Mrs Hollingsworth's Men - Padgett Powell (2 page)

That is Memaw’s position: if the bastard would just
stand still, she could save him and the money. She could get Lonnie
Sipple’s letters out of the money, get the money out of the bag,
then get Pawpaw, as he stupidly yet sits the mule guarding his pipe,
which she could verily whap into the woods with one shot, and then
get Pawpaw and the mule on down the road, where they are fool enough
to think they want to go. She knows the mule is not fool enough to
want to go down the road—the mule would appear to be a faultless
fellow until caught up in human malfeasance and crossfire and
dithered by it; plus he is on fire—but she is going to uncharitably
link him to Pawpaw during the inexact thinking that prevails during
domestic opera of this sort. This is precisely the kind of inexact
thinking in which it does not occur to one that burnt money can be
replaced at a bank under certain technical circumstances which make
one nervous to speculate upon in the event that the money concerned
is one’s own. But now that the army of our private authority has
revealed the further intelligence of the existence of personal
letters, also in the satchel, we know that the money was never
Memaw’s first concern in her zealous whapping of the fire on the
mule. And we know that Memaw, no matter how inexact her thinking
during domestic opera of this sort, is not inclined to think that
letters, like money, can be replaced, under certain technical
circumstances, after they are burnt. Letters of the sort she is
protecting now, in fact, are themselves but the thinnest substitute
for, papery vestiges of, the irreplaceable tender emotions they
recall, tender emotions that she held and that held her in a state of
rapt euphoria some thirty years ago, emotions she can but vaguely
recollect when she holds the letters in her rare few moments of calm,
tired tranquillity. She and Lonnie Sipple are only nineteen years
old, they kiss without the nuisances of whiskey and whiskers and
malodorous thrusting, without the complications of bearing children,
and Lonnie Sipple has not yet been found with the pitchfork tine
through his heart. Pawpaw is, in contrast to Lonnie Sipple in this
recollected tender tranquillity, and in the loud, mean, prevailing
domestic opera that surrounds her small tranquillities like a flood
tide, a piece of shit what thinks it won World War II and thereby
earned the right to be every kind of shitass it is possible to be on
earth, and then some, if there is any then some. This, his
single-handed winning of WWII, is inextricably and inexplicably a
function of his people’s collective losing of the Civil War eighty
years before.

Memaw did not become Memaw until she allowed herself
to be linked to Pawpaw via a civil ceremony during the postwar frenzy
of imprudent coupling that wrought more harm to the country, she now
thinks, than Hirohito. She had a normal name and was normal herself.
She was Sally, and a fond uncle had called her Salamander, which now,
against Memaw, sounds charming. And Pawpaw had been Henry Stiles
until two minutes after the ceremony, when people seemed to come out
of the woods and the woodwork all calling him Pawpaw and her nothing,
ignoring her for a full two years, it seems, until slowly addressing
her, tentatively at first but then unerringly, as Memaw. She was
powerless to stop this phenomenon; it was not unlike a slow, rising
tide, unnoticed until it is too late to escape. There she had been,
first on a wide isolated silent mudflat of wedding-gift Tupperware
and their VFW mortgage, and then in a sudden full sea of Memaw and
only a thin horizon of sky and water around her. It stunned her to
hear "Memaw makes the best cornpone,” stunned her into hearing
it again and again, and then Sally was never heard of or from, and
she was not a Salamander but a Hellbender.

We have it from the army of private authority that
dogs love Memaw. Two dogs are, in fact, at her heels as she herself
dogs the heels of the mule, of which dogging she is tiring, and
Pawpaw, who dropped his pipe and voluntarily quit the mule to
retrieve it, having grown complacent with his surmise that his pipe
is unhurt, is in an awkward amalgam of embarrassment and fatigue and
uncertainty as to what to do now. Memaw is between him and his
burning getaway mule, and he is more winded than Memaw and the mule,
so that the matter of his skirting around Memaw and overtaking the
mule himself is out of the question. He is somewhat concerned—even
the innocent witness can deduce this, by the nervous motions of his
feet when she turns occasionally to glare at him and point one long
finger at him—that Memaw will desist pursuit of the burning mule
and come after him, which will put him in the face-losing position of
having to retreat.

