Padgett Powell - Edisto

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 iiddlers, 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 $5,50 °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. Gihhhffff 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 super-heroes. 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.