Last Gentleman and The Second Coming

by Walker Percy

  But wait. Was he a stranger? Strange as he was, smeared with clay and bent double, there was something about the set of his shoulders, a vulnerability in their strength, that struck in her a sweet smiling pang. She recognized him. No, in a way she knew who he was before she saw him. The dog recognized him. It was the dog, a true creature of the world, who knew when to be affrighted and enraged, e.g., when a man falls on him, who therefore had attacked as before and as before had as quickly stopped and spat out the hand, the furious growl winding down to a little whine of apology. Again the dog was embarrassed.

  Perhaps she ought to be an engineer or a nurse of comatose patients. For, from the moment of her gazing down at him, it was only a matter of figuring out how to do what needed to be done, of calculating weights and angles and points of leverage. Since he had crashed through one potting table, the problem was to get him up on the other one. But first make sure he wasn’t dead or badly hurt. It seemed he was neither, though he was covered with bumps and scrapes and blood and clay. He smelled of a freshly dug ditch. A grave. Again her mind cast about. Had he been digging a well for her in secret, knowing her dislike of help? But how does one fall from a well? Perhaps he had found a water supply on the ridge above.

  She tried to pick him up. Though she was strong and had grown stronger with her heavy work in the greenhouse and though he was thin, he was heavy. He was slippery. His long slack muscles were like straps on iron. When she lifted part of his body, the rest clove to the earth as if it had taken root. Now sitting propped against the wall, the dog’s anvil head on her thigh, she considered. The block-and-tackle she figured gave her the strength of three men. Better than three men. Three men would have demoralized her. Her double and triple pulleys conferred mastery of energy gains and mechanical advantages. With pulleys and ropes and time to plan, one could move anything. Now that she thought of it, why couldn’t anyone do anything he or she wished, given the tools and the time? It was hard to understand why scientists had not long ago solved the problems of the world. Were they, the scientists, serious? How could one not solve any problem, once you put your mind to it, had forty years, and people didn’t bother you? Problems were for solving. Perhaps they the scientists were not serious. For if people solved the problems of cancer and war, what would they do then? Who could she ask about this? She made a note to look it up in the library.

  She got him up by first rolling him onto a door from the ruin, then, using a single double-gain pulley, hoisted one end of the door enough to slide the creeper under it, then rolled him to her bunk, devised a rope sling for the door, a two-strand hammock, hoisted door by two double-blocks hooked to the metal frame of the gambrel angle in the roof where the vents opened. The trick was to pull the ropes to both systems, then when the pulleys had come together take both ropes in one hand and stack bricks under the door with the other and start over. When the door was a little higher than the cleared bunk, she eased him over door and all, hoisted one end of the door, the head end, high enough to put three bricks under it so water would run off when she gave him a bath.

  The only real trouble was getting his clothes off. Pulleys were no use. Man is pitiful without a tool. It took all her sweating gasping strength to tug the slippery khaki over his hips and to roll him over far enough to yank one elbow clear of a sleeve. Why not cut his clothes off? Then dress him in what? She considered his underwear shorts. She wouldn’t have minded him naked but perhaps, later, he would. She covered him with her sleeping bag while she drew two pots of water, one for him, one for his clothes, the clothes first so they would have time to dry in the sun. No, the sun would take too long. Instead, she hung the shirt and pants on the nickel towel rack of the great stove. Quel pleasure, putting her stove to such good use!

  It took all afternoon. She didn’t mind bathing a man. How nice people are, unconscious! They do not glance. Yes, she should be a nurse of comatose patients. Again it was a matter of calculating weights and angles and hefts. The peculiar recalcitrant slack weight of the human body required its own physics. Heaving him over to get at his back, a battleground of cuts and scrapes and caked blood and bruises, she wondered: what had he done, fallen off a mountain? His face! With its week’s growth of beard, a heavy streaked yellow-and-white stubble, and the lump above his jawbone, he looked like a covite with a wad of chewing tobacco. But only when she finished did she stop to gaze down at him. No, not a redneck. Except for the golfer’s tan of his face and arms, his skin was white, with a faint bluish cast. The abdomen dropping away hollow under his ribs, the thin arms and legs with their heavy slack straps of muscle, cold as clay, reminded her of some paintings of the body of Christ taken down from the crucifix, the white flesh gone blue with death. The closed eyes sunk in their sockets and bluish shadow. The cheekbones thrust out like knees. He had lost weight. While his beard grew he had not eaten.