Keeping his distance, as
he is, he has had occasion to pick up pieces of charred currency and
an envelope with a canceled stamp on it dated 1943, which he knows
was the war because he knows (first to bloom in his troubled brain at
this moment, this is to say) of the 1943 steel penny, a
copper-conservation thing owing to the war, which he knows (second to
bloom) he was in, which he knows (third) because he won it. The
letter is addressed to Sally Palmer in a handwriting not his own.

* * *

This was the best grocery list Mrs. Hollingsworth had
ever conceived. There were things on it that obviously suggested you
need not go to the store only to be disappointed over not getting
them. She sat at her table marveling at the fun of such a grocery
list. She was going to make a few of these. Yessireebob, she said to
herself, slapping at a fly. This was a bit more like it. She studied
for a moment her linoleum floor, which had a nice old agate speckle
to it and made a sound like something breaking when you walked on it.
 
 

Bluegill

Mrs. Hollingsworth had read or heard some things
about Nathan Bedford Forrest. She had to have. It was the name of the
high school. Had she read of him as well? The idea had formed in her
mind that he had been indomitable; he had been the War’s Achilles.
Achilles with pinworms and slaves besmirching his heroic profile. Had
she heard even that the South could ' have won had he been given
broader command? He seemed listable.

She put him on:
A man who has
seen Forrest catches two bluegills at one time on his hook, on his
cane pole, noticing as he does, inexplicably, an exotic
fish—parrotfish? yellowtail?—in the water. The fish is as odd as
his vision of the Civil War figure: a strange waking dream of a man
on a horse larger and louder than Hollywood, whom he somehow knew to
be representing Nathan Bedford Forrest. In the same spirit of
unblinking improbability he saw what looked like a pompano in the
dark lake, now the two bluegills. He enters the dockhouse to show the
improbable catch to his wife. In the dim shack he sees a leg in tight
polyester shorts hanging awkwardly off a cot, and as the party wakes
up he realizes the leg is not his wife’s. “Excuse me, sir—ma’am,”
he says to a fogged woman who looks like his father’s sister a bit,
but more bleached. He intends to explain everything, including how
and why a man up to something, as it appears a man this close to a
strange woman sleeping must be, would not loom over her like this
with two fish on a pole. Only an honest bumbler would do that. Why
this woman is where his wife should be, and in a drunken stupor, he
cannot begin to decide. He says to her, holding forth the two fish as
she begins to focus on him for an explanation of his intrusion, “The
escapees of the hattism of dived-in-ness." By "hattism of
dived-in-ness" he seems to mean regularity of conformity.

The man was named Lonnie Sipple before he forgot who
he was because of his broken heart.
 
 

