Last Gentleman and The Second Coming

by Walker Percy

  “You spoke to Val just now?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She’s flying out.”

  “You called because I asked you?”

  “Jamie also asked me.”

  Sutter put both feet on the floor and gave him an odd look. “You say Jimmy asked you?”

  “He asked me to call Val about a book she promised him. That was earlier.”

  Sutter sank into thought. There was time for another look at Jamie. The bed had been freshly made, the seersucker counterpane drawn tightly across the youth’s bony chest. It seemed to the engineer that Jamie’s nose had grown sharper and that his skin clove closer to his cheekbones.

  “He’s developed a spruelike diarrhea and lost some fluid,” said Sutter from the radiator. Was this an explanation? Sutter turned to the priest. “I refused to allow intravenous fluid, Father,” he said in what struck the engineer as a challenging tone. “Even though it might prolong his life a few days. What do you think of that?”

  “No objection,” said the priest, scratching his fist absently. “Unless he is unconscious and you want him conscious for some reason.”

  Sutter’s eye gleamed and he lifted an eyebrow toward the engineer. How about this fellow? Sutter asked him. But the engineer frowned and turned away. He wanted no humbug with Sutter.

  “Of course, whether he is unconscious or not, I’ll be glad to baptize him conditionally,” said the priest, settling the glasses with the bracket of his hand.

  “Conditionally, Father,” said Sutter with a lively expression.

  The priest shrugged. “I have no way of knowing whether he’s been baptized before.”

  “Is that what the canon prescribes, Father?” Sutter’s eyes roamed the ceiling.

  “I think, Father—” began the engineer sternly. He would have no part of Sutter’s horsing around. At the same moment he glanced at Sutter’s coat pocket: it still held the pistol.

  “This young man asked me to come in here,” said the priest

  “That’s right,” said the engineer sternly.

  "Therefore I should like to ask you, sir,” said the priest straight to Sutter, “whether you concur in your sister’s desire that I administer the sacrament of baptism to the patient. If you do not, then I shall be going about my business.”

  “Yes,” said the engineer, nodding vigorously. He thought the priest expressed it very well in his umpire’s way, taking no guff from Sutter.

  “By all means stay, Father,” said Sutter somewhat elaborately.

  “Well?” The priest waited.

  “Why don’t you ask him yourself, Father.” Sutter nodded to the bed behind the other two.

  They turned. Jamie was getting out of bed! One hand had folded back the covers quite cogently, and the left knee had started across right leg, his eyes open and bulging slightly with seriousness of intent.

  Later Sutter told the engineer that, contrary to popular notions, dying men often carry out complex actions in the last moments of life. One patient he recalled who was dying of tuberculosis had climbed out of bed, washed his pajamas in the sink, hung them out to dry, returned to the bed, pulled the covers up to his chin to hide his nakedness, and died.

  “Hold it, son,” Sutter stopped Jamie fondly and almost jokingly, as if Jamie were a drunk, and motioned the engineer to the cabinet. “Jamie here wants to move his bowels and doesn’t like the bedpan. I don’t blame him.” The priest helped Sutter with Jamie. After a moment there arose to the engineer’s nostrils first an intimation, like a new presence in the room, a somebody, then a foulness beyond the compass of smell. This could only be the dread ultimate rot of the molecules themselves, an abject surrender. It was the body’s disgorgement of its most secret shame. Doesn’t this ruin everything, wondered the engineer (if only the women were here, they wouldn’t permit it, oh Jamie never should have left home). He stole a glance at the others. Sutter and the priest bent to their task as if it were nothing out of the ordinary. The priest supported Jamie’s head on the frail stem of its neck. When a nurse came to service the cabinet, the engineer avoided her eye. The stench scandalized him. Shouldn’t they all leave?

  Sutter conducted Jamie back to bed fondly and even risibly. Suddenly the engineer remembered that this was the way Negro servants handle the dying, as if it were the oldest joke of all.

  “Hold it now, son. Look out. There you go.” Leaning over the bed, Sutter took hold of Jamie’s chin, almost chucked it. “Listen, Jimmy. This is Father Boomer. He wants to ask you something.”

  But the youth goggled and closed his eyes, giving no sign of having heard. Sutter took his pulse and stepped back.

  “If you have any business with him, Father,” he said dryly, “I think you’d better conduct it now.”

  The priest nodded and leaned on the bed, supporting himself on his heavy freckled fists. He looked not at Jamie but sideways at the wall.

  “Son, can you hear me?”—addressing the wall. The engineer perceived that at last the priest had found familiar territory. He knew what he was doing.

  But Jamie made no reply.

  “Son, can you hear me?” the priest repeated without embarrassment, examining a brown stain on the wall and not troubling to give his voice a different inflection.

  Jamie nodded and appeared to say something. The engineer moved a step closer, cocking his good ear but keeping his arms folded as the sign of his discretion.

  “Son, I am a Catholic priest,” said Father Boomer, studying the yellow hairs on his fist. “Do you understand me?”

  “Yes,” said Jamie aloud. He nodded rapidly.

  “I have been asked by your sister to administer to you the sacrament of baptism. Do you wish to receive it?”

