The Thanatos Syndrome

by Walker Percy

Somehow also he knows that we’ve finished with each other. He reaches for the trapdoor, turns the rung. “Give my love to Ellen and the kids.”

  “Sure.”

  At the very moment of his touching the rung, there is a tapping on the door from below. The door lifts against his hand.

  “That’s Milton,” says Father Smith in his workaday ham-operator voice and lifts the door.

  A head of close-cropped iron-gray hair pops up through the opening and a man springs into the room.

  To my astonishment the priest pays no attention to the new arrival, even though the three of us are now as close as three men in a small elevator. He takes my arm again.

  “Yes, Father?”

  “Even if you were a combination of Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, and Charles Kuralt rolled into one—no, especially if you were those guys—”

  “As a matter of fact, I happen to know Charlie Kuralt, and there is not a sweeter guy, a more tenderhearted person—”

  “Right,” says the priest ironically, still paying not the slightest attention to the stranger, and then, with his sly expression, asks, “Do you know where tenderness always leads?”

  “No, where?” I ask, watching the stranger with curiosity.

  “To the gas chamber.”

  “I see.”

  “Tenderness is the first disguise of the murderer.”

  “Right.”

  The stranger has sprung up through the opening with no assistance, even though he’s carrying a plastic pail of water in one hand and an A&P shopping bag in the other. Evidently he’s used to doing this.

  “Well—” I say, stepping down. We needn’t shake hands.

  “Here’s the final word,” says the priest, taking hold of my arm.

  “Good,” I say.

  Now we three are standing facing in the same direction, the stranger evidently waiting for me to leave, not even having room to set down pail and shopping bag.

  “If you are a lover of Mankind in the abstract like Walt Whitman, who wished the best for Mankind, you will probably do no harm and might even write good poetry and give pleasure, right?

  “Right.”

  “If you are a theorist of Mankind like Rousseau or Skinner, who believes he understands man’s brain and in the solitariness of his study or laboratory writes books on the subject, you are also probably harmless and might even contribute to human knowledge, right?”

  “Right.”

  “But if you put the two together, a lover of Mankind and a theorist of Mankind, what you’ve got now is Robespierre or Stalin or Hitler and the Terror, and millions dead for the good of Mankind. Right?”

  “Right,” I say indifferently.

  Now the stranger places the pail in a corner and lines up items from the bag on the table next to the azimuth: two bars of soap, a pack of small Hefty bags, a double roll of Charmin toilet paper, three large boxes of Sunkist raisins, half a dozen cans of food, including, I notice, Vienna sausage and Bartlett pears.

  The priest introduces me. “Dr. Thomas More, this is Milton Guidry, my indispensable friend and assistant. He keeps me in business, brings me the essentials, removes wastes, serves Mass. Unlike me, he is able to live a normal life down there in the world. He used to run the hospice almost single-handedly, plus milk the cows. He still milks the cows. Now he works as a janitor at the A&P. Between his small salary there and my small salary from the forestry service and selling the milk, we make out very well, don’t we, Milton?”

  The newcomer nods cheerfully and stands almost at attention, as if waiting for an order. Milton Guidry is a very thin but wiry man of an uncertain age. He could be a young-looking middle-aged man or a gray-haired young man. His face is unlined. His neat flat-top crewcut, squared at the temples, frames his octagonal rimless glasses, which flash in the sun. The bare spot at the top of his head could be the result of a beginning of balding or a too-close haircut. He wears a striped, long-sleeved shirt and a bow tie—he could have bought both at the A&P—neatly pressed jeans, and pull-on canvas shoes. He is of a type once found in many rectories who are pleased to hang around and help the priest. In another time, I suppose, he would be called a sacristan. He listens intently while the priest gives him instructions. It does not seem to strike him as in the least unusual that Father Smith is perched atop a hundred-foot tower in the middle of nowhere and giving him complicated instructions about getting cruets, hosts, and wine. This, Milton’s attentive attitude seems to say, is what Father does.

  “Do you say Mass here?” I ask the priest. We stand at close quarters, our eyes squinted against the sun now blazing in the west.

  “Oh yes. Every morning at six. And Milton has not been late yet, have you, Milton?”

