by Walker Percy
“What do you think you’re doing, boy?”
“Honey, I’ve been waiting three weeks to grab you like this.”
“Well now that you’ve grabbed me you can turn me loose.”
“Sweetheart, I’ll never turn you loose.” Mother of all living, what an armful.
“All right now, son—”
“What?”
“You can turn me loose.”
“No.”
“Listen, big buddy. I’m as strong as you are.”
“No, you’re not.”
“I may not be as big as you are—”
“You are here.”
“—but I’m just as strong.”
“Not really.”
“All right, you watch here.” She balls up her fist like a man’s and smacks me hard on the arm.
“That hurts.”
“Then quit messing with me.”
“All right. I won’t mess with you.”
“Hit me.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Hit me.” She holds her elbow tight against her body. “Come on, boy.”
“What are you talking about? I’m not going to hit you.”
“Come on hit me. I’m not kidding. You can’t hurt me.”
“All right.” I hit her.
“Na. I don’t mean just playlike. Really hit me.”
“You mean it?”
“I swear before God.”
I hit just hard enough to knock her over.
“Got dog.” She gets up quickly. “That didn’t hurt. I got a good mind to hit you right in the mouth, you jackass.”
“I believe you,” I say laughing. “Now you come here.”
“What for? All right now!” She cocks her fist again. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“I just want to tell you what’s on my mind.”
“What?”
“You. You and your sweet lips. Sweetheart, before God I can’t think about anything in the world but putting my arms around you and kissing your sweet lips.”
“O me.”
“Do you care if I do?”
“I don’t care if you do.”
I hold springtime in my arms, the fullness of it and the rinsing sadness of it.
“I’ll tell you something else.”
“What?”
“Sweetheart, I can’t get you out of my mind. Not since you walked into my office in that yellow dress. I’m crazy about you and you know it, don’t you?”
“O me.”
I sit back to see her and take her hands. “I can’t sleep for thinking of you.”
“You swear?”
“I swear.”
“We made us some money, didn’t we?”
“We sure did. Don’t you want some money? I’ll give you five thousand dollars.”
“No, I don’t want any money.”
“Let’s go down the beach a ways.”
“What for?”
“So they can’t see us.”
“What’s the matter with them seeing us?”
“It’s all right with me.”
“Ho now, you son.”
“You’re my sweetheart. Do you care if I love you?”
“Nayo indeed. But you’re not getting me off down there with those rattlesnakes.”
“Rattlesnakes!”
“No sir. We gon stay right here close to those folks and you gon behave yourself.”
“All right.” I clasp my hands in the hollow of her back. “I’ll tell you something else.”
“Uh oh.” She rears back, laughing, to see me, a little embarrassed by our closeness. “Well you got me.”
“I’m sorry you work for me.”
“Sorry! Listen, son. I do my work.”
“I wouldn’t want you to think I was taking advantage of you.”
“Nobody’s taking advantage of me,” she says huffily.
I laugh at her. “No, I mean our business relationship.” We sit up and drink our beer. “I have a confession to make to you. I’ve been planning this all week.”
“What?”
“This picnic.”
“Well I be dog.”
“Don’t kid me. You knew.”
“I swear I didn’t.”
“But it’s the business part of it that worries me—”
“Business and pleasure don’t have to mix.”
“Well, all I wanted you to know was that when I acted on impulse—”
“I always act on impulse. I believe in saying what you mean and meaning what you say.”
“I can see that.”
“You just ask Joyce what I said about you.”
“Joyce?”
“My roommate.”
“What did you say?”
“You just ask her.”
I look up and down the beach. “I don’t see her.”
“I don’t mean now, you jackass.”
We swim and lie down together. The remarkable discovery forces itself upon me that I do not love her so wildly as I loved her last night. But at least there is no malaise and we lie drowsing in the sun, hands clasped in the other’s back, until the boat whistle blows.
