Lancelot

by Walker Percy

  But what if you could show me a sin? a purely evil deed, an intolerable deed for which there is no explanation? Now there’s a mystery. People would sit up and take notice. I would be impressed. You could almost make a believer out of me.

  In times when nobody is interested in God, what would happen if you could prove the existence of sin, pure and simple? Wouldn’t that be a windfall for you? A new proof of God’s existence! If there is such a thing as sin, evil, a living malignant force, there must be a God!

  I’m serious. When was the last time you saw a sin? Oh, you’ve seen quite a few? Well, I haven’t, not lately. I mean a pure unadulterated sin. You’re not going to tell me that some poor miserable slob of a man who beats up his own child has committed a sin?

  You don’t look impressed. Yes, you know me too well. I was only joking. Well, half joking.

  But joking aside. I must explain my second discovery. After I walked out of the dark parlor, where no one ever sat, and quietly out the front door. I took a different route to my pigeonnier. A tiny event but significant. Because it was only when I did this that I realized that I had taken exactly the same route for months, even years. I had actually made a path. My life had fallen into such a rut that it was possible to set one’s watch (Suellen told me this) when I walked out the front door at night. It must be two minutes to ten because he likes to get there just in time to turn on the ten o’clock news. News of what? What did I expect to happen? What did I want to happen?

  No. First, I paid a visit to Siobhan and Tex. who talked about runny babbits.

  “I liked the bunny rabbits,” said Siobhan, hugging my neck.

  “You like those runny babbits!” cried Tex, still holding out his hands for her and, thinking he’d made a joke, kept on repeating it: “I told you you’d like those runny babbits!”

  Tex got on her nerves, in fact bored the hell out of her. It was almost as if he knew it and wanted to, enjoyed the mindlessness of runny babbits.

  Siobhan escaped both of us, squatted under the TV livid in the phosphorescent light, her cloudy blue eyes not even then quite focused on the big-eyed cartoon animals.

  Tex, of course, got on his next favorite subject, not chivvying Siobhan with his bad jokes but chivvying me for my neglectful ways. He couldn’t get over the fact that I had allowed Margot to rebuild the old burned wing of Belle Isle over a gas well even though it had been capped.

  For the tenth time he upbraided me in his fond jabbing inattentive way. Was it his wealth, I often wondered, which gave him license to be such a pain, a prodding tunnel-visioned unheeding bore, or had he gotten rich because he was such a pain?

  Yet he was a friendly-seeming pleasant-looking fellow with his big-nosed Indian-brown face, slicked-down black-dyed hair, liver-spotted muscular arms. At first sight one might take him for a golf pro, an old seasoned, whiskey-cured sun-drenched Sam Snead—until one noticed that he was not, that his way of standing around hands on hips was not like a golfer at all but the way an oilfield roughneck stands slouched at his alert ease, waits his moment while great machinery hums, heavy pipes swing, chains clank. Yes, that was it, that was his happiness and unhappiness: idleness can be happy only if the machinery is running and one looks on with a presiding interest, comforted as only machinery, one’s own machinery, can comfort. His sudden riches had stunned him. In the silence of wealth he felt deprived, deafened, and so he must reach out, grab, poke, drive Siobhan crazy.

  “When are you going to cement that well in?”

  “There’s nothing left down there but a little marsh gas, Tex.”

  “How you get by with having a Christmas tree under your house beats me.” He can’t or won’t listen.

  “It was put there before the state law was passed. Anyhow, it’s only a small shallow well.”

  “It still has two hundred pounds of pressure.”

  “Christ, no. Thirty pounds at the outside.”

  “—two hundred pounds in rotten wartime black pipe.”

  Christ, you stupid Texas bastard, why don’t you listen?

  “It’s got to be sealed,” Tex droned on. “A Christmas tree won’t do it. The only way to seal a well is to cement it.”

  “I know.”

  “How in hell can Maggie seal a producing well and build a house over it?”