Forrest

——
Do you see our leader with his hair on fire
riding like——
——
No.
——
the
wind?
——
I didn’t even see that he was
on a horse.
——
You’d better get with it,
then. If your leader rides by with his hair on fire slapping at you
with the flat of his saber so as to inspire you or goad you or
outright scare you to heroics beyond yourself, and taking up
falterers by the collar and throwing them to constitute roadblocks
before other falterers, and otherwise threatening them with
sufficient otherworldly gesture that they become convinced simple
mortality is less dreadful than what he promises them if they run,
and so they decide to turn and fight, and thank him later, whether
they are dead or alive—if you do not see this going on about you,
you are in trouble.
——
I did not see "my
leader." I am not aware that I am being led. Or that I follow
——
Then you are in deep, deep trouble, my friend.
I should take this can of Ronson here—who bought this? for what?
very pretty can—and set
your
hair on fire.
——
Maybe you should.
——
This can reminds me of a bad high school
football uniform, the loud blue-and-yellow combo. Hard to win in that
rig.
——
Red-and-black beats that every
time.
——
There’s Forrest again!
——
Where?
——
Right
there!
——
I can’t see him.
——
It
is true, then. Some people see him, and some do not.
——
I’d
just as soon not.
——
Frankly, I do not
know that you are wrong. Because I do not know what to do with myself
when I have seen him ride through a town square, horse and hair
aflame, salt and leather and sweat and steel penetrating the trailing
air, and a malaise of sadness and loss consuming all witness to him,
leaving us diffident and afraid and idle in his wake.
——
Maybe you should shoot him.
——
The
bullet would tink off him like a piece of errant solder. It would lie
molten and deformed, splashed in the dirt. One side of it would shine
and the other would be dulled by annealed dirt. It would be a symbol.
Of something.
——
Indeed. But what?
——
I would not know. I failed Symbol.
——
I
failed Meta-everything.
——
High five to
that! But still, I can see Forrest, and you cannot.
——
You
have not failed Forrest.
——
No, I have
not. I will not fail Forrest. Forrest was made so that a man, even a
confused one, a little afraid, or a lot, might not fail him, and
thereby might not fail himself.
——
He
sounds like Jesus, sort of. But I failed Jesus too.
Let’s
not get into that. This is enough: a man whose head and horse are on
fire storms through town squares under my minute inspection. He is
either there, invisible to the townsfolk his passing would otherwise
knock down or blow down, or only there in my perhaps specially tuned
vision. To me it does not matter how he exists, or why. I see him, he
leads, I follow. Sometimes that means I go into the closest café on
the square and have coffee. But I do what I can do. Even the terms of
society are clear in a café after Forrest passes. The waitress in
white or light green is tired but polite. The drunk is at the
counter. The regulars are at their table, sclerotic and suspendered,
gouty and flushed and content. And I am I, on my Mars, dithered even
by the choices on a country breakfast menu, so all I have is coffee.
But I have seen Forrest. I am not doing badly.
 
 

Room

The man who has seen Forrest takes a room over the
café. How long he will want the room he does not know. It is white.
The floor is oak, with a gymnasium certainty to it, clean and hard.
He wants nothing on it. He has one chair, by the window. There is a
radio. It is black and on, but silent. A red stereo-indicator light
shows, and a comforting green luminescent tuning band. The man is
unsure whether he has found this appliance (improbable) or brought it
(improbable). The tuning band shows the same comforting green light
that originally issued from radium in such an application. He
considers, not seriously, throwing the radio out the window.

Out the window, on the courthouse lawn, wearing
blazing white shirts and loose herringbone trousers held up by
handsome suspenders, are three or four or five or six or seven black
men who appear to be ancient. Realistically—a word or notion that
rolls saltily and oddly in the man’s head, like an olive—they are
probably seventy years old, but the impression they give is that they
were alive when the great minié-ball debate over their fate took
place. Like the radio, they too are on and silent and improbably
placed. What they are discussing the man has no idea, in their
immaculate clothes, consummately sober and peaceful and wise-looking,
immutable agreeable whiskate.

The man turns and looks at his four plain walls and
regards them as an invitation to rest.

Down on the courthouse lawn, he makes four plain
mistakes.
——
Gentlemen (#1), what town is
this? I mean (#2), I’ve been driving and enjoying the scenery (#3),
and my map is torn right where I think this is, I can't read where I
am, I think.
——
Where your map?
——
In my car.
——
Where
your car?
The man waves vaguely behind
himself (#4). He looks up at the window of his new room. He sees
himself smiling and smirking at his intelligence-gathering mission
among the seated sages.
——
Holly Spring.
——
Holly Spring what?
——
Holly
Spring what what?
——
Which Holly Spring?
——
This Holly Spring.
——
Which
state Holly Spring?
——
State?
——
He
say his map bad.
——
His map
real
bad.
——
Missippi.
——
Mississippi?
——
Missippi.
The man
waves to himself in his window, not concealing his waving to no one
from the dark sages, which is not mistake #5. It says to them, Lost?
Maybe loster than you think, gentlemen.