Edisto - Padgett Powell (2 page)

"My maid has quit," she said.

"I have not served anyone yet," the
stranger said.

"You wanted her daughter, anyway. I am now
without retainer. Do you paralegals make restitution of damages such
as retiring twenty-year employees?"

"Do you know where her daughter is?" He sat
down.

"Do you want to find out?"

Here they stopped. I could see his back, arms on his
knees; he was sitting looking directly at her. She had her drink. She
looked over the rim of it at him, sort of looking out the tops of her
eyes and hiding her mouth with the drink.

“
If you’ll tell me, I’ll get the other one
back," he said.

“
No, you won’t. You won’t even find her."

"Lately I am a professional at finding—"

"You won’t find her unless I tell you where
she is, and you probably won’t find her daughter unless she tells
you where she is."

"Where did she go, then?"

"That’s a laid-low to catch a meddler."

“
A what?"

"Skip it. I’ll tell you what. Since you scared
hell out of my maid and my estate is consequently shorthanded, you
might assist me . . . She kind of trailed off.

They looked at each other a while.

"If you want to find either of them, you might
hang around a bit."

"Hang around?"

"I am short on domestics, it would seem. There’s
the gardening and the brass polishing, of course, but as a coachman .
. . And Simons has just today manifested a problem in his school-bus
riding. You could escort him to school and back, and keep up the
quarters on the beach, and let me see if I can locate Athenia for
you."

"I suppose I might," he said.

"And could you tell me what is paralegal
service?"

She knew what it was. The old man was a lawyer and
every joe to take her out since who wasn’t a professor was an
ambulance chaser or coroner. She was not asking to get an answer, but
to know the answerer. This tactic was used when she had brilliant
students over, mostly.

The stranger accepted the game. She was still
accelerating, ever since the door, and virtually beaming at him over
the whiskey, her tawny old Kool-Aid.

"That straddles law and law enforcement"he
said, and I was certain, without any evidence, that he was grinning.
He had passed a little test with flying colors—not flinched at all
the crap about servants and brass polishing, but accepted her game,
and what her game was even I did not know. But I knew something was
going on, and if I had not been buzzing on Empirin, I could have told
whether it was really going on, or just me, buzzing on Empirin.

"Well," the Doctor said, in her summing-up
tone, "there’s a cake down there. Send it back with Simons.
Can you walk okay, Ducks?”

"Yes ma’am," I said.

I beat him out the door into the trees, leaning with
the night wind away from the beach, and headed us for Theenie’s
shack. It was my birthday and I had a cake.
 

An Assessment of the Stranger

Our beach is steep and not white but cochina. We took
the fronting road, named Juno Boulevard by the speculator who sold
his model-home land office to the Doctor. It is a mod building: an
octagonal pagoda on stilts with two levels of parapet walks and
sliding glass doors all around, a cupola on top with a widow’s
walk, all of it squatted over five thousand dollars’ worth of
heating and cooling equipment on a slab below, which would flood out
with the first good blow. The Doctor got it for a price so famously
cheap that everyone still shakes his head about it, but I don’t
know the exact amount. She caught him depressed.

The speculator bought a two-square-mile patch of
desert, evenly between Savannah and Charleston, and figured to
civilize it with fifty miles of city-block roads and sell it to the
next wave of vacation-house affluents. He named the streets for the
fifty states and those left over for their capitals. And the road on
the beach, behind the first stand of dunes, he called Juno Boulevard,
he told the Doctor, "for the moon." When the moon is up on
this coast at this deep beach, it pours forth a hot glassy triangle
over the sea, spreading just enough to illuminate both the land
office and the maid’s quarters if you stand between them. At that
point facing inland you can see on the left the spectacular Mars-like
edifice the Doctor got cheap and named the Savannah Cabana (her
version of This’ldu or Here ’tis) and which probably helped
secure for her the designation "Duchess" by the locals, and
on the right a regular human shack, never moved or destroyed by the
developer because he never sold or came close to selling the lot it
was on. The Doctor told him she would need servants’ quarters, and
he threw that lot into the deal as well. I believe it was the only
two lots he sold. Then the bank called in the paper.

The shack was stifling, with mosquitoes. Someone left
the door open. In those days it was bug-tight, relatively speaking.
Here, where the greatest natural resource is a toss-up between sand
flea and mosquito, a thing is bug-tight if you do not die of a fever.

"Stand back,” I told our new livery man. "I
got to gun these things." I pulled the sprayer from under
Theenie’s bed, one of those old underslung can types with a slide
plunger you can aim like a rifle. He not only stepped back, he went
out and got some whiskey from his car.

Later we cut a hole in the windward side for the
romantic view of the sea and perverted the genius of the builder. For
this undoing there was no atonement. The original shack, by the grace
of common sense, had faced inland, not romantically seaward, and when
we got the boys’ club spirit, combined with my dreamy horseshit
("We need a
Weltanschauung!
” I said), and cut a
four-by-four hole, we invited an unstoppable, hourly legion of
stinging pests into the shack and there was no screening them then,
they could just let the wind push them gently through the wire like
little hungry Houdinis, so we only put up shutters, iron-hinged,
green, warped things Taurus got from Charleston, for larger
pestilence, like hurricane.

But in those days if the door was shut it was all
right. The stranger slapped himself a few times.

"The Cook’s tour," I said.

"Wait." He poured out four inches of his
whiskey in a jelly glass and drank an ice-water gulp. "Okay."

