Last Gentleman and The Second Coming

by Walker Percy

  Straight across the Delta he flew and down into the tongue of the Yazoo plain to Ithaca, so named by a Virginian who admired Pericles more than Abraham and who had had his fill of the Bethels and the Shilohs of the Scotch-Irish. Yonder in the haze rose the brownish back of the Chickasaw Bluffs, and just beyond, the old wormy concrete towers of the Vicksburg battlefield.

  When he stopped at Roscoe’s Servicenter, Roscoe spoke as if he had never been away.

  “What you say there, Will?—” holding nozzle to spout and all the while taking in the Trav-L-Aire, acknowledging it with a quirk of his mouth but not willing to make a fuss over it or even to speak of it directly.

  “All right. What you say, Roscoe?”

  “You been camping or going?”

  “Camping? Oh, I’m going.”

  “Do you know those niggers over there?”

  “Who? No.”

  “They seem to know you.”

  Beyond the pumps sat a bottle-green Chevrolet, a stout old Bel Aire two-door, round as a turtle and filled with Negroes and what appeared to be a couple of Syrians. Sure enough the driver, a stately bun-headed preacher-type Negro seemed to be making signs and grimaces at him. The courteous engineer, the last man on earth to inflict a snub, nodded and smiled in turn even though he didn’t know them from Adam. Or did he? Ah, the dread tug of the past not quite remembered! Then, even as he nodded, an aching vista opened in his head and he remembered—not them but Kitty! The green Chevrolet sent his mind spinning back but there stood Kitty like a lion in the path. God in heaven, he groaned, I’ve left Kitty. Dear Jesus, he said, and began to slap his pocket again. The check for $100,000—I’ve lost it. Yet even as he groaned he was giving a final cheery nod and now he gunned the Trav-L-Aire out into traffic. Oh, my lovely strapping wealthy Chi O ’Bama bride, he thought, and gave his leaping knee a few hard socks. I must call her immediately.

  But after half a dozen blocks he noticed that the green Chevrolet had drawn abreast of him on the left, the passengers on the front seat pressing back to clear a view for the driver, who was motioning frantically. “Barrett!” The Chevrolet began to yaw like a tender on the high seas. He still can’t drive, thought the engineer, even though he did not yet know that he knew the pseudo-Negro. At the same moment he caught sight of a commotion in front of the new courthouse. Pickets bearing signs were marching on one side of the street and a crowd watched from the other. Troopers directed traffic with electric batons. Somewhere to his rear, a siren growled. Having had enough of ruckuses and police sirens and especially of this particular carload of importuning Negroes, he swung the Trav-L-Aire without slowing into a lane between Club 85 and Krystal Hamburgers. The cabin swayed dangerously, dishpans clattering into the sink. The lane was a segment of the abandoned river road which turned at this very point into the lee of the levee. Not hesitating a second, the sturdy G.M.C. swarmed straight up and over the levee out onto the batture and dove into a towhead of willows.

  No one followed.

  He waited in the cab until the sun set in Louisiana. When it grew dark, he walked to the highway with his firkin, emerging by dead reckoning at a haunted Piggly Wiggly and a new-old Rexall, new ten years ago and persisting stupendously in his absence.

  My lovely Kitty coed, he groaned even as he stocked up on grits and buttermilk and bacon, I must call her now. The thought of her living under the same roof with Son Thigpen, a glum horny key-twiddler, set him off in a spasm of jealousy. Yet it fell out, strange to say, that when he did find himself in a phone booth, he discovered he had spent all but nine cents! Oh damnable stupidity and fiendish bad luck, but what are you going to do? I’ll call her in the morning after I’ve been to the bank, where I will stop payment on the check, he told himself, and returned to the camper in a better humor than one might suppose.