  On he went, poking me like poking Siobhan, poking and not listening, not even listening to himself. His fond unhappy eyes drifted away. Even his expert opinion was nutty. In the same breath he complained about the well producing and not producing and didn’t listen long enough to hear the contradiction. Getting rich had made him so miserable he must make everyone miserable.

  Why didn’t I do something about Siobhan, not about the well, which I couldn’t have cared less about, whether it produced or not, went dry or blew up, but why didn’t I do something about Siobhan? Either throw Tex out or give her back to Suellen or both. They’d both be better off. Christ, for all I knew Tex was fooling with her. Doesn’t it happen sometimes with fine fond upstanding grandfathers? You nod. You mean they’re penitent afterwards? Good for them. Suellen was good to Siobhan before and would be again. She had raised me, thousands of Suellens had raised thousands like me, kept us warm in the kitchen, saved us from our fond bemused batty parents, my father screwed up by poesy, dreaming of Robert E. Lee and Lancelot Andrewes and Episcopal chapels in the wildwood, and my poor stranded mother going out for joyrides with Uncle Harry.

  Why didn’t I do something about Siobhan earlier? Here’s a confession, Father. Because I didn’t really care, and that had nothing to do with her not being my daughter (that made me feel better, gave me an excuse). We are supposed to “love” our children. But what does that mean?

  Yet, and here’s the strangest thing of all, it was only after my discovery, after I found out that Siobhan was not my child, that I was able to do something about it. Since Siobhan was not my child, I could help her! It was simple after all: (1) Tex was bad for the child, (2) something should be done, (3) nobody was doing anything or even noticing, (4) therefore I would tell Tex to move back to New Orleans and let Suellen take care of Siobhan.

  Why couldn’t I take care of her? To tell you the truth, she got on my nerves.

  Why didn’t I love Siobhan when I thought she was my own child? Well, I suppose I “loved” her. What is love? Why this dread coldness toward those closest to you and most innocent? Have families ever loved each other except when some dread thing happens to somebody?

  Oh, yes, you speak of love. That is easy to do. But do you wish to know my theory? That sort of love is impossible now if it ever was. The only way it will ever be possible again is if the world should end.

  Siobhan turned fretfully to the TV to watch the animated cartoon.

  “What a coinkidinki!” Tex cried, hugging Siobhan. “Just when you asked about runny babbits. Tex turned on the TV and there they were.”

  “Say coincidence,” I told Tex.

  “What’s that?” he asked quickly, cupping his ear, listening for the first time.

  “I said, don’t say coinkidinki to her, for Christ’s sake. Say coincidence.”

  “All right. Lance,” said Tex. He listened! Maybe he hadn’t listened to me before because I hadn’t told him anything.

  I pondered. Could it be true all one needs to know nowadays is what one wants?

  Leaving the pleached alley of oaks, my usual route, I cut across the meadowlike front yard, took the gardener’s gate through the iron fence, and climbed the levee.

  Believe it or not. I had not seen the river for years. A diesel towboat was pushing an acre of barges against the current. It sounded like a freight engine spinning its wheels. I turned around. Belle Isle looked like an isle, a small dark islet hemmed in by Ethyl pipery, Dow towers. Kaiser stacks, all humming away. Farther away, near the highway, gas burnoffs flared in the night as if giant hunters still stalked the old swamp.

  The stars were dim but by following the handle of the dipper I recognized Arcturus, which my fa
ther showed me years ago. My father: a failed man who missed the boat all around but who knew how far away Arcturus was. He was editor of a local weekly, where he published his own poems and historical vignettes about this region on such subjects as St. Andrew’s Chapel: the First Non-Roman Church in the Parish (I remember thinking that my ancestors must have arrived here to find the swamp teeming not with wild Indians but with Romans). The Kiwanis Club gave him a certificate officially entitling him the Poet Laureate of Feliciana Parish. He was an ordinary newspaper poet, an ordinary newspaper historian, and he had an ordinary newspaperman’s wonder about science.

  “Think of it,” he said, standing in this spot and showing me Arcturus. “The light you are seeing started thirty years ago!”

  I thought about it. In those days we thought about such things.

