The Last Gentleman: A Novel

by Walker Percy

  “I suppose.”

  “Very well. Can you keep me from the foggy foggy dew?”

  “Sure,” he said absently.

  This time when she jostled, she managed to sidle and give him a friendly kidding hip-bump such as you used to do in high school corridors or playing basketball.

  His body seemed to remember something and, turning toward her, confronted hers like a man moving in his sleep.

  The cloud had come over the cliff. As it came up the short steep yard it seemed to thin and turn into fog. Wisps of fog curled around the tree, which looked more and more like a common Mississippi scrub oak than a stylish Carolina scarlet oak.

  Before they came to the tree his father said: There are two singles. You take one and I’ll take the other.

  Then they went ahead until the tree came between them.

  One single got up, the one on the man’s side of the tree. He had hardly heard the furious wingbeat against the tiny drum of body before the first shot came blotting out everything in the shockroar which went racketing through the swamp. His father always shot on the rise.

  Before he could reach the door, his daughter stopped him. Her face was cross, the frowning U cut deep in her forehead.

  “You’ve got to get that shaman off my back.”

  “Who?”

  “Father what’s-his-name.”

  “Oh, Jack.”

  “Yep. He’s getting on my nerves. Tell Jack he’s not marrying me and Jason. We’re marrying each other.”

  “Okay. Anything else?”

  “The only reason we’re doing this here is that I promised Mother.”

  “Okay. I have to go.”

  “Go? Where?” Her glasses flashed. “You’re not pulling another fade-out.”

  “Fade-out?” He tried to focus on her.

  “That little number you do, now you see me now you don’t—though I’ll give you this much, sweet Poppy”—and she gave him an absentminded hug, still frowning—“you always turned up when I needed you.”

  “Not this time.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  I’ll be damned, he thought. Nothing changes. Am I doing to her exactly what he did to me, leaving her? But there’s a difference. She doesn’t need me.

  And for a fact she had already turned away, her frowning crossed-up face thrust toward Jack Curl and the Cupps.

  “Wait,” he said.

  “What?” she said, stopping but not turning toward him.

  “Ah—well.”

  Ah well. Yes. That’s it. Maybe there had been a time when there was something to say and maybe the time would come again, but it was not now.

  “What?” said Leslie.

  “Goodbye,” he said.

  “What?” she asked vacantly and nodded. “Okay.” She nodded again, eyes fixed in a stare. “Okay.”

  “Give me—” He held out his hand.

  “Oh, Poppy,” said Leslie, turning back and giving him a cheek hug but still frowning past him. She hadn’t heard him.

  Just before he turned away, he took a last look at her. Is it possible to see someone here and now? Her hair was perfectly straight, a long shining fan spread across her shoulders, as bright and clean as a happy child’s. She was a child, hardly more. But when she turned, her face was cross and thrusting, moving in a kind of tic against her hair. When he looked at her, the flashing granny glasses, the inverted U on her forehead, the chewed lip, she slid away from him back in time and he seemed to see her as a child when he passed her in the foyer on 76th Street on her way to Central Park with the nurse, she giving him the same quick fretful cheek hug, and then slid away again but forward in her own time, casting ahead of herself to the park, worrying about. . . Are women beside themselves from the beginning?

  3

  In the upstairs study, built with a widow’s walk above it like a Nantucket house, he found the Greener in a broom closet behind the Electrolux and the waxer. The straps and buckles of the old stiff scuffed case were hard to undo. He gazed at the gun. It was one of four things he had saved from Mississippi. The other three were the Luger, his grandfather’s Ivanhoe, and his father’s Lord Jim. It figured. Both his grandfather and his father had enemies. One, like Ivanhoe, had enemies he hated. The other had the guilts like Jim and an enemy he hated, himself. And one had the shotgun, the other the Luger. What do you do when you are born with a love of death and death-dealing and have no enemies?

  He had not looked at the shotgun or Lord Jim or Ivanhoe for twenty years.