  After supper, as he lay in the balcony bunk listening to patriotic and religious programs, he heard a noise from the river, a mild sustained roar like a surf. He found a flashlight in the locker and went outside. Twenty feet away the willows were nodding and thrashing against the current. Flotsam and brown foam were caught in the leaves. He knelt and examined the thicker trunks. The water was high but falling. The sky was clear. He returned to his bunk and listened to Profit Research, a program which gave money tips for changing times, and read from Sutter’s notebook:

  Moderately obese young colored female, circa 13

  Skin: vaccination 1. thigh; stellate keloid scar under chin.

  Head: massive cmpd depressed fracture right parietal and right zygomatic arch. Brain: frank blood in subdural space, extensive laceration

  right cortex; brick shards. Thorax: comminuted cmpd fractures, right ribs 1 through 8; frank blood in pleural space; extensive lacerations

  RML, RLL, brick shards. Heart: neg. Abdomen: neg. Gen.: neg.

  Cops report subject discovered in basement toilet of Emmanuel Baptist Church following explosion. Church tower fell on her.

  But never mind the South.

  It is you who concerns me. You are wrong and you deceive yourself in a more serious way. Do you know what you have managed to do? You have cancelled yourself. I can understand what you did in the beginning. You opted for the Scandalous Thing, the Wrinkle in Time, the Jew-Christ-Church business, God’s alleged intervention in history. You acted on it, left all and went away to sojourn among strangers. I can understand this even though I could never accept the propositions (1) that my salvation comes from the Jews, (2) that my salvation depends upon hearing news rather than figuring it out, (3) that I must spend eternity with Southern Baptists. But I understand what you did and even rejoiced in the scandal of it, for I do not in the least mind scandalizing the transcending scientific assholes of Berkeley and Cambridge and the artistic assholes of Taos and La Jolla.

  But do you realize what you did then? You reversed your dialectic and cancelled yourself. Instead of having the courage of your scandal-giving, you began to speak of the glories of science, the beauty of art, and the dear lovely world around us! Worst of all, you even embraced, Jesus this is what tore it, the Southern businessman! The Southern businessman is the new Adam, you say, smart as a Yankee but a Christian withal and having the tragical sense, etc., etc., etc.—when the truth of it is, you were pleased because you talked the local Coca-Cola distributor into giving you a new gym.

  But what you don’t know is that you are cancelled. Suppose you did reconcile them all, the whites and the niggers, Yankees and the K.K.K., scientists and Christians, where does that leave you and your Scandalous Thing? Why, cancelled out! Because it doesn’t mean anything any more, God and religion and all the rest. It doesn’t even mean anything to your fellow Christians. And you know this: that is why you are where you are, because it means something to your little Tyree dummies (and ten years from now it won’t even mean anything to them: either they’ll be Muslims and hate your guts or they’ll be middle-class and buggered like everybody else).

  The reason I am more religious than you and in fact the most religious person I know: because, like you, I turned my back on the bastards and went into the desert, but unlike you I didn’t come sucking around them later.

  There is something you don’t know. They are going to win without you. They are going to remake the world and go into space and they couldn’t care less whether you and God approve and sprinkle holy water on them. They’ll even let you sprinkle holy water on them and they’ll even like you because they’ll know it makes no difference any more. All you will succeed in doing is cancelling yourself. At least have the courage of your revolt.

  Sutter’s notebook had the effect of loosening his synapses, like a bar turning slowly in his brain. Feeling not unpleasantly dislocated, he turned off the light and went to sleep to the sound of the lashing willows and a Spanish-language broadcast to Cuban refugees from WWL in New Orleans.

  3.

  The next morning he walked the levee into Ithaca, curving into town under a great white sky. New grass, killed by the recent frost, had whi
tened and curled like wool. Grasshoppers started up at his feet and went stitching away. Below where the town was cradled in the long curving arm of the levee, the humpy crowns of oaks, lobules upon lobules, were broken only by steeples and the courthouse cupola. There arose to him the fitful and compassed sound of human affairs, the civil morning sounds of tolerable enterprise, the slap of lumber, a back-door slam, the chunk of an engine, and the routine shouts of a work crew: ho; ho; ho now!