  Milton nods seriously, hands at his sides. “It is easy,” Milton explains to me, “because I have an alarm clock and I live in the shed below.” He points to the floor. “I set the alarm for five-thirty.”

  “I see.”

  “I used to set my alarm for five-forty-five, but I felt rushed. I like to give myself time.”

  “I see.” I really have to get out of here.

  “Milton has to work mornings next week,” says the priest, eyeing me. “Would you like to assist?”

  “No thanks.”

  The priest seems not to mind. In the best of humors now, he holds the trapdoor open for me and again sends his love to Ellen and the children.

  “Tom,” he says, holding the door in one hand and shaking my hand with the other, “take care of yourself.”

  “I will.”

  “Let me say this, Tom,” he says in a low voice, not letting go of my hand, pulling me close.

  “What?”

  “I think you’re on to something extremely important. I know more than you think.”

  I look at him. The white fiber around his pupils seems to be spinning.

  “I have great confidence in you, Tom. I shall pray for you.”

  “Thanks.” I am working my hand free.

  “Did I ever tell you that I had spent a year in Germany before the war in the household of an eminent psychiatrist whose son was a colonel in the Schutzstaffel?”

  “Yes, you did. Goodbye, Father.”

  “Last night I dreamed of lying in bed in Tübingen and listening to church bells. German church bells make a high-pitched, silvery sound.”

  “Goodbye, Father.”

  “Goodbye, Tom.” He lets go. Both he and Milton stand clear. They are smiling and nodding cheerfully. “There are dangers down there, Tom, you may not be aware of. Be careful.”

  “I will,” I say, stepping down, wanting only to be on my way.

  III

  1. OUT OLD I-12 and into the sun toward Baton Rouge and the river. A short hop, but the old interstate, broken and rough as it is, is nevertheless clogged with truckers of all kinds, great triple tandems and twenty-six-wheelers thundering along at eighty who like nothing better than terrorizing private cars like my ancient Caprice. There are many hitchhikers, mostly black and Hispanic. The rest stops are crowded by pitched tents, seedy Winnebagos, and Michigan jalopies heading west from the cold smokestacks and the dried-up oil wells.

  I fancy I catch sight of the Cox Cable van, but he is ahead of me, so how could he be following? But just in case. Just in case, I squeeze in between two tandems in the right lane, duck past the trucker and into an exit so fast that he gives me the bird and an angry air-horn blast.

  Take to the blue highways, skirting Baton Rouge and the deserted Exxon and Ethyl refineries, picking my way through a wasted countryside of tank farms, chemical dumps, befouled bayous. The flat delta land becomes ever greener with a pitch-dark green, as if the swamp grass had been nourished by oil slicks. The air smells like a crankcase.

  Upriver and into West Feliciana, the first low loess bluffs of St. Francisville, and into the pleasant deciduous hills where Audubon lived with rich English planters, painted the birds, and taught dancing for a living. Out of the hills and back toward the river and Grand Mer, the g
reat widening of the river into a gulf where the English landed with their slaves from the Indies, took up indigo farming, and lived the happy life of Feliciana, free of the seditious Americans to the north, the corrupt French to the south, and in the end free even to get rid of the indolent Spanish and form their own republic.

  Down to the old river and the great house, Pantherburn, once on Grand Mer itself, left high and dry by one of the twists and turns of the river now some miles to the west, leaving behind not a worn-out plantation but a fecund bottomland, Lucy’s two thousand acres of soybeans, straight clean rows now in full leaf gray-green as new money. A tractor pulling a silver tank trails a rooster tail of dust. The tractor stops. The driver dismounts and picks up one end of the tank.

  The alley of great oaks which used to run from house to landing now ends in the middle of a field. The first house inside the gate is not Pantherburn but a new mobile home propped on cinder blocks and fenced by white plastic pickets. A Ford Galaxy, older than my Caprice, is parked under a chinaberry tree.

  Pantherburn is a graceful box, a perfect cube flanked all around by wide galleries and Doric columns. Some colonial architect knew what he was doing. The plastered columns, as thick as oak trunks, are worn to the pink of the bricks and from a distance look as rosy as stick candy. The siding is unpainted, silvery lapped cypress. The house, lived in by Lipscombs for two hundred years, looks hard used but serviceable. It has not been restored like the showplaces on the River Road. An old-fashioned Sears chest freezer, big enough to hold a steer, hums away on the side gallery.

