Last Gentleman and The Second Coming

by Walker Percy

  By the time the engineer’s nausea had cleared, Beans had caught sight of Mona in the booth. Without taking his eyes from her, he pulled Ellis close and began to whisper. The engineer had time to straighten himself and to brace his foot in the corner of the jamb and sill of the front door. For once in his life he had time and position and a good shot, and for once things became as clear as they used to be in the old honorable days. He hit Beans in the root of his neck as hard as he ever hit the sandbag in the West Side Y.M.C.A. Beans’s cap and glasses flew off and he sat down on the floor. “Now listen here, Ellis,” said the engineer immediately, turning to the tall, younger policeman. “Yall go ahead,” he told the others casually, waving them over Beans’s outstretched legs and out the front door. “Catch a Bluebird cab at the corner.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Ellis, but he did not stop them.

  “Don’t worry about it, Ellis. They haven’t done anything. They’re leaving town and that’s what you want.”

  “But, shit, man,” said Ellis, who could not take his eyes from the fallen policeman. “You done hit Beans.”

  “I know, but look at Breeze,” said the engineer by way of answer, and nodded to the Negro, who was laid out straight as a corpse. Standing next to Ellis, he took him by the elbow just as he used to touch him in a football huddle. Ellis was all-state halfback and the engineer, who was quarterback (not all-state), had called the plays in huddle. Ellis was a bit slow in catching the signals and the engineer used to squeeze him so, just above the elbow.

  “Yeah, but hailfire, Will.”

  “Listen, Ellis,” said the engineer, already moving. “You bring charges against me to clear yourself, do you understand? Tell Beans the others got in behind you. You got it?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Now give Beans a hand and tell him to come after me, O.K.?” He said this though Beans was still out cold, and giving Ellis a final huddle sort of squeeze and nod, the engineer walked quickly to the back door and out into Heck’s Alley.

  “Will,” cried Ellis again, feeling that all was not well. But the other had already crossed the alley to a certain board in a fence which had been eroded into the shape of Illinois and which he knew, now fifteen years later, to swing free on a single nail, was through it and into Miss Mamie Billups’ back yard. Miss Mamie was sitting on her side porch when he stooped to pass under her satsuma tree.

  “How do you do, Miss Mamie,” said the courteous engineer, bowing and putting his tie inside his coat

  “Who is that?” called out the old woman sharply. Everyone used to steal her satsumas.

  “This is Will Barrett, Miss Mamie.”

  “Will Barrett! You come on up here, Will!”

  “I can’t right now, Miss Mamie,” said the engineer, turning up Theard Street. “I’ll be right back!”

  4.

  His friends waited for him but not long enough. By the time he rounded the lower curve of Milliken Bend, having walked the inner shoulder of the levee out of sight of highway and town, the Trav-L-Aire had already lumbered out of the willows and started up the levee—at an angle! The cabin teetered dangerously. He forgot to tell Mona not to do this. He covered his face with his hands: Mona, thinking to spare the G.M.C. the climb straight up, was in a fair way to turn her plumb over. When he looked up, however, the levee was clear.

  It was two o’clock. He was hungry. At the levee end of Theard Street he bought a half dozen tamales from a street vendor (but not the same whose cry Rayed hot! used to echo up and down the summer night in the 1950’s). Now finding a patch of waist-high elephant grass past the towhead and out of sight of anyone standing on the levee behind him, he rolled to and fro and made a hollow which was tilted like a buttercup into the westering sun. It was warm enough to take off his coat and roll up his sleeves. He ate the tamales carefully, taking care not to stain his clothes. The meat was good but his tooth encountered a number-eight shot: rabbit or possibly squirrel. Afterwards he washed his hands in river water, which still thrashed through the lower level of the towhead, and dried them with his handkerchief. Returning to his hollow, he sat cross-legged for a while and watched a towboat push a good half acre of sulphur barges up the dead water on the Louisiana side. Then he curled up and, using his coat folded wrong-side-out for a pillow, went to sleep.