  Fitting barrel into stock, he clicked it out straight and snapped on the forestock. The gun was shorter and heavier than he remembered, short as a carbine, both barrels cylinder-bore. God, no wonder they were good shots. How could you miss anything with a cannon full of birdshot? The metal was not rusty but the bluing had long since worn away to greasy steel. Only a faint design, fine as scrollwork on money, remained. He broke the breech and sighted at the windows through the barrels. White light from the cloud came spinning down the mirrored bore. There was a faint reek of gun oil and powder from the last shot. Who had cleaned the gun? the sheriff? I? I. On the rib between the barrels he read: W. W. Greener, 68 Haymarket, London. Best in all trials 1875-1888. The grip was worn smooth as a police pistol. The wood of the forestock had shrunk around the bone ornament like an old man’s muscle.

  He closed the breech, hefted the gun, sighted it again, pulled the two triggers, first one then the other, then both together. Again, he broke and closed the breech to cock the firing pins. Again he pulled both triggers.

  I’ll be damned. You can fire both barrels at once.

  Wait a minute. You shot the single. There were two singles. That left one shell for the other single.

  But you reloaded.

  Why? Why didn’t you wait for the second single and the second shot before reloading?

  But you reloaded, then swung around to track the second single, swung so far around and so intent on the tracking that you forgot I was there, didn’t see me through the post oak, and got me too.

  Then you reloaded again with one shell. Because one shell was all you needed.

  Wait a minute.

  There were four empty shells, three the guide had picked up and put on the quilt beside me in the Negro cabin, and one in the breech of the Greener. “Here yo bullets,” the guide said, not even knowing that spent shells are worthless.

  Wait a minute.

  Then you had to have fired both barrels at the second single.

  Why?

  You don’t unload two Super-X’s on one small quail.

  Wait a minute.

  There was no second single. If there had been, I’d remember, because I remember everything now. I’d have heard him get up before you shot, heard the sudden tiny thunder. I knew that all along. Why didn’t I know that I knew it?

  Then both barrels were for me, weren’t they?

  Well, I’ll be damned. No wonder the Greener spit fire and smoke like a cannon.

  So that was it.

  Will could not take his eyes from the shotgun. An electric shock seemed to pass into his body from the greasy metal clamped in both hands like an electrode. A violent prickling went up his back and into his hairline.

  His diaphragm contracted. He found that he had laughed.

  Well, I’ll be damned. Is it possible that I knew it all along and until this moment did not know that I knew it? Or did you miss me? Or am I killed and until this moment did not know it? Can you be only technically alive?

  Well, as you used to say, it’s a different ball game now, isn’t it?

  Hm. Why do I feel relieved, even dispensed, as if somehow I were now free to do what I am going to do?

  Smiling, he turned the carbine-length shotgun, swinging the muzzle toward him. Easily done: you can even put both thumbs on both triggers.

  Let me get it straight now.

  You shot the first single.

  Then you broke the breech, removed the one spent shell, and reloade
d.

  Then you fired both barrels.

  Then you broke the breech, ejected the two, and reloaded, but with one shell.

  One shell for the single, two for me, one for you.

  Then how did you nearly miss me?

  You couldn’t miss a quail on the wing with one barrel at fifty feet. Yet you nearly missed me with both barrels at fifteen feet.

  What happened at the very last split second that you pulled up?

  Was it love or failure of love?

  And how did you miss yourself?

  Well, whatever the reason, you corrected it the next time, didn’t you? In the attic, in Mississippi. But why didn’t you take me with you then, if you knew something and were that sure you knew it?

  The sorrow in your eyes when I came over and sat beside you in Georgia—were you sorry you did it or sorry you didn’t?

  He was smiling down at the shotgun and shaking his head.

  Sorry you didn’t do it. Because the next time you took no chances and did it right, used both barrels, both thumbs and your mouth.

