Edisto - Padgett Powell (7 page)

"Thanks for showing us," I said. "We
got to go. Dr. Manigault is very grateful. I’d seen it." I
lied. "It was him that needed—" Taurus was out the door;
I was going to give them an oral history spew they’d never edit
out.

But he was already down the hall.

"Hey. Let’s go get something to eat."

"Like what?"

"Potatoes."

He smiled. "What was that, anyway?"

"They use them for corns and bunions. Potatoes
are the second great cure."

"And the first?"

"Ammonia."

“
Ammonia?"

"Yeah, except not like you said it. Say it
ah-MON-ia and it’ll cure whatever it won’t clean."

The only thing I remember about the rest of the day
is the shirt I had on. It was my green-and-yellow. I tried to picture
a new universe of potato Wearing, who could and who couldn’t. It
was at the Grand. Preston and Jinx had on potatoes big as brogans,
flared open at the ankles like construction workers’. The bitches
came in in high-heeled spuds trim as cigars. Jake had on a
nondescript pair. I had on some saddle oxfords, warm ones. Then I saw
the oral history boys trying theirs on, and every one they reached
for them, red sparks hit their fingers like Dorothy’s red shoes.
They couldn’t get their potatoes on. The Doctor had a pair at the
foot the wicker settee which she chose not to put on.

They were out of style. She just sat on her legs
folded up under her and had a dreamy look. Then I took mine off and
tried on everybody else’s, like Goldilocks. Daddy's were in a
drawer at his desk with his golf shoes. He could wear them, I
thought, for a special occasion. Then Taurus showed up very
inconspicuous. He was kneeling down, I thought looking at his. Then I
saw he was polishing his potatoes. He was the only one taking care of
them. He was using a big Kiwi hardwood brush and the skins were
lightly steaming, and the brush stroking through the steam pulled it
in slow clouds like a tug on the waterway in the early mornings.
 

One of My Custody Junkets

When we got out of the oral history studio we went
over to the market to see some real basket weaving. It was going on
as usual—about five or six ladies on their metal cafeteria chairs
(they must have got a deal, or they closed a school out in the
country, or it burned, except chairs). They were all set up on the
outside corners of the old slave-market longhouses, surrounded by
their four hundred straw artifacts and sacks of new grass and straw
at their feet, in the sunshine. Just inside, where all the flea
market tables were, it was dark, with all kinds of van people selling
jewelry and belt buckles and other things you can get in a pawnshop.

The van people came every weekend and sold this stuff
like portable garage sales, stopping in on Friday night to hold their
booth and early Saturday setting up, mostly in the middle of the
market. At the upper end, where the auction block for the slaves had
been, they filled the market in with boutiques painted in pastels.
They have antiques there too, but these are on consignment from the
North, Daddy says. They also have fancy restaurants that write what
they have to eat on a blackboard outside so you know the food is as
fresh as new chalk. They should use one of those at school, to
upgrade the image: "Today we have a fresh, steamed hot dog, pork
beans, butter squash, Tuesday surprise cake, cold, sweet milk. $.35."

Then down at the far end it’s no boutiques or even
van people, but Negroes selling vegetables. I mean they sell
them—running up and shouting down a neighbor's price and demanding
you feel their tomatoes. That end of the market is like it was before
the front end got boutique cuisine and turquoise. It is just heavy
green paint, open rafters, dirty shale floor, tables, and vegetables.
It was like that all the way, before: bats in the rafters and
pigeons, paint heavy as metal falling loose, piss in the corners,
bums, and very dark-except at one or two places there were these
enclosures, like a barbershop or a hot-dog joint.

But those places weren’t boutique-y. No one went in
them, and they were run by Negroes. Well, someone went in them, I
guess. Daddy took me in one of them once, we were just walking
around. I remember now. It was a place about as big as a car, a room
behind swirled old glass in green wood framing, and up against the
glass were pressed all these clothes. Inside, there were some on
hangers and on a table, but a lot were just piled up against the
windows. Daddy stopped and went in.

A Negro, invisible except for his white shirt, was in
there.

"Yezza."

"Need suspenders."

Nothing.

"How much are your suspenders?"

" ’Pend which."

Daddy plunged his hand into the wall of clothes at
the door, and I saw through the window this banded strip of material
with a brass buckle disappear into the dark mountain like a snake
into the ground. The strip snapped free inside.

"These," he said, holding up a
brown-and-white set of suspenders.

The Negro felt them and said a dollar. Daddy got
them.

"Those would cost you fifteen dollars on King
Street," he said, when we left. And suddenly we were looking
into a barbershop, built like the haberdasher’s, with another lone
Negro very much like the first, but this one behind a barber chair
with white porcelain armrests and a white porcelain headrest, looking
twenty degrees away from us.

Then there was this food place where you stepped up
to a half-open door and ordered.

"I’m hungry."

"All right, let’s go on up to Hen—" He
stopped.

"What do you want to eat?"

"What do they have here?"

"Let’s see."

We did, and had two very reasonable hot dogs and
Pepsis in Coke cups—they explained the difference before they sold
them to us. They put ice cubes from an ice-cube tray in them out of a
refrigerator like at a house.

The next time I went to the market it was all gone.
Bats, rafters, shale, pee, lead paint, clothes wads, the stuck barber
pole, chili in open pots, all went to dropped ceilings for energy
saving, parquet, restrooms, pastel, jean shops, international flags
waving in front of a deli store, and food described on a blackboard.
It was something.

The only thing left intact was the vegetable end,
where, besides the women shouting could they help us with something
that day, Daddy and I saw this kid with a big dog on a kite string
leash.