  Cold and stiffness woke him. It was a moonless overcast night, but he could make out Scorpio writhing dimly over Louisiana, convulsed around great bloody Antares. Buttoning all three buttons of his jacket, he ran along the inner shoulder of the levee, out of sight of town, until he got warm. When he came abreast of the stacks of the gypsum mill, he went quickly over and down into Blanton Street and took the Illinois Central tracks, which went curving away behind the high school. It was pitch dark under the stadium, but his muscles remembered the spacing of the ties. The open rear of the bleachers exhaled a faint odor of cellar earth and urine. At the Chinaman’s he took the tangent of Houston Street, which ran through a better Negro neighborhood of neat shogun cottages and flower gardens, into the heavy humming air and ham-rich smell of the cottonseed oil mill, and out at De Ridder.

  He stood in the inky darkness of the water oaks and looked at his house. It was the same except that the gallery had been closed by glass louvers and a flagpole stuck out of a second-story window. His aunts were sitting on the porch. They had moved out, television and all. He came closer and stood amid the azaleas. They were jolly and fit, were the aunts, and younger than ever. Three were watching “Strike It Rich,” two were playing canasta, and one was reading Race and Reason and eating Whitman’s Sampler. He remembered now that Sophie wrote love letters to Bill Cullen. What a tough hearty crew they were! hearty as muzhiks, and good haters, yet not ill-natured—they’d be honestly and unaffectedly glad to see him walk in, would kiss him and hold him off and make over him—rosy-skinned, easy in their consciences, arteries as supple as a girl’s, husbands dead and gone these forty years, pegged out so long ago that he could not remember anyone ever speaking of them; Christian ladies every one, four Protestant, Presbyterian, and Scotch-Irish, two Catholic and Creole, but long since reconciled, ecumenized, by bon appétit and laughter and good hearty hatred.

  It was here under the water oaks that his father used to stroll of a summer night, hands in his pockets and head down, sauntering along the sidewalk in his old Princeton style of sauntering, right side turning forward with right leg. Here under the water oaks or there under the street light, he would hold parley with passers-by, stranger and friend, white and black, thief and police. The boy would sit on the front steps, close enough to speak with his father and close enough too to service the Philco which played its stack of prewar 78’s but always had trouble doing it. The mechanism creaked and whirred and down came the record plop and round it went for a spell, hissing under the voyaging needle. From the open window came Brahms, nearly always Brahms. Up and down the sidewalk went his father, took his turn under the street light sometimes with a client, sometimes alone. The clients, black and white and by and large the sorriest of crews but of course listening now with every eager effort of attention and even of a special stratspheric understanding. Between records the boy could hear snatches of talk: “Yassuh, that’s the way it is now! I have notice the same thing myself!”—the father having said something about the cheapness of good intentions and the rarity of good character—“I’m sho gon’ do like you say”—the passer-by working him of course for the fifty cents or five dollars or what, but working him as gracefully as anyone ever worked, they as good at their trade as he at his. The boy listening: what was the dread in his heart as he heard the colloquy and the beautiful terrible Brahms which went abroad into the humming summer night and the heavy ham-rich air?

  The aunts let out a holler. Bill Cullen had given away a cabin cruiser to a lady from Michigan City, Indiana.

  It was on such an evening—he passed his hand over his eyes and stretching it forth touched the sibilant corky bark of the water oak—that his father had died. Th
e son watched from the step, old Brahms went abroad, the father took a stroll and spoke to a stranger of the good life and the loneliness of the galaxies. “Yes suh,” said the stranger. “I have heard tell it was so” (that the closest star was two light years away).

  When the man came back the boy asked him:

  “Father, why do you walk in the dark when you know they have sworn to kill you?”

  “I’m not afraid, son.”

  To the west the cars of the white people were nosing up the levee, headlights switched first to parking, then out altogether. From the east, beyond the cottonseed-oil mill, came the sound of Negro laughter.

  The man walked until midnight. Once a police car stopped. The policeman spoke to the man.

  “You’ve won,” said the youth when the man came back. “I heard the policeman. They’ve left town.”

  “We haven’t won, son. We’ve lost.”

  “But they’re gone, Father.”

  “Why shouldn’t they leave? They’ve won.”

  “How have they won, Father?”

  “They don’t have to stay. Because they found out that we are like them after all and so there was no reason for them to stay.”

  “How are we like them, Father?”

  “Once they were the fornicators and the bribers and the takers of bribes and we were not and that was why they hated us. Now we are like them, so why should they stay? They know they don’t have to kill me.”

  “How do they know that, Father?”

  “Because we’ve lost it all, son.”

  “Lost what?”

  “But there’s one thing they don’t know.”

