Padgett Powell - Edisto

He said nothing — turned the table again.

"Yessiree-bob," I appended. "Yessireebob.”

There was the funny pot and the sparrow.

"Look," I said, "I don’t want to get lugubrious but I have to say it — I’ll miss you, we’ve had my most fun in my life, so thanks."

"Me too, Sim."

"Annh. . let’s gedattaheah,” I said.

"Let’s bury this vulture you slew." We did.

Mullet

"Before you go off to the middle of nowhere we better go fishing, to ratify our experience together," I said.

So I stopped off at the Cabana and got two mullet specials all fixed up. You need a long pole in case they’re deep. Not too small a hook. The idea that mullet have small mouths is specious. It's actually part of a racist wives’-tale scheme of lies which relegates mullet as fish to a similar position known by Negroes as people, but we don’t have time for all that. Their mouths are plenty large is all. But delicate, so you have to pull them in a firm but not exuberant fashion. (Also part of this bogus press on mullet is they don’t even bite hooks, which is already a bit obvious in its error, or I wouldn’t be under the house untangling cane poles and rusty hooks.) And a cork — not too big there. You want a good, subtle cork, preferably a thin one capable of doing things other than simply going under, because most mullet will not take a cork under. The cork should be able to shiver.

We took off to get worms. The best place is behind the Grand, by Jake’s old house, where you’re supposed to believe there was a still, and I suppose there was. There’s plenty of worms, I know that. You have to go in through the Grand, where Jake will be cleaning up, and tell him, and he’ll never say a word of greeting. You just tell him and he calls his mother, who still lives there, and she’ll chain up that pit bulldog which I said had mice in his ears the day I began becoming famous. Mice in his ears or not, it is a very crazy dog that tightens out this chain from a log truck.

"The story is they dumped the mash in this pit," I told Taurus. "All the corn and potatoes and vegetables they couldn’t eat went in the mash. Here they use anything. Or did. I don’t think anybody runs one now. They just get the bootleg stuff without tax stamps. It’s the modern world."

"Where’s a shovel?" he said.

"You can’t shovel worms," I said. "It’s too gross."

So I showed him how you have to use your lingers if you care about the worms or you’ll have half a mash pit of halved worms.

"Another thing, you can’t profane this mash pit, because of Jake’s boy."

"Who’s Jake’s boy?"

"He’s Jake’s boy, but it’s on the q.t. because he’s in Bull Street in the retard section. I’ve never seen him. The story is, they fed him the wood chips for coloring the shine and he ate them like potato chips and that did it. All they meant to do was kind of slow him down so they didn’t have to mind him so close, but it slowed him down further than they figured? Taurus was combing worms out of the leaves like a pro. Big ones fighting all over the leaves between his knees, and he was picking them up without even taking any detritus, so I put a dirt wad in the can for their shade.

"I think it was red oak," I said. This is a guess, because I never could learn what kind of wood they really used. "Red oak because not too much sap but a nice reddish color, like real whiskey, and then they’d pull the chips out and suck on them like a martini olive, only Jake’s boy was undersized, so he sort of O.D.’d. Nobody talks about him much."

We got over to Horry Slough, where I thought the mullet would be, and they weren’t. It’s a good place usually. When the tide’s out all you see is pluff mud slick and olive-green and drilled full of fiddler holes. It has a nice salt stink, and the mud actually ticks —you can hear it — in the sun. When the tide’s full you’d never know the place: blue water brimming up to green saw grass like a postcard, and a million mullet jumping like tiny tarpon. But all Taurus and I saw was two Negro ladies sitting hopelessly in the sun on their buckets. I watched them not get any bites.

"When they sposed to start biting?" I said.

"They might not be sposed to," one of them said, laughing.

"Did they bite yesterday?"

" Might did."

I was trying to find out if they were operating on information or on faith. It looked like faith.

"Have ya’ll seen anybody fishing anywhere else?" I said.

"A bunch of ’um at the pier," she said.

"Wheat and Lilly ovadeah," the other one said.

"Wheat? He out the hospital?" the first said.

"Shomuss be ."

The thing you can’t do with Negro ladies fishing is expect them to care very much about immediate success, theirs or yours. There could be a hundred people hauling them in tuna style at that pier and they wouldn’t pick up and ride over there like most people would. It violates something. I’ve never figured it out. They will sit there and sweat and their worms will cook in the can and get too pink-soft and stinky to stay on the hook and they won’t catch a fish and later will hear about all the fish Wheat and Lilly caught and will not despair. It’s magic, that kind of control, maybe like Theenie’s live-till-you-die program. Or they will catch some fish, three bream that wouldn’t crowd a coffee cup, and keep them and fry them hard as toast and still not despair, eating them in five bites of exploding greasy cornmeal and bones and salt.

But we couldn’t stay there without despair setting in, sol adjourned us to the action at the county pier, out where the river is wider. Pulling up, we saw a heavy woman at the corner of the pier set her hook and haul a mullet over the silver guardrail. And a man was riding down the pier on a three-wheeled bicycle. He passed us. In his baskets he had sacks and boxes and empty pop bottles and an open bucket full of mullet in pink slime.

"Mornin’," he said, and kept pedaling.

"Wheat!" the heavy woman shouted, without turning but yelling at the river. "Hurry up!"

He jammed the front wheel sideways like a trailer jackknifing and had to get off to straighten it out. He doddered around the bike like Charlie Chaplin in slow motion. He could hardly walk.

Meanwhile, the woman had corralled the mullet flipping all over the pier and sat on it. "Hurry wid dat bucket!" She was laughing and all the others about three — were, too, but quietly, all still watching their corks.

There was another guy on the pier, a white guy. He was off at a remove from the ladies, who were sitting with their arms through the guardrail — they have to haul the fish over their heads without getting up. The guy was standing, his line far out on the bottom. He was not fishing for mullet. Of course. They chap my ass. It’s one thing to niggerize a fish and think little of it but here’s an asshole who goes out into a mullet run and turns up his nose at them in public. He was red-colored and knotty-looking. Mr. James has his famous line about a kind of guy would have been a redhead? Well, this kind of guy would have been a stepchild named Psoriasis. Except somebody named him Billy. Or Billy Ray. Or Billy Ray Bob. Billy Ray Bob Wally Pickett.

Next he starts mumbling real chummy about "Lilly, I bleve you gone catch all the fish in the river!"

"Shih, I hope so," she says back, obligated.

What he’s really saying is, "I hope you catch all the stinking mullet while I catch a good fish," it’s clear. Or he’d reel in and bait up short and start catching mullet himself. There is something to do to this kind of guy but I don’t yet know what it is. But this Lilly seems to know.

Right in the middle of this happy talk with Psoriasis, she picks up an Old Milwaukee beer by her hip and tilts it up on her face and gags.