  But what I was thinking that night a year ago was not how strange it was that light from Arcturus started out thirty years ago (when we were listening to Parkyakarkus and Frank Mann, the Golden Voice of Radio) but how strangely one’s own life had turned out during these same thirty years while Arcturus’ light went booming down the long, lonesome corridors of space.

  Then for the first time I saw myself and my life just as surely as if I were standing in the dark parlor and watching myself sitting at the table with Margot.

  Do you know what happened to me during the past twenty years? A gradual, ever so gradual, slipping away of my life into a kind of dream state in which finally I could not be sure that anything was happening at all. Perhaps nothing happened.

  That, after all, is quite a discovery for the man you knew, president of the student body, all-conference halfback. Most Likely to Succeed. Rhodes scholar, Golden Glover, holder of the record of the Longest Punt Return in the entire U.S.A.

  Clearly you haven’t done too well either. You know what our trouble was? We liked to go to school too much. And into the service. I managed to stay in school or the service until I was thirty-two. And you with your M.D., D.D. In fact, aren’t you taking some courses at Tulane now?

  I practiced law in a small town on the River Road. I say practice in quotes, so to speak, because I found that I was doing less and less law as time went on. True, times got harder, business was slow. In the end I was doing a couple of hours of title work a day and that was it.

  One good thing about small towns: it was convenient to come home for lunch. Margot was usually there at first. We’d have a drink or two or three before lunch—something she was used to doing with her lady friends in New Orleans. That was a pleasure. After Suellen’s lovely lunch, we often made love. Not a bad life! drink well, eat well, and make love to Margot. I fell into the custom of taking a nap. The naps grew longer. Then one day, I did not go back to the office in the afternoon. Instead, and as an excuse because it was said to be good for one, I took up golf. The three other members of the foursome were Cahill Clayton Lamar, cousin and failed gentry like me, bad dentist, good golfer; and two successful newcomers, the undertaker and the chiropractor.

  But golf is a bore. I quit.

  During the sixties I was a liberal. In those days one could say “I was such and such.” Categories made sense—now it is impossible to complete the sentence: I am a—what? Certainly not a liberal. A conservative? What is that? But then it was a pleasure to take the blacks’ side: one had the best of two worlds: the blacks were right and I wanted to be unpopular with the whites. It was a question of boredom. Nothing had happened since I ran 110 yards against Alabama—we lived for great deeds, you remember, unlike the Creoles, who have a gift for the trivial, for making money, for scrubbing tombs, for Mardi Gras. The sixties were a godsend to me. The blacks after all were right, the whites were wrong, and it was a pleasure to tell them so. I became unpopular. There are worse things than being disliked: it keeps one alive and alert. But in the seventies the liberals had nothing more to do. They were finished. I can’t decide whether we won or lost. In any case, in the seventies ordinary whites and blacks both turned against the liberals. Perhaps they were right. In the end, liberals become a pain in the ass even to themselves. At any rate, the happy strife of the sixties was all over. The other day I ran into a black man with whom I had once stood shoulder to shoulder defying angry whites. We hardly recognized each other. We eyed each other uneasily. There was nothing to say. He told me had had a slight stroke, nothing serious. We had won. So he bought a color TV, took up golf, and developed hypertension. I became an idler.

  I gave up golf and stayed home to do a bit of reading and even some research and writing: the Civil War of course: nobody knew much about what happened in these parts. I even wrote a learned article or two. Sometimes I took the tourists around Belie Isle, like my grandfather before me. But instead of telling them Eleanor Roosevelt jokes as he did, I gave them scholarly disquisitions on the beauty of plantation life, somewhat tongue-in-cheek—to see how far I could go without getting a rise from these good Midwestern folk—hell, I found out it’s impossible to get a rise from them, they hate the niggers worse than we ever did. Things are not so simple as they seem, I told them. There is something to be said for the master-slave relation: the strong, self-reliant, even piratical master who carves a regular barony in the wilderness and lives like Louis XIV, yet who treats his slaves well, and so help me they weren’t so bad off on Belle Isle. They became first-class artisans, often were given their freedom, and looked down on the white trash. “Now take a look at this slave cabin, ladies and gentlemen. Is it so bad? Nice high ceilings, cool rooms, front porch, brick chimney, cypress floors. Great arching oaks back yard and front. Do you prefer your little brick bungalow in Lansing?” They watched me carefully to catch the drift and either nodded seriously or laughed. It’s impossible to insult anybody from Michigan.

