The Last Gentleman: A Novel

by Walker Percy

  “It’s strange, but I remember every detail. I could go straight to the tiger’s lair.”

  “Let me show you something.”

  A thousand feet below the sunny golf links the tiger had crawled into the cave thirty-two thousand years ago, lain down in darkness, and died so long ago that slender stalagmites and stalactites had grown together over the opening and zoo-caged him, him a bone, a skull and curve of tooth fused with the floor as if he were shaped from rock. For a while Lewis Peckham had charged admission, shown the Confederate powder works and the tiger until the state claimed him, broke into the stone cage, and hauled him off to Raleigh.

  As he watched, Lewis seemed to vanish into the rock—and reappear as magically.

  “How did you do that?”

  “Look. It’s a slot behind this rock. One step sideways and you’re in the cave.”

  “It looks like a trick.”

  Lewis said it was, that the Confederates had used it as an escape exit.

  Now he stood alone in the glade after slicing out-of-bounds on eighteen. He was holding the three-iron, not like a golf club or a shotgun now, but like a walking stick. Its blade resting on a patch of wet moss sank slightly of its own weight and the weight of his hand. Tiny bubbles of air or marsh gas came up through the moss next to the metal of the iron.

  Once he was in the pine forest the air changed. Silence pressed in like soft hands clapped over his ears. Not merely faint but gone, blotted out, were the shouts of the golfers, the clink of irons, the sociable hum of the electric carts. He listened. There was nothing but the sound of the silence, the seashell roar which could be the eeing and ohing of his own blood or the sound of cicadas at the end of summer which seems to come both from the pines and from inside one’s head.

  Then he heard a chain saw so faraway that he could not make out its direction yet close enough to register the drop in pitch as the saw bit into wood and the motor labored.

  The golf carts were going away. They had crossed a rise in the fairway. Through the trees he could see their white canopies move, one behind the other, as silently as sails.

  He turned his head. Beyond the glade the pine forest was as dark as twilight except for a single poplar which caught the sun. Its leaves had turned a pale gold. Though the air was still in the forest, one leaf shook violently. Beyond the aspen he made out a deadfall of chestnuts. A flash of light came from the chestnut fall. By moving his head he could make the light come and go. It was the reflection of sunlight from glass.

  Above him the branches of the pines came off the trunks at intervals and as regularly as the spokes of a wheel.

  Lifting the three-iron slowly and watching it all the while, once again he held it like a shotgun at rest, club head high between his chest and arm, shaft resting across his forearm. Now, carefully, as if he were reenacting an event not quite remembered, as if he had forgotten something which his muscles and arms and hands might remember, he swung the shaft of the iron slowly to and fro like the barrel of a shotgun. He stopped and again stood as still as a hunter. Now turning his head and stooping, he looked back at the fence.

  But he had not forgotten anything. Today for some reason he remembered everything. Everything he saw became a sign of something else. This fence was a sign of another fence he had climbed through. The hawk was a sign of another hawk and of a time when he believed there were fabulous birds. The tiger? Whatever he was, he was gone. Even the wheeling blackbirds signified not themselves but a certain mocking sameness. They flew up, flustered and wheeling and blown about by the same fitful wind just as they had thirty, forty years ago. There is no mystery. The only mystery is that nothing changes. Nothing really happens. Marriages, births, deaths, terrible wars had occurred but had changed nothing. War is not a change but a poor attempt to make a change. War and peace are not events.

  Only one event had ever happened to him in his life. Everything else that had happened afterwards was a non-event.

  The guitar sound of the fence wire stretched above him and the singing and popping of the vines against his body were signs of another event. Stooping now, he was trying to make his body remember what had happened. Suddenly it crossed his mind that nothing else had ever happened to him.

  The boy had gone through the fence first, holding the new Sterlingworth Fox double-barreled twenty-gauge ahead of him, while the man pulled up the top strand of barbed wire. He had gone through the fence, but before he could stand up, the man had grabbed his shoulder from the other side of the fence in a grip that surprised him not so much for the pain as for the suddenness and violence and with the other hand grabbed the gun up and away from him, swung him around and cursed him. Goddamn you, haven’t I told you how to go through a fence with a loaded shotgun? Don’t you know what would happen if—suddenly the man stopped.

