The Last Gentleman: A Novel

by Walker Percy

  In my case I had to go crazy to make the discovery. It’s like that man in West Virginia who walked away from the airplane crash. He walked through the woods until he came to a highway. Do you know what I think? That he felt absolutely free to turn right or turn left or sit down on the culvert.

  At any rate, I acted for myself and here you are, we are, doing it.

  Good luck.

  For some reason she felt a need to count her money. Her wallet contained $326. There was seventy-six cents in change in the pocket of her new jeans. She folded her wallet and put it and the notebook and the knife in the deep pocket of her camouflage jacket. After thinking a moment, she packed the candles and the can of neat’s-foot oil in her knapsack, between the sleeping bag and the wedge of cheese. She hung the knapsack on the back of the bench. Now only the map remained on the bench.

  Drumming her fingers on her knees, she watched the ants carrying their little green sails toward the policeman. Rising suddenly, she took half a dozen steps and tapped him on the shoulder and in the same moment (this was wrong) asked him a question. He did not give a start but turned, his head already inclined and nodding as if he were prepared for her question. Many people must ask him questions. His eyes were darting around the concrete of the sidewalk.

  “What’s that?” he said, putting his great hairy ear close to her mouth.

  She had asked her question too soon and in too much of a rush. Yet before she could repeat it, it seemed to her that he was backtracking and listening to her first question again.

  “Whose place?” he asked.

  “Miss Sally Kemp” She wanted to ask him to come to the bench, sit down, and look at the map. Instead, she found that she was giving a tug at his sleeve. “Would you—”

  It was surprising how quickly he understood. In an instant they were sitting on the bench with the map between them. He went on nodding and gazing down at the map instead of the sidewalk. It was not a good map. A few trails crisscrossed. In the blank spaces between the trails were drawings of chipmunks and whiskey stills and mountaineers carrying jugs of “mountain dew” and wearing overalls with one shoulder strap.

  In his eagerness to be helpful and even before he knew where she wanted to go, his forefinger began tracing the trails on the map. His fingernail was as large and convex as a watch crystal and, surprisingly, polished. The nail made a slight sound on the paper as it passed up and down the trails. As their heads bent close over the map, she could not hear him breathe in but his exhalations came out whistling and strong as a bellows. The sight of his large polished nail on the map and the sound of his breathing so diverted her that she could not collect her thoughts.

  “I know where old Judge Kemp’s summer place used to be. He used to come up here when I was a boy. I even worked in his greenhouse.”

  “Greenhouse?” she said drowsily.

  “His daddy got the idea a long time ago of growing orchids and selling them to the rich people at the old Grove Park Inn where they used to have dances every night.”

  “That’s him,” she said but not really remembering.

  “This is where it used to be.” The gleaming watch-glass fingernail strayed off a trail into a blank space.

  “Used to be?”

  “It burned down years ago.”

  “It all burned?”

  “The main house. Must have been bums or hippies living out there. Ain’t nobody been out there for years.”

  “Show me how to get there.” After she said it, she realized she had said it. She had uttered not a question, not a statement, but a request. How long had it been since she had said to someone: Do this, do that? Perhaps the secret of talking was to have something to say.

  “Take this trail.” The watch-glass nail glided, hesitated, then stopped like a Ouija in a white space. “It’s just the other side of the golf course.”

  “How far is it from here?”

  “Three, four miles.”

  “Do you mind telling how old you are?” It would help if she knew whether he was forty-five or sixty-five. But he went on nodding and didn’t reply. Her question, she saw, was inappropriate, but he let it go.

  Instead he looked at her and said: “Are you going to stay out there?”

  “Yes. It’s my place.”

  “Be careful, young lady.”

  “Why?”

  “Hippies and bums stay out there. Last summer a lady got—hurt. Just keep your eyes open.”

  “All right.”

  He rose.

  “It’s a nice walk. Have a nice day.”

  “What?” She was puzzled by the way he said it, in a perfunctory way like goodbye. But what a nice thing to say.