  On winter afternoons it began to get dark early—five o’clock. Elgin would build us a fire and Margot and I would have several drinks before supper.

  During the day I found myself looking forward to radio news on the hour. At night we watched TV and drank brandies. After the ten o’clock news I had usually grown sleepy enough to go to bed.

  So what was my discovery? that for the last few years I had done nothing but fiddle at law, fiddle at history, keep up with the news (why?), watch Mary Tyler Moore, and drink myself into unconsciousness every night.

  Now I remember almost everything, except—Every event in the past, the most trivial imaginable, comes back with crystal clarity. It’s that one night I blank out on—no, not blank out, but somehow can’t make the effort to remember. It seems to require a tremendous effort to focus on. What I remember is that miserable Janos Jacoby looking up at me, the firelight in the trees … The headlines come back.

  SCION CRAZED BY GRIEF. RESTRAINED FROM ENTERING HOUSE. HANDS BURNED.

  That night. I can’t get hold of it. Oh, I try to, but my mind slides back to the past or forward to the future.

  I can remember perfectly what happened years ago, like the time we, you and I, were riding down the river on a fraternity-sorority party and were passing Jefferson Island, which lies between Mississippi and Louisiana, was claimed by both states, and in a sense belonged to neither, a kind of desert island in the middle of the U.S., so you, drinking and solitary as usual, said to no one in particular: “I think it would be nice to spend a few days in such a place,” pulled off your coat, and dove off the Tennessee Belle (that was an “act” too, wasn’t it?); I, of course, having to go after you as usual, taking just time enough to wrap some matches in a tobacco pouch, and even so it took me three hours to find you huddled shivering under a log, looking bluer than Nigger Jim and more emaciated than usual; you, ever the one to do the ultimate uncalled-for thing—I never really knew whether it was a real thing or a show-off thing. And do you know, I’ve often wondered whether your going off to the seminary out of a clear sky was not more of the same—the ultimate reckless lifetime thing. Hell, you were not Christian let alone Catholic as far as anyone could notice. So wasn’t it just like your diving off the Tennes
see Belle to go from unbeliever to priest, leapfrogging on the way some eight hundred million ordinary Catholics? Was that too an act, the ultimate show-off thing or the ultimate splendid thing? You shrug and smile. And as if that weren’t enough, you weren’t content to be an ordinary priest. Father John from New Orleans; no, you had to take off for Uganda or was it Biafra? You had to go to medical school and outdo Albert Schweitzer, because of course that was outdoing even him, wasn’t it, because you had the True Faith and he didn’t, being only a Protestant.

  And it didn’t turn out too well, did it? Else why are you here?

  Something is wrong, isn’t it? Have you lost your faith? or is it a woman?

  Is that all you can do, look at me with that same old hooded look? You smile and shrug. Christ, you don’t even know the answer yourself.

  But you left, you see. And you might have stayed. Maybe you were needed here. Maybe I needed you worse than the Biafrans. If you’d been around all those years … Christ, why is it that I could never talk to anybody but you? Well, you’re here now and I can use you. I’ve discovered that I can talk to you and get closer to it, the secret I know yet don’t know. So I’ll start behind it and work up to it, or I’ll start ahead of it and work back.

  My mind slides forward, to the future, to the person next door. I have an idea even crazier than one of yours. It is that somehow the future, my future, is tied up with her, that we, she and I, must start all over. Did I tell you that I saw her yesterday? Just a glimpse as I ventured out on one of my infrequent forays, this time for my monthly physical and mental examination. Her door was open. She was thin and black-haired but I couldn’t see her face; it was turned to the wall, that wall, her knees drawn up. Her calves were slim but well-developed and still surprisingly suntanned. Had she been a dancer? a tennis player? She reminded me of Lucy.