Mrs Hollingsworth's Men - Padgett Powell (10 page)

The impossible job he would not get that he would
somehow get would be on the order of the lowest hand at the
feedstore. He would carry fifty-pound bags of feed and fertilizer and
seed to pickup trucks while his superiors at the store, some of them
much younger than himself, handled the transactions at the counter.
These would involve a total figure that was rarely particularized, a
check that was never questioned, and some talk about cutworms, or
bots, rust, whatever the hell the new rot-thing or bug was; the
county agent might know, might not, would pretend to until it was too
late. Was it true sixteen-gauge shells was going to disappear? No,
not that we heard, anyway. What is this shit about not being able to
vaccinate your own dog for rabies? I don’t know, that’s what they
say. Well, they ain’t worth the powder it’d take to blow them.

The man lately from the bed would grunt all day
beneath l his loads in paper and burlap sacks, some of which smelled
good enough to eat. A thick-necked, thick-shouldered high school
football player, traditional holder of his position at the feedstore,
would one day beat him up behind the feedstore. Or, more precisely,
two other football players, on behalf of the jobless football player,
themselves without feedstore aspirations, would beat him up. Whoever
did it, they would not realize that the wild and lucky moves the man
came up with in the hopeless defense of himself were inspired by
fear. They would see only that he had the balls and the surprising
skill to somehow nick them and so would not extinct him altogether
but would leave him there and say, “Go on in there and tote your
bags, old man,” and the man would notice that, wing them or not, he
had not disturbed even the Skoal tucked in their lips. No one after
this would ever bother the man again.

He crossed the street now in his red-plaid highwater
nattiness and approached the council of elders in their herringbone
and suspenders. They regarded him without cheer. He said to them,
“Wondering where I might find work.”

They appeared not to have heard him. Finally one of
them—the man could not tell which one—said, "Woik.
Heah
?"

“
Yes."

The elders looked off with far and indifferent gazes,
each in a different direction away from the man, as if they expected
something more interesting to appear over the horizon.

Mrs. Hollingsworth put the blueberries back down into
the surreal fog of the freezer and left the store without buying the
blueberries or the okra or anything at all. It was acceptable,
leaving the grocery store empty-handed, the odd time.
 

Home

When she got home purchaseless from the store, nosing
the Volvo through some boys on her street whom she had difficulty
regarding as the backbone of Forrest’s final command, particularly
given the horrendous postures of the boys, Mrs. Hollingsworth retook
her kitchen, headquarters for her recent lovely campaign. The house
had a thick and palpable quiet to it that was almost frightening; it
allowed you to smell its emptiness. This stillness and smell of
emptiness and quiet ticking space had in fact frightened her before
her visit to the wonderful place of the list, before her list—making
ride with Forrest. Now there was something thrilling about it, a
challenge to defy it.

Something final had occurred as she held the
blueberries just above the cool fog of the freezer. “I guess I had
a goddamn epiphany,” she said to her egg pot, and put an egg on to
boil. She understood that she had come to use this little gesture,
boiling an egg, as a signal that she could, at will, cook a real
meal. There had been nothing like cooking that other one, though. Ray
Oswald had saved her life—she tried that out in her mind, observed
the hysterical stripe down it, like the line of white down a skunk,
and thought the little skunky idea was fine. She had gone to a
marvelous, improbable, at times profane and silly place, and it had
been just what she needed. There was not a lot to be said for
replacing your uncorrupted dull daily waste of living with a
corrupted vital imaginary escape from it, perhaps, but it was a fact
that she and others around her were living in stilled and stilted
timid toadspawn conformity, afraid of something they could not
identify except in particulars—their burglar bars, their life
insurance policies, their options—weighing at every moment of their
lives. This was a fearful fetid nothingness she could do nothing
about. She had at least not escaped into the talk shows, or into
part—time commercial self—actualizing (a 6 percent commission on
a house made you whole), or into swooning at the disorders of
environment management. She thought it funny how the poor environment
had been raped just fine until there was a sufficient excess of the
people who had effected the raping to produce sufficient numbers of
themselves who were sufficiently idle that they might begin to
protest the raping of the environment, which was irretrievably lost
to the raping by that point. And this would be the great soothing
cathedral music, the stopping of the chainsaws amid the patter of
acid rain, that all good citizens would listen to for the
quarter-century it took them all to wire up into cyberspace and
forget about the lost hopeless runover gang-ridden land, reproducing
madly still all the while, inside their bunkers listening to NPR. She
wondered what Forrest might make of these tree and owl rebels.
Forrest was the only man on earth who could ride against the forces
of the NPR, stop the music of antidoom, tell them the music wasn’t
going to cut it, they were doomed before the first idler picked up
the first fiddle. jesus been hard on all you, she could hear him say.

But she knew he wasn’t interested in that, because
she wasn’t interested in that. The root cause of no trees left was
no people to say too many people. And that was because, by hysterical
reasoning, the Civil War had been lost, the Union perfected, and the
perfect Union meant the most populous one you could make. Once the
one population got on everyones nerves, as it had, it was a simple
logical matter to assert the good of other populations; hence the
loud, swiveling, clarion call extolling the endless virtues these
days of what had come to be called, in exquisite euphemism, in the
speech of the realm, diversity. Forrest had not meant to stop this
nonsense, because he had not—no one had—had the sense to see
nonsense like it coming, or even to conceive it, way back then when
people were still sane shooting each other over Sir Walter Scott.

She got her egg, cooled it in a stream of tapwater,
and sat down to eat it. The man now up off the bed who had lost the
most beautiful woman in the world and not got a job carrying grain
and seed to be beaten by high school boys and ignored by old men was
the man for her, after all. He was wounded, and none too custodial of
his wounds, but who was any better? Her head was no clearer than his,
his no more fogged than hers. In the surreal fog she could see him
ask a plain woman to a real dance in Holly Springs Mississippi and
begin again.

