Mrs Hollingsworth's Men - Padgett Powell (4 page)

Dark now only when the station wagon headlights do
not illuminate it, rolling over its swell and slough, crushing what
is left of its game, the urban-adapting coon, the
strange-no-matter-where-you-put-him possum. The snakes are flattened
to dust and blown away into herpetological archives. The alligator
and the deer have received protection. All the rest have been allowed
to perish.

The trees are under cultivation, bristling like large
weeds, rent this way and that and spindly, after a not thorough job
of weeding by a hasty, mad hand getting out of the garden before
sunstroke sets in.

That is the land, the wilderness. The pristine tracts
of the new wilderness are the fresh expanses of asphalt around the
malls. A new petroleum air of virgin potential resides there, but
only until the Volvos and the skateboards pull in. The Volvos
discharge baby strollers and easy-listening FM, the skateboards the
funk of boys, all taming the new wilderness.
 
 

Queers and Cigars

Forrest might talk like this, so she let him:

Hard on the Negro?
Jesus
is hard on the Negro, buddyro. Negro hard on himself too, Still, I
will tell you something. Given Davis and Bragg over me, playing
keep-away with the ordnance and men, and Bobby Lee wrapping his
battle orders around cigars and giving them to the enemy, if the
Negro were in charge today we’d stand a sight better chance of
winning this fight. The Negro has not cost me one empty saddle at the
end of a fight. Them what talk for a living has. The Negro does not
talk for a living. Not yet.

Carp

The golden-floored room fills with golden carp. The
oak is as hard and clean as marble slabs for fish in a proper
poissonerie
. The carp
do not resist flooding into a rented room in Holly Springs
Mississippi. The river has not been kind to them for some time. They
relax. On the cot a man and a woman relax. The carp say, “Psst!"
and the woman props up on her elbow and beholds them. “Why, y’all
are just a bunch of lonely boys,” she says, affecting some kind of
drawl that pleases the carp. The carp affect drawls themselves, among
fishes, and they wonder how the woman knows to play with them like
this, if she does know how and is not just goofing. The carp do not
have time to speculate or to question the woman about this. Their
time on the floor is limited, a fact they sense without knowing the
limit.

“
The floor is filled with fish, babe," the
woman says to the man, who reclines on his back with his arm across
his eyes.

“
What kind`?"

“
Redhorse suckers."

“
Hmm. Had me two bluegills at wunst on my onliest
hook, saw a yellertail, din’t see no carp.” The man is doing
put-on talk too. The carp are delighted with these people, their
hosts. The carp flow out of the room by the drain of the window,
leaving the floor cleaner than it was before their tour. When they
are back in the river, the river is kinder to them. All day they say,
Wunst we went to a room, and the river says, Sure you did, boys.

Bream Bedding

——
I smell fish. You smell fish?
——
Smell
like ... no.
——
Like bream beddin! That a
smell now, people say you cain smell no fish under water but you sure
as—
——
We know that, Erasmus. Save it
for the tourists.
——
Ain no tourist.
——
We know that too. What we do not know is why
not. The Negro woman can hold a fond court among her handicrafts upon
the roadside, or wrap her head and sell pancakes or God
knows
what else, baskets, you name it, and be blinded by flash-bulbs. But I
have yet to see a council of elders such as ourselves holding court
on the courthouse lawn all the live-long day, as we do, with so much
as one person interested in us at all.
——
Cept
if he don’t know what state he in.
——
Exception
duly noted. Short of that, the white man has no use for us. Why is
this?
——
Is we got any use for us?
——
Erasmus, that is entirely beside the point,
existentially speaking.
——
Well scuse the
doowop out of me. I smell fish, an I tell you something: they come
out that winder up there bout a half-hour ago, a funk parade to beat
the band.
——
You saw them—what, fish po
out that window?
——
Shet up wid yo po.
No, Satohmo, they disnt not po out, I disnt not eben see em, I done
smelt em, as I told you in a straightforward reportorial manner
innocent of shuck, jive, prevaricate, and procrastinate. If you were
not so concerned with the want of a gaggle of tourists who you
somehow fantasize could be interested in us and the anachronistic
reminder of the pox on their land that we represent, you would
perhaps be in a position to listen to someone. When, ah mean, he
speak to you. Bout something impotent.
——
Fish.
——
Right on. Come out dat winder up yonder. Girl
up in deah too, lookin good.
——
With Mr.
Whatstate?
——
Yessiree. You tell me,
existentially speaking, how a man don’t know what state he in get a
woman like that in his bed—you tell me that, existentially
speaking, you be tellin me something.
 
 

Differently Different

You could get cigars and even guys at the grocery
store, though not by fiat, Mrs. Hollingsworth reflected, but you
could not get carp, or bluegill, or bream. She was getting stranger
in her shopping wants. She was getting further from what was
available. The meal she was assembling was going to satisfy only a
hungrier, larger fool than the kind of fool she had originally
thought she might invite to dinner.

This getting stranger did not bother her. It had been
coming on for some time. She had felt restless, of course, in
specific and vague ways, all her life, as have, she figured, all
people paying sufficient attention to their lives to admit that their
lives are utter mysteries. But lately there had been an agreeable
yawning in her heart, a surmising of new hollow She was trying to
draw a breath of something with nothing visible or prudent in it,
just other air. When she breathed this air, or tried to, or pretended
to, or merely hoped to, she fancied that she was trying to breathe an
air that no one near her cared or knew anything about. Her daughters,
for example: they had makeup, men, ambition or not, they were
fatigued or not, with the world or with her or not. Her husband was .
. . well, himself. Men did not entertain the vapors, or if they did,
which she allowed might happen, they went off the edge entire and
wound up in institutions of either a gentle or a cruel kind. But
there was a safe zone for women to lose their minds and remain among
the zombies who had not, and to not be recognized as having lost
their minds. The zombies, after all, were pretty slow to appreciate
someone other than themselves, and they had been schooled not to
denigrate the different. They were attending just now, in fact, a
large adult-education academy, studying a curriculum that insisted
there was no such thing as difference at all. The harbinger for this
had been, she supposed, handicapped-person legislation. It had come
from somewhere, and it had received a great activating boost of
philosophically underpinning energy from the American academy, which
had invented political correctness, a new language, to shore up the
shaky proposition that there were no differences among people. Mrs.
Hollingsworth discovered this when she went to the local university
to take a night course in Coleridge and found instead, in the
scheduled room at the scheduled time, a course entitled “Theorizing
Diaspora, Adjudicating Hybridity."