  Here he used to walk with his father and speak of the galaxies and of the expanding universe and take pleasure in the insignificance of man in the great lonely universe. His father would recite “Dover Beach,” setting his jaw askew and wagging’ his head like F.D.R.:

  for the world which seems

  To lie before us like a land of dreams,

  So various, so beautiful, so new,

  Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

  Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain—

  or else speak of the grandfather and the days of great deeds: “And so he looked down at him where he was sitting in his barber chair and he said to him: ‘I’m going to tell you one time you son of a bitch, and that’s all, so hear me well; if anything happens to Judge Hampton, I’m not asking any questions, I’m not calling the police, I’m coming to look for you, and when I find you I’m going to kill you.’ Nothing happened to Judge Hampton.”

  Beyond the old brown roiled water, the bindings and lacings of water upon water, the Louisiana shore stretched misty and perfunctory. When he came abreast of the quarterboat of the U.S. Engineers, his knee began to leap and he sat down in the tall grass under a river beacon and had a little fit. It was not a convulsion, but his eyes twittered around under his eyeballs. He dreamed that old men sat in a circle around him, looking at him from the corners of their eyes.

  “Who’s that?” he cried, jumping to his feet and brushing off his Macy’s Dacron. Someone had called to him. But there was no one and nothing but the white sky and the humpy lobuled oaks of the town.

  He went down into Front Street, past the Syrian and Jewish dry goods and the Chinese grocery, and turned quickly into Market and came to the iron lion in front of the bank. It was a hollow lion with a hole between his shoulders which always smelled of pee.

  Spicer CoCo and Ben Huger, two planters his own age, stood in line behind him at the teller’s window and began to kid him in the peculiar reflected style of the deep Delta.

  “Reckon he’s going to get all his money out and go on back off up there?” said Spicer CoCo.

  “I notice he got his box-back coat on. I think he be here for a while,” said Ben Huger.

  He had to grin and fool with them, fend them off, while he asked the teller about the check. “Doris,” he said to the pretty plump brunette, remembering her before he could forget, “can I stop payment on a certified check?”

  She gave him a form to fill in. “Hello, Will. It’s good to see you.”

  “Just fine.” He scratched his head. “No, ah— You see, it’s not my check and it’s not on this bank. It was a check endorsed to me. I—it was misplaced.” He hoped he didn’t have to tell the amount.

  “Then have the payer make a stop-payment order,” she said, gazing at him with an expression both lively and absent-minded. “How long ago did you lose it?”

  “I don’t remember—ah, two days.”

  “Same old Will.”

  “What?”

  “You haven’t changed a bit.”

  “I haven’t?” he said, pleased to hear it. “I thought I was worse.” I’ll call Poppy then, he said to himself and fell to wondering: how strange that they seem to know me and that I never supposed they could have, and perhaps that was my mistake.

  “You know why he taking his money out,” said Spicer.

  “No, why is that?” asked Ben.

  The two were standing behind him, snapping their fingers and popping their knees back and forth inside their trousers. They were talking in a certain broad style which was used in Ithaca jokingly; it was something like Negro talk but not the same.

  “He on his way to the game Saddy. You can tell he come on into town to get his money—look, he done took off his regular walking shoes which he hid under a bridge and done put on his town slippers”—pointing down to the engineer’s suede oxfords.

  “That had slipped my notice,” said Ben. “But look how he still th’ows his foot out like Cary Middlecoff, like he fixin’ to hit a long ball.”

  “He come over here to draw his money out and make a bet on the game and take our money because he thinks we don’t know they number one.”

  “What are you talking about,” cried the engineer, laughing and shaking his head, all but overcome by an irritable sort of happiness—and all the while trying to tell Doris Mascagni about his savings account. “Yall are number one on the U.P.,” he told them, turning around nervously.