  But he only repeated it—“Have a nice day”—and raised a finger to the place where the brim of his hat would have been. He returned to his street corner.

  After marking the trail with her Scripto pencil and making an X in the blank space, she folded the map carefully with the marked trail on the outside and stuck it in the breast pocket of her shirt. Opposite the Gulf station she stopped and looked down at her boots. They felt stiff. She went into the rest room, tore three coarse tissues from the roll above the washbasin, put the toilet seat lid down, sat and took off her boots, removed the can of neat’s-foot oil from her knapsack and oiled her boots, using the entire can. Carefully she disposed of the oil-soaked paper and empty can. She washed and dried her hands.

  In the street her boots felt better, light and strong yet pliable as suede. There was a small pleasure too in getting rid of the can. She meant to live with very few things.

  Passing a drugstore window, she noticed a display of Timex wristwatches. Perhaps she should own a watch. Else how would one know when it was time to get up, eat meals, go to bed? Had there ever been a time in her life when she did not eat a meal when mealtime came? What if one did not? Who said one had to get up or eat meals at a certain time?

  After a moment she shrugged and shouldered her NATO knapsack, this time using both straps, and walked on. The distributed weight felt good on her shoulders. For the first time in her life, she felt that it, her life, was beginning.

  But maybe that was because she could not remember much about her old life.

  III

  UNDOUBTEDLY SOMETHING WAS HAPPENING to him. It began again the next day when he sliced out-of-bounds and was stooping through the barbed-wire fence to find his ball. For the first time in his life he knew that something of immense importance was going to happen to him and that he would soon find out what it was. Ed Cupp was holding the top strand high so he could crawl through, higher than he needed to, to make up for his, Ed Cupp’s, not following him into the woods to help him find the ball. To prove his good intentions, Ed Cupp pulled the wire so hard that it stretched as tight as a guitar string and creaked and popped against the fence posts.

  As he stopped and in the instant of crossing the wire, head lowered, eyes slightly bulging and focused on the wet speckled leaves marinating and funky-smelling in the sunlight, he became aware that he was doing an odd thing with his three-iron. He was holding it in his left hand, fending against the undergrowth with his right and turning his body into the vines and briars which grew in the fence so that they snapped against his body. Then, even as he was climbing through, he had shifted his grip on the iron so that the club head was tucked high under his right arm, shaft resting on forearm, right hand holding the shaft steady—as one might carry a shotgun.

  He did not at first know why he did this. Then he did know why.

  Now he was standing perfectly still in a glade in a pine forest holding the three-iron, a good fifty feet out-of-bounds and not looking for the ball. It was only after standing so for perhaps thirty seconds, perhaps two minutes, that he made the discovery. The discovery was that he did not care that he had sliced out-of-bounds.

  A few minutes earlier he had cared. As his drive curved for the woods, the other players watched in silence. There was a mild perfunctory embarrassment, a clucking of tongues, a clearin
g of throats in a feigned but amiable sympathy.

  Lewis Peckham, the pro, a grave and hopeful man, said: “It could have caught that limb and dropped fair.”

  Jimmy Rogers, a man from Atlanta, who had joined the foursome to make it an unwieldy fivesome, said: “For a six-handicapper and a Wall Street lawyer, Billy is either nervous about his daughter’s wedding or else he’s taking it easy on his future-in-laws.”

  He hit another ball and it too sliced out-of-bounds.

  The other four golfers gazed at the dark woods in respectful silence and expectation as if they were waiting for some rule of propriety to prevail and to return the ball to the fairway.

  As he leaned over to press the tee into the soft rain-soaked turf, he felt the blood rush to his face. Jimmy Rogers had gotten on his nerves. Was it because Jimmy Rogers had messed up the foursome or because Jimmy Rogers had called him Billy? How did Jimmy Rogers know his handicap?