  The engineer frowned. Wasn’t the priest putting it a bit formally?

  “Val,” whispered Jamie, goggling at the engineer.

  “That’s right,” said the engineer, nodding. “I called her as you asked me to.”

  Jamie looked at the priest.

  “Son,” said the priest. “Do you accept the truths of religion?”

  Jamie moved his lips.

  “What?” asked the priest, bending lower.

  “Excuse me, Father,” said the sentient engineer. “He said ‘what.’”

  “Oh,” said the priest and turned both fists out and opened the palms. “Do you accept the truth that God exists and that He made you and loves you and that He made the world so that you might enjoy its beauty and that He himself is your final end and happiness, that He loved you so much that He sent His only Son to die for you and to found His Holy Catholic Church so that you may enter heaven and there see God face to face and be happy with Him forever.”

  Without raising his eyes, the engineer could see the curled-up toe of Sutter’s Thom McAn shoe turning to and fro on the radiator trademark.

  “Is that true?” said Jamie clearly, opening his eyes and goggling. To the engineer’s dismay, the youth turned to him.

  The engineer cleared his throat and opened his mouth to say something when, fortunately for him, Jamie’s bruised eyes went weaving around to the priest. He said something to the priest which the latter did not understand.

  The priest looked up to the engineer.

  “He wants to know, ah, why,” said the engineer.

  “Why what?”

  “Why should he believe that.”

  The priest leaned hard on his fists. “It is true because God Himself revealed it as the truth.”

  Again the youth’s lips moved and again the priest turned to the interpreter.

  “He asked how, meaning how does he know that?”

  The priest sighed. “If it were not true,” he said to Jamie, “then I would not be here. That is why I am here, to tell you.”

  Jamie, who had looked across to the engineer (Christ, don’t look at me!), pulled down the corners of his mouth in what the engineer perceived unerringly to be a sort of ironic acknowledgment.

  “Do
you understand me, son?” said the priest in the same voice.

  There was no answer. Outside in the night the engineer saw a Holsum bread truck pass under the street light

  “Do you accept these truths?”

  After a silence the priest, who was still propped on his fists and looking sideways like a storekeeper, said, “If you do not now believe these truths, it is for me to ask you whether you wish to believe them and whether you now ask for the faith to believe them.”

  Jamie’s eyes were fixed on the engineer, but the irony was shot through with the first glint of delirium. He nodded to the engineer.

  The engineer sighed and, feeling freer, looked up. Sutter hung fire, his chin on his knuckles, his eyes half-closed and gleaming like a Buddha’s.

  Jamie opened his mouth, it seemed, to say something bright and audible, but his tongue thickened and came out. He shuddered violently. Sutter came to the bedside. He held the youth’s wrist and, unbuttoning the pajamas, laid an ear to the bony chest. He straightened and made a sign to the priest, who took from his pocket a folded purple ribbon which he slung around his neck in a gesture that struck the engineer as oddly graceless and perfunctory.

  “What’s his name?” the priest asked no one in particular.

  “Jamison MacKenzie Vaught,” said Sutter.

  “Jamison MacKenzie Vaught,” said the priest, his fists spread wide. “What do you ask of the Church of God? Say Faith.”

  Jamie said something.

  “What does Faith bring you to? Say Life Everlasting.”

  Jamie’s lips moved.

  The priest took the bent sucking tube from Jamie’s water glass. “Go fill that over there.”

  “Yes sir,” said the engineer. But surely it was to be expected that the priest have a kit of some sort, at least a suitable vessel. He half filled the clouded plastic glass.

  As he returned with the water, Jamie’s bowels opened again with the spent schleppen sound of an old man’s sphincter. The engineer went to get the bedpan. Jamie tried to lift his head.

  “No no,” said Sutter impatiently, and coming quickly across simply bound the dying youth to the bed by folding the counterpane into a strap and pressing it against his chest. “Get on with it, Father,” he said angrily.

  The priest took the plastic glass. “I baptize you in the name of the Father—” He poured a trickle of water into the peninsula of fried dusty hair. “And of the Son—” He poured a little more. “And of the Holy Ghost.” He poured the rest.

  The three men watched as the water ran down the youth’s bruised forehead. It was dammed a moment by the thick Vaught eyebrows, flowed through and pooled around the little red carbuncle in the corner of his eye.

  The priest bent lower still, storekeeper over his counter, and took the narrow waxy hand between his big ruddy American League paws. “Son,” he said in the same flat mercantile voice, looking first at the brown stain on the wall and then down at the dying youth. “Today I promise you that you will be with our Blessed Lord and Savior and that you will see him face to face and see his mother, Our Lady, see them as you are seeing me. Do you hear me?”

  The four white vermiform fingers stirred against the big thumb, swollen with blood (did they, thumb and fingers, belong to the same species?).

  “Then I ask you to pray to them for me and for your brother here and for your friend who loves you.”

  The fingers stirred again.

  Presently the priest straightened and turned to the engineer as blank-eyed as if he had never laid eyes on him before.

  “Did you hear him? He said something. What did he say?”