  “What you say there, Will.” They shook hands with him, still-casting an eye about in the oblique Ithaca style.

  What good fellows they were, he thought, as Doris counted out his money. Why did I ever go away? Ben Huger detained him and told a story about a man who bought a golf-playing gorilla. The gorilla had been taught to play golf by the smartest trainer in the world. This man who bought the gorilla was also a hard-luck gambler but for once he seemed to have hit on a sure thing. Because when he took the gorilla out to a driving range and handed him a driver and a basket of balls, each ball flew straight down the middle for five hundred yards. So he entered the gorilla in the Masters at Augusta. On the first tee, a par five hole, the gorilla followed Nicklaus and Palmer. He addressed his ball with assurance and drove the green four hundred and ninety yards away. Great day in the morning, thought the gambler, who was acting as the gorilla’s caddy, I got it made this time for sure. Already he had plans for the P.G.A. and the British Open after collecting his fifty thousand in first prize money. But when the threesome reached the green and the gambler handed the gorilla his putter to sink the one-footer, the gorilla took the same full, perfected swing and drove the ball another four hundred and ninety yards. Then—

  Here’s what I’ll do, thought the engineer who was sweating profusely and was fairly beside himself with irritable delight. I’ll come back here and farm Hampton, my grandfather’s old place, long since reclaimed by the cockleburs, and live this same sweet life with these splendid fellows.

  “You gon’ be home for a while, Will?” they asked him.

  “For a while,” he said vaguely and left them, glad to escape this dread delight.

  Hardly aware that he did so, he took Kemper Street, a narrow decrepit boulevard which ran as string to the bow of the river. It still had its dusty old crape myrtles and chinaberries and horse troughs and an occasional tile marker set in the sidewalk: Travelers Bicycle Club 1903. The street changed to a Negro district. The old frame houses gave way to concrete nightclubs and shotgun cottages, some of which were converted to tiny churches by tacking on two square towers and covering the whole with brick paper. He sat on a trough which was choked with dry leaves and still exhaled the faint sunny tart smell of summer, and studied the Esso map, peering closely at the Gulf Coast, New Orleans, Houston, and points west. It came over him suddenly that he didn’t live anywhere and had no address. As he began to go through his pockets he spied a new outdoor phone in a yellow plastic shell—and remembered Kitty. Lining up quarters and dimes on the steel shelf, he gazed down Kemper to the old city jail at the corner of Vincennes. Here on the top step stood his great-uncle the sheriff, or high sheriff, as the Negroes called him, on a summer night in 1928.

  The telephone was ringing in the purple castle beside the golf links and under the rosy temple of Juno.

  The sheriff put his hands in his back pockets so that the skirt of his coat cleared his pistol butt. “I respectfully ask yall to go on back to your homes and your families. There will be no violence here tonight because I’m going to kill the first sapsucker who puts his foot on that bott
om step. Yall go on now. Go ahead on.”

  “Hello.” It was David.

  “Hello. David.”

  “Yes suh.” He would be standing in the narrow hall between the pantry and the big front hall, the receiver held as loosely in his hand as if it had fallen into the crotch of a small tree.

  “This is, ah, Will Barrett.” It sounded strange because they didn’t, the Negroes, know him by a name.

  “Who? Yes suh! Mist’ Billy!” David, feeling summoned, cast about for the right response—was it surprise? joy?—and hit instead on a keening bogus cheeriness, then, seeing it as such, lapsed into hilarity: “Ts-ts-ts.”

  “Is Miss Kitty there?”

  “No suh. She been gone.”

  “Where?” His heart sank. She and Rita had gone to Spain.

  “School.”

  “Oh yes.” Today was Monday. He reflected.

  “Yes suh,” mused David, politely giving shape and form to the silence. “I notice the little bitty Spite was gone when I got here. And I got here on time.”

  “Is anyone else there?”

  “Nobody but Miss Rita.”

  “Never mind. Give Miss Kitty a message.”