by Walker Percy
“Why not?”
She smiles. “He said my treatment was like horse serum: you can only use it once.”
“What did happen?”
“The war came.”
“That helped?”
“He helped himself. He had been in bed for a month, up in your room—you were off at school. He wouldn’t go to the clinic, he wouldn’t eat, he wouldn’t go fishing, he wouldn’t read. He’d just lie there and watch the ceiling fan. Once in a while he would walk down to the Chinaman’s at night and eat a po-boy. That was the only way he could eat—walk down to the Chinaman’s at midnight and eat a po-boy. That morning I left him upstairs as usual. I sent Mercer up with his paper and his tray and called Clarence Saunders. Ten minutes later I look up and here he comes down the steps, all dressed up. He sits himself down at the dining room table as if nothing had happened, orders breakfast and eats enough to kill a horse—all the while reading his paper and not even knowing he was eating. I ask him what has happened. What has happened! Why, Germany has invaded Poland, and England and France have declared war! I’m here to tell you that in thirty minutes he had eaten his breakfast, packed a suitcase and gone to New Orleans.”
“What for?”
“To see the Canadian consul.”
“Yes, I remember him going to Windsor, Ontario.”
“That was two months later. He gained thirty pounds in two months.”
“What was he so excited about?”
“He knew what it meant! He told us all at supper: this is it. We’re going to be in it sooner or later. We should be in it now. And I’m not waiting. They were all so proud of him—and especially Miz Cutrer. And when he came home that spring in his blue uniform and the gold wings of a flight surgeon, I swear he was the best looking man I ever saw in my life. And so—cute! We had the best time.”
Sure he was cute. He had found a way to do both: to please them and please himself. To leave. To do what he wanted to do and save old England doing it. And perhaps even carry off the grandest coup of all: to die. To win the big prize for them and for himself (but not even he dreamed he would succeed not only in dying but in dying in Crete in the wine dark sea).
“Then before that he was lazy too.”
“He was not!”
“It is not laziness, Mother. Partly but not all. I’ll tell you a strange thing. During the war a bad thing happened to me. We were retreating from the Chongchon River. We had stopped the Chinese by setting fire to the grass with tracer bullets. What was left of a Ranger company was supposed to be right behind us. Or rather we thought we were retreating, because we got ambushed on the line of retreat and had to back off and head west. I was supposed to go back to the crossroad and tell the Ranger company about the change. I got back there and waited half an hour and got so cold I went to sleep. When I woke up it was daylight.”
“And you didn’t know whether the Rangers had come by or not?”
“That wasn’t it. For a long time I couldn’t remember anything. All I knew was that something was terribly wrong.”
“Had the Rangers gone by during the night?” asks my mother, smiling and confident that I had played a creditable role.
“Well no, but that’s not—”
“What happened to them?”
“They got cut off.”
“You mean they were all killed?”
“There wasn’t much left to them in the first place.”
“What a terrible thing. We’ll never know what you boys went through. But at least your conscience was clear.”
“It was not my conscience that bothered me. What I am trying to tell you is that nothing seemed worth doing except something I couldn’t even remember. If somebody had come up to me and said: if you will forget your preoccupation for forty minutes and get to work, I can assure you that you will find the cure of cancer and compose the greatest of all symphonies—I wouldn’t have been interested. Do you know why? Because it wasn’t good enough for me.”
“That’s selfish.”
“I know.”
“I’ll tell you one thing. If they put me up there and said, Anna, you hold your ground and start shooting, you know what I would do?”
“What?”
“I’d be long gone for the rear.”
I summon up the vision of my mother in headlong retreat before the Chinese and I have to laugh.
“We’ll never know what it was like though,” Mother adds, but she is not paying much attention, to tell the truth. I really have to laugh at her. She kneads a pink cube so the fish can smell it. “You know what, Jack?” Her eyes brim with fondness, a fondness carefully guarded against the personal, the heartfelt, a fondness deliberately rendered trite. “It’s funny you should mention that. Believe it or not, Roy and I were talking the other day and Roy, not me, said you would be wonderful in something like that.”
“Like what?”
“Cancer research.”
“Oh.”
Fishing is poor. The egret pumps himself up into the air and rows by so close I can hear the gristle creak in his wings.
5
AFTER BREAKFAST THERE is a commotion about Mass. The Smiths, except Lonnie, would never dream of speaking of religion—raising the subject provokes in them the acutest embarrassment: eyes are averted, throats are cleared, and there occurs a murmuring for a minute or two until the subject can be changed. But I have heard them argue forty five minutes about the mechanics of going to Mass and with all the ardor of relief, as if in debating the merits of the nine o’clock Mass in Biloxi as against the ten thirty in Bay St Louis they were indeed discussing religion and who can say they weren’t? But perhaps they are right: certainly if they spoke to me of God, I would jump in the bayou.