  The engineer, who did not know how he knew, was not even sure he had heard Jamie or had tuned him in in some other fashion, cleared his throat.

  “He said, ‘Don’t let me go.’” When the priest looked puzzled, the engineer nodded to the bed and added: “He means his hand, the hand there.”

  “I won’t let you go,” the priest said. As he waited he curled his lip absently against his teeth in a workaday five-o’clock-in-the-afternoon expression.

  After several minutes Sutter let go the sheet which he still held as a strap across Jamie.

  “All right, Father,” said Sutter in an irritable voice when the priest didn’t move. “On the way out, would you send in the nurse and the resident?”

  “What?” said the priest, bracketing his glasses with his free hand. “Oh, yes. Certainly.” He started for the washstand, thought better of it, turned and left the room. Pausing in the doorway, he turned again. “If you need me for anything else, I’d be glad to—”

  “We won’t,” said Sutter curtly, managing to embarrass the engineer after all.

  The engineer followed the priest out into the corridor and thanked him. He wondered if one was expected to “make an offering,” but he had no notion of how to hand money over except to hand it over. He contented himself with wringing the priest’s hand warmly and thanking him twice.

  12.

  It took him two blocks at top walking speed to overtake Sutter, who strode along with his hands in his pockets, bent forward as if he were bucking a strong wind.

  “Where are you going?” the engineer asked in an unexpectedly loud voice.

  “What?” said Sutter, giving a start. “Oh, to the ranch.”

  “The ranch,” repeated the engineer absently. When Sutter started to leave, he held up his hand. “Wait.”

  “Wait for what?”

  “What happened back there?”

  “In the hospital room? You were there.”

  “I know, but what did you think? I could tell you were thinking something.”

  “Do you have to know what I think before you know what you think?”

  “That does not mean that I would necessarily agree with you,” said the engineer, trying to see Sutter’s expression. Suddenly the engineer felt his face flush. “No, you’re right. I don’t need to know what you think. Wait. Did you say ranch?”

  “Yes.” Still he could not make out Sutter’s face.

  “Do you mean your ranch?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I have a date.”

  “A date?” His heart began to thud. “No, wait. Please don’t go to the ranch!” Without realizing that he had done so, he had taken hold of Sutter’s sleeve.

  Sutter angrily shook himself free. “What in God’s name do you want now?”

  “Oh. I—what about the family?”

  “What about them?”

  “I mean, meeting them. Val should be here tonight and the rest tomorrow.”

  “Yes.”

  “They won’t know. Shall I meet them? Perhaps I could even call the Vaughts and catch them before they leave.”

  “Good. Fine.”

  “Then I’ll call the airport and see what the plane schedule is.”

  “Very good.”

  “What about the arrangements?”

  “Arrangements? You make them. You do very well.”

  Sutter reached the Edsel and got into the driver’s seat but made no sign that the engineer should follow.

  “All right. Wait—” cried the engineer when the old buckety Ford motor caught and roared (he wondered if Sutter had ever changed the oil or whether it had oil).

  “What?”

  He peered down into the dark car.

  “Dr. Vaught—ah—”

  “What?”

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “I’m going to have a drink.”

  “No. I mean, what are you going to do?”

  There was no answer. All the engineer could see was that Sutter had put his hands on the wheel at six o’clock and nine o’clock, left elbow on the window sill, a style of driving which the engineer faintly recalled from the 1940’s when Delta sports used to pick up their dates and drive to the Marion Parlor on Front Street.

  “Are you going home, I mean.”

  “I told you, Barrett, I’m going to the ranch.”

 
“Dr. Vaught, don’t leave me.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Dr. Vaught, listen to me. I’m going to do what I told you I planned to do.”

  “I know. You told me.”

  “Dr. Vaught, I want you to come back with me.”

  “Why? To make this contribution you speak of?”

  “Dr. Vaught, I need you. I, Will Barrett—” and he actually pointed to himself lest there be a mistake, “—need you and want you to come back. I need you more than Jamie needed you. Jamie had Val too.”

  Sutter laughed. “You kill me, Barrett.”

  “Yes sir.” He waited.

  “I’ll think about it. Here’s some money for the arrangements, as you call them.”

  “Oh, no, sir.” He backed away. “I have plenty.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No sir.”

  But as the Edsel took off, spavined and sprung, sunk at one corner and flatulent in its muffler, spuriously elegant and unsound, like a Negro’s car, a fake Ford, a final question did occur to him and he took off after it.

  “Wait,” he shouted in a dead run.

  The Edsel paused, sighed, and stopped.

  Strength flowed like oil into his muscles and he ran with great joyous ten-foot antelope bounds.

  The Edsel waited for him.

  The Second Coming

  Walker Percy

  Contents

  Part One

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  Part Two

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  Part One

  I

  THE FIRST SIGN that something had gone wrong manifested itself while he was playing golf.

  Or rather it was the first time he admitted to himself that something might be wrong.

  For some time he had been feeling depressed without knowing why. In fact, he didn’t even realize he was depressed. Rather was it the world and life around him which seemed to grow more senseless and farcical with each passing day.

  Then two odd incidents occurred on the golf course.