Last Gentleman and The Second Coming

by Walker Percy

  Because he wasn’t there? No, it wasn’t so simple. She could make it now, with him or without him. But think of life with him there beside her in the Mercedes! Or in her greenhouse. He would remember for her if she forgot. She would hoist him if he fell. Now she knew what she did not want: not being with him. I do not want him not being here.

  But what if he left?

  She parked the car at the country club and dove into the woods before some official questioned her.

  Why was she so happy now? Because like the checker she hoped for a sweet honey man? No. Because she hoped to get married? No. Married. The word made her think of the married leafers up here, mooning around, fed up with the red leaves and each other. What if they married? Married. The word was a flattening out, a lightening, and a rolling up. Rolled up tight in a light-colored rug. And a winding up and a polishing off. In short, stuck like her mother and father. On the other hand, the thought of marrying him made her grin and skip like a schoolgirl. Marrying. What an odd expression. Marrying. Is it merry to marry or marred? What if we marry? What if we marry?—she sang to the music of Schubert’s Trout. She’d not forget these words. Other marriages might get screwed up but not theirs. Hm. Look at these old couples gazing at the lovely scarlet Smokies with the same glum expression. She? She could look at a doodlebug with him and be happy. With him, silence didn’t sprout and looks didn’t dart. What happened after you got married? Do you look at each other and say: Well, here we are, me and you, what’ll we do, tea for two? Then was she happy because she was going to surprise him with a steak dinner? Not exactly. Then was she happy because it is a pleasure to carry out a task assigned by a task assigner? Yes, in a way. She looked forward to reporting to him everything she had done. While the doctor examined him, she could cook the steaks, put the beer under the waterfall to keep cold, fix avocado salad with Plagniol (goodbye dandelion-and-dock), unfold the chairs, upend two big pots for tables, open the mica door of the firebox to see the wood fire. What about wild shallots with the avocados? Should she invite the doctor for supper? No.

  She was planning her supper like any other housewife.

  6

  But he was gone. The potting room was empty. Leaning over, she felt for him in all parts of the sleeping bag as if he might have shrunk. Her stomach hurt where the rail of the bunk hit her. When she straightened up, she felt dizzy and nauseated. How could his not being there make her sick?

  Yet even as she searched, uncovering pots, looking behind creeper, she could feel her eyes narrow, her lips begin to curl as her searching self turned round and went down into her Sirius self until she stood now, arms folded, in the corner next to the stove from where she could see all of the potting room and through the door into the greenhouse. She eyed the vent in the eave where the cave air entered and blew across the room and through the space above the partition. Not much warm air came down. The room was cold.

  The room had the look of his not coming back.

  She shrugged. Very well, then. She drummed her fingers on her thigh. Why did the room suddenly feel cold? The warm air blowing in from the cave needed to come down. There must have been a system of ducts here earlier, probably of wood which had rotted. It would be possible to make new ducts out of—there were piles of cardboard boxes behind the A & P, many of the same size perhaps for standard-size cans like Campbell’s soup. One could cut out the ends and connect them. The only expense would be paper tape and wire to suspend them from the ceiling. It would be an interesting problem to make branches in the duct system, cut boxes at the proper angle to deflect air to the proper places. How to transport the boxes? Flatten them out, load them on the creeper, and drag them from town?

  She was nodding and chewing her lip when she caught sight of the steaks on the stove, still wrapped in white butcher paper. Wet pink spots stained the paper. What to do with them? All at once her mouth spurted with juices. Eat them. She couldn’t remember the last time she ate red meat.

  Feeling sick about him is all right, but not all night.

  After starting a fire of fat pine in the Grand Crown, she went with her Clorox bottle to the waterfall, drumming her fingers to the running chords of the Trout. It was almost dark—

  —and there he was in the path as if he had just fallen down and was trying to get up, hand propped under him in the very act of pushing himself up, but he didn’t. He couldn’t get up. When she knelt beside him (her stomach was hurting again), his one-eyed profile gazed not at her but at the wet cold earth inches away. The eye bulged in the terrific concentration of pushing the earth away. He didn’t move. The eye didn’t blink. Was he dead? Not knowing that she did so, she both lay on him and pulled him up, hands locked around his waist, then stopped still to see if he lived, because he was so cold, lying on him long enough to feel the onset of the rigor, which started like an earthquake tremor then shook him till his teeth rattled.

  Then what will love be in the future, she wondered, lying on him cheek pressed against his, a dancing with him in the Carolina moonlight with the old world and time before you, or a cleaving to him at the world’s end, and which is better?

  “Don’t worry. I’ll get you back.”