Yet loves revives as we spin homewards along the coast through the early evening. Joy and sadness come by turns, I know now. Beauty and bravery make you sad, Sharon’s beauty and my aunt’s bravery, and victory breaks your heart. But life goes on and on we go, spinning along the coast in a violet light, past Howard Johnson’s and the motels and the children’s carnival. We pull into a bay and have a drink under the stars. It is not a bad thing to settle for the Little Way, not the big search for the big happiness but the sad little happiness of drinks and kisses, a good little car and a warm deep thigh.
“My mother has a fishing camp at Bayou des Allemands. Would you like to stop there?”
She nods into my neck. She has become tender toward me and now and then presses my cheek with her hand.
Just west of Pearl River a gravel road leaves the highway and winds south through the marshes. All at once we are in the lonely savannah and the traffic is behind us. Sharon still hides her face in my neck.
A lopsided yellow moon sheds a feeble light over the savannah. Faraway hummocks loom as darkly as a flotilla of ships. Awkwardly we walk over and into the marsh and along the boardwalk. Sharon cleaves to me as if, in staying close, she might not see me.
I cannot believe my eyes. It is difficult to understand. We round a hummock and there is the camp ablaze like the Titanic. The Smiths are home.
2
MY HALF BROTHERS and sisters are eating crabs at a sawbuck table on the screened porch. The carcasses mount toward a naked light bulb.
They blink at me and at each other. Suddenly they feel the need of a grown-up. A grown-up must certify that they are correct in thinking that they see me. They all, every last one, look frantically for their mother. Thérèse runs to the kitchen doorway.
“Mother! Jack is here!” She holds her breath and watches her mother’s face. She is rewarded. “Yes, Jack!”
“Jean-Paul ate some lungs.” Mathilde looks up from directly under my chin.
My half brother Jean-Paul, the son of my mother, is a big fat yellow baby piled up like a buddha in his baby chair, smeared with crab paste and brandishing a scarlet claw. The twins goggle at us but do not leave off eating.
Lonnie has gone into a fit of excitement in his wheelchair. His hand curls upon itself. I kiss him first and his smile starts his head turning away in a long trembling torticollis. He is fourteen and small for his age, smaller than Clare and Donice, the ten-year-old twins. But since last summer when Duval, the oldest son, was drowned, he has been the “big boy.” His dark red hair is nearly always combed wet and his face is handsome and pure when it is not contorted. He is my favorite, to tell the truth. Like me, he is a moviegoer. He will go see anything. But we are good friends because he knows I do not feel sorry for him. For one thing, he has the gift of believing that he can offer his sufferings in reparation for me
n’s indifference to the pierced heart of Jesus Christ. For another thing, I would not mind so much trading places with him. His life is a serene business.
My mother is drying her hands on a dishcloth.
“Well well, look who’s here,” she says but does not look.
Her hands dry, she rubs her nose vigorously with her three middle fingers held straight up. She has hay fever and crabs make it worse. It is a sound too well known to me to be remembered, this quick jiggle up and down and the little wet wringing noises under her fingers.
We give each other a kiss or rather we press our cheeks together, Mother embracing my head with her wrist as if her hands were still wet. Sometimes I feel a son’s love for her, or something like this, and try to give her a special greeting, but at these times she avoids my eye and gives me her cheek and calls on me to notice this about Mathilde or that about Thérèse.
“Mother, I want you to meet Sharon Kincaid.”
“Well now!” cries Mother, turning away and inserting herself among the children, not because she has anything against Sharon but because she feels threatened by the role of hostess. “There is nobody here but us children,” she is saying.
Sharon is in the best of humors, rounding her eyes and laughing so infectiously that I wonder if she is not laughing at me. From the beginning she is natural with the children. Linda, I remember, was nervous and shifted from one foot to the other and looked over their heads, her face gone heavy as a pudding. Marcia made too much over them, squatting down and hugging her knees like Joan Fontaine visiting an orphanage.