I suggest to Roy Smith, who has just returned from the Rigolets, that Sharon and I stay home and mind Jean-Paul. “Oh no,” says my mother under drooping lids. “Jean-Paul can go. Well all go. Sharon’s going too, aren’t you, Sharon?” Sharon laughs and says she will. They’ve been talking together.
The church, an old one in the rear of Biloxi, looks like a post office. It is an official-looking place. The steps are trodden into scallops; the brass rail and doorplate are worn bright as gold from hard use. We arrive early so Lonnie can be rolled to a special place next to a column. By the time Mass begins we are packed in like sardines. A woman comes up the aisle, leans over and looks down our pew. She gives me an especially hard look. I do not budge. It is like the subway. Roy Smith, who got home just in time to change to a clean perforated shirt, gives up his seat to a little girl and kneels in the aisle with several other men, kneels on one knee like a tackle, elbow propped on his upright knee, hands clasped sideways. His face is dark with blood, his breath whistles in his nose as he studies the chips in the terrazzo floor.
Sharon is good: she has a sweet catholic wonder peculiar to a certain type of Protestant girl—once she is put at her ease by the heroic unreligiousness of the Smiths (what are they doing here? she thinks); she gazes about yellow-eyed. (She thinks: how odd they all are, and him too—all that commotion about getting here and now that they are here, it is as if it were over before it began—each has lapsed into his own blank-eyed vacancy and the priest has turned his back.)
When the bell rings for communion, Roy gets heavily to his feet and pilots Lonnie to the end of the rail. All I can see of Lonnie is a weaving tuft of red hair. When the priest comes to him, Roy holds a hand against Lonnie’s face to steady him. He does this in a frowning perfunctory way, eyes light as an eagle’s.
6
THE WOMEN ARE IN the kitchen, my mother cleaning red-fish and Sharon sitting at a window with a lapful of snap-beans. The board sash opens out over the swamp where a flock of redwings rattle like gourds and ride down the cattails, wings sprung out to show their scarlet epaulets. Jean-Paul swings over the floor, swiveling around on his fat hip, his sharklike flesh whispering over the rough boards, and puts his finger into the cracks to get at the lapping water. There comes to me on the porch
the voices of the morning, the quarreling late eleven o’clock sound of the redwings and the talk of the women, easy in its silences, come together, not in their likenesses (for how different they are: Sharon’s studied upcountry exclamations—“I surely didn’t know people ate crawfish!”—by which she means that in Eufala only Negroes eat crawfish; and my mother’s steady catarrhal hum—“If Roy wants bisque this year, he’d better buy it—do you know how long it takes to make bisque?”) but come together rather in their womanness and under the easy dispensation of the kitchen.
The children are skiing with Roy. The blue boat rides up and down the bayou, opening the black water like a knife. The gear piled at the end of the dock, yellow nylon rope and crimson lifebelt, makes aching phosphor colors in the sunlight.
Lonnie finds me and comes bumping his chair into my cot. On Sundays he wears his suit and his snapbrim felt hat. He has taken off his coat but his tie is still knotted tightly and fastened by a chain-and-bar clasp. When Lonnie gets dressed up, he looks like a little redneck come to a wedding.
“Do you want to renew your subscriptions?”
“I might. How many points do you have?”
“A hundred and fourteen.”
“Doesn’t that make you first?”
“Yes, but it doesn’t mean I’ll stay first.”
“How much?”
“Twelve dollars, but you don’t have to renew.”
The clouds roll up from Chandeleur Island. They hardly seem to move, but their shadows come racing across the grass like a dark wind. Lonnie has trouble looking at me. He tries to even his eyes with mine and this sets his head weaving. I sit up.
Lonnie takes the money in his pronged fingers and sets about putting it into his wallet, a bulky affair with an album of plastic envelopes filled with holy cards.
“What is first prize this year?”
“A Zenith Trans-World.”
“But you have a radio.”
“Standard band.” Lonnie gazes at me. The blue stare holds converse, has its sentences and periods. “If I get the Zenith, I won’t miss television so much.”
“I would reconsider that. You get a great deal of pleasure from television.”