On the blackboard, on a paper handout, and on
individual CRT screens in front of each seat in the room was a
statement:

The primary requirements are a strong
commitment to visually expressing support for all students within our
community. By displaying the provided sign or button, a Friend can
send a message of acceptance or encouragement.

We encourage proposals on the rhetorical
intersections of gender with race, class, age, sexuality, and
ability; interpreting the academy, disciplinarity, and professional
identities from a feminist perspective; reclaiming the lost or
marginalized voices of women (e.g., rhetors, writers, teachers,
artists, workers); analyzing the rhetoric of historical depictions of
women; the rhetoric of the feminist movement and the feminist
backlash; males and mens studies and scholarship in relation to
feminism; extrapolations of theory from the everyday (e.g., etiquette
manuals, cookbooks, diaries)

Mrs. Hollingsworth was dazed by this, but snapped to
at “cookbooks”: was she perhaps, she wondered, already
extrapolating theory from a grocery list? Maybe she had finally
written her paper for the course, if she could induce the professor
to include grocery lists in the catalogue of extrapolatable genres.
That odd phrase rolled in her brain a moment until she became aware
that there was a man in sandals and socks speaking very softly and
very self-assuredly at the head of the long table that they—she and
some much younger students—were sitting at. He was saying, "
.. the interactions of discourse and ideology—that is, how the work
of the poet operates within a variety of prevalent romantic cultural
discourses—e.g., romantic, amatory religious, hedonist,
colonialist—in order to collaborate with, challenge, oppose, or, in
rare cases, subvert them." Here, at “subvert,” the professor
raised his eyebrows several times until everyone at the table
chuckled, which it seemed to Mrs. Hollingsworth was the actual
requirement so far of the course. She had failed to chuckle. At the
same moment that she perceived everyone in the room to be staring at
her very politely, she noticed in her hand a button of the pin—on
political variety that said on it FRIEND.

Into the silence that apparently awaited something
from her, Mrs. Hollingsworth said, “Are we going to read ‘The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner”P”

“
You mean theorize diaspora, adjudicate hybridity?”
the professor asked, with more of the eyebrow hydraulics.

She could not respond, so the professor, whose role
seemed to be that of helping out the obtuse, went on: “We will
focus on the ways in which diasporan subjectivity complicates and
problematizes the relationship between theory and identity, on the
one hand, and representation and collectivity, on the other.”

This remark had the effect of liberating the other
students from staring politely at her. When they resumed their fond
gaze at the professor, Mrs. Hollingsworth left the room. In her one
hand was the FRIEND button, in her other hand her purse. She had a
headache and was breathing hard.

Now she understood a few things: that the American
academy, which one might have thought the place to defend freedom of
speech, had been the seat and soul of abrogating freedom of speech,
if the first assault on its freedom can be said to be restricting, or
handcuffing, speech. The day she heard “redneck” on NPR, she
turned NPR off, not because broadcasters were still using the term,
but because she knew one day they would not be. In fact, she had a
vision of the quiet moment backstage at a Boston studio when a good,
surprised correspondent was let go for saying “redneck” the last
time it would be said.

Her getting stranger had something to do with this
truly getting stranger the nation was about. She wanted to be
somewhere else, so she was making her list.
 
 

Forrest and Bobby Lee

——
Bobby Lee, let me ast you, friend, what you
boys upair in the high cotton wrapping up cigars in you battle orders
and droppin em behind enemy lines for? I find fightin hard enough
without that.
——
That? That warnt but a
thang.
——
Warn’t but a thang? Put some
boy bones in the ground, din't it?
——
Yeah.
Yeah it did.
——
Well then it warn’t just
no thang, Bobby E. Lee. I got outright queers on my back down here
and it cost me boy bones all day long and it ain’t just a thang. We
ain’t got no cigars down here. And it ain’t just a thang down
here.
——
You do go on, Genel.
——
Do
I, Genel? Where boy bones is concerned, I don’t hold with the
luxury of cigars.
——
I take your point,
Genel. I take your point.
——
You keep on
takin it, Genel.
Mrs. Hollingsworth wondered
if this item were not too obscure for even a hungry fool to
understand. That is probably because it is real, she thought. Few
people could credit that the War might have been over had not battle
orders from Lee been found wrapped around cigars and given to
McClellan in time to avert Lee’s annihilation of him in the Valley
campaign. That was harder to believe, she thought, than that, say, a
media mogul might try to produce a species of media baby and fight
the War again. She was having these vague visions of television
technology and Forrest and a new soldier, a New Southerner. All of
this, she thought, more probable than battle orders wrapping up
cigars in enemy territory, a sad and ineluctable fact of history. She
liked the day that allowed you to say “ineluctable,” and also
“eponymous."

Funeral

The man who could see Forrest and who would see a
yellowtail in a lake and who had known love when he was Lonnie and
saw Sally, and who had not known it later, wont to the funerals, one
hard upon another, of his mother and his lather. Both of them were
held in desertlike heat.