  “What’s that, Father?”

  “They may have won, but I don’t have to choose that.”

  “Choose what?”

  “Choose them.”

  This time, as he turned to leave, the youth called out to him. “Wait.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t leave.”

  “I’m just going to the corner.”

  But there was a dread about this night, the night of victory. (Victory is the saddest thing of all, said the father.) The mellowness of Brahms had gone overripe, the victorious serenity of the Great Horn Theme was false, oh fake fake. Underneath, all was unwell.

  “Father.”

  “What?”

  “Why do you like to be alone?”

  “In the last analysis, you are alone.” He turned into the darkness of the oaks.

  “Don’t leave.” The terror of the beautiful victorious music pierced his very soul.

  “I’m not leaving, son,” said the man and, after taking a turn, came back to the steps. But instead of stopping to sit beside the youth, he went up past him, resting his hand on the other’s shoulder so heavily that the boy looked up to see his father’s face. But the father went on without saying anything: went into the house, on through the old closed-in dogtrot hall to the back porch, opened the country food press which had been converted to a gun cabinet, took down the double-barrel twelve-gauge Greener, loaded it, went up the back stairs into the attic, and, fitting the muzzle of the Greener into the notch of his breastbone, could still reach both triggers with his thumbs. That was how it had to happen, the sheriff told the youth, that was the only way it could have happened.

  The sound came crashing through the music, louder than twenty Philcos, a single sound, yet more prolonged and thunderous than a single shot. The youth turned off the Philco and went upstairs.

  “—and Anacin does not upset your stummick,” said Bill Cullen.

  Again his hand went forth, knowing where it was, though he could not see, and touched the tiny iron horsehead of the hitching post, traced the cold metal down to the place where the oak had grown round it in an elephant lip. His fingertips touched the warm finny whispering bark.

  Wait. While his fingers explored the juncture of iron and bark, his eyes narrowed as if he caught a glimmer of light on the cold iron skull. Wait. I think he was wrong and that he was looking in the wrong place. No, not he but the times. The times were wrong and one looked in the wrong place. It wasn’t even his fault because that was the way he was and the way the times were, and there was no other place a man could look. It was the worst of times, a time of fake beauty and fake victory. Wait. He had missed it! It was not in the Brahms that one looked and not in solitariness and not in the old sad poetry but—he wrung out his ear—but here, under your nose, here in the very curiousness and drollness and extraness of the iron and the bark that—he shook his head—that—

  The TV studio audience laughed with its quick, obedient, and above all grateful Los Angeles laughter—once we were lonesome back home, the old sad home of our fathers, and here we are together and happy at last.

  A Negro came whistling toward him under the street light, a young man his own age. Entering the darkness of the water oaks, the Negro did not at first see him (though it had been his, the Negro’s, business, until now, to see him first), then did see him two yards away and stopped for a long half second. They looked at each other. There was nothing to say. Their fathers would have had much to say: “In the end, Sam, it comes down to a question of character.” “Yes suh, Lawyer Barrett, you right about that. Like I was saying to my wife only this evening—” But the sons had nothing to say. The engineer looked at the other as the half second wore on. You may be in a fix and I know that but what you don’t know and won’t believe and must find out for yourself is that I’m in a fix too and you got to get where I am before you even know what I’m talking about and I know that and that’s why there is nothing to say now. Meanwhile I wish you well.

  It was only then, belatedly, and as if it were required of him, that the Negro shuddered and went his way.

  As he watched his aunts, a squad car came slowly down De Ridder and stopped not twelve feet beyond the iron horse. A policeman, not Ross or Gover, went up to the porch and spoke to Aunt Sophie. She shook her head four or five times, hand to her throat, and when the policeman left, turned off the television and in her excitement stumbled a little as she told the others. Aunt Bootie forgot the Whitman’s Sampler in her lap, stood up and scattered nougats and bird eggs in all directions. No one noticed.

