Padgett Powell - Edisto

But back to the lecture. She'd plug up the Cadillac dirt sucker and I’d say, "Where’d you get that thing, anyway?"

"I got it."

"How?"

"I got it, ain’t I?" A mock shriek.

"Yeah, but how?”

"You never mind.”

"It’s a secret."

"A secret?"

"A secret"

"What kind of secret?"

"A milintary secret," she’d scream. "Now git on, I got work to do.”

And she’d run that thing for two hours, when you could have swept the house in ten minutes.

Well, it was like that, or would be, in Hilton Head. And she’d love it, as long as she got a fair shake on her room, if it wasn’t smaller or too much bigger than anyone else’s. She might have even forgotten the precious things I had in the box. Well, I toted it anyway, took it to the Cabana to be the first thing to go in that van.

Edisto Was Over

That van never came. We split. Left it all in place, like a museum. They were either serious about coming back for vacations, or they were real unsure about it working out, because not one drop of liquor left with us, or book, or toaster, curtain, camera, anything. Just some clothes. I found myself standing on the porch by the wringer waiting for the Doctor, hand on the tub rim as I’d seen Taurus that first night he came to the house. I listened to it, too, a big conch shell of enameled sounds. The old rubber rollers were yellow and hard and wrinkled like skin. I tried to push the washer into the kitchen but it got stuck. I couldn’t pull it out or push it through, and I could hear the Doctor rustling and knew she’d get mad, so one big shoulder-to and the rig squeezed in finally, lurching away on its caster wheels into the cabinets.

The Doctor gave it a queer look as she came through, and me one too, so I went over and settled the thing in a corner, patted it a little, like I was in control, and we locked up and left.

My mother and I rumbled by Jake’s in the Cadillac in the hot middle of the morning — the lot a damp gray plot of crushed cans and shells and the Baby Grand a crummy dive-looking joint you’d never go in if you didn’t know.

We wound up the road from shack to shack, blasts of close sound coming from the woods in between, then whining open spaces where we passed the bare yards. The salt smells of the ocean thinning and falling off, too. We got into some big oaks finally and then I started seeing pruned trees. Yards with grass in them. Heavy post fences. Private drives. A Mercedes. Negro on a mowing machine cut a swath about eight feet wide. Hilton Head.

As soon as we got there, I was handed over to Daddy like a baton in a relay. The next day he hurried me up to the eminent Cooper Boyd Academy for registration, which means they make sure your name can be found on certain genealogical pathways and you have the money.

I aced a little test they gave me and there was talk of my skipping a grade or two. "What academy is this young man transferring from?" the head dude asks Daddy. He says: "Put him in the grade befits his age." That had an effect. No more gab.

Daddy took me outside and said he’d be back, was going into town on "new business." I caught that odd modifier and noticed he was new. His suit was without wrinkles. Even his skin looked smoother. My idea of him all along was one of these modern store mannequins with stark wood-cut faces always too darkly stained and expressing some dire problem despite the perfect poise with which they model a new suit — he had been like that during the custody junkets. But now he looked more refined and natty, a genuine relaxed Brooks Brother.

They took me to classes. One was a Latin class. I never had that before. Was very interesting. There was a photograph of Edith Hamilton herself on the wall, inscribed to the teacher, a heavy woman carrying on like some folk were cruising for a caning if they didn’t shape up.

I said okay, I’ll take that class, like I had a choice, and they took me to geometry, where I knew what acute and obtuse were but not their corresponding meanings in that room, so I said that was fine too, sign me up. I had the picture. I was an anomaly in a regular soup of high-water khaki duck-asses, white-soled Top-Sidered gentry bound for college and careers suitable to family name, which is a hint odd if you remember ten days ago I was an anomaly in a backwater of blacks with the same family names, bound nowhere, but bound.

Daddy retrieved me and we whistled on back to the architect-conceived, Arab-financed, model railroader’s plot of paradise. I have this speechless nervous reaction when we pop out of the untended sticks of the scrub into suddenly pruned oaks, yellow flesh wounds where limbs were sawn, their moss all shorn. And miles become kilometers, shacks condominia, marsh marina, and I feel like one of those bullet-shaped birds in Audubon’s drawer.

Doctor, Duchess, Soldier, Mother

When I say she’s a good soldier I mean having a mother who’s ordinarily regarded as a Duchess or a Doctor by everyone you know, but who’s all right.

The day I took the bulldog by the ears was the first day I heard her called Duchess. I have found at the Grand that you can manage to hear Negroes say stuff under their breath in ways that sound like these whispery devil noises in exorcist movies. She was getting the bootlegged liquor for the party I had jeopardized by dropping the real liquor that time, and she was getting such a load that the early Grand drinkers came up to watch. She turned from Jake to, I think, Preston (I hadn’t met anyone then) and told him to load it, which he did, even though he didn’t work there. Manigault will pay you for this Monday,” she told Jake, and walked out. As far as I know, it was the only instance of credit at the Grand in history. And I would guess the liquor was over $200. Well, all around this scene you could hear on the edges of talk this whispered rodent-like sound, the Duchess. Jake looked surprised by her abrupt credit maneuver but not upset. I waited until she had cleared the front door and ran after her. But I don’t think that’s when she was named Duchess. I put that earlier. It’s another time I now know more about than when it happened. All I knew then was that Theenie was staying at the house at night late sometimes, and the Doctor and Progenitor would come in later. Now I know that only one of them would come in later. The other stayed gone. I also knew then that they were driving cars like Cale Yarborough on the last lap, you could hear them burning the hard road sometimes, and crushing palmettos on the way in. That, I now know, was just her. He’ll do that ratchet noise with the transmission, and the six-inch skid, and that’s all, while she’ll paint a Darlington stripe from here to Savannah. Anyway, all this business was during the salad days of the breakup, I figure, and they were in a sleeping-out duel, and generally furious.

One thing that helps date all this is my teeth. I was having trouble collecting from the tooth fairy, and said something about it, and one morning a twenty-dollar bill showed up under my pillow. Probably the Progenitor was on home duty, came in, released Theenie, got in bed, remembered his parental fairy duties, couldn’t find any change (couldn’t find any teeth either, as far as I recall. They were in a jar because I had lost hope in the irregular fairy), and puts twenty dollars under my pillow. I believed all over again. And there was no effort made to recover the excessive grant, which you would rightly expect if they had been having regular home-style man-wife times, instead of the bust-up contest. Anyway, one day during this time, I got off the bus at the hard road and just as I turned into our road one of the trees we have painted white to mark the curve moved. And smoked a cigarette. It was the Doctor, in white.