  I remember now. I cleaned the gun when I got it back from the sheriff in Mississippi. Both barrels. Wouldn’t one have been enough? Yes, given an ordinary need for death. But not if it’s a love of death. In the case of love, more is better than less, two twice as good as one, and most is best of all. And if the aim is the ecstasy of love, two is closer to infinity than one, especially when the two are twelve-gauge Super-X number-eight shot. And what samurai self-love of death, let alone the little death of everyday fuck-you love, can match the double Winchester come of taking oneself into oneself, the cold-steel extension of oneself into mouth, yes, for you, for me, for us, the logical and ultimate act of fuck-you love fuck-off world, the penetration and union of perfect cold gunmetal into warm quailing mortal flesh, the coming to end all coming, brain cells which together faltered and fell short, now flowered and flew apart, flung like stars around the whole dark world.

  4

  “Going hunting?”

  “No.” It was Lewis Peckham standing in the doorway behind him. He wondered if anything could surprise him.

  “I got an old cornfield the hogs have been into. It’s full of doves. You could come down this afternoon.”

  “No thanks.” He unlatched the forestock of the gun, broke the breech, replaced the parts carefully in the plush cavities of the heavy fitted case.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “What?”

  “I said what’s the matter?”

  “What do you mean what’s the matter?”

  “Something’s been the matter with you.”

  “It’s okay now.” He laughed.

  “You do seem better. What was it?

  He looked at Lewis. It was unusual for him to ask questions.

  “It was something I didn’t know that was bothering me. Now I know.”

  “I could tell you how to correct your slice, but that’s not it, is it?”

  “No.”

  Lewis Peckham’s face, narrow and dark as a piece of slab bark, was as usual slightly averted.

  “But the slice is part of it, isn’t it? I’ll tell you a funny thing. I can watch a man swing a golf club and tell you more about him than a psychiatrist after a hundred hours on the couch.”

  It was probably true. Lewis had a shrewd grave watchful intelligence which, however, was almost spoiled by a restlessness under the quietness. He was not what he appeared. It had at first appeared that Lewis was a natural man, one of the few left, a grave watchful silent courteous man, a Leatherstocking. But he was not. He was a discontent golf pro. He looked like a Cherokee scout but his family was old-line Tidewater and he had played golf at the University of Virginia. He was an unhappy golf pro. Maybe books had ruined him. What a shock to learn from this grave silent man that he wrote poetry in secret! Imagine Leatherstocking a poet. Lewis knew a great many things, could read signs like an Indian but unlike an Indian he did not know what he could not do. He thought he was a good poet but he was not. He thought books could tell him how to live but they couldn’t. He was a serious but dazed reader. He read Dante and Shakespeare and Nietzsche and Freud. He read modern poetry and books on psychiatry. He had taken a degree in English, taught English, fought in a war, returned to teach English, couldn’t, decided to farm, bought a goat farm, managed a Confederate museum in a cave on his property, wrote poetry, went broke, became a golf pro. Lewis showed him some of his poetry once. It was not good. There was one poem called “New Moon over Khe Sanh,” which was typed in the shape of a new moon:

  How could Lewis who could locate others so well, so misplace himself? How could he read signs and people so well, yet want to be a third-rate Rupert Brooke with his rendezvous with death at Khe Sanh? Why would he even want to be a first-rate Rupert Brooke? On the other hand, what was Lewis supposed to do? be an Indian scout? goatherd? English teacher? golf pro? run a Confederate cave? Lewis didn’t seem to know. But what was good about him was that he remained himself despite himself. Books had not spoiled him. He knew a great deal he hadn’t learned from books. The trouble was he didn’t set store by it.

  Will Barrett smiled. All at once he knew what Lewis was supposed to do and what would make him happy. After all the local Angles and Jutes and Saxons have driven each other crazy over niggers and gone to war for lack of anything better to do, Lewis is the fellow who keeps his head and goes around picking up people with his pickup and saving a remnant in his cave.

  “You’re sure you’re okay, Will?”

  “Sure.”

  “You want to know what I think?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think you’re in a clinical depression. I believe you might do with some counseling. Have you heard of logotherapy?”

  Logotherapy. Jesus Christ. What’s he been reading now? English teacher, goatherd, spelunker, poet, golf pro, now a psychiatrist.