Lonnie appears to reconsider. But he is really enjoying the talk. A smile plays at the corner of his mouth. Lonnie’s monotonous speech gives him an advantage, the same advantage foreigners have: his words are not worn out. It is like a code tapped through a wall. Sometimes he asks me straight out: do you love me? and it is possible to tap back: yes, I love you.
“Moreover, I do not think you should fast,” I tell him.
“Why not?”
“You’ve had pneumonia twice in the past year. It would not be good for you. I doubt if your confessor would allow it. Ask him.”
“He is allowing it.”
“On what grounds?”
“To conquer an habitual disposition.” Lonnie uses the peculiar idiom of the catechism in ordinary speech. Once he told me I needn’t worry about some piece of foolishness he heard me tell Linda, since it was not a malicious lie but rather a “jocose lie.”
“What disposition is that?”
“A disposition to envy.”
“Envy who?”
“Duval.”
“Duval is dead.”
“Yes. But envy is not merely sorrow at another’s good fortune: it is also joy at another’s misfortune.”
“Are you still worried about that? You accused yourself and received absolution, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Then don’t be scrupulous.”
“I’m not scrupulous.”
“Then what’s the trouble?”
“I’m still glad he’s dead.”
“Why shouldn’t you be? He sees God face to face and you don’t.”
Lonnie grins at me with the liveliest sense of our complicity: let them ski all they want to. We have something better. His expression is complex. He knows that I have entered the argument as a game played by his rules and he knows that I know it, but he does not mind.
“Jack, do you remember the time Duval went to the field meet in Jackson and won first in American history and the next day made all-state guard?”
“Yes.”
“I hoped he would lose.”
“That’s not hurting Duval.”
“It is hurting me. You know what capital sin does to the life of the soul.”
“Yes. Still and all I would not fast. Instead I would concentrate on the Eucharist. It seems a more positive thing to do.”
“That is true.” Again the blue eyes engage mine in lively converse, looking, looking away, and looking again. “But Eucharist is a sacrament of the living.”
“You don’t wish to live?”
“Oh sure!” he says laughing, willing, wishing even, to lose the argument so that I will be sure to have as much fun as he.
It is a day for clouds. The clouds come sailing by, swelled out like clippers. The creamy vapor boils up into great thundering ranges and steep valleys of cloud. A green snake swims under the dock. I can see the sutures between the plates of its flat skull. It glides through the water without a ripple, stops mysteriously and nods against a piling.
“Jack?”
“Yes?”
“Are we going for a ride?”
For Lonnie our Sundays together have a program. First we talk, usually on a religious subject; then we take a ride; then he asks me to do him like Akim.
The ride is a flying trip over the boardwalk and full tilt down the swamp road. Lonnie perches on the edge of his chair and splits the wind until tears run out of his eyes. When the clouds come booming up over the savannah, the creatures of the marsh hush for a second then set up a din of croaking and pumping.
Back on the porch he asks me to do him like Akim. I come for him in his chair. It has to be a real beating up or he won’t be satisfied. During my last year in college I discovered that I was picking up the mannerisms of Akim Tamiroff, the only useful thing, in fact, that I learned in the entire four years.
“I must get those plans.”
“Come on now Jack don’t.” Lonnie shrinks back fearfully-joyfully. His hand curls like a burning leaf.
My mother sticks her head out of the kitchen.
“Now aren’t those two a case?” She turns back to Sharon. “I tell you, that Lonnie and Jack are one more case.”
After I kiss him good-by, Lonnie calls me back. But he doesn’t really have anything to say.
“Wait.”
“What?”
He searches the swamp, smiling.
“Do you think that Eucharist—”
“Yes?”
He forgets and is obliged to say straight out: “I am still offering my communion for you.”
“I know you are.”
“Wait.”
“What?”
“Do you love me?”
“Yes.”
“How much?”
“Quite a bit.”
“I love you too.” But already he has the transistor in the crook of his wrist and is working at it furiously.
7
ON ITS WAY HOME the MG becomes infested with malaise. It is not unexpected, since Sunday afternoon is always the worst time for malaise. Thousands of cars are strung out along the Gulf Coast, whole families, and all with the same vacant headachy look. There is an exhaust fume in the air and the sun strikes the water with a malignant glint. A fine Sunday afternoon, though. A beautiful boulevard, ten thousand handsome cars, fifty thousand handsome, well-fed and kind-hearted people, and the malaise settles on us like a fall-out.
Sorrowing, hoping against hope, I put my hand on the thickest and innerest part of Sharon’s thigh.
She bats me away with a new vigor.
“Son, don’t you mess with me.”
“Very well, I won’t,” I say gloomily, as willing not to mess with her as mess with her, to tell the truth.