"This is it," I said, sweeping the room
with my hand. It had the order of a Negro maid: things are not out of
place but they are so crowded together that what is actually a tight
bit of stacking at first looks random. The bed has four blankets,
each turned down more than the one beneath and each a new color—blue
and brown and yellow and red—giving a crowded, messy look to the
neatness of a hospital-cornered bed. A small brown radio is at a
perfect angle to the listener on the bed, but it struggles on the
nightstand with a Mason jar and a Jesus, and shoeboxes full of folded
papers are stacked on chests, doilies are everywhere, a religious
velvet painting, on the windows see-through curtains, throw rugs on
the floor. The room could be a museum exhibit obliged to have
everything one old black woman could have or could be known to ever
have had, a composite picture of the known habitat of the Negro maid.
And smells like a washed dog. It was a mosaic, because if you stood
too close it looked just stuffed together, odd pieces of all manner l
of cheap human conveniences glued into the room. But if you looked at
it as a whole, the picture had an elegant form, was a spare machine
of necessary items for a lone person to live in a single room.

He pushed the jelly glass a half foot toward me on
the enameled metal table, white with a cobalt trim. I sniffed at it
and took a sip and wheezed. He smiled, I reading the newspaper on the
walls.

I got the cake, still in its pan, and was ready to go
when something made me slow down. The  Doctor had engaged this
man to chauffeur me, had easily granted him Theenie’s place on the
assumption she was gone and he was responsible what was going on? In
their little compact it looked like they knew more than I did, a
regular thing for the adults, but now I was being asked to comply
with this common understanding that welcomes a process server into
what passes for the family unit as the Doctor and I know it. The Boy
Act is the best thing I when in doubt. "You want to look through
the telescope?" I said.

"If you do,” he said.

Curious bird, I thought, taking my leave. "Wait
here." I run down—time for another Empirin, the ribs are
starting to creak again—and drop off the cake and get my telescope
and go back. The Doctor got it to go with the old, varnished,
cigar-brown globe she got me that you can’t see any particular
country on, and the telescope does match: you can’t see anything
particular with it either. It is brass and the old glass optics have
something in them like cataracts, but for occasions like this one it
serves fine. I pulled this number on one of the Doctor’s suitors
once, a coroner named Cud, vulture of a fellow circled around for
weeks before I got rid of him with a telescope stunt. It came very
natural then. I was hiding in my room, mostly from him, because the
Doctor was gone and I didn’t care to talk to him, but he’s there,
waiting for her, and my door opens and I grab the first prop
available, which is the scope. I hunk down on it out of reflex and
the coroner says, "How’s the weather?" Again out of
reflex, so I don’t reveal any idleness in my apparent absorption
with the view, I hunk down as if glued to something fascinating. I am
impervious, so great is the vision. I fix my eyeball airtight on the
ocular lest he see a point to invite himself on in with.

"See any pirate ships out there?" he says
(vomit) and I screw down so hard that the surf I’m aimed at is
falling slow and fast and is gray and another gray, then becomes,
like, colors, tumbling corpuscles of TV snow, which become blue and
yellow and then purple and red, and then shapes begin to appear
within a field of the tumbling colors.

Anyway, these cloud shapes start moving around in the
view, irregular and flowing, about like when you press your eyelids.
And one of them looks like a clipper ship, so I tell the coroner
named Cud: "I see clipper ships at 0—9—2." Then go
purple in my descriptions. Well, it worked like a charm. He was gone,
as I recall, before the Doctor returned. And it occurred to me after
that that it was a nifty little adult gauge, a feeler, that
telescope.

But this night was a hint different. The Empirin had
my tongue like a grit of sand in an oyster of nonsense, and this
stranger was no Cud going to hightail because of a little imagination
in the family.

I set it up outside, where the mosquitoes were less
dense, and addressed the view like a mariner, legs wider than the
brass tripod. I give it the old hunk, then a little juke one way,
another hunk. "Oooo," I let out, a little cat moan over the
surf, choirboy. Then I start tracking. "Clippers." He just
stands there and looks out at the Atlantic.

"Some fetching old Yankee Doodles, yessiree."
He has not flinched. "Here. You look." I stepped back,
careful to hold the telescope on line, nodded to it."Come on,
hurry, they’re at good speed."

The stranger took the scope. “I don't see them."

I figured the test about over, but I threw in one
more thing. "More south. They’re not called clippers for
nothing."

"No,” he said, "not clippers for
nothing."

"Tell me what you see."

He sighed, and then he jerked the scope a half inch
to the right and froze it. Looking back on it, this is where I place
his biggest gamble, his shrewdest moment. "Tell me, what should
I see?"

"Clippers!" I exhaled. “Wooden laminate
masted rolling regular clippers!"

He grunted and shuffled his feet.

"The canvases are coarse," I say. "Shredded
and hemp-flogged, wet, salt-stained, grand pieces of cotton
representing the lost fields who bore them!"

"Yes," the stranger said.

"Muslin!" I nearly shout. Who was testing
who? "Great flying manila, popping in the breath of Neptune. And
the wood. Varnished hard and sleek, teak and oak. The grains are a
study."

"A what?"

"Check the hulls!" He just looked on,
patient as ever.

"Well?" I had him.

He blurted, "The hulls. Yes." He got away
with something again! This really set me up. I turned the
vertical-hold knob.

"And the paints, marine paints, coat on coat,
voyage on voyage, haul, haul, dry haul diurnal and long. The colors
are myriad and embattled, layered soldiers on the land it is their
end to protect: blues, yellows, marine greens, and reds barnacled all
over each other in their hopeless flaking mission. They’ve had it,
bleached christenings of some jack-leg lubber in . . . I was spent.
Where had my boats been painted?

"Savannah," he said, still looking.

We looked over the water where the pattern of
infinite shatterings forming the bright, glassy triangle from the
moon was unbroken by boat or bird.

"I’m Simons," I said. We shook hands.