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.
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.