  Inside, the house is simple and not large. The great galleries and columns give it its loom and spread. There are four rooms downstairs and up, divided by a hall as wide as a dogtrot.

  Lucy and her uncle are waiting for me on the lower gallery, Lucy is in shirt-sleeves and jeans, hands in pockets, eyeing me, lip tucked. She reaches up and gives me a hug and, to my surprise, a frank kiss on the mouth. What a splendid, by no means small, woman. Again the smell of her cotton gives me a déjà vu. I know if I choose to know, but don’t of course, what will happen next. And yet I do.

  The uncle shakes hands, giving one pump country-fashion, not meeting my eye, and stands off a ways, snapping his fingers and socking fist into hand. He is silent but agreeable. His face is as narrow and brown as a piece of slab bark. He wears an old duck-hunting cap and a loose bloodstained camouflage army jacket, with special pockets for shells and game. The cap is folded like a little tent on his narrow head.

  We stroll around the front yard and to the back, which contains a tiny graveyard. The sun has reached the trees. It is cooler. Lucy walks like a housewife going abroad, arms folded, stooping with each step. The uncle keeps up, but in a flanking position, some twenty feet away. His old liver-and-white pointer, Maggie, follows at his heel, her nose covered with warts, nuzzling him when he stops, burrowing under his hand. He talks, I think, to us. He speaks of his bird boxes and points them out. “Ain’t been a bluebird in these parts for forty years. I got six pair this summer. I got me twenty pair of wood ducks down in the flats. You want to see them?”

  “Sure,” I say.

  “Not now, Uncle,” says Lucy, stooping over her folded arms as she walks.

  The uncle, flanking, keeps talking, paying no attention to Lucy nor she to him. “Most folks don’t know how the ducklings get out of the boxes twenty feet high. Some say they climb down the bark using a special toenail. Some say mamma duck helps them down. Not so. I saw them. You know what those little sapsuckers do? They climb out of the hole and fall, flat fall out and hit the ground pow, bounce like a rubber ball, and head for the water.”

  The graveyard is a tiny enclosure, fenced by rusty iron spikes and chest-high in weeds. “I can’t cut in there with a tractor, so it doesn’t get cut,” says Lucy.

  “I heard they used to cut it with scissors,” says the uncle. “Did you know once there were forty people here not counting field people?” By “they” and “people,” he means slaves.

  Lucy, paying no attention, shows me the grave of our common ancestor, an English army officer on the wrong side of the Revolution. It is a blackened granite block surmounted by an angel holding an urn.

  “Do you remember that in his will he left his daughter, who was thirteen, an eleven-year-old mulatto girl named Laura for her personal use.” Lucy jostles me. “I wish somebody would leave me one.”

  “You seem to be doing fine.”

  “He suffered spells of terrible melancholy and harbored the delusion that certain unnamed enemies were after him, all around him, coming down the river and up the river to put an end to the happy life in Feliciana.”

  “It was probably the Americans.”

  “We come from a melancholy family. Are you melancholy?” she asks. “No, you don’t look melancholy; me either.” I notice that her cheeks are flushed. “He married a beautiful American girl half his age, only to have his first, English wife show up. Both women lived here at Pantherburn for a while.” Lucy gives me a sideways look.

  “No wonder he jumped in the river. Which wife are we descended from?” I ask her.

  “I’m from the English, the legitimate side; you from the American.”

  “Then we’re not close kin.”

  “Hardly kin at all. I’m glad,” says Lucy.

  We are walking again, the uncle in his outrider position. “I got me a pair of woodies right there,” he says, shaking two loose fingers toward the woods. “You ought to see that little sucker fly into the hole.”

  “I’d like to.”

  “They’ve long since left the boxes, Uncle,” says Lucy wearily.

  “Do you know how he does that? Some people say he lights on the edge and goes in, but no. He flies in. I saw him. I’m talking about, he flies right in that hole. Do you know how he does it?”

  Lucy, stooping and walking, is paying no attention.

  “No, I don’t,” I say.

  “He’s only got about a foot of room inside, right?”

  “Right.”