  Exhausted, she cooked a supper of oatmeal and made a salad of brook lettuce and small tart apples from the ruined orchard and hickory nuts. Her back felt looks. She turned around. The dog and the man were watching her, the dog with his anvil head between his paws, the man with his cheek resting on his elbow. The looks did not dart or pierce or impale. They did not control her. They were shyer than she and gave way before her, like the light touch of a child’s hand in the dark. The man looked one way, the dog the other, as if she were not there. Was she there?

  The man could not sit up to eat. She fed him. He ate heartily but his eyes, like the dog’s, only met hers briefly and went away as he chewed. She put hot oatmeal in the dog’s dry meal from the fifty-pound sack, which she had packed from town by tying it like a blanket roll in the lower flap of the Italian NATO knapsack. Her strength surprised her. She could hoist anything.

  2

  It wasn’t bad taking care of him. To tell the truth, before he landed in the greenhouse, she had begun to slip a little. It surprised her. She liked her new life. Physically she was healthy and strong. The hard work of cleaning the greenhouse and moving the stove made her hungry and tired. She ate heartily and slept like a log. She gained weight. When she caught sight of herself in the shop windows of Linwood, she did not at first recognize the tan towheaded long-haired youth loping along.

  But looks became more impaling. Some people, most Southern people, guard their looks as if they knew what she knew about looks: that they are not like other things. The world is full of two kinds of things, looks and everything else. Some people do not guard their looks. A woman met her eye in an aisle of the supermarket and looked too long. The look made a tunnel. The shelves of cans seemed to curve around the look like the walls of a tunnel. She knew she was not crazy because a can fell off.

  Some people use their looks to impale. Once, as she walked down the street, her thighs felt a look. She turned around. A dark stout man perhaps from Florida (most visitors were from Florida), perhaps a Cuban, perhaps South American, was not only looking at her buttocks but had bunched his fingers under his chin and was shaking them and making a sucking noise, not a whistle, through his pursed lips.

  Time became separated into good times and bad times. The nights and mornings were good times.

  Then along comes late afternoon—four o’clock? five o’clock? she didn’t know because she had no clock and lived by forest time—but a time which she thought of as yellow spent time because if time is to be filled or spent by working, sleeping, eating, what do you do when you finish and there is time left over? The forest becomes still. The singing and clomping of the hikers, the cries of the golfers, the sweet little sock of the Spalding Pro Flites and Dunlop Maxflys, the sociable hum of the electric carts die away and before the cicadas tune up there is nothing but the fluting of the wood thrush as the yellow sunlight goes level between the spokes of the pines. By now the golfers, sweaty and hearty, are in the locker room tinkling ice in glasses of Tanqueray, and Diz Dean briquets are lighting up all over Linwood. Forest time turned back into clock time with time going out ahead of her in a straight line as a measure of her doin
g something, but she was not doing anything and therefore clock time became a waiting and a length which she thought of as a longens. Only in late afternoon did she miss people.

  She said to the dog: This time of day is a longens.

  The dog turned his anvil head first one way then the other. What?

  In this longitude longens ensues in a longing if not an unbelonging.

  What? said the dog.

  One way to escape the longens of clock time marching out into the future ahead of her was to curl away from it, going round and down into her dog-star Sirius serious self so there she was curled up under, not on, the potting table. The dog did not like her there. He whined a little and gave her a poke with his muzzle. Okay okay. She got up. No, it wasn’t so bad and not bad at all when it got dark and clock time was rounded off by night. She lit a candle and the soft yellow light made a room in the dark and time went singing along with cicada music and not even the screech owl was sad except that just at dusk there rose in her throat not quite panic but something rising nevertheless. She swallowed it, all but the aftertaste of wondering: tomorrow will it be worse, even a curse?