  Lewis inclined his head gravely. “The trouble is you and I share something that sets us apart.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We’re the once-born in a world of the twice-born. We have to make our way without Amazing Grace. It’s a lonely road but there are some advantages along the way. The company, when you find it, is better. And the view, though bleak, is bracing. You see things the way they are. In fact, don’t you feel sometimes like the one-eyed in the land of the blind?”

  He frowned. Why was Lewis’s unbelief so unpleasant? It was no better than the Baptists’ belief.

  If belief is shitty and unbelief is shitty, what does that leave?

  No, Lewis was even more demented than the believers. Unbelieving Lewis read Dante for the structure. At least, believers were consistent. They might think Dante is a restaurant in Asheville but they don’t read Marx for structure.

  “Have you considered analysis, Will?”

  “Analysis of what?”

  “Of you. Psychoanalysis.”

  “I did that. Three years of it.”

  “Analysis? No kidding.” Lewis brightened. Lewis thought better of him! Lewis envied him! Lewis wanted to be analyzed! “Then you of all people should know that depression is eminently treatable, right?”

  Lewis waited, not quite watching him, as grave and courteous as if he were waiting for a putt.

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  “Of course I’m right. What is more, you know as well as I do that such a reaction is quite common following the death of a spouse.”

  A spouse. Marion was a spouse. But did Marion’s death depress him or mystify him?

  “Also, if you want to know the truth. Will, I think you retired too soon.”

  “May be,” he said absently.

  “Early retirement is one of the major causes of depression.”

  “Is that right?”

  He took a good look at Lewis, at the dark slab-sided face and straight black hair which was too long for a golf pro and too short for a poet. There was a space in him where a space shouldn’t be, where parts were not glued togeth
er. What it was was that there is nothing wrong with being a goatherd-poet-golf-pro but there was something wrong with the way Lewis did it. What?

  “After all. Will, you got it all. You got everything a man needs. And you’re a good athlete. You could play scratch golf if you put your mind to it.”

  “What would you do if you had it all, Lewis?”

  “I’d raise beef cattle, listen to Beethoven and Wagner, read and write,” said Lewis without hesitation.

  Two fingers strayed along the greasy steel of the Greener barrel.

  “You don’t enjoy such things, Will?”

  “Sure.”

  Lewis touched his arm, a rare thing. Leatherstocking didn’t touch anybody. “Tell you what, Will. They don’t need the father of the bride around here. Let’s me and you cut out, go down to my spread, crack a bottle, and put on the Ninth Symphony.”

  “No thanks, Lewis.” Dear Jesus. Sitting with Lewis in his farmhouse, listening to the Ninth Symphony.

  “Name one thing better than the Ninth Symphony.”

  Kitty’s ass. “I’m not in the mood.” He looked at his watch. What did Kitty have in mind?

  “You and I know that golf is not enough.”

  “Right.”

  “You couldn’t do without them any more than I can, Will.”

  “Do without what?”

  “The finer things in life.”

  “Right.”

  “Man does not live by bread alone and we make plenty bread at golf.”

  “Right.” Why was it that the thought of the finer things in life, such as the Ninth Symphony, made his heart sink like a stone? For a fact, the Ninth Symphony was one of the finer things. On the other hand, Lewis’s proposal was so demented he had to laugh: he and this solemn poet-golf-pro music lover listening to the Ode to Joy of an afternoon in old Carolina.

  “You want to know what I’ve decided over the years, Will?”

  “What?”

  “I’ve decided the worst thing that can happen to a man is to lose his heritage.”

  What heritage? Tidewater unbeliever who had read Dante six times for the structure, could draw the circles of hell, the platforms of purgatory, and the rose of heaven? When you came down to it, Lewis took Erich Fromm more seriously than God, Dante, or Virginia. Was this not madness pure and simple, to come from Tidewater Virginia, read about Dante and God, read the terza rima aloud with such admiration that tears came to his eyes—and top it off with Erich Fromm?