Mrs Hollingsworth's Men - Padgett Powell

Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men

Padgett Powell
2000

For Nan Morrison
 

"After all, I think Forrest was the
most remarkable
man our Civil War produced?
—
General William Tecumseh Sherman

“
Forrest, . . .had he had the
advantages of a thorough
military education
and training, would have been the
great
central figure of the Civil War."
—
General
Joseph E. Johnston

“
Genera1 N. B. Forrest of Tennessee,
whom I have
never met,...accomplished more
with fewer troops
than any other officer on
either side."
—
General Robert E. Lee
 
 

Hollingsworth

Mrs. Hollingsworth likes to traipse. Her primary
worry is thinning hair, though this has not happened yet. She enjoys
a solidarity with fruit. She is wistful for the era in which hatboxes
proliferated, though a hatbox is not something even her grandmother
may have owned. More probably what she wants is hat boxes themselves,
without the era or the hats. But the proud,  firm utility of the
hatbox requires a hat and an era for its dignity; otherwise it is a
relic. She does not want relics. Her husband is indistinct. She
regards friendly dogs with suspicion. Her daughters have lost touch
with her, or she with them, or both; it is the same thing, she
thinks, or it is not the same thing, which means it might as well be
the same thing: so much is pointless this way, indifferent, moot, or
mute, as a friend of hers says. Not a friend, but a friendly man whom
she cannot bring herself to correct when he says “mute" for
“moot," for then she might have to go on and indict his entire
presumption to teach at the community college, inspiring roomfuls of
college hopefuls to say "mute" for "moot" and
filling them with other malaprops, and if she indicts him on that
presumption she’ll need to go on and indict him for the presumption
of his smug liberalism and for affecting to like film as Art and not
movies as entertainment and for getting his political grooming from
the smug liberalism and film-as-Art throat clearing of National
Public Radio, and all of this, since it would be but the first strike
in taking on the entire army of modest Americans who believe
themselves superior to other Americans (but not to any foreigners,
except dictators) mostly by virtue of doing nothing but electing to
think themselves superior all of this would be unwise, or moot, and
indeed she may as well be mute, maybe the oaf was on to something.
She wanted to summon a plumber and pour something caustic down the
crack of his ass when he exposed it to her, as he invariably would
when assuming the plumbing position. Drano, she thought, tres
apropos. She had learned recently that the British term for the
propensity of the working man to expose himself in this way was
“showing builder’s bottom." That was a lovely touch of
noblesse oblige, of gently receding empire. She was less gentle in
her apprehension that the entire world and everyone in it was showing
its ass. She was not unaware, and not happy, that this apprehension
linked her closely to the film-as-Art side of the herd, and she would
go to a movie with a plumber wearing no pants at all before she’d
go to some noir with a man in slacks, but still she found herself
actually calculating the drift of things if one were to try to burn a
builder’s bottom. She figured on this seriously all one morning
until finally she faced it: it had come to this, had it? Her mind had
gone. The practical consequences of her symbolically telling the
world to pull its goddamn pants up filled up her otherwise empty head
at age fifty. It had all come to this. Muriatic acid for the driveway
contractor, liquid chlorine for the pool man, shot of Raid for the
bug man, upgrade the plumber to a bead of molten solder. When this
nonsense left her mind alone, she thought about the Civil War. How a
woman could be prevented from doing anything but thinking of
builder’s bottom, and of all which that represented, and of all her
impotence at reversing the disposition of the human world to show its
ass, was owing somehow to the Civil War. The American Civil War,
arguably as silly a war as they come, she was virtually ignorant of.
She was not better informed of any war, actually, save for perhaps
the Second World War and Vietnam, on a very topical basis. And she
knew of one man who had been in Korea. But the Civil War ... was
beginning to haunt her.

