“Jake,” I’m going to say some night shortly, “save us. I’m not going to save us.”
“Who?”
“Any of us.”
“We save,” he’ll say.
“Hilton Head’s coming, man. Buy you out. Cut your trees. That cash register be a computer. Washington, D.C., coming, man. People be in here knock you in the head.”
“Got that now.” He produces the Crown Royal bag. He smiles broadly.
“The Wawer!” I say. “The Wawer!”
Jake looks at his pistol in its purple velvet bag. He does not investigate, at all, this thing I’m saying. What can he think I’m saying?
I am saying that either I gave up before the battle began or there was no war to fight, I cannot tell. If there was a war — even if it is but the war of human potential, which today looks, militarily speaking, less winnable than ever before — and one chooses not to fight it, it seems to me that that relieves you from having to mutter and weep in your musty study in twenty or forty years about how close you came to winning.
I do not want to be remembered as a soldier. Simons Manigault, whatever else he was, was not a soldier in life. You may call him a momma’s boy. He went AWOL, following his mother, not his father — absent with opprobrious love. He deigned not the Wawer, in all its aspects. He surrendered early.
About the Author
Padgett Powell is the author of six novels, including The Interrogative Mood and You & Me. His novel Edisto was a finalist for the National Book Award. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Little Star, and the Paris Review, and he is the recipient of the Rome Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the Whiting Writers’ Award. He lives in Gainesville, Florida, where he teaches writing at MFA@FLA, the writing program of the University of Florida.