Padgett Powell - Edisto

That's the assignment. To tell what has been going on since this fellow came trying to serve a subpoena to we think Athenia’s daughter and scared Theenie so bad it about blued her hair. Before he came I spent most of my time at the Baby Grand — Marvin’s R.O. Sweet Shop and Baby Grand, where I am a celebrity because I’m white, not even teenage yet, and possess the partial aura of the Duchess ("The Duchess boy heah!"). And I look like I hold I my liquor ("Ain’t he somp’m."). The trick there is to accept a new can when anybody offers and let your

old one get drunk by somebody else.

And besides playing the freak I can jive a little, too, like the Arab alarum I like to ring. “If it wasn’t for the Marines down the road, these Arabs’d do more than buy this place!” "Shih! Boy crazy!" And the dudes there play a tune back, a constant message: Life is a time when you get pleasure until somebody get your ass. And one of the ways to prolong pleasure is to not chop up time with syllables. They go for something larger than words, but no essays. This way nothing large is inaccurate, presumptuous. "Bitch look heavy." “Tell me. " Like these James Brown guitar riffs of five notes that run twenty minutes, and then one of the five notes goes sharp and a statement is made. A whole evening hums, and then there’s a new note — razor out. I still hit the Grand, but less now with Taurus and me doing things.

That night when he stepped on the porch and I was trying to breathe, the Doctor came to the door and stopped short of pushing it open as she would have for an ordinary visitor — he had his hand inside the rim of the wringer tub and his head was slightly cocked off at it as if he were listening to a large conch shell. I noticed then a stack of linen folded — not folded anymore, thrown — by the sink. Some kind of nut is on the porch and I take time out to notice this because now I know something is up.

Because when your Southern barony is reduced as ours is to a tract of clay roads cut in a feathery herbaceous jungle of deerfly for stock and scrub oak for crop, and the great house is a model beach house resembling a pagoda, and the planter’s wife is abandoned by the planter, as ours has been, and she has only one servant left (Theenie, who for quarters has only one 10' x 12' shack insulated by newspaper and flour on a cold Atlantic bluff), well, that vestigial baroness insists that vestigial slave do her one duty right—"the linen," all that remains of cotton finery. Theenie vacuums the house too, but that doesn’t signify as Preserving the South. And the laundry was not in the hall closet (successor to armoire) but flung all over the kitchen counter, which was not right.

If I had not rolled sixty feet at forty miles an hour into an oak tree just hours before, I might have thought nothing of that laundry. But there it was, flopped forlorn on the drainboard, looking a bit like I might have before I stood up to disassociate myself from the dead in that sudden ring of gawkers. There was somehow a connection in all this: my suddenly seeing the linen in the new good-as-dead way of seeing, the linen an embodiment of Theenie and the Doctor’s old order and of, somehow, the someone cocking an ear to a sound on our porch, whose discovery stopped the Doctor mid-track and knocked her into her classroom style, so that she suddenly stood three feet inside the door, straightened up, and spoke as if there were an invisible podium between her and her audience.

“Won’t you please come in and let us talk," said the Doctor heavily, as though scanning the line for a student, and she stepped forward and slowly swung open the screen door to a total stranger, who looked young enough and strong enough to be the ax murderer. (Man, several years ago I was all-hours victim to accounts of boogeymen on this wind-riddled spit of remote earth, one thing that did encourage me to read: you keep reading to stay awake and so get a good jump if the Hook Man breaks in.)

He stepped in. She stepped back. "In the name, it would seem, of paralegal service," she said, and turned and walked away and crossed the living room and sat on the creaking wicker sofa on her legs, "you have done me a grave disservice." She said this in her explicatory, cadenced style, punctuated and metered so no idiot could fail to record it in his notebook. The stranger, who had not followed her, then looked at me, evenly and without expression. He came in.

"My maid has quit," she said.

"I have not served anyone yet," the stranger said.

"You wanted her daughter, anyway. I am now without retainer. Do you paralegals make restitution of damages such as retiring twenty-year employees?"

"Do you know where her daughter is?" He sat down.

"Do you want to find out?"

Here they stopped. I could see his back, arms on his knees; he was sitting looking directly at her. She had her drink. She looked over the rim of it at him, sort of looking out the tops of her eyes and hiding her mouth with the drink.

“If you’ll tell me, I’ll get the other one back," he said.

“No, you won’t. You won’t even find her."

"Lately I am a professional at finding—"

"You won’t find her unless I tell you where she is, and you probably won’t find her daughter unless she tells you where she is."

"Where did she go, then?"

"That’s a laid-low to catch a meddler."

“A what?"

"Skip it. I’ll tell you what. Since you scared hell out of my maid and my estate is consequently shorthanded, you might assist me. . She kind of trailed off.

They looked at each other a while.

"If you want to find either of them, you might hang around a bit."

"Hang around?"

"I am short on domestics, it would seem. There’s the gardening and the brass polishing, of course, but as a coachman. . And Simons has just today manifested a problem in his school-bus riding. You could escort him to school and back, and keep up the quarters on the beach, and let me see if I can locate Athenia for you."

"I suppose I might," he said.

"And could you tell me what is paralegal service?"

She knew what it was. The old man was a lawyer and every joe to take her out since who wasn’t a professor was an ambulance chaser or coroner. She was not asking to get an answer, but to know the answerer. This tactic was used when she had brilliant students over, mostly.

The stranger accepted the game. She was still accelerating, ever since the door, and virtually beaming at him over the whiskey, her tawny old Kool-Aid.

"That straddles law and law enforcement" he said, and I was certain, without any evidence, that he was grinning. He had passed a little test with flying colors — not flinched at all the crap about servants and brass polishing, but accepted her game, and what her game was even I did not know. But I knew something was going on, and if I had not been buzzing on Empirin, I could have told whether it was really going on, or just me, buzzing on Empirin.

"Well," the Doctor said, in her summing-up tone, "there’s a cake down there. Send it back with Simons. Can you walk okay, Ducks?”

"Yes ma’am," I said.

I beat him out the door into the trees, leaning with the night wind away from the beach, and headed us for Theenie’s shack. It was my birthday and I had a cake.

An Assessment of the Stranger

Our beach is steep and not white but cochina. We took the fronting road, named Juno Boulevard by the speculator who sold his model-home land office to the Doctor. It is a mod building: an octagonal pagoda on stilts with two levels of parapet walks and sliding glass doors all around, a cupola on top with a widow’s walk, all of it squatted over five thousand dollars’ worth of heating and cooling equipment on a slab below, which would flood out with the first good blow. The Doctor got it for a price so famously cheap that everyone still shakes his head about it, but I don’t know the exact amount. She caught him depressed.