Padgett Powell - Edisto

She had about twenty cigarettes crushed all around her, and was looking down the road. "I’ll be in in a little while" is all she said. When I got home the phone was off the hook. I hung it up. And she came back in. Even today I don’t know what all that meant.

But I do think that’s when she became the Duchess. Some dude rounding the curve in a low deuce-and-a-quarter, thinking about nothing except getting up to the Grand, saw just what I did — a tree smoke a cigarette. Whoever it was figured out it was the white lady who bought the only beach house in this part of the world (which makes it a rich man’s house), and somebody else said, "What she doin’ out there?" "Yeah.” "Standing out there." And somebody like Jinx would say, "Man, like a, like a duchess or something." And everybody would agree, like a duchess or something, no one the least bit curious to know what was like a duchess in it, and the name would fix. So that’s the day. If it wasn’t, it was merely another day, another eccentricity. "She drive that car like she a duchess or something.” And she did.

Well, you can live with a Duchess easy, it’s the Doctor part can get you. But she can be a good soldier right along. This good-soldier stuff shows up all kinds of ways once you’re ready to see it. Like the formal sign-off in Howard Johnson’s that day, when she said it was all Jack London and baseball from here on in. But do you know what? About three weeks into my Cooper Boyd Latin tour, she casually asked to see the Commentaries , which the class was doing, Gallia est omnis divisa, etc.

I gave it to her and she tossed through it for about half a drink and then put it back with my other schoolbooks in their neat stack. And the very next day, in that same stack, under those Commentaries, was Horace on the bees! Leather-bound, dusty, and I know it’s fifth-year Latin stuff. Well, I don’t say anything, and she doesn’t either, because she’s bound by the code of the good soldier to keep her word about Rogering out and turning me over to the Dodgers.

Also, she stole it. How soldier can you get? Nothing new there, she’s done that before, from this old library at her college that has been replaced by a modern one of glass and elevators and photomagnetic krypton turnstiles. There are all these old books that she says will be sold for a quarter in a basement sale one day that she takes as she needs — now, not wholesale, but at need, like Indians and buffalo, which is strictly soldier. Anybody on the outside wouldn’t notice good soldiering in this, he would just see a stage mother in overdrive shoplifting, etc. For that matter, no one would see that she did me a favor going to the Grand for a trunkload of unstamped liquor when she could have called Vergil and had the authentic stuff delivered. She made the contact for us (for me) at the Grand with that planter’s wife act. That’s what got me in there later, with no questions, by myself. That’s what — her soldiering all along — got Taurus for me. All through the liquor and leftovers and coroners and mendacity is this other string — pulling shadowy maneuvering of things, mostly for me. So don’t get down on your mother if she’s drunk a lot, demanding, promiscuous, imperious, or anything. Because you might be wrong, you might not see the good soldier marching all along down in the trenches, for you. And you might be an igno, after all.

One time I remember she raised up out of the dark trench and squeezed off a round right in the open. It was at the party where Margaret Pinckney told the joke, and Bill called Taurus a thesis, and Margaret said some people had regular hopes still, and the Doctor told Jim to shut up. Well, I left the next part out because of the assignment. But I’m in a clear censor mode now so I’ll add it on. After Margaret said the girls still had regular hopes, I saw the Doctor do the most amazing thing.

She kissed Margaret Pinckney full on the lips, like a man, lipstick and everything. Well, Margaret started crying and hugging her like they were long-lost relatives, one of whom had been missing in action and given up for dead, which was not amazing, not for Margaret, still holding her tumbler of bourbon plumb over the Doctor’s shoulder and calling for Kleenex with her free hand. Bill of course turns beet-red and runs for the bathroom and comes back recomposed but trailing unbroken toilet paper because he forgot to break it off. ‘“That’ll do fine right there, Bill," the Doctor says, and there’s a laugh all around, and the women separate, and immediately the regular party hum-drum cranks up again — a gentle, assuring din that says everything’s fine. Except the Doctor has a hard, clear pair of eyes deliberately looking nowhere, which she does to conceal purpose. That’s what got me, that look. And that smooching was a doozie. That, as they’d say in the Grand, was most definitely jam up.

And I know this, too — soldiering once got her a purple heart. Because once upon a time she was a regular polite heroine in the small-town world of young virgins, as described by the most famous playwright. She went to a small college and was engaged to a handsome dude with papers and everything was set. Here the playwright always turns the screws with something like the girl catching her dude in another man’s arms. Well, our soldier doesn’t catch the fiancé in bed with a man, he just comes out and announces it, and the wedding is off, of course, and the rest of the play proceeds. She doesn’t blame herself for the next two acts because the gent shoots himself, or screw an entire army base, but she does set-to on the nearest law school. She doesn’t get crazier, she gets saner, with a vengeance. Lawyers, she figures, can’t be that duplicitous, at least not with their bound commitment to uphold the law and all these unnatural-act statutes staring them in the face, so it’s a much safer bet, getting one of these guys. The other guy was a poet, whose job, by comparison, was to challenge laws like that, anyway. So she wised up. That’s why I’m half Republican and in Cooper Boyd instead of altogether socialist and taking dancing or piano lessons. It’s like an outcross in dogs or horses. If she’d got that first dude, it would have been severe ideological inbreeding, and I might be shy or vicious or something. This way, the way Vergil tells it anyway (he breeds bird dogs), I can be a "good athlete,” which means not baseball but just a solid individual partaking of two separate strengths and not two compounded weaknesses, I hope.

I realize now I sort of trusted her as the commander all along, the man in charge, like at Parris Island, where they say that even though what they do to you and ask you to do looks bad, if not insane, you won’t get hurt if you do what they tell you. If you trust the man in charge. And on top of that, you’ll thank them for making you let sand fleas burrow a quarter inch into your hide and for breaking your nose if you scratch at one. So I sort of knew or trusted, in this way at least, the principle of the man in charge, and she was him, and I believe it did not hurt, and I’ll do that thanking in the end.

Taurus in a Spot of Trouble

This one’s true. The one about Theenie’s lost grandbaby might have been put together, fiction-mode. But this one happened. Right before we went to that photo parlor — in fact, we went in there to rest after the trouble — Taurus got in a fight with a bum. We were in a little restaurant by the bus station in Charleston. A jukebox was playing and this little girl had learned to kick it and make the needle skip back to the beginning. She replayed the song about five times and was giggling when the bum called her over to the counter by saying, "Tell me what’s on your Santy Claus list." It wasn’t near Christmas, but she went for it. Well, it worked. The song ended. She ran back over and kicked the box, but too late. She got mad and the bum drank his beer.