She could not reckon this sudden absorption with it,
given how vastly uninformed she was of it. Manassas was molasses,
Sharpsburg was Dullsville; the March to the Sea was no more than Hard
to Lee. Her images of the dead, which she did know to nearly exceed
the dead of all our other wars combined, were not those of the bodies
themselves that the wet-plate photography so in its infancy had
allegedly recorded in such stunning graphic detail. She kept seeing
not bodies but crows on them. To her, true torment was not death but
a crow.

The thousands of baleful tears shed then now went,
she thought, into laundry softener—the women threw these
handkerchiefs of the laundromat into their machines as they had
thrown kerchiefs at military parades. The result was every bit as
good: things smelled sweet and the women felt good about themselves.
Their men marched on in the perfume of goodfeeling and put their cell
phones to their heads and zeroed in on the enemy and fired nonsense
at him all day. They had learned from Vietnam how to drop smoke on
the enemy to target him better. There was much information. It was
not clear when everyone had stopped believing in himself.

A prison term was not the worst thing that could
obtain in this age, she thought. Nothing was. Nothing was the end of
the world. All could be surmised and survived. Death and rape were
just particularly bad. We were mature. But crows could land, after
all; they need not fly all day long. And you had to regard them.

She knew that the Confederate mint in Columbia had
printed its worthless millions and stood today in vacant ruin, but
virtually intact, for sale at too high a price to sell to whoever
would turn it into a museum or a mall. She knew that Appomattox is a
National Park, fully restored, visited by thousands of tourists a
year. She knew that only 4 percent of the final site of the Lost
Cause is original, based on the number of original bricks compared to
the total number of unoriginal bricks used in the restoration. She
knew that this restoration had had to commence from the very
archaeological digs that had discovered the outlines of the
foundation of the house where it all ended. None of the bricks was
even in its original location. Only some stones of the hearth are in
the same place. Beyond that, only the airspace is the original thing,
where it was. Maybe a piece of furniture or two that Grant and Lee
might have looked at. And she knew about Lee’s ingenious battle
orders that the Yankees found wrapped around dropped cigars. That
business amazed and frightened her. And the name Nathan Bedford
Forrest was in her head like the hook of a pop-radio tune. In her
grasp of it all, he was a man who had somehow never been beaten in a
war that was lost from the start. She knew more than she knew she
knew.

On her kitchen table she noticed an odd, tall can of
Ronson’s lighter fluid. There had not been a cigarette lighter of
the sort that required this fuel in this house in she would guess
twenty years. It would squirt down a builder’s bottom as pretty as
you please. She chuckled. She was not herself, she thought, or she
was, perhaps, and she chuckled again.

Were men who could not keep their pants up a function
of the Civil War? Were women who put up with them a function of the
Civil War? Was having yourself an indistinct husband a function of
the Civil War? Was finding a strange bottle of flammable petroleum
distillate beside your grocery list a function of the Civil War? Was
chuckling and not knowing what was yourself and what was not yourself
a function of the Civil War? Was not really caring at this point “who
you were," and finding the phrase itself a hint risible, a
function of the Civil War? She sat down at the table and wrote on her
grocery list, “A mule runs through Durham, on fire,” and then,
dissatisfied with merely that, sat down to augment the list.
 
 

Cornpone

Mrs. Hollingsworth wrote on:

A mule runs through Durham, on fire. No--there is
something on his back, on fire. Memaw gives chase, with a broom, with
which she attempts to whap out the fire on the mule. The mule keeps
running. The fire appears to be fueled by paper of some sort, in a
saddlebag or satchel tied on the mule. There is of course a measure
of presumption in crediting Memaw with trying to put out the fire; it
is difficult for the innocent witness to know that she is not just
beating the mule, or hoping to, and that the mule happens to be on
fire, and that that does not affect Memaw one way or another. But we
have it on private authority, our own, that Memaw is attempting to
save the paper, not gratuitously beating the mule, or even punitively
beating the mule. Memaw is not a mule beater.

