Padgett Powell - Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men

I believe it a tenable proposition that people in books or life do not do more work than is required of them.

Date

Give me some of your foo-foo water, lieutenant. I have a date. Should I go acourtin when Grant is out there at large`? No, I should not. If that sumbitch is drunk, hope to God he don’t sober up. They’d a had his butt in charge sooner we’d be resting now. Wrong people fought this thing, lieutenant. Saved ourself some boys, we could have been bettern what we were. Got to go to this address here in Holly Springs. I’ll ride over alone. It’s a note on this purple paper, parfumy.

Find out what that new boy’s name is. Worries me. Still think he might be a Floyd, even a Buckner. Come up to me today with that lemon dog and a brace of rabbit he’d got, and I congratulated him, you know, and suddenly the fool is saying, “General, my daddy didn’t even teach me how to play cards? All I could do not to laugh.

Lieutenant, I confess the boy had me stumped there. I had to resort to the Leader Act. I leaned down to him and looked at him with the electric fightin eye and said, deep — like, “Boy, I’mone teach you how to play cards and raise God.” Boy fell back teary and grateful from the horse like I’d done christened him. Made me blush. This Leader thang get on your nerves. I sprung off before it got any worser. Make sure he aint a Floyd — or related to anyone in command.

How you tie these things? Women. I wouldn’t even go if people wouldn’t say maybe I'm gettin like Davis and Bragg. Don’t wait up. You in charge. Anything happens, fight. That don’t work, run.

Frugging with Forrest

When Forrest comes in the door, Mrs. Hollingsworth is wearing the same cologne he got from his lieutenant. She and Forrest smell so much alike they are put at ease and think themselves more familiar with each other than they are. Mrs. Hollingsworth has Jimi Hendrix playing, loud. Mrs. Hollingsworth is moving about in a strange, contortional way. “Do you frug, general?"

“What is that shit?” Forrest says, holding his ears. Mrs. Hollingsworth begins laughing hysterically at this. Forrest himself begins to laugh. He has a slightly impish look unlike any Mrs. Hollingsworth has heretofore conceived. She has only seen the grim look and the electric look. He is putting her on!

He has picked up the Hendrix album cover. “I be damn." Mrs. Hollingsworth decides this business will be funny but predictable, and cuts it off.

“Have a seat, general?

Forrest takes an order as well as he gives one. He notices the fabric of the sofa. It is a nubbly nylon that is utterly alien to his hand. He passes his hands absently over it for some time.

Mrs. Hollingsworth has time to regard him: a man who will have fought so hard that he will wither away once this conflict is over and die, of nothing more certain than atrophy, at age fifty-six. A man this strong who can collapse.

“General, have you found the woman you love?"

“That has never occurred to me."

“Does it interest you?"’

“No, it does not. Not the way you put it."

“Why not?”

“I don’t know."

“That’s not a bad answer.”

“That’s a relief"

“General, you mock me.”

"Ma’am, why not?"

“That’s not bad either."

"Well, we all do-si-do then.”

While it was true that she could do with Forrest what she wanted, it was also not true. He was difficult. But this too, his difficulty she had given him, she thought. She wasn’t sure. The uncertainty was thrilling. He did not need a nurse — a peculiar man, in this respect. She had not known a man who did not need a nurse. The only man she could have imagined before this who did not need a nurse was a dead man. And the dead man would have needed a nurse, desperately, right up until he died.

The proposition of having a man who did not need you was a bit frightening. It should not be, but it was. The thing she thought she had failed at was precisely this: waiting for the man who did not need her but wanted her. She had been afraid to wait for that, then, and when she saw it before her, now, the thing itself it too scared her. Perhaps she was merely afraid of everything. Most people, she thought, were, and she was perhaps finally not any better. It had been pretty to think so, she thought. A woman was not to be faulted for her pretty thoughts.

“Is a woman to be faulted for her pretty thoughts, general?"

“That has not occurred to me either,” Forrest said.

Mrs. Hollingsworth realized why she had summoned the general. "General, could you send that boy with the lemon dog over tomorrow, if you are not fighting?"

Forrest looked at her directly. He understood and accepted her rejection. His hand continued to move sensually on the sofa, feeling the fabric. “Sho I can do that, ma’am — that is what general means. What kind of hide is this?"

“Hide?” She then understood him to mean the fabric on the sofa.

"I don’t want to see whatever you skunt this off of," Forrest said. "Or hunt it.”

“General, are you tired?”

“I’m tireder than a dog lying underneath another dog.”

Nor Nurse nor Need

The man in the plaid shirt came into the house like something hunted and hunting. He was nervous and deliberate. Mrs. Hollingsworth could see that she had complicated him to a point that was not easy for him. He was hurt in some way that he did not wish to acknowledge; he felt that if he did, it would confirm and solidify and even deepen the hurt. There was an aura about him that, like Forrest’s hologram, showed a storm of improbable and distorted hallucinations that emanated from his real life. He was standing there in her foyer, surrounded by a spectral play of his injuries and failures that was as plastic and mobile and colorful and ridiculous as the kind of light show that had accompanied, in its day, the Hendrix music that she had played for the general.

She had no music playing now, and this light show was not funny. The man’s mother unkissed and the coach unanswered and the father unapproached were there, in a swirl, and the impossibly beautiful woman was there, and she was crying, and she was crying for something the man had done or said to her. The man was aroused, and he looked at her— Mrs. Hollingsworth — with a piercing hunger that was at once honest and direct and simple and also hopelessly fraught with reservations and riders and provisos just beneath the surface of his leering desire. It was an irresistibly messy kind of desire. It promised as much pain as balm. He looked like the kind of cat who would bite you on the neck to hold you down and spend days kissing the wound.

Was he a man who wanted but did not need her? Since she stood in a convenient relationship to getting the truth from this kind of man, Mrs. Hollingsworth asked him, “Do you want me?” To this he said, clear-eyed and broad of shoulder because of the grain sacks, and looking strangely elegant in the cheap shirt,

"Yes."

“Do you need me?”

“Need?"

They regarded each other a long time. The man looked at the floor. They heard a sound at the door and the man opened it and the lemon dog came into the house. It began snuffling the baseboards, raptly, undistracted. Every couple of increments forward the dog made a kind of cough, as if clearing its system, like a wine taster between tastes, and then resumed its eager inhalation of her house. It worked one of the boards until out of their sight.

“That’s a good dog," the man said. “I had a life in which I would have needed you, once. It was not an honest life. I died. I have a new life. In it I want you, but it would be dishonest of me to need you. If I were to get succor from you, I would not be able to return it properly — I would only take. Then I would repudiate your succor and accuse you of giving it to me. The form of this accusation would be intractable, but that is its substance. You would have, in giving me succor which I could not return, exposed me to be a nonreciprocator of love, and I would have to hate you for this. This hate also would take intractable forms. One of the commoner intractable forms would be a declaration that I wanted yet another woman to do this to. I would tell you this to hurt you, and then hurt the new woman the same way. You do not want me to need you. You want me to want you.”