to William’s House.

  Climbing down from his roost, Lee padded to the door and applied his ear to the opening. He could hear ice cubes, his uncle mixing up the dominoes, and the smaller sound of his grandmother jotting down the score—she never lost—on the little yellow pad—they let her win—kept for that purpose. That was when Leland heard his brother speak out loud and clear: “Yeah. If he was down here with y’all, then maybe we could have some peace up there.”

  “Ought to be ’shamed!” Molly said. “Talkin’ that way.”

  She was a great black woman, Molly, of two hundred fifty pounds, who in theory was looking after Leland’s grandmother but who in fact came and went at pleasure. And was she, too, playing dominoes? Based upon the woman’s mathematical skills, Lee doubted it. He heard then, Lee, a voice that was not familiar to him: “Or, you could send him to one of those military schools.”

  That did it. Emerging from his chamber, Lee put on a groggy face and began rubbing his eyes as if he had just now come awake. The sixth person in the room had always been a relative of his uncle’s wife, as Lee now recollected. His brother, two-thirds asleep, was sitting in their father’s lap while assisting with the game. But Lee had been wrong about the tea; in fact, the adults were consuming alcoholic spirits of some nature, all save his grandmother, who had opted for straight buttermilk.

  “Shoot!” his uncle said. “We figured you was dead.”

  “Not yet,” Lee said, looking about sadly.

  “Should be,” his brother contributed.

  “Can’t have Christmas without you.”

  “We could if we wanted to.”

  Lee glanced to the corner of the room and the rather fatigued tree, where a few presents sa
t at random among the branches. Christmas was several days past; however, his grandmother’s calendar was nearly always out of tune. And although he had fingered these gifts the night before without being able precisely to identify the contents, he was only faintly interested in anything his grandmother might have chosen. He would be expected to put on a delighted face all the same.

  He sat off to one side, reflecting a greater and greater degree of boredom as the adults continued with the dominoes. It was a genteel game, and they were genteel, too. Seen from behind, he could detect in the tilt of his father’s head that the man was having fun. And why not? He was in William’s House, and that was his own very mother sitting just across from him. Outside, a few post-season crickets were still stridulating bravely from their posts in the garden and lawn and, in one or two instances, in the fretwork that decorated the leeward side of the house. Suddenly, his father smote himself ruefully on the forehead, as if he had not forfeited the game on purpose.

  “Well,” said Lee, standing and stretching. “I reckon it’s time to open the presents now.”

  No one gave attention to him. And was he, really, part of this family?

  “Or maybe we should go fishing first,” he said, “and then open the presents.”

  No one noticed what he said. His grandmother was tallying the score, while the woman Molly was in the corner eating ice cream with a large iron fork. As to this latter person’s contribution to his grandmother’s safety and happiness . . . There was none.

  “Or, we could . . .”

  “Lee?”

  “Sir?”

  “I reckon you better fetch some more of that good ice cream for Molly over there.”

  And so that was it, that at age eleven he had come to waiting on negresses. He arose, kicked at the rug, made a couple of faces, and was actually about to trudge off toward the icebox when his uncle said this: “We’ll go fishing in a little bit.”