Padgett Powell - Edisto

So I knew it didn’t take no genius to know something big was about, and from the way the Doctor took in Taurus like the bright kid they’d heard had decided to be an English major, from the way she toyed with him, the crap about servants, his hanging around, an obvious bid for a surrogate father for me — it isn’t the first time she has solicited the attentions of your notably masculine types, at least partly I am sure for some father image around the house — and from what Taurus told me about her (Theenie) bolting out of the shack with jets of terror into the palms waving around like big testifying arms at a revival, from this I knew something was up, particularly for Theenie, old Theenie, who says to me, "Sim, you ain’t got to do but two things. One is die, and thuther is live till you die." I turn my head like a beagle at the novelty of this suggestion coming from her. "Ain’ I right?" she says. "I guess you are," I say. "You believe it, then."

And I suppose you begin to. You certainly have to think she must believe it, odd as it seems at first that she can believe she has freedom, but then it looks like that belief might be her support in her heavy old world. She must say deep down somewhere very quietly while standing on those swelling brown-scaled legs ironing again and again the brocade this, the fancy that, that she can stand it, stand the steam rising off the board into her face, hot fingers manipulating the coverlets and slipcases just out of range of the iron, steam rising to her sweaty face before the fan turns and blows it off her, because she doesn’t have to, she likes Simons, he all right, but I ain’ got to do it for him neither, I will is all. I only got to do two things. Die and live till.

So what makes her pour out of her house and job like water downhill because a man who might be a simple bill collector, some fool, interrupts her at cake baking?

You don’t ask an old soothsayer like Theenie herself, who in this case could not be asked because she didn’t stop running, save for the brief talk she had with the Doctor, until she got safely back on John’s Island. You ask a great old earthy philosopher like Theenie something truly mysterious too directly and the answer you get, if you get one, will be as evasive as your question was blunt. I'm sitting on the commode one day and look off at the trash can by my knee and see some gauze, a bandage, and open it up and there’s blood on it, with black flecks like pepper in it — I about faint. " Theeeenle |" I yell. " Theenee! " I’m buckling up in a white flne sweat and pointing at the can when she opens the door. “Who got cut?"

"Hmmp!" she says. "No one." And slams the door, leaving me there in the surgical chamber.

That leaves the Doctor sole heiress to the fortune of secrecy that has her quietly jubilant about losing her maid and welcoming into the house the man who chased off her maid, and she gives him the maid quarters when he doesn’t ask for them, and charges him with taking me to school. It leaves the Doctor, who had quite a little chat with Theenie, it would seem.

There was nothing for it but direct questions, no one but the new man and the Doctor to ask.

"How’d you scare her that bad?"

"I don’t know."

"See you tomorrow."

I took my cake back to the Cabana, where the Doctor was perfectly blumbery. I took her drink and freshened it without being asked (she holds the glass out and says, "Do me?").

"How come that dude scared Theenie?"

"Have you been writhing?”

"Yes ma’am, a whole story just today. But tell me how he scared her.”

"She believes she’s her grandson — he’s. He’s her grandson. He’s come to avenge them for leaving him in New York."

"Who?"

"Her daughter. Her daughter and she did."

"A baby?" I asked. Didn’t sound like Theenie at all.

She nodded.

"Because he was not. ."

"Half," she said. "And she says it was sick. Anyway, I’m not sure she’s right.”

"But she’s scared," I said.

"Yes, she’s scared," she confirmed, with a slow, exaggerated nodding of her head.

“Well, good night."

"Sleep tight," she said. "Sweet dreams." It wouldn’t do to ask any more. I can make it up just as true as she can. So I got out my spiral notebook and corrected for the lie I told about writing a story that day.

BETWEEN LIVING AND DYING

by Simons Manigault

Between living and dying, she had made two mistakes. One was letting her daughter go to New York to be a singer, and the other was letting them take her daughter’s baby from its grandmother, herself, who got there in time to get it and take it home and raise it right, whether he was half white or not and sick. It was the sick that got him away from her, the sick that her daughter gave it, junk in it. Her daughter in New York messed up on drugs and taking things called fixes got the baby away from her and got her half convinced he was going to die so she let them take him and then she was never able to get him back and her fool daughter crazy enough to go to a place like that was too crazy to want him if she could have had him and she was just an old colored lady a long way from home and she left. It grinded her up to think about it and she never forgot it and she knew it was not true about having only to die and live till you die. You had to be careful somewhere in between or you could be chased by something like losing your daughter's baby because you weren’t careful somewhere else, and you lost your daughter herself or she lost her sense, which is the same. You could be chased by it and even caught up with.

And it would come for you, not your daughter who had no sense, but you who did, who knew better all along, you the wrong one in it. You would have to leave Simons and Mizmanigo and weave baskets again, but that would be the price.

So Theenie and Taurus never talked, not after her terrible recognition, trundling kawhoosh past him, floorboards bending and springing her off the porch over the steps she would have stumbled down, her crooked-worn and polished pump heels flying in the sand. And her turning the yellow-and-white eyes on him for one last look and whirling at last into the ushering arms of the rat palms. I call them rat palms because we were pulling them off, the dead butts of branches, one night for a fire, and because you must pull very hard to rip them loose, I learned the hard way that whatever is between the husk and the coconut-hair bark of the tree comes down on your arm, and that night in the dark my whatever-in-between was no drowsy rumpled sparrow or polite silken tree frog but a rat about the size of possum and texture of armadillo, and it landed all over my arm from hand to shoulder in one shuddering rush, and I nearly shook my arm out of socket and got a chronic case of girls’ fear of rats from that and still have it, and you would too.

So he goes in the house and reads W.P.A. stories on the walls where the roaches have eaten away the flour but not the ink of the newspapers, and he naps, wakes, and emerges into the old, bored heat of this named but never discovered small place of the South and hears the tin roof tic, tic in that heat. So they never talk. One runs calf-eyed into the woods from the other, who later watches her on Sony monitors in a wall bank of federally funded TV sets. On a tape he sees what he sees of her, what he sees of — I found out — of his only known or at least speculative origins, watches as calmly as a surgeon an operation.

What would she have told him if she could have stayed? Probably the usual speech she would make to coroners courting the Doctor.

"She got a double use for you , mister. If you cain’ see that, why you scudgin’ us all. Ever since Mr. M. left, it’s been a trile with that Simons. Because iss onliess us here. He roundbunction, in trouble, fallin’ out of buses , ekksetra. All she wont is somebody to keep him right. Even she know that. And Law knows I do, I see enough of that in my own. Somebody got to hep that boy kotch up. He so far ahead he’s behine . Yes, he is." Her head nodding, in a rhythm like a small, gentle locomotive; her whole head rolling on the syllables. "Yessuh."