  Straddling him and trying his pelvis for heft, she looked around, gauging trees and limbs for hoist points. But he could move, enough so that by rolling him and getting herself almost under him with his arm around her neck, he could help her push them up and, leaning heavily on her, walk. Staggering though she was, her eye for angles was good enough to bend at the right moment and lever him onto the bunk without hurting him. He shook like a leaf. There was nothing for her to do now but, spent, gasping, trembling, use her last strength and climb over him, cover them with the sleeping bag and hold him until she got stronger and he stopped shivering. Somehow she, they, got them undressed, his wet clothes her dry clothes off, her warm body curled around his lard-cold muscle straps and bones, spoon-nesting him, her knees coming up behind him until he was shivering less and, signaling a turn, he nested her, encircled her as if he were her cold dead planet and she his sun’s warmth.

  It was dark. There was no firelight from the stove. Flexed and enfolded she lay still, waiting for him to get warm, blinking in the dark but not thinking. Her arm went to sleep. She began to worry, about the doctor, that he might not come or that he might and find them so and that the stove fire of fat pine might go out.

  Presently he stopped shivering and went slack around her. “Ah,” he said quite himself. “You undressed me again.”

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m getting up to fix the fire. The doctor is coming.”

  “He came.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing. He said my leg wasn’t bad, didn’t need a cast. He smelled me, looked in my eye, shook his head, and told me to come in tomorrow for a checkup.”

  “Is there something wrong with you?”

  “No.”

  “Then what were you doing out there on the ground?”

  “I went out to get some water and fell down.”

  “Why didn’t you get up?”

  He was silent.

  “I mean either I am not understanding something or something is not understandable.”

  “I blacked out.”

  “Is there something serious wrong with you?”

  “No. Except I tend to fall down.”

  “I am a good hoister.”

  “I know.”

  “When you fall down, I’ll pick you up.”

  “I know.”

  “I have to fix the fire.”

  She got up naked but not shivering. The pine had gone out, but it was so fat, a new fire could be started with a match. Atop the blazing kindling she laid two short green maple logs and a heavy hunk of chestnut to press them down. She left the door to the firebox open. When she started to climb over him, she discovered that he had moved to make room. As she turned to nest again, he held her shoulder and she came down facing him. But
he was bent a little away from her. She bent too. They seemed to be looking at each other through their eyebrows. The wind picked up and pressed against the greenhouse. The metal frame creaked. There was a fine sifting against the glass. At first she thought it was blown pine needles. The sound grew heavier. It was sleet.

  Winter had come.

  His hand was in the hollow of her back, pressing her against him. She came against him, willingly. It was a marvel to her this yielding and flowing against him, amazing that I was made so and is this it then (whatever it is) and what will happen to myself (do I altogether like the yielding despite myself and the smiling at it like smiling when your knee jerks when Dr. Duk hits it with his rubber hammer) and will I for the first time in my life get away from my everlasting self sick of itself to be with another self and is that what it is and if not then what? He kissed her on the lips. Ah then it is that too after all, the dancing adream in the Carolina moonlight except that it was sleeting and it was firelight not moonlight on the glass.

  “Oh my,” she said. “Imagine.”

  “Imagine what?”

  “Imagine having you around at four o’clock in the afternoon.”

  He laughed. “What’s wrong with night? What’s wrong with now?”

  “Nothing. But—”

  She was moving against him, enclosing him, wrapping her arms and legs around him, as if her body had at last found the center of itself outside itself. But he stopped her or rather took her face in his hands and looked she thought at her, the firelight making his eye sockets deeper and darker than they were.

  “There is something I must tell you.”

  “Yes, but—” she said.

  “Yes, but what?”

  Yes, but not now. Yes, but why did you stop? Keep on.

  “What?” he asked her.

  “I said why did you stop. I mean I meant to say ‘it.’ Why did you stop? I think this is ‘it.’”

  “I have to leave,” he said.

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  “Is the leaving—”

  “I’ll be back.”

  “When?”

  “Soon. There are some things I must do.”

  “What about this? It? That is, us.”

  “What about us?”

  “Is there anything entailed?”

  “Is anything entailed between us?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is the entailment?”

  He lay back, his hand behind his head. The wind shifted to the south. The sleet turned to rain. Some of the drops on the glass beyond his head didn’t run. In the big drops the open firebox was reflected in a bright curved stripe like a cat’s eye. With his hand behind his head, his shoulders and chest bare, the firelight showing the line of his cheek and the notch of his eye, with my hair falling across my arm and touching his arm, we are like lovers in the movies. Men never wear pajamas in the movies. So Sarge didn’t wear pajamas. My father always wore pajamas.

  “There is something you need to know,” he said.

  Yeah, she thought, there is something I needed to know and I think I know. What I need to know and think I know is, is loving you the secret, the be-all not end-all but starting point of my very life, or is it just one of the things creatures do like eating and drinking and therefore nothing special and therefore nothing to dream about? Is loving a filling of the four o’clock gap or is it more? Either way would be okay but I need to know and think I know. It might be the secret because a minute ago when you held me and I came against you, there were signs of coming close, to it, for the first time, like the signs you recognize when you are getting near the ocean for the first time. Even though you’ve never seen the ocean before, you recognize it, the sense of an opening out ahead and a putting behind of the old rickrack bird-chirp town and countryside, something tasting new in the air, the dirt getting sandier, even the shacks and weeds looking different, and something else, a quality of sound, a penultimate hush marking the beginning of the end of land and the beginning of the old uproar and the going away of the endless sea.