  Without taking much care about it, he walked through the azaleas and around to the back screen door, which was locked and which he opened, without knowing that he remembered, by wedging the door back against its hinges so that the bolt could be forced free of its worn wooden mortise, and went straight up the two flights to the attic and straight into the windowless interior room built into the peak of the house. His upraised hand felt for and found the string. The old clear-glass 25-watt bulb shed a yellow mizzling light, a light of rays, actual striae. The room had not been touched, they were still here; the grandfather’s army blanket, Plattsburg issue, the puttees, a belt of webbing, the Kaiser Bill helmets, the five-pound binoculars with an artillery scale etched into one lens. He picked up the Greener, broke the breech and sighted at the yellow bulb. The bore was still speckled with powder grains. And the collapsible boat: an English contraption of silvery zeppelin fabric with varnished spruce spars to spring it into shape. It lay as it had lain ten years ago, half disassembled and hastily packed from a duck hunt he and his father had taken on the White River in the early fifties. Now, as if it were the very night of their return, he knelt absently and repacked the boat, remembering the feel and fit of the spar-ends and the brass sockets and even the goofy English directions: “—Don’t be discouraged if spar L does not fit immediately into socket J—patience is required.”

  After he repacked the boat, he lay on the coat and, propping himself against the wall, drew the hard scratchy army blanket up to his armpits. For two hours he sat so, wakeful and alert, while his eyes followed the yellow drizzle of light into every corner of the attic room.

  It was eight o’clock when he went downstairs, English boat slung over one shoulder, artillery binoculars over the other. The aunts had not gotten up. Hearing D’lo shuffling about the
kitchen, he took care not to startle her: he slipped out the back door and came in noisily again.

  “Law, if it ain’t Mr. Billy,” said D’lo, rolling her eyes conventionally and noticing the wall clock as she did so. She was no more surprised by the doings of white folks than he was.

  D’lo stirred steaming boilers of grits and batter, fist sunk deep into her side, knees driven together by her great weight and bare heels ridden off her old pink mules and onto the floor. It crossed his mind that D’lo had somehow known he was here. He asked her not to tell his aunts.

  “I ain’t gon’ tell them nothing!”

  “I’m surprised you’re still here.”

  “Where I’m going!”

  “They still fight?”

  “Fight! You don’t know, fight.”

  “The police are looking for me.”

  “Uh-oh,” said D’lo. This was serious. Yet he could not have sworn she did not know all about it.

  D’lo found him his father’s Rolls razor and, while he washed and shaved in the downstairs bathroom, fixed him a big breakfast of grits and sausage and batter cakes. When he left, he gave her twenty dollars.

  “I thank you,” said D’lo formally and twisted the bill into the stocking roll below her fat old knee, which curved out in six different arcs of rich cinnamon flesh.

  A step creaked. “Here she come,” said D’lo. Sophie was she, ole miss, the one who gave the orders.

  “I’ll be seeing you, D’lo,” he said, shouldering the boat.

  “All right now, Mist’ Billy,” she cried politely, socking down the grits spoon on the boiler and curling her lip in a rich and complex acknowledgment of his own queerness and her no more than mild sympathy and of the distance between them, maybe not even sympathy but just a good-humored letting him be. (All right now, you was a good little boy, but don’t mess with me too much, go on, get out of my kitchen.)

  Ten minutes later he was up and over the levee and down into the willows, where he assembled the boat and the two-bladed paddle. It was a sparkling day. The river was ruffled by glittering steel wavelets like a northern lake. Shoving off and sitting buttoned up kayak style in the aft hole, he went dropping away in the fast water, past the barrow pits and blue holes, and now beginning to paddle, went skimming over the wide river, which seemed to brim and curve up like a watchglass from the great creamy boils that shed tons of cold bottom water, down past old Fort Ste. Marie on the Louisiana side, its ramparts gone back to blackberries and honeysuckle. He knew every tunnel, embrasure, magazine room, and did not bother to look. Two Negroes in a skiff were running a trotline under the caving bank. They watched him a second longer than they might have. Now they were watching him again, under their arms as they handed the line along. He frowned, wondering how he looked in the face, then recollected himself: it was after all an uncommon sight, a man fully dressed in coat and necktie and buttoned up in a tiny waterbug of a boat and at nine o’clock of a Tuesday morning. They could not encompass him; he was beyond their reckoning. But hold on, something new! As he drifted past the fort, he rubbed his eyes. A pennant fluttered from the parapet, the Stars and Bars! And the entire fort was surrounded by a ten-foot-high hurricane fence. But of course! This very month marked the hundredth anniversary of the reduction of the fort by Admiral Foote’s gunboats. It was part of the preparation for the Centennial! No doubt they would, at the proper time, imprison the “Confederates” behind the fence.