Edisto - Padgett Powell (3 page)

"When it’s school time you’d better come get
me," he said.

"All right. You want to tell me about this
Theenie thing?"

We went in the shack and he poured himself another
jelly glass of liquor and my own little wheeze of it and told me what
happened. And a few other things I wanted to know, and more in the
morning and afternoon, and we began our association thenceforth.
 

A Summons at Edisto

The process server told me he took the coastal
highway south and the small road off to the left at a sign marked
Edisto Beach. For twenty miles he drove in the dark to the steady
sound of his automobile. Then he began to hit the marsh pockets.

He could not see the beginning marshes but could hear
them. The cruising fullness of sound made by his car noises bouncing
back from the close oaks and country houses would suddenly stop; a
hollow, retreating, new quiet air. He looked out and saw nothing and
then house and brush and trees blasted back close and full of sound.
It was like running through an old wooden house, rooms opening off a
narrow hall, hollows of sound breaking the noise of your running.

It was too late to serve a paper. He stopped and
stayed in a motel that sat in a halo of its own pink-and-green neon
lights. In the small wooden room, he went to sleep listening to the
hypnotizing hum of cars down the road.

In the morning all he had to go on was an account of
a set of roads near the beach beyond the paved road. There were miles
of them, and on one of them, near the beach, was what was described
to him as a rich man’s house. Near it was a small shack. There his
trail ended. He had a summons for a woman someone said had something
to do with that shack.

Coming around a curve in the road where oak trees
were painted white, he had to stop because of people in the road. He
parked his car and got out and walked toward a tree they were
surrounding."Law," one of them said. Looking through them,
he saw at the foot of the tree a boy, as if asleep, suddenly open his
eyes and jump up. as if awakened. Then the boy sat down.

He shouldered back through the crowd past a school
bus and continued. The air was salty as he reached the end of the
hard road and began nosing down a graded road through heavy palmetto.
The palmetto grew fuller, became a virtual tunnel of scabbling palms.
He passed a wooden sign, SAVANNAH CABANA, and then saw the rich man's
house. He got out and climbed its stairs and knocked and looked in.
In the main room were wicker sofas and chairs, a bamboo bar, a
ceiling fan, metal tumblers, and glass decanters. The long curtains
suspended over the floor-to-ceiling windows kept billowing out with
the breezes, dusting the hardwood floors. The place was lit by the
ocean’s bright upward glare. He went down the stairs and saw,
beside a rusted-out Carrier compressor, a heap of carpets housing sea
roaches and sand crabs.

He pulled up to the other, smaller house up the
beach. The door opened and an old Negro woman said, "Sim, your
momma was’n spose—” and stopped, eyes lowering. "What you
wont?"

"I’m looking for Louester Samuels.”

She looked at him in wonder. She managed to say,
"What you wont wid her?"

"It’s a legal paper for her."

"I know what you wont," she then said, and
fell back into the small house and grabbed a shawl and a stack of
linen and nearly knocked the process server down with her charge out
the door. Then she turned and circled him and went back in and pulled
a bundt pan from the oven bare-handed and charged him again. Then she
stopped and dropped the cake on a table and made a final charge past
him and down and out and trundled to the first tunnel of palms
husking in the wind and stopped and turned and she fixed him with an
incredulous look. Then was gone into the queer, muffling, constantly
moving trees. The process server stood on the porch under an overhang
of tin roof, its wood hot and dry from the long afternoon sun, the
tin going tic, tic.

He went inside and smelled the hot cake and looked
the room over. What took his attention was the walls, covered with
yellowed newspapers. He read them, kneeling on the bed to get
closer—stories about the Work Projects Administration. He felt the
bed, soft in its heavy blanketing, and lay down and crossed his feet
and put his hands back under his head and took a nap.

He woke a little after dark and left the house for
the husking tunnel of palms and palmettos the Negress had taken. At
its end was the other house, the Savanah Cabana. He climbed the
stairs again and stood on the porch beside a wringer washing machine
until a woman came to the door.

 
That’s the bare bones of how he scared
Theenie out of the county. What took me some time to figure out was
why. She thought he was her grandson. That’s what the Doctor said,
anyway. It sounds crazy, because he looks as white as a regular
coroner to me. But you know how that works.

I remembered then that Theenie used to complain about
her daughter being in trouble. In Theenie’s book you can be dead
broke, sick, jobless, no place to stay, and still be doing all right
provided the law is not after you. She calls it the gubmen. The
gubmen is like God: all-powerful and merciless. The hardest thing in
the world for her to do is call the social security office about a
late check. If she had one stolen from her mailbox, I’m not sure
she’d call anybody. “Life hard, Sim" is about what she’d
say. And hire someone to watch for the postman next time.

And the Doctor said she thought this process server
was her grandson by her daughter who went to New York, which is
Gomorrah to people here. Well, one look at him and you knew he was
not all black, and that meant white people were involved, and one
look at his blue summons and she knew the gubmen was involved, so
it’s major.
 

A Question of Heredity

It didn’t take a genius to know it was big, not
after I knew Theenie had been at the house and thrown down the
laundry and wasn’t back at her shack and had left my cake out there
without her wax paper sealed to it like peritoneum—you know, she
has a thing about freshness. She can sit down with some chicken she
found in tin foil about two weeks old and heat it up by letting it
sit on the table while she irons and then eat it with a Co’-Cola,
bouncing the bones in her hand to check for meat she hadn’t sucked
off, and be perfectly happy. And she could cook mullet brought in
head down in a pickle bucket of pink fish slime and worm goo, fry
them, and bounce those bones a little too, but when it comes to
making something like a cake, which, considering its components (like
water and flour and other powders), can’t be too foul, at least not
like mullet in a bucket sat on by a fat lady in the sun until they
stopped biting—it comes to making a bakery-clean white thing like a
cake and she’s got to have fresh eggs, fresh real butter, sweet
milk, and you can’t even walk around the house while it cooks lest
it fall, and she won’t run the vacuum cleaner while it’s in there
either. She can only sit down with another Co’-Cola and a Stanback
powder to virtually pray for it, and then it’s out, it will have to
cool, and nine times out of ten, before you can touch it, she has
grafted to it wax paper set into the hot buttery sugary crust of the
cake and welded there by a fusion of wax and cake, and that cake you
could throw in the ocean and it would float like a crab-pot marker
for years, and the day it washed up on a beach and was found by an
islander he could take it to his hut and with great-eyed delight peel
off the wax paper with his skinning knife and devour the rich, golden
flesh inside. And as soon as you slice up this memorial, this baby,
and make your smacky fuss about how good it is, she starts making her
fuss about how much trouble it is, and she’s not making any more,
she’s too old, you’re too old, too old for her to have to work
that hard, why, she raised you. (She raised two other sets of white
kids before me. And she’s not through until she hears they got
married.) You smile and smack and smile away, she sitting at the
kitchen table in her white uniform, hair bluing and legs swollen,
fingering an aspirin onto a toothache, complaining and complaining
before rising and completing without another idle breath the rest of
the cleaning or ironing or bedmaking or whatever kind of tracking
after the mess of white folks that afternoon presents, and she shows
up the next morning with a silent assault on the breakfast detail,
fresh and renewed somehow against a thousand cigarette butts in amber
dregs of whiskey, and strewn clothes, and crap, crap from the high
life.

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.