  Then why had he stopped and would she ever know the secret or if there was a secret?

  “This is like running around at the Dunes Exxon a mile from the beach and going back to town,” she said.

  “What’s that?” he asked quickly. He looked at her. “You mean the ocean, getting near the ocean.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Perhaps that is what I want,” he said absently.

  “The ocean?”

  “Something like that. Now may I tell you something?”

  “Okay.”

  He turned to face her. Her cheek was on his arm.

  “How are you?” he asked her.

  “I’m all right now.”

  “But not before?”

  “I’m all right because you are doing the instigating and you seem to know what you are doing. I was a good dancer.”

  “So if I do the instigating you’ll do the cooperating?” he asked.

  “Ha ha. Very funny.”

  “Very well. I am going to tell you what has happened concerning you because you are entitled to know. I’m also going to tell you what I have learned because, for one reason, you may be the only person who would understand it.”

  “All right.”

  “First, your mother and I are old friends. That is, I used to know her a long time ago.”

  “You and my mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “How about that?” she said in her mother’s voice, using an expression her mother liked to use. “Did you and she—?”

  “Hardly.”

  “Does hardly mean yes or no?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Could you be my father?”

  “Hardly.”

  “Remind me to look up hardly.”

  “Okay.”

  “How do you know you’re not my father?”

  “If I were, I wouldn’t be here.”

  “Then why is it I seem to have known you before I knew you. We are different but also the same.”

  “I know. I don’t know.”

  “Then why does it seem I am not only I but also you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Could I have known you in another life? Kelso believes in that.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Then why is it that I live this life as if it were a dream and as if any minute I might wake up and find myself in my real life?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Doesn’t that mean that I had a real life once and that I might have again?”

  “I don’t know. Could I tell you what I want to tell you?”

  “All right.” He thought: She says all right the same odd non-signifying way as Jane Ace in Easy Aces.

  “Because your mother and I are old friends, among other reasons, she has asked me if I will be your legal guardian—God, I hate this beard, I meant to ask you to buy me a razor.”

  “I bought one.”

  “You did? Why?”

  “It pleases me to please you. It is also joyful.”

  “I see. Your mother does not know that you are here and she doesn’t know that I know you.”

  “Legal guardian. What is there to guard?”

  “Your real and personal property.”

  “My property. I own fifty-eight dollars and fifty-three cents.”

  “Your real estate. This property and the island you inherited. They are quite valuable. Your parents believe it is in your interest to be declared legally incompetent and for me to be appointed your guardian since the court will not appoint them.”

  “What do you believe?”

  “In my opinion you are not incompetent in the legal sense or the medical sense. I think you are quite capable of taking care of your own affairs.”

  “Aren’t you a lawyer?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is your preference in this matter?”

  “I’d as soon not be your
guardian, though I’d be glad to help you any way I can. However, if your parents can get your doctor to go along they can probably succeed in having the court declare you legally incompetent. In that case, you might be better off having me as your guardian than, say, your aunt.”

  “Oh my stars yes,” she said, using Aunt Grace’s expression. “Tell me this please.”

  “All right.”

  “Are my parents out to screw me?”

  “What an expression.”

  “That’s Kelso’s.” I can talk like anybody but me, she thought. “Her parents never came to see her. Mine came twice—until Miss Sally died. Kelso said my parents are out to screw me.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t put it that way.”

  “How would you put it?”

  “That your parents are not out to screw you. Perhaps they are trying to help you. They have a right to be concerned. And they can be a big help to you. Anyhow, you think about it and tell me later.”

  “All right.”

  “There is something else I want to tell you. About me.”

  “All right.”

  “It’s what I learned in the cave and what I am going to do.”

  But he fell silent and turned away to watch the raindrops.

  “What did you learn?”

  He turned back. Their foreheads touched. Their bodies made a diamond. “As you can see, I don’t know much. You are always asking questions to which I have no answers. By the way, did you always ask so many questions?”

  When he began to talk she found that she could not hear his words for listening to the way he said them. She cast about for his drift. Was he saying the words for the words themselves, for what they meant, or for what they could do to her? There was something about the way he talked that reminded her of her own rehearsed sentences. Was she a jury he was addressing? Though he hardly touched her, his words seemed to flow across all parts of her body. Were they meant to? A pleasure she had never known before bloomed deep in her body. Was this a way of making love?

  He was using words like “my shameful secret of success as a lawyer,” “phony,” “radar,” “our new language,” “this gift of yours and mine,” “ours” (this was her favorite), “being above things,” “not being able to get back down to things” (!), “how to reenter the world” (?), “by God?” “by her?” (!!!!!), “your forgetting and my remembering,” “Sutter,” “Sutter was right,” “Sutter was wrong,” “Sutter Vaught.”