  After teeing up the third ball and as he measured the driver and felt his weight shift from one foot to the other, he was wondering absentmindedly: What if I slice out-of-bounds again, what then? Is a game so designed that there is always a chance that one can so badly transgress its limits and bounds, fall victim to its hazards, that disgrace is always possible, and that it is the public avoidance of disgrace that gives one a pleasant sense of license and justification?

  He sliced again but not out-of-bounds, having allowed for the slice by aiming his stance toward the left rough.

  He said: “I’m picking up. It’s the eighteenth anyhow. I’ll see you in the clubhouse.”

  The slice, which had become worrisome lately, had gotten worse. He had come to see it as an emblem of his life, a small failure at living, a minor deceit, perhaps even a sin. One cringes past the ball, hands mushing through ahead of the club in a show of form, rather than snapping the club head through in an act of faith. Unlike sin in life, retribution is instantaneous. The ball, one’s very self launched into its little life, gives offense from the very outset, is judged, condemned, and sent screaming away and, banished from the pleasant licit fairways and the sunny irenic greens, goes wrong and ever wronger, past the rough, past even the barbed-wire fence, and into the dark fens and thickets and briars of out-of-bounds. One is punished on the spot. When his third drive dropped fair, he was lying seven.

  It had been bad enough to begin with that he couldn’t play with his regular foursome. For more than a week, his daughter’s future father-in-law, a seven-foot Californian, had taken the place of Slocum McKeon, a local attorney and excellent golfer, a taciturn unambitious intelligent man who knew how to be both distant and amiable. To make matters worse, who should show up today but his brother-in-law Bertie, a benumbed addled aging New Yorker with no feel for the game or its etiquette, the sort who will drive into other players and fuddle on his way like Mr. Magoo, noticing nothing. This meant he couldn’t play with Dr. Vance Battle, the happiest man he knew, a young husky competent G.P. who liked to get his hands on you, happy as a vet with his fist up a cow, mend bones, take hold of your liver from the front and back, stick a finger up your anus paying no attention to your groans, talking N.C. basketball all the while, pausing only to frown and shake his head at the state of one’s prostate: “It feels like an Idaho potato.”

  The last time his foursome played, he fell down. Vance grabbed him and squinted at him. “You better come in, Will. I want to take a look at you.”

  As if this weren’t bad enough, Bertie shows up with Jimmy Rogers, an old con man from the campus, an unwelcome wraith from the past, a classmate who had got blackballed even by the Betas. Who, what brought this pair together?

  Maybe Vance was right. Something was happening to him.

  A few minutes earlier, on number-sixteen green, he had suffered another little spell and had fallen down in the deep trap behind number-sixteen green. But he had gotten up quickly and no one had noticed. His brother-in-law was lining up a putt, crouched over his putter with its gimmicky semicircular head, elbows sticking out, right foot drawn back daintily. Though the sun shone brightly, the green seemed suddenly to grow dark as if the daylight had drained down the hole. The other players, waiting in silence for the putt, grew taller. After the putt Jimmy Rogers took his arm and drew close and said Hail Caesar and he said Hail Caesar? and Jimmy Rogers said You really did it, didn’t you? and he said Did what? And Jimmy said You picked up all the marbles, that’s all. You married one of them and beat them at their own game in their own ball park. Them? Who’s them? Yankees? What game? Practicing law? Making money?

  But then Jimmy drew close and looked solemn.

  “I’m so sorry, old buddy.”

  “Sorry about what?”

  “Your wife’s passing.”

  “Oh. Thank you.”

  “What a wonderful person she must have been.”

  “Yes, she was.”

