Padgett Powell - Edisto

Well, I’m in these ugly meditations when the Doctor gets up and announces we’re going to church. We do that about twice a year; once if it rains on Easter. I’m 3 a.m. fugued out anyway, so I sport up and we head out.

It’s the usual. We go to Savannah, the closest place you can find an Episcopal layout. Right down in the slums, people already holding tallboys and blinking at the rising glare, we hit this pocket of new cars and a cathedral. All the dirt and smoke butts and dead banana trees changes to the soft, stained panes of biblical wonderment, and fresh acolytes with red-and-white robes and white faces and red lips carry gold candles; and the priest puts on twenty sashes and linen underthings and gold-braid overthings until he sweeps when he walks; and gold emerald-studded pikes get carried around, with three prongs for the Trinity; and the people kneel and stand and sing and kneel and pray on red velvet cushions that swing down for your knees like footrests under Greyhound bus seats, but of the finest, heaviest, wood-pegged oak, not bent pot metal; and the sermon intones with catch phrases like "more and more"; and the creeds, Apostle’s and somebody’s, get done; and then we pray, and then we line up for Communion. The Father wipes the silver chalice with a beautiful linen rag large as a small tablecloth, turns the cup two inches each time to keep you from having to drink where the last worshipper lipped it, as if that takes care of the germs. But I don’t care, I always reach out very piously — that’s to say, in slow motion, the way you move for some reason to take and Bat the body of Our Savior-reach out and lay my hand over the Father’s in somber reverence to the moment and then press down as the silver rim clears my upper lip and suck a slug of wine that should have fed six communers. I have to, because the bread of His body is stuck to the roof of my mouth like a rubber tire patch, and if I can’t wash it loose by swishing His blood around, I’m going to have to dig it off with a finger, in slow motion, and possibly gag.

When the service is over we go to a Howard Johnson’s for the business at hand. She wants to talk. I should have known. She orders a grilled cheese and takes one bite, as usual. She never eats. It’s the liquor. I get this ice-cream thing that looks like Mt. Pisgah. She has cup after cup of coffee, lights a cigarette.

"Well. I want to tell you something very important.”

"Shoot." I don’t like to be flip, but something about parents draws that out.

"Your father and I" — she takes a long drag—"have decided to get back together? She taps out that new cigarette and lights another.

"Okay," I say.

"Contain yourself." I do, by destroying one of Pisgah’s promontories. "I thought you might be excited by the news."

"The news is fine. But what’s going to happen'?"

"Well, a lot." Tap-out. Waitress, more coffee. "We will move to Hilton Head."

"Oh, God. Have the Arabs got him?"

"Stop being a smart ass. He has a wonderful opportunity to join a good firm. And he is. We will move there. You will go to Cooper Boyd."

"What about the house?"

"We don’t know. We may sell it if it works out. Or keep it for vacations."

“What about. . Theenie?"

"She’l1 come to Hilton Head."

I’d heard enough. The good old days were on a respirator. A boarding school and landed gentry snot-nose college-prep buggers for Simons Manigault.

"I don’t know how to put this," she said, "but in the past what became of you was more or less my bailiwick. That’s shifted in the deal."

"Baseball."

She laughed. "I don’t think that bad. But you will go to a good school, as your father wants. And what you read is up to you and them. You’re a bright boy, son. Maybe I overdid things. Forgive me if I did."

"No, you did all right." You couldn’t blame her for hedging the progeny gamble. I only held the shrink trip at three against her.

“No hard feelings?"

"Naaah."

"Give me a hug, then." She stood up right there and I had to follow suit and we hugged. I did like her. She was what they call a good soldier.

We sat back down and I glared at all the people looking at us' and she smiled through more blue smoke.

This was heavy news. Taurus was good as gone. That didn’t really bother me, especially because of the yet confusing whiskey revelation, but I knew I’d get over that and like him the same for showing me all he did, in the end. But I hadn’t figured leaving the neighborhood — accessible mullet and the Baby Grand, the sporting life, being the Duchess’s boy, and all that. That would be tough. I just figured I’d be tough, something was finally happening good or bad for damn sure, and if the good old days were on a respirator, I’d do them the service of going around and pulling the plug.

"All set?" she said, collecting her purse and keys.

We left Savannah and cruised north through the curiously hot, still quality of late Sunday mornings when your church clothes need to be taken off.

Taking Leave

Monday night I went up to Jake’s expecting to engineer a big he’s-a-good-fellow send-off, to collect a few condolences about leaving, etc. Yet I get there and stool up and order and swing around a couple of times making the joint blur, making the pool-table green send rocket trails of ball colors into the players. I don’t feel bad a bit. More like snappy, I somehow feel.

They don’t want me in there claiming hardship, carrying my howitzer can around for them to drop a tearful memento in and us to embrace like Boy leaving the jungle for Civilization and stiff British lips. All that's about as uncouth if not unethical as I could get. I’m supposed to be one of them. They’ll know as soon as the first stick of furniture walks into that van what happened to me, it don’t need no news conference.

Jinx comes up. His eyes are brilliant. We knuckle bump. He looks off for Jake and says to me, looking away for Jake, “Where you been?"

“I been around.”

"Man, ain’ seen you in a long time."

I shrug. "Just happens.”

"Look so."

He got a beer and drank some of it. Nothing came to us to say. Then he says, "So take care yourself, man."

“You too, Jinx." He walks off. I notice he’s dressed up. He dresses funny for a country Negro in the Grand. He wears cardigan sweaters and nice dark slacks — pushes up the sweater sleeves over his forearms — with matching socks or sometimes no socks. He looks like a college golfer. He goes over to the jukebox and studies it.

Jake’s down at the other end, occupied with himself. He’s got one foot up on a beer box, leaning on his knee, smoking, looking off at the wall. It’s a slow night.

"Jake, what’s the weather sposed to do?" I say.

"Might be sposed to rain."

We figure on that a bit. I had heard a rumble. Then he says, "You ready?”

"Nah," I tell him, setting my can back down in circles of water. "Not yet." He keeps smoking, looking at the wall.

I slip out.

Outside, it’s thunder and purple dusk. I hustle. A black pickup about forty years old with hog-slop buckets in the back stops. An old guy squints at me. He’s sixty to a hundred. No teeth. Gumming something. I get in. He nods. I did the right thing. We drive, a little slower than I was running, to the Cabana road, where he lets me out. I wonder about the hog business — if he gets the slop free from restaurants, etc. — but don’t ask him anything. The palmettos sound like a stampede, crackling and brushing and popping. They’re bristling around like fur, in waves and counterwaves. Jake sent me out the back door once at the Grand. I was all set to go out the front when his girl said, "Jake! You gone let that chile go out there?"

"Why not?” Jake said.