The paper is Memaw’s money, perhaps (our private
authority accedes that this is likely), which money Pawpaw has
strapped onto his getaway mount, perhaps (our private authority
credits him with strapping the satchel on, but hesitates to
characterize his sitting the mule as he does as a deliberate,
intelligent attempt to actually “get away”); that is to say, we
are a little out on a limb when we call the mule, as we brazenly do,
the mount on which he hoped to get away, and might have, had he not,
as he sat on the plodding mule, carelessly dumped the lit contents of
the bowl of his corncob pipe over his shoulder into the satchel on
the mule’s back, thereby setting the fire and setting the mule into
a motion more vigorous than a plod. A mule in a motion more vigorous
than a plod with a fire on its back attracts more attention than etc.

Memaw, we have it on private authority, solid, was
initially, with her broom, after Pawpaw himself, before he set fire
to the satchel behind him, so the argument that Pawpaw might have
effected a clean getaway without the attention-getting extras of a
trotting mule on fire is somewhat compromised. Memaw, with her broom,
has merely changed course; she wants, now, to prevent her money’s
burning more than Pawpaw's leaving, though should Pawpaw get away
with the money unburnt, she presumably loses it all the same. That
loss, of unburnt money, might prove temporary: unburnt money is
recoverable sometimes, if the thieves are not vigilant of their
spoils, if the police are vigilant of their responsibilities, if good
citizens who find money are honest and return it, etc. But burnt
money is not recoverable, except in certain technical cases involving
banks and demonstrable currency destruction and mint regulations
allowing issue of new currency to replace the old, which cases Memaw
would be surprised to hear about. And it is arguable that were she
indeed whapping Pawpaw and not the fire behind him, her object might
be not to prevent his leaving but to accelerate it.

So Memaw is now whapping not the immediate person of
Pawpaw but the fire behind him. It is not to be determined whether
Pawpaw fully apprehends the situation. He may think Memaw’s
consistent failure to strike him with the broom is a function of her
undexterous skill with the broom used in this uncustomary manner. We
are unable, even with the considerable intelligence available from
our private authority, to hazard whether he knows the area to his
immediate rear is in flames. Why Memaw would prefer to extinguish the
fire rather than annul his escape or punish him for it is almost
certainly beyond the zone of his ken. We have this on solid private
authority, our own, our own army of private authority, in which we
hold considerable rank. Pawpaw is maintaining his seat, careful to
keep his clean corncob pipe from the reach of Memaw’s broom, errant
or not. Were the pipe to be knocked from his hand, either by a clean
swipe that lofts it into the woods or by a glancing blow that puts it
in the dirt at the mule’s hustling feet, he would dismount to
retrieve it and thereby quit his escape. It is likely that Memaw and
the burning mule would continue their fiery voyage, leaving him there
inspecting his pipe for damage.

The mule is an intellectual among mules, and probably
among the people around him, but we, the people around him,
intellectuals among people or not, as per our test scores, our
universities and degrees therefrom, and our disposition to observe
public broadcasting, and with the entire army of private authority we
command, cannot know what he knows. It is improbable that he knows of
Pawpaw’s betrayal, of Memaw’s hurt rage, of the accidental nature
of the fire, of the denominations of the currency, of the improbable
chance that among the money are dear letters to Memaw before she was
Memaw that she does not want Pawpaw to discover, even after he has
left her and might be presumed to be no longer jealous of her
romantic affairs. It is not certain that he, the mule, knows his
back, or something altogether too close to his back, is on fire. It
is certain, beyond articulated speculation, that he senses his back
is hot and that the kind of noise and the kinds of colors that make
him hot and nervous when he is too near them are on his back. He has
elected to flee, or is compelled to flee. Nervousness puts him in a
predisposition to flee. A woman with a broom, a two-legger with any
sort of prominent waving appendage, coming at him puts him in full
disposition to flee, which he does, which increases the unnerving
noises and colors and heat on his back, confirming him in the
rectitude of this course of action, notwithstanding certain arguments
that he has almost certainly never heard and might or might not
comprehend were he to hear them that he’d be better off standing
still.