He was going from table to table piled high with
vegetables, showing it off. "Lookit my new collie!” They
couldn’t help but lookit: it was tall as his shoulders, and
prancing ahead of him without straining the kite string, as if it had
been trained. Its back was bowed up and it had a long, skinny
bone-head, and the whole dog was about half a foot wide, like it was
sick, and smiling.

"What’s wrong with that dog?"

"Probably nothing," Daddy said. "Except
he’s lost."

"Lost from where?"

"From his owner."

"It’s not his Bonsai?"

"That’s a Borzoi."

That’s where I learned they weren’t Bonsais, but
they still look as tortured as those little trees they plant in
square china pots. Daddy made a call from the corner and a big car
came around in a minute and Daddy told the man to go up the market.

"On a
string
?" the man said,
laughing. “They something
else
, aindee, Iv?" He sped
off.

Daddy’s name is Everson Simons Manigault. You
shorten names here to the least sound workable and then, if you can,
change the sound. Iv. A regal name like Cambridge becomes Bridge,
then Brudge, then Budge. And so forth. Girls, sometimes it’s
lengthened. Mary can’t be plain Mary, but Mary C., stuck on. Anne
won’t do, it becomes Annie, still something missing, so Annie-boo.
People get more charming that way, more memorable and distinct.

"Who was that man?" I asked Daddy.

“
Old friend of mine from Clemson," he said.

"What’s his name?"

"Bun."
 

We Entertain: A Faculty Raree

Something more than all get-out. That was the phrase
at school one year. Sharp as all get-out. Fast as all get-out. Where
did it come from? What could it mean? Well, the night the Doctor had
her associates over to inspect her circus property, it was ludicrous
as all get-out.

I had to get the party condiments out of the
Cadillac. She’d got a bunch of things she never drank herself, like
Wild Turkey and J&B Scotch, to impress the guests with. And a box
of Coke and things for mixing it. It was quite a load, though at the
time I didn’t notice, except for the insane trips with one bottle
in each hand so I wou1dn’t break anything like I did once. "Please,
honey, no more than two at a time. I don’t want you to strain."
She was always referring to the time a blue crab scared me on the
steps and I bailed out because I was still in my childhood mode. He
was perfectly crushed and pickled by the best discount liquor money
could buy when she got there, holding the door open, looking down
truly aghast, the lame crab waving his last threats from a pile of
glass and wet paper sacking and sharp whiskey stink. She replaced
everything with one stop at the Grand bootleg door, the day I first
heard her called the Duchess, and the day they first saw her little
prince. Apparently I did something to impress them, like pet a bad
dog or look in its ears and tell them it had mice, which I thought
was plural for "mite" then. We went home and transferred
the cheap stuff to her decanters and got ready for that party.

And ever since I have been a two-bottle lackey.
Tonight was big if you considered the number of my trips. And on one
of them I met her coming down with a coat on her shoulders, and she
went up the beach toward Theenie’s. I thought she meant to get
Theenie for a vacuum run, or even for maid work during the bash,
until I remembered Theenie was gone. She was up there to talk to the
star boarder. I was so dense, picturing him cracking ice for them or
driving the soddy ones home. He was going to be it, guest of honor.

The party collects very quickly because it is so
casual, twos and singles parking up the road in the palmettos, which
they think of as the jungle, and they walk in like soldiers on leave
from all their trench work teaching their
ignorami
, which
great parts of their conversation dwell on in the early going. No one
can write or read or—brace yourself—think in any of my classes.
Nor mine. Nods. Toasts. A few more rounds and the culprit has been
determined: the president of the college! Not the dean, not social
promotions, not even their less adept
colleagues (everyone not
present). It’s the president. Then president stories.

The president was a general in the army before he was
a college president, which allowed him to view academic developments
in martial terms. So funds were not appropriated by budgetary
solicitation, the till was sacked. The fine-arts department was not
enlarged, it was reinforced. So-and-So would not be denied tenure, he
would be discharged without dishonor. They called him the General.

"The General went up to poor Bill,"
somebody says, "and smiled so effusively Bill thinks he’s in
trouble. Then he said he’d heard Bill planned to get married."
They howled, because Bill knows the General knows he’s homo. He’s
so scared for his job he can’t teach!

But the way the General most significantly ruined the
school was by designating department heads from the outside, rather
than by promoting from within. This not only leaves them all
unpromoted but at one time eight department heads were from military
colleges or West Point itself, and the faculty meetings "sounded
like Yalta," somebody said. "
Enfilades
, for Christ’s
sake. I need smaller sophomore sections and he says to me, in public,
if I can’t run a full company, fall to the rear."

"Get off the pot," somebody seconds, the
party beginning to roll. But they never get very far with the
General, because the campaign he runs is successful. They just don’t
like the language. And he’s so powerful that even their most inept
colleagues are reprieved and warmly taken back, because their fragile
roles in the total ruination of education are by comparison so minor
and incidental.

But after a time gossip beats out professional
problems, and all gossip is finally about sex and a lot of giggling
gets going, with grown men putting their heads between their own
knees and laughing at the floor about, say, a wager someone present
has made that someone absent always takes a shower after "doing
it." "Whenever she'll let him." "Whenever he’ll
let her!" Red faces burled in the bouncing knees, people going
to the sideboud end losing count-something they rarely do. Thess are
drink accountants.

Well, it’s one of these when Taurus drops in and
hurls the talk backward through sexual indiscretion and the faults of
the president and the failure of mind in America to a real problem:
How to accommodate a nonprofessional guest who is not a servant or a
child or an old friend of the hostels? Play It by ear, play it by
ear.