  “You know what he does—I saw him.”

  “No.”

  “That sucker flies right in and brakes in the one foot of room inside, like this,” says the uncle, suddenly flaring out his elbows like braking wings. “I’ve seen him! You want to see him? Let’s

  go.”

  “All right.”

  “Not now, Uncle,” says Lucy.

  2. LUCY AND I SIT on the gallery watching the sun go down across the levee through the oaks of the alley, making winks and gleams and casting long shafts of foggy yellow light. She smokes too much, long Picayunes, often plucks a tobacco grain from the tip of her tongue, looks at it.

  Lucy fixes toddies of nearly straight bourbon in crystal goblets the size of a mason jar. My nose is running. Perhaps the toddies will help. I haven’t had a toddy for years. An eighteenth-century traveler once wrote of Feliciana and Pantherburn: “There is always at one’s elbow a smiling retainer ready with a toddy or a comfit.” What’s a comfit?

  Beyond the oaks, the truncated cone of the Grand Mer facility rises as insubstantial as a cloud in the sunset. A pennant of vapor is fastened to its summit like the cloud on Everest.

  We sit in rocking chairs.

  “Well now,” I say after a long drink of the strong, sweet bourbon. My nose stops running.

  “Yes indeed,” says Lucy.

  A duck is calling overhead.

  “Is that the uncle?”

  “Yes.”

  Footsteps go back and forth on the upper gallery. The quacking is followed by a chuckling sound.

  “Is he talking to somebody?”

  “No, he’s practicing his duck calls. He was runner-up in the Arkansas nationals last year. That’s the feeding call he’s doing now. He does it with his fingers. He’s been doing it six hours a day since January.

  “I see.” I take another long pull. The bourbon is so good it doesn’t need sugar. “I was wondering why you wanted me to come.”

  “I want
you to stay here while Ellen’s gone. It’s all right with Ellen. I asked her.”

  I look at her quickly. Is she trying to tell me something? She is. She rocks forward in her chair to look back at me, shading her eyes against the sun. “What if I were to tell you that it is absolutely all right for you to be here? Would you take that on faith without further explanation?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want me to explain further?”

  “No.”

  She looks at me along her cheek, eyes hooded.

  I take another drink. “I appreciate it, but I’m fine. Hudeen’s taking good care of me.”

  “Not as good as I could.”

  “I’m sure of that.”

  “No, I’m also selfish. Just now I think I can help you with your syndrome. I have an idea about it. And just now I also need you. You’re my only relative besides him”—her eyes go up—“and he’s driving me nuts. He needs you too. It’s all right for you to stay. Vergil thought you were my father.”

  “Vergil?”

  “You remember Vergil. He’s my only help on the farm, he and Carrie, his mother. You remember him. He remembers you. He drives the tractor, does everything. Unfortunately, I have to pay him a fortune. Nobody gave him to me. Will you stay?”

  “You mean tonight or—?”

  “Speak of the devil.”

  Vergil has come onto the gallery behind us.

  I had known him as a child, but do not recognize him. His father, laid up in a mobile home by the gate and living on the Medicaid Lucy got him, I remember as a hale, golden-skinned Ezio Pinza, fisherman and trapper, hearty and big-chested, too big—he had emphysema even then. They, the Bons, are known hereabouts as freejacks, meaning free persons of color, freed, the story goes, by Andrew Jackson for services rendered in the Battle of New Orleans. More likely, they’re simply descendants of the quadroons and octoroons of New Orleans. A proud and reticent people, often blue-eyed and whiter than white, many could “pass” if they chose but mainly choose not to, choose, rather, to stay put in small contained bayou communities.

  Vergil Bon, Jr., is another cup of tea. He’s got the off-white skin, black eyes, and straight black Indian hair of his mother, but he wears, somewhat oddly, a Tom Selleck mustache. His body is rounded, drawn in simple lines, as if he still had his baby fat, but he’s very strong. It was his large simple arm I saw lifting the silver tractor tank. When we shake hands, he smiles but doesn’t look at me. His hand is large and inert. He thinks he’s being polite by not squeezing. He speaks softly to Lucy, shows her a greasy machine part. Lucy says, “You can? Okay, fix it and I’ll get a new one tomorrow. Write down what it is.