Mother does not ask how I happen to be here or give a sign that my appearance is in any way remarkable—though I have not seen them for six months. “Tessie, tell Jack about your class’s bus trip.”—and she makes her escape to the kitchen. After a while her domesticity will begin to get on my nerves. By the surest of instincts she steers clear of all that is exceptional or “stimulating.” Any event or idea which does not fall within the household regimen, she stamps at once with her own brand of the familiar. If, as a student, I happened to get excited about Jackson’s Valley Campaign or Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, it was not her way to oppose me. She approved it as a kind of wondrous Rover boy eccentricity: “Those? Oh those are Jack’s books. The stacks and stacks of books that boy brings home! Jack, do you know everything in those books?” “No’m.” Nevertheless I became Dick Rover, the serious-minded Rover boy.
It is good to see the Smiths at their fishing camp. But not at their home in Biloxi. Five minutes in that narrow old house and dreariness sets into the marrow of my bones. The gas logs strike against the eyeballs, the smell of two thousand Sunday dinners clings to the curtains, voices echo round and round the bare stairwell, a dismal Sacred Heart forever points to itself above the chipped enamel mantelpiece. Everything is white and chipped. The floors, worn powdery, tickle the nostrils like a schoolroom. But here on Bayou des Allemands everybody feels the difference. Water laps against the piling. The splintered boards have secret memories of winter, the long dreaming nights and days when no one came and the fish jumped out of the black water and not a soul in sight in the whole savannah; secrets the children must find out and so after supper they are back at their exploring, running in a gang from one corner to another. Donice shows me a muskrat trap he had left last August and wonder of wonders found again. They only came down this morning, Mother explains, such a fine day it was, and since the children have a holiday Monday, will stay through Mardi Gras if the weather holds. With Roy away, Mother is a member of the gang. Ten minutes she will spend in the kitchen working with her swift cat-efficiency, then out and away with the children, surging to and fro in their light inconstant play, her eyes fading in a fond infected look.
Thérèse is telling about her plans to write her Congressman about the Rivers and Harbors bill. Thérèse and Mathilde are something like Joan and Jane in the Civics reader.
“Isn’t that Tessie a case?” my mother cries as she disappears into the kitchen, signifying that Tessie is smart but also that there is something funny about her precocity.
“Where’s Roy? We didn’t see a car. We almost didn’t walk over.”
“Playing poker!” they all cry. This seems funny and everybody laughs. Lonnie’s hand curls. If our arrival had caused any confusion, we are carried quickly past by the strong current of family life.
“Do you have any more crabs, Mother?”
“Any more crabs! Ask Lonnie if we weren’t just wondering what to do with the rest. You haven’t had your supper?”
“No’m.”
Mother folds up the thick layer of newspaper under the crab carcasses, making a neat bundle with her strong white hands. The whole mess comes away leaving the table dry and clean. Thérèse spreads fresh paper and Mathilde fetches two cold bottles of beer and two empty bottles for hammering the claws and presently we have a tray apiece, two small armies of scarlet crabs marching in neat rows. Sharon looks queer but she pitches in anyhow and soon everybody is making fun of her. Mathilde shows her how to pry off the belly plate and break the corner at the great claw so that the snowy flesh pops out in a fascicle. Sharon affects to be amazed and immediately the twins must show her how to suck the claws.
Outside is the special close blackness of night over water. Bugs dive into the tight new screen and bounce off with a guitar thrum. The children stand in close, feeling the mystery of the swamp and the secrecy of our cone of light. Clairain presses his stomach against the arm of my chair. Lonnie tries to tune his transistor radio; he holds it in the crook of his wrist, his hands bent back upon it. Once his lip falls open in the most ferocious leer. This upsets Sharon. It seems to her that a crisis is at hand, that Lonnie has at last reached the limit of his endurance. When no one pays any attention to him, she grows fidgety—why doesn’t somebody help him?—then, after an eternity, Mathilde leans over carelessly and tunes in a station loud and clear. Lonnie turns his head, weaving, to see her, but not quite far enough.
