A Woman Named Drown - Padgett Powell by Padgett Powell Read Free Book Online

in her neck. Sweat is on her like rain. She is not
far from the gin flash point.
    She'll come in, and all the gentle care of plants
outside will translate into a ruthless hammering of ice in the
kitchen. She uses a chrome gizmo which serves, screwed into
respective configurations, as a jigger, a corkscrew, and a hammer. On
her way to shower, she will deliver a drink and a hard kiss, holding
my neck with the back of her cold hand, leaving me to contemplate the
scene. The drink sits tall, emerald lime refracting through sparkling
soda, on a queer blond split-level end table with splayed conical
legs and rusting brass feet.
    Yesterday I suffered the momentary illusion that I
was progressing at pool, but I am finally only mastering a more manly
look of indifference to the trouncing. You would think her cruel in
this if you did not see how absorbed she is, oblivious to even Ray
Conniff and Perry Como when she gets a challenging run. She would be
mean, I think, only if she were capable of pulling back in my behalf.
    After pool Mary asked if I was any good with figures
and I said fair and she handed me a desk-style book of checks, which
she explained was "a bit behind."
    It hadn't been balanced in eighteen months, there
were checks missing, there was a statement showing automatic deposits
from two sources which I was told were regular. I made the bold
presumption that they were Stump's pensions of some sort and
determined monthly cash flow, within a tolerance of three hundred
dollars, and figured the account to be breaking even or gaining
slightly.
    Mary came out in a waxy wig that frightened me.
    " Want anything from the grocery?" she
asked.
    " What is that?"
    " My disguise."
    " For what?"
    "Theatergoers."
    " Come on."
    " You've read the play. Give me a check."
    " Give me a list, I'll go. You look like a wick."
    She shrugged and I went shopping. I had indeed read
the play. If she was telling the truth about people recognizing her
and mistaking her for the character she played, I could believe that
they would harass her. They could hardly not.
    The woman named Drown was charged with manslaughter
(forty-three counts) because she had failed to relocate her shanty
town away from the river. A large flood swept her plantation into the
Mississippi and to the Gulf.
    DROWN: Negligence! Was I negligent standing on the
second floor of my house in a nightgown Fighting water moccasins? Was
I negligent when I saw my cash box float out the window?
    PROSECUTOR: You were negligent when you did not
inform your colored workers of the imminent danger.
    DROWN: What was there to tell? They could see it was
raining. They knew damned well how high the water was--they were at
the river day and night salvaging bateaus and wagons and whatever
else came down. They were getting rich in trees over the water with
gang hooks, hooting and laughing. You don't know a damned thing about
poor niggers if you think they would have listened to a rich white
woman telling them to abandon a rolling mint like that river.
[Jury whispers among itself; judge calls for
order]
    PROSECUTOR: No further questions at this time.
    This speech turned the tide in Drown's favor. She was
let off on the manslaughter business, which, it seems, had been only
a thin pretext for exposing the real issue: she had two mulatto
children drowned in the flood, who were allegedly hers by a black
worker named Carlisle. What implicated her was having taken two other
children--fully black ones--into her home the night of the flood.
This survival of only two of the four children on her place gave
credence to the town talk which for years had rumored her to have had
twins, no less, by Carlisle, a big handsome man who sometimes worked
as her chauffeur.
    PROSECUTOR: Were you not in St. Louis for a period of
five months seven years ago--seven years before two seven-year-old
children were allowed to drown on your property while two others were saved?
    DEFENSE: Objection.
    COURT: Sustained.
    PROSECUTOR: And was