  But in the dark: turn a flowerpot upside down and put the candle on it to read by, the dog now waiting for her signal, which is opening the book, hops up he not she spiraling round and down but always ending with his big anvil head aimed at her, eyes open, tiny flame upside down in each pupil, watching her until she starts reading her book: then down comes his head on her knee heavy as iron. She read from The Trail of the Lonesome Pine:

  Hand in hand, Hale and June followed the footsteps of spring from the time June met him at the school-house gate for their first walk in the woods. Hale pointed to some boys playing marbles.

  “That’s the first sign,” he said, and with quick understanding June smiled.

  Sign of what? Spring?

  3

  One morning she woke and could not quite remember what she was doing in the greenhouse. But she remembered she had written a note to herself in her notebook for just such an occasion. The note read:

  The reason you are living here is to take possession of your property and to make a life for yourself. How to live from one moment to the next: Clean the place up. Decide on a profession. Work at it. What about people? Men? Do you want (1) to live with another person? (2) a man? (3) a woman? (4) no one? (5) Do you want to make love with another person? (6) “Fall in love”? (7) What is “falling in love”? (8) Is it part of making love or different? (9) Do you wish to marry? (10) None of these? (11) Are people necessary? Without people there are no tunneling looks. Brooks don’t look and dogs look away. But late afternoon needs another person.

  What do I do if people are the problem? Can I live happily in a world without people? What if four o’clock comes and I need a person? What do you do if you can’t stand people yet need a person?

  For some reason when she read this note to herself, she thought of an expression she had not heard since grade school: “Doing it.” Was “doing it” the secret of life? Is this a secret everyone knows but no one talks about?

  She “did it” at Nassau with Sarge, the Balfour jewelry salesman, thinking that it might be the secret of life. But even though she and Sarge did everything in the picture book Sarge had, it did not seem to be the secret of life. Had she missed something?

  On the days she walked to town she found herself sitting on the bench near The Happy Hiker. One day the marathon runner saw her and sat down on the bench beside her. Again he shook hands with his fibrous monkey hand. Again he asked her to crash with him in the shelter on Sourwood Mountain. Again she said no. Again he loped away, white stripes scissoring.

  Another afternoon a hiker asked for a drink of water at the greenhouse. Unshouldering his scarlet backpack, he sat beside her on the floor of the little porch. Though he was young and fair as a mountain youth, his face was dusky and drawn with weariness. When he moved, his heavy clothes were as silent as his skin. He smelled, she imagined, like a soldier, of sweat and leather gear. They were sitting, knees propped up. His arm lay across his knee, the hand suspended above her knees. She looked at the hand. Tendons crossed the boxy wrist, making ridges and swales. A rope of vein ran along the placket of muscle in the web of the thumb. Copper-colored hair turning gold at the tip sprouted from the clear brown skin. The weight of the big slack hand flexed the wrist, causing the tendon to raise the forefinger like Adam’s hand touching God’s.

  As she watched, the hand fell off his knee and fell between her knees. She looked at him quickly to see if he had dozed off but he had not. The hand was rubbing her thigh. She frowned: I don’t like this but perhaps I should. Embarrassed for him, she cleared her throat and rose quickly, but the hand tightened on her thigh and pulled her down. Mainly she was embarrassed for him. Oh, this is too bad. Is something wrong with me? The dog growled, his eyes turning red as a bull’s. The man thanked her and left. He too seemed embarrassed.

  Was there something she did not know and needed to be told? Perhaps it was a matter of “falling in love.” She knew a great deal about pulleys and hoists but nothing about love. She went to the library to look up love as she had looked up the mechanical advantages of pulleys. Surely great writers and great lovers of the past had written things worth reading. Here were some of the things great writers had written:

  Love begets love

  Love conquers all things

  Love ends with hope

  Love is a flame to burn out human ills

  Love is all truth

  Love is truth and truth is beauty

  Love is blind

  Love is the best

  Love is heaven and heaven is love

  Love is love’s reward

  “Oh my God,” she said aloud in the library and smacked her head. “What does all that mean? These people are crazier than I am!”