“That’s all right. You come here.”
“I�
��m here.”
She gives me a kiss. “I got your number, son. But that’s all right. You’re a good old boy. You really tickle me.” She’s been talking to my mother. “Now you tend to your business and get me on home.”
“Why?”
“I have to meet someone.”
Four
1
SAM YERGER IS WAITING for me on the sidewalk, bigger than life. Really his legs are as big and round as an elephant’s in their heavy cylindrical linens and great flaring brogues. Seeing him strikes a pang to the marrow; he has the urgent gentle manner of an emissary of bad news. Someone has died.
Beyond a doubt he is waiting for me. At the sight of my MG, he makes an occult sign and comes quickly to the curb.
“Meet me in the basement,” he actually whispers and turns and goes immediately up the wooden steps, his footsteps echoing like pistol shots.
Sam looks very good. Though he is rumpled and red-eyed, he is, as always, of a piece, from his bearish-big head and shoulders and his soft collar riding up like a ruff into the spade of hair at the back of his neck to his elephant legs and black brogues. It would be a pleasure to be red-eyed and rumpled if one could do it with Sam’s style. His hair makes two waves over his forehead in the Nelson Eddy style of a generation ago.
Sam Yerger’s mother, Aunt Mady, was married to Judge Anse’s law partner, old man Ben Yerger. After college in the East, Sam left Feliciana Parish for good and worked on the old New Orleans Item. In the nineteen thirties he wrote a humorous book about the French-speaking Negroes called Yambilaya Ya-Ya which was made into a stage show and later a movie. During the war Sam was chief of the Paris bureau of a wire service. I remember hearing a CBS news analyst call him “an able and well-informed reporter.” For a while he was married to Joel Craig, a New Orleans beauty (Joel’s voice, a throaty society voice richened, it always seemed to me, cured, by good whisky—took on for me the same larger-than-life plenitude as Sam himself). They lived first in the Quarter and then in the Mexican state of Chiapas, where I visited them in 1954. There he wrote a novel called The Honored and the Dishonored which dealt, according to the dust jacket, with “the problem of evil and the essential loneliness of man.” Sam broke his leg in search of some ruins in a remote district and nearly died before some Indians found the two of them. He and Joel were very fond of each other and liked to joke in a way that at first seemed easy-going. For example, Sam liked to say that Joel was just the least little bit pregnant, and before they were married Joel liked to say that she was sick and tired of being Sam’s bawd; I liked hearing her say bawd in that big caramel voice. She liked to call me Leftenant: “Leftenant, it has at long last dawned on me what it is about you that attracts me.” “What?” I asked, shifting around uneasily. “You’ve got dignidad, Leftenant.” It was not a good thing to say because thereafter I could never say or do anything without a consciousness of my dignity. When I visited them in Mexico, each spoke highly of the other and in the other’s presence, which was slightly embarrassing. “He’s quite a guy,” Joel told me. “Do you know what he told me after lying under a cliff for thirty six hours with two inches of his femur sticking out? He said: Queenie, I think I’m going to pass out and before I do, I’m going to give you a piece of advice—God, I thought he was going to die and knew and was telling me what to do with his book—and he said quite solemnly: Queenie, always stick to Bach and the early Italians—and passed out cold as a mackerel. And by God, it’s not bad advice.” Sam would say of Joel: “She’s a fine girl. Always cherish your woman, Binx.” I told him I would. That summer I had much to thank him for. At the City College of Mexico I had met this girl from U.C.L.A. named Pat Pabst and she had come down with me to Chiapas. “Always cherish your woman,” Sam told me and stomped around in very good style with his cane. I looked over at Pat Pabst who, I knew, was in Mexico looking for the Real Right Thing. And here it was: old Sam, a regular bear of a writer with his black Beethoven face, pushing himself around with a stoic sort of gracefulness; and I in my rucksack and with just the hint of an old Virginian voice. It was all her little California heart desired. She clave to me for dear life. After leaving Mexico—he had been overtaken by nostalgia, the characteristic mood of repetition—Sam returned to Feliciana where he wrote a nostalgic book called Happy Land which was commended in the reviews as a nice blend of a moderate attitude toward the race question and a conservative affection for the values of the agrarian South. An earlier book, called Curse upon the Land, which the dust jacket described as “an impassioned plea for tolerance and understanding,” had not been well received in Feliciana. Now and then Sam turns up in New Orleans on a lecture tour and visits my aunt and horses around with Kate and me. We enjoy seeing him. He calls me Brother Andy and Kate Miss Ruby.