  Jimmy Rogers began to tell him a joke about a Jew and a German and a black on an airplane with a single parachute. A high-pitched keening filled the sky. Am I going crazy? he wondered curiously. Earlier he had seen a bird, undoubtedly some kind of a hawk, fly across the fairway straight as an arrow and with astonishing swiftness, across a ridge covered by scarlet and gold trees, then fold its wings and drop like a stone into the woods. It reminded him of something but before he could think what it was, sparks flew forward at the corner of his eye. He decided with interest that something was happening to him, perhaps a breakdown, perhaps a stroke. When his turn came to putt and he stooped over the ball, he looked at the hole some twenty feet away and at Lewis Peckham, who was tending the pin and who was looking not at him or the hole but in a small exquisite courtesy allowing his eyes to go unfocused and gaze at a middle distance. The green broke to the right. He did not know whether he was going to hit the ball five feet or fifty feet. It was as if the game had fallen away from him and he was trying to play it from a great height. He felt like a clown on stilts. Lewis Peckham cleared his throat and now Lewis was looking at him and his eyes were veiled and ironic (as if he not only knew that something was happening to him but even knew what it was!) and he putted. The ball curved in a smooth flat parabola and sank with a plop.

  It was a good putt. His muscles remembered. When the putt sank, the golfers nodded briefly, signifying approval and a kind of relief that he was back on his game. Or was it a relief that they could play a game at all, obey its rules, observe its etiquette and the small rites of settling in for a drive and lining up a putt? He was of two minds, playing golf and at the same time wondering with no more than a moderate curiosity what was happening to him. Were they of two minds also? Was there an unspoken understanding between all of them that what they were doing, knocking little balls around a mountain meadow while the fitful wind bustled about high above them, was after all preposterous but that they had all assented to it and were doing it nevertheless and because, after all, why not? One might as well do one thing as another.

  But the hawk was not of two minds. Single-mindedly it darted through the mountain air and dove into the woods. Its change of direction from level flight to drop was fabled. That is, it made him think of times when people told him fabulous things and he believed them. Perhaps a Negro had told him once that this kind of hawk is the only bird in the world that can—can what? He remembered. He remembered everything today. The hawk, the Negro said, could fly full speed and straight into the hole of a hollow tree and brake to a stop inside. He, the Negro, had seen one do it. It was possible to believe that the hawk could do just such a fabled single-minded thing.

  Lewis Peckham did not offer to help him find his ball. He knew why. Because Lewis had helped him on the last hole, seventeen, where he had also sliced out-of-bounds and to do so now would be unseemly. In a show of indifference Lewis permitted him the freedom to look or not to look for the ball, to drop or pick up. It was a nice calculation. Your ordinary pro would make a great sweaty show of helping out.

  It was not his regular foursome. It was not an ordinary golf
game.

  The first time he had sliced out-of-bounds, Lewis had gone through the fence with him and shown him something odd. At the base of a low ridge, they were halfheartedly poking at weeds, hoping to turn the new Spalding Pro Flite, when Lewis stopped and stood still.

  “You notice anything unusual about that tree?” asked Lewis, nodding toward a flaming sassafras, not a tree really but a large shrub. The red three-fingered leaves caught a ray of sunlight and turned fluorescent in the somber laurels.

  “No.”

  “Put your face next to it.”

  He did, expecting to smell something, perhaps licorice. Smelling nothing, he plucked a leaf for sucking, tasted the licorice stem. Lewis held a branch aside as if it were a drape at a window.

  “Now?”

  “Now what?”

  “You still don’t notice anything?”

  “No.”

  “Come closer.”

  There was nothing to come closer to except a shallow recess in the rock of the ridge.

  “Now?”

  Something stirred against his cheek, a breath of air from the rock itself, then as he leaned closer a steady current blew in his face and open mouth, not like the hot summer breeze of the fairway, but a cool wet exhalation smelling of rocks and roots. His mouth tasted minerals.

  “Where does that come from, a cave? I don’t see an opening.

  “Yeah. My cave.”

  “Your cave?”

  “Lost Cove.”

  “Lost Cove cave? But that’s down below.”

  “I know, but it’s the same cave.”

  “Sure I remember. I remember every detail, the room where you found the saber-tooth tiger, the Confederate powder works. Where does the air come from?”

  “It’s a phenomenon around here. Like Blowing Rock. Warm summer air blowing up the gorge into the big entrance below, percolating up through the mountain, and coming out cracks like this, cool in the summer, warm in the winter.”