Lonnie is dressed up, I notice. It turns out that Aunt Ethel, Roy’s sister, was supposed to take him and the girls to a movie. It was not a real date, Mother reminds him, but Lonnie looks disappointed.
“What is the movie?” I ask him.
“Fort Dobbs.” His speech is crooning but not hard to understand.
“Where is it?”
“At the Moonlite.”
“Let’s go.”
Lonnie’s head teeters and falls back like a dead man’s.
“I mean it. I want to see it.”
He believes me.
I corner my mother in the kitchen.
“What’s the matter with Lonnie?”
“Why nothing.”
“He looks terrible.”
“That child won’t drink his milk!” sings out my mother.
“Has he had pneumonia again?”
“He had the five day virus. And it was bad bad bad bad bad. Did you ever hear of anyone with virus receiving extreme unction?”
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“He wasn’t in danger of death. The extreme unction was his idea. He said it would strengthen him physically as well as spiritually. Have you ever heard of that?”
“Yes. But is he all right now?”
She shrugs. My mother speaks of such matters in a light allusive way, with the overtones neither of belief nor disbelief but rather of a general receptivity to lore.
“Dr Murtag said he’d never seen anything like it. Lonnie got out of bed in half an hour.”
Sometimes when she mentions God, it strikes me that my mother uses him as but one of the devices that come to hand in an outrageous man’s world, to be put to work like all the rest in the one enterprise she has any use for: the canny management of the shocks of life. It is a bargain struck at the very beginning in which she settled for a general belittlement of everything, the good and the bad. She is as wary of good fortune as she is immured against the bad, and sometimes I seem to catch sight of it in her eyes, this ra
dical mistrust: an old knowledgeable gleam, as old and sly as Eve herself. Losing Duval, her favorite, confirmed her in her election of the ordinary. No more heart’s desire for her, thank you. After Duval’s death she has wanted everything colloquial and easy, even God.
“But now do you know what he wants to do? Fast and abstain during Lent.” Her eyes narrow. Here is the outrage. “He weighs eighty pounds and he has one foot in the grave and he wants to fast.” She tells it as a malignant joke on Lonnie and God. For a second she is old Eve herself.
Fort Dobbs is good. The Moonlite Drive-In is itself very fine. It does not seem too successful and has the look of the lonesome pine country behind the Coast. Gnats swim in the projection light and the screen shimmers in the sweet heavy air. But in the movie we are in the desert. There under the black sky rides Clint Walker alone. He is a solitary sort and a wanderer. Lonnie is very happy. Thérèse and Mathilde, who rode the tops of the seats, move to a bench under the projector and eat snowballs. Lonnie likes to sit on the hood and lean back against the windshield and look around at me when a part comes he knows we both like. Sharon is happy too. She thinks I am a nice fellow to take Lonnie to the movies like this. She thinks I am being unselfish. By heaven she is just like the girls in the movies who won’t put out until you prove to them what a nice unselfish fellow you are, a lover of children and dogs. She holds my hand on her knee and gives it a squeeze from time to time.
Clint Walker rides over the badlands, up a butte, and stops. He dismounts, squats, sucks a piece of mesquite and studies the terrain. A few decrepit buildings huddle down there in the canyon. We know nothing of him, where he comes from or where he goes.
A good night: Lonnie happy (he looks around at me with the liveliest sense of the secret between us; the secret is that Sharon is not and never will be onto the little touches we see in the movie and, in the seeing, know that the other sees—as when Clint Walker tells the saddle tramp in the softiest easiest old Virginian voice: “Mister, I don’t believe I’d do that if I was you”—Lonnie is beside himself, doesn’t know whether to watch Clint Walker or me), this ghost of a theater, a warm Southern night, the Western Desert and this fine big sweet piece, Sharon.
