Mrs Hollingsworth's Men - Padgett Powell Read Online Free PDF Page A

sho.
    The Land
    Forrest could never talk this way, so Mrs.
Hollingsworth made him:
    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