  Now on the golf links years later he recognized the smell. It was the funky tannin rot of the pin-oak swamp as sharp in his nostrils as wood smoke.

  The boy, who had already gotten oven the pain but not the surprise, stood looking at the man across the fence holding the two shotguns, still too surprised to feel naked and disarmed without his gun. Nothing would ever surprise him again. Once the surprise was gone and his heart slowed, he began to feel the first hint of the coolness and curiosity and watchfulness of the rest of his life. Is it possible that his eyes narrowed slightly (he wasn’t sure of this) as he put his empty hands in his pockets (he was sure of this) and said:

  If what?

  They had gone into the woods after singles. The dog had run over the covey instead of pointing it, and the covey had flushed too soon and too far away for a shot, the fat birds getting up with their sudden heart-stop thunder, then angling off tilt-winged and planing into the trees. The man, white-faced with anger, cursed the guide, shot the dog instead of the birds, to teach the dog never to do that again, he said, not to hurt the dog bad what with the distance and the number-eight bird shot. The dog and the guide disappeared.

  When the man handed the shotgun back to him, his eyes glittered but not in the merry way they did when a hunt went well. He had given the boy the new shotgun for Christmas and he had just finished trying an important lawsuit in Thomasville close by and this was the very place, the very woods where he, the man, once had had a great hunt, perhaps even a fabled hunt, with his own father. But this hunt had gone badly. The Negro guide was no good. The dog had been trained badly. The lawsuit was not going well. They, the man and the boy, had spent a bad sleepless night in an old hotel (the same hotel where the man had spent the night before the great Thomasville hunt). The hotel was not at all as the man had remembered it.

  Here, said the man, handing him the shotgun and stretching up the top strand of barbed wire. The wire creaked. I trust you now.

  Thank you. The boy was watchful as he took the gun.

  Do you trust me? asked the man.

  Yes. No.

  You have to trust me now.

  Why?

  I’m going to see to it that you’re not going to have to go through what I am going through.

  What’s that?

  You’ll just have to trust me, okay?

  Okay, said the boy, eyes wary and watchful. The man sounded almost absentminded and his glittering eye seemed to cast beyond him to the future, perhaps to the lawsuit Monday.

  Come over here a minute.

  What?

  Here. Over here by me.

  Oh.

  Now, as the boy stood beside him, the man gave him a hug with the arm not holding the gun. He felt the man’s hand giving him hard regular pats on the arm. He was saying something. The boy, no longer surprised, did not quite hear because he was reflecting on the strangeness of it, getting an awkward hug from his father, as they stood side by side in their bulky hunting clothes in the wet cold funk-smelling pin-oak swamp. He couldn’t remember being hugged before except at funerals and weddings, and then the hugs were perfunctory and the kisses quick cheek kisses and that was all right with him, he didn’t want to be
hugged or kissed then or now.

  And now, standing in the glade with the three-iron, he was wondering idly. Why? Why is it that I would not wish then or now or ever to kiss my father? Why is it that it was then and now a kind of violation, not the violation of the man grabbing him across the fence but a violation nevertheless, and a cheapening besides. Italians and Frenchmen and women hugged and kissed each other and what did it signify?

  What? asked the boy.

  The man pulled him close and turned his face down toward him and the boy smelled the heavy catarrh of his breath with the faint overlay of whiskey from the night before. His father was understood to suffer from “catarrh” and all night long, while the boy lay still, watchful and alert, the man had tossed and breathed out his heavy catarrh-and-whiskey breath.

  Two singles went in here. I’ll take one and you the other. But the man didn’t let him go, held him still and gave him regular hard pats.

  The man liked to go after singles after the covey was flushed, veering from the fields and open woodlands which the dogs had quartered and plunge backward into thickets and briars where not even the dogs would go, turning and using his body as entering wedge, the vines singing and popping against the heavy duck of his pants and jacket. When a single got up and he shot it and found it (no thanks to the dogs), and held the bird in his hand for a moment before stuffing it into the game pocket, his eyes would grow merry as if he had set himself an impossible quest and won, had plunged into the heart of the darkness and disorder of the wet cold winter woods and extracted from it of all things a warm bright-eyed perfect bird.

