Padgett Powell: Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men

Mrs. Hollingsworth put her whole tongue in his ear, like a teenager. “If I can still do that,” she said, “you can still run. Did you really retire?”

“I am as retired as a dog ready for another dog to lie on top of him.”

Startled, Mrs. Hollingsworth said, “Hey! General Forrest said that!"

Her husband said, “I know General Forrest said that. Anybody went to Nathan Bedford Forrest High School knows that.”

“Anybody went” was Ray Oswald. Dogs under dogs was Forrest. The whole thing had been her husband, her apprehensions of fifty or a hundred too-familiar years with her husband, whom she had found again by making him a list, a list of her husband, a meal at last for him. And the man she had taken out of powder-blue oxford cloth and put in red plaid was her husband, wounded and tired on pin legs in her tub.

The best things in the universe are the out-of-mind and the invisible, those sunny caves of ice you forget when you wake up — as Coleridge put it before his hybridity was adjudicated. Mrs. Hollingsworth distrusted the fairy-taleness of all this, but not enough to not believe it. She and her husband had emerged from stupefaction, and she was not going to gainsay it. They were going to get on the horse of this new life, real or not, and ride. They were going to tear the very air with determination to win. They were not going to inspect the cause or weigh their slim chances. “Come in the bedroom, love,” she said to her retired skinny-legged husband. “You be canvas and I’ll be silk. I’ll be a thimble, you be silver. I’ll melt you into the ground. There is no operators manual for my gizmo.”

Her husband stood up and got himself a towel and headed for the bedroom. He had nothing on but that impish look, and he said not a word, a retired judge.