  Nowhere could she find a clear explanation of the connection between “being in love” and “doing it.” Was this something everybody knew and so went without saying? or was it a well-kept secret? or was it something no one knew? Was she the only Southern girl who didn’t know? She began to suspect a conspiracy. They, teachers, books, parents, poets, philosophers, psychologists, either did not know what they were talking about, which seemed unlikely, or they were keeping a secret from her.

  Was something wrong with her? What did she want? Was she supposed to want to “do it”? If she was supposed to, who was doing the supposing? Was it a matter of “falling in love”? With whom? a man? a woman? She tried to imagine a woman hiker’s hand falling between her knees.

  Naargh, she said.

  The dog cocked an eyebrow. What?

  Is one supposed to do such-and-so with another person in order to be happy? Must one have a plan for the pursuit of happiness? If so, is there a place where one looks up what one is supposed to do or is there perhaps an agency which one consults?

  Who says?

  Who is doing the supposing?

  Why not live alone if it is people who bother me? Why not live in a world of books and brooks but no looks? Going home one evening, she passed Hattie’s Red Barn. Young folk were dancing and drinking and joking. Couples came and went to vans. Someone beckoned to her from the doorway. She did not belong with them. Why not? They were her age. They were making merry, weren’t they? and she would like to make merry, wouldn’t she? They were good sorts, weren’t they? Yes, but not good enough.

  You have to have a home to make merry even if you are away from home. She had a home but it was not yet registered. A registrar was needed to come and register her home in the presence of a third party, a witness. Upon the departure of the registrar the third party would look at her and say: Well, this is your home and here we are. She would make sassafras tea. Then they could make merry.

  Perhaps she had not sunk deep enough into her Sirius self. If one sinks deep enough there is surely company waiting. Otherwise, if one does not have a home and has not sunk into self, and seeks company, the company is lonesome.
Silence takes root, sprouts. Looks dart.

  On the other hand, look what happens to home if one is too long at home. Rather than go home to Williamsport, she’d rather live in a stump hole even though her parents’ home was not only registered with the National Registry but restored and written up in Southern Living. Rather than marry and have a life like her mother, she’d rather join the navy and see the world. Why is a home the best place and also the worst? How can the best place become the worst place? What is a home? A home is a place, any place, any building, where one sinks into one’s self and finds company waiting. Company? Who’s company? oneself? somebody else? That’s the problem. The problem is not the house. People are the problem. But it was their problem. She could wait.

  4

  The man watched her from the bunk but she didn’t mind. His look was not controlling or impaling but son and gray and going away. Her back felt his and the dog’s eyes following her, but when she faced them, their eyes rolled up into their eyebrows. The mornings grew cold. It was a pleasure to rise shivering from her own potting-table bunk and kneel at the Grand Crown stove and start a fat-pine fire for its quick blazing warmth and busy crackle-and-pop which peopled the room. Outside, the great dark rhododendrons dripped and humped in close, still hiding croquet balls knocked “galley west” in 1890 tournaments. This dreary cold clime is not getting me down!

  The first morning the man said: “You gave me a bath.”

  “Yes. And washed your clothes.” She dropped the clothes on him. “You can put them on.” She was stiff. She had slept with the dog on croker sacks. From the army surplus store she bought two scratchy Italian NATO blankets and made a bed of pine needles on a slatted flat, which she propped on four upended big pots.

  They talked about the once cool-feeling now warm-feeling cave air blowing above them. He told her how Judge Kemp had saved the cost of kerosene for the greenhouse but think what you could save. Your overhead is zero. (It made her feel good that her overhead was not over head and pressing down on her but was nought, had gone away.) You could grow produce all winter and sell at one hundred percent profit. Grow what and sell where, she asked. I don’t know, he said, but we can find out—is that what you want to do, make a living here? I don’t know, she said.