  But now the man was standing still, eyes glittering, holding the gun oddly and gazing down at it, the stock resting on the ground, the barrel tilted just back from the vertical and resting lightly in the crotch of thumb and forefinger.

  You and I are the same, said the man as if he were speaking to the gun.

  How?

  You are like me. We are two of a kind. I saw it last night.

  Here come the pats again, hard, regular, slow, like a bell tolling.

  Saw what?

  I saw the way you lay in bed last night and slept or didn’t sleep. You’re one of us, I’m afraid. You already know too much. It’s too bad in a way.

  Us? Who’s us?

  You’d be better off if you were one of them.

  Who’s them?

  The ignorant armies that clash by night.

  The boy was silent.

  We have to trust each other now, don’t we?

  Yes, said the boy, rearing slightly so he could see the man better.

  We’re buddies, aren’t we?

  Yes. No. You’re wrong. We’re not buddies. I don’t want to be anybody’s buddy.

  Okay. Let’s go. There are two of them. You take the one on the right.

  Okay.

  Oh shit, said the man. Last hard pat, sock, wham, on the shoulder. I’m sorry.

  The boy looked up not surprised but curious. He had never heard the man say shit before.

  Now standing with the three-iron in the glade, he was thinking: he said that one and only shit in exactly the same flat taped voice airline pilots use before the crash: We’re going in. Shit.

  Now the man was looking more like himself again, cheeks ruddy, cap pushed back on his head as if it were a summer day and he needed the air, though it was very cold. It was his regular chipper look but when the boy, going forward, looked at him sideways he noticed that his eyes were too bright.

  They kicked up two singles but the birds flew into the trees too soon and there was no shot. The birds angled apart and the man and the boy, following them, diverged. A lopsided scrub oak, dead leaves brown and heavy as leather, came between them. A ground fog filled the hollows like milk. As the boy moved ahead silently on the wet speckled leaves, his heart did not beat in his throat as it used to before quail are flushed. Then it came, on the man’s side of the tree, the sudden tiny thunder of the quail and the shot hard upon it and then the silence. There was not even the sound of a footstep but only a click from the Greener. Now the boy was moving ahead again. He heard the man walking. They were clearing the tree and converging. Through the leathery leaves and against the milkiness he caught sight of a swatch of khaki. Didn’t he hear it again, the so sudden uproar of stiff wings beating the little drum of bird body and the man swinging toward him in the terrific concentration of keeping gunsight locked on the fat tilt-winged quail and hard upon the little drumbeat the shocking blast rolling away like thunder through the silent woods? The boy saw the muzzle burst and flame spurting from the gun like a picture of a Civil War soldier shooting and even had time to wonder why he had never seen it before, before he heard the whistling and banging in his ear and found himself down in the leaves without knowing how he got there and even then could still hear the sound of the number-eight shot rattling away through the milky swamp and was already scrambling to get up from the embarrassment of it (for that was no place to be), but when he tried to stand, the keening in his ear spun him down again—all that before he even felt the hot wetness on the side of his face which was not pressed into the leaves and touched it and saw the blood. It was as if someone had taken hold of him and flung him down. He heard the geclick and gecluck of the Greener’s breech opening and closing. Then he heard the shot. He waited until the banging and keening in his head stopped. He did not feel cold. His face did not hurt. Using the gun as a prop, he was able to get to his knees. He called out. It had been important to get up before calling. Nobody, not him, not anybody, is going to catch me down here on the ground. When there was no answer, he waited again, aware only of his own breathing and that he was blinking and gazing at nothing in particular. Then, without knowing how he knew, he knew that he was free to act in his own good time. (How did he know such a thing?) Taking a deep breath, he stood up and exhaled it through his mouth sheeew as a laborer might do, and wiping blood from his lip with two fingers he slung it off as a laborer might sling snot. Twelve years old, he grew up in ten minutes. It was possible for him to stretch out a hand to the tree and touch it, not hold it. He walked around the tree before it occurred to him that he had forgotten his shotgun. At first he didn’t see the man, because born the jacket and the cap had a camouflage pattern which hid him in the leaves like a quail and because the bill of the cap hid his face. The man was part lying, part sitting against a tree, legs stretched out and cap pulled over his face like a countryman taking a nap and there was the feeling in the boy not that it was funny but that he was nevertheless called upon to smile and he might even have tried except that his face suddenly hurt. He did not see the man’s gun, the big double-barreled twelve-gauge English Greener. For some reason which he could still not explain, he went back to look for his own gun. It was not hard to walk but when he bent to pick up the gun his face hurt again. When he came back he saw the dark brown stock of the Greener sticking out from the skirt of the man’s jacket.