She drew a hot bath. She had found this was a tonic
thing to do in the middle of the day, especially if you ran the water
too hot and allowed yourself plenty of time to waste in it. She
traipsed around naked, ostensibly collecting little bath necessities,
a little Clinique this in a bottle the color of a stinkbug, the eau
de that in cut glass, a German boar-bristle brush with a nice waxed
wood handle that felt much better to your hand than the bristle did
to your skin. She did not need or want these things.

She wanted only the good heat and the water and her
calmed mind. She got in the bath.

The water was hot enough to make her wonder if she
should let it cool—perhaps she was herself a giant human egg set to
boil—but stepping out of a tub once in it is a hassle greater than
burning yourself, so she slipped on in. The determination was good.
She was level with steam coming off the water. It went over the
surface of the water like miniature clouds, which is what it was. She
moved these small clouds about gently with her hands. The clear,
unbroken water under them was perfect and beautiful.

She suddenly wanted a lemon beagle. The prospect of
this yellow-and-white dog was vivid—a washed-out-looking gentle
thing that hunted rabbits with great passion and even greater skill
but meant no harm to rabbits. She was not sure if you called it a
lemon beagle or a lemon-and-white. To lie in a scalding tub of water
in the middle of the day in a transport of steam and want a dog she
had not thought of or seen in maybe thirty years, and have this be
the dominant want in her heart at this moment—was she trivial? Was
she merely idle?

She entertained this thought: she was losing her way.
Was she losing her way? The question presumed she had once not been
losing her way. Had she once not been losing her way? She thought it
obvious that all people, or virtually all, must for a time be
convinced they know their way. It has not yet occurred to them that
they do not know their way, to be more precise. Then at some point it
does occur to them. They may suddenly, or gradually, feel that they
do not know their way, and they may then be able to doubt that they
ever actually did know it. Given the condition they suddenly find
themselves in, they wonder what species of hoodwink convinced them
they ever thought they knew what was going on. They had merely
trotted along, confident and doglike, as people do, full of pride and
certainty and ambition and their little educations, as people are
supposed to. And some of them, like Mrs. Hollingsworth, come to a
halt. In a tub, in a store, in a kitchen, in making a list of real
things, in making a list of surreal things, in cooking for a sane man
or cooking for a fool.

She thought again about the place she'd been. Was
there a fool it would nourish, real or not? What if the fool it would
nourish was only the cook? The cook who lay under small hot gambols
of surreal fog the idle live-long day wanting a bleachy yellow dog?
Not wanting even, perhaps, probably, a real dog but just this
prospect of a dog? No damned shed hair and Volvoing it to the vet
where the labels on a vaccine read like computer applications and
cost as much. She just wanted a dog.

So maybe she should just cook. Cook the fool’s meal
for herself, the fool cook. Then she saw the man who had left the bed
and been left by the woman, who had been beaten by the boys and been
left by the boys. He was in his cheap red plaid shirt, sober and
alone. Anyone else on earth in that shirt was not sober and was not
alone.

He was puzzling in the realm of his father and his
fathers mother. Mrs. Hollingsworth could not tell what he was after.
He did not know himself, perhaps, probably. She was tired of that;
“perhaps, probably” She’d make it “perbly.”

Perbly he was wondering how his father could he a
football hero and go to war and have been slapped with a knife by his
mother and still love his mother, when he the son would not even go
out for track, yet would run from war, or a street fight for that
matter, and did not kiss his own mother beside her very grave. Perbly
something like that. He had somehow come to be a bleached-out yellow
dog, afraid even of love, if we are to judge from his travail with
Sally and Helen of Troy, perbly Sally’s later incarnation.

Perbly he was waiting for someone to cook him a
fool’s meal. She was tired of perbly. He was waiting for a meal. He
was waiting to be transformed into a man. He was waiting for Forrest
to ride by and ask him if he wanted to go out for track, so to speak.
It had been at Forrest High School, after all, that he first deigned
not to participate, fearing a little pain in the legs. The legs had
been good enough to attract the coach, whether the coach was a
pederast or legitimate. He should have tried the coach, either way.
For whatever reason, or complex of reasons, real or surreal, novel or
not, that Mrs. Hollingsworth could dream up or not, that were to be
found in her brain or in her heart or were not in either place and
were possibly in some real place, the moment he did not regard the
coach as a man is the moment he lost his way. Mrs. Hollingsworth was
a woman who had lost her way.

The man was getting his legs back by carrying sacks
of grain. When Forrest came by, he would need nourishment to accept
whatever role Forrest offered him—stopping in a leather-creaking
surge of horse stink and steel, saying, “You aint no relation to
Bragg or Floyd, saddle up, you want to fight. Put that hound dog in a
saddlebag. We could use some rabbit,” and gone in a blur of saber
and canvas and horse snort and clenching rump.

Mrs. Hollingsworth would cook. She would be the
campaign cook. That night Forrest would not remark of the food. He
would never talk of food. He would say, “Picked up a boy with a
yellow dog today. Dog looked like a ghost of a dog. Boy about the
same. Boy looked like a Floyd. Hope to God he aint.

Dog look like a damn lemon. Don’t nobody tell that
Jackson character we got us a lemon dog.” There would be a round of
chuckling, some polite and some earnest, at this levity Mrs.
Hollingsworth made some notes in the air over the steamy water;

1. The levity of the doomed has no equal.

2. Only the airspace at Appomattox is original, where
it was. The floor is not the floor they trod, the window not the
window that admitted the light on the document they signed. The light
is not the same, but it is in the same place. The space only is truly
preserved.