  Now the boy was squatting (not sitting) beside the man. He pushed his own cap back as if it were a hot day. He pulled the man’s cap off. He was not smiling and his eyes were closed but his face looked all right. His cheeks were still ruddy.

  He put his hand under the man’s jacket but the Greener got in the way. He pulled the shotgun out by the butt and put his hand under the jacket again and against the man’s chest. The heart beat strongly. But his hand was wet and something was wrong. The fabric of shirt and underwear was matted into flesh like burlap trodden into mud.

  Now squatting back on his heels beside the man he took his handkerchief from his pocket with his dry hand and carefully wiped the blood from the other hand. Then he pushed his cap back still farther because his forehead was sweating. He blew into both hands because they were cold and began to think.

  What he was thinking about was what he was going to do next but at the same time he noticed that he did not feel bad. Why is it, he wondered, that I feel that I have all the time in the world to figure out what to do and the freedom to do it and t
hat what is more I will do it? It was as if he had contracted into the small core of curiosity and competence he had felt within himself after the man had grabbed him across the fence, spun him around, cursed him, and took his gun away. Now he was blowing into his hands and thinking: This is a problem and problems are for solving. All you need to do anything is time to do it, being let alone long enough to do it and a center to do it from. He had found his center.

  The guide doesn’t live far from here. We passed the cabin. The Negro boy ran home when the man cursed him and shot the dog.

  Now he was standing up and looking carefully around. He even made out a speckled quail lying in the speckled leaves. As he waited for the dizziness to clear, he watched the man.

  Don’t worry, I’m going to get us both out of here. He knew with certainty that he could.

  Later, after it was over, his stepmother had hugged them both. Thank God thank God thank God she said in her fond shouting style. You could have both been killed!

  So it had come to pass that there were two accounts of what had happened, and if one was false the other must be true; one which his stepmother had put forward in the way that a woman will instantly and irresistibly construe the world as she will have it and in fact does have it so: that the man had had one of his dizzy spells—he knows with his blood pressure he shouldn’t drink and hunt!—and fell; that in falling he discharged the double-barrel, which wounded the boy and nearly killed the man. The boy almost came to believe her, especially when she praised him. We can thank our lucky stars that this child had the sense and bravery to know what to do. And you a twelve-year-old-mussing up his hair in front in a way she thought of as being both manly and English—We’re so proud of you. My fine brave boy!

  But it was not bravery, he thought, eyes narrowing, almost smiling. It was the coldness, the hard secret core of himself that he had found.

  The boy and his father knew better. With a final hug after he was up and around and the boy had recovered, except for a perforated and permanently deafened left middle ear and a pocked cheek like a one-sided acne, the man was able to speak to him by standing in the kitchen and enlisting D’Lo the cook in the conversation and affecting a broad hunter’s lingo not at all like him: I’m going to tell yall one damn thing—Yall? He never said yall. Talking to D’Lo, who stood at the stove with her back to them? I’m getting rid of that savage. He nodded to the Greener on the pantry table. I had no idea that savage had a pattern that wide! So wide it knicked you—did you know that, D’Lo? Hugging the boy, he asked D’Lo. D’Lo must either have known all about it or, most likely, had not been listening closely, for she only voiced her routine but adequate hnnnonnhHM! Now ain’t that something else!—which was what the man wanted her to say because this was the man’s way of telling the boy, through D’Lo, what had happened and soliciting and getting her inattentive assent to the routineness and even inevitability of it. Such things happen! And I’ll tell you something else, the man told D’Lo. When a man comes to the point that all he can think about is tracking a bird and shuts everything out of his mind to the point of shooting somebody, it’s time to quit! D’Lo socked down grits spoon on boiler rim. You right, Mister Barrett! Was she even listening? And now the man finally looking down his cheek at him hugged alongside: Right?