Love in the Ruins

by Walker Percy

  “Thankee, Doc!” says Willard in the same goofy Gullah accent. “May you and missee have many a more!”

  I refuse to look at Willard, watching instead sections of a road map, pieces of highway, dots of towns, drifting across my retina.

  But Lola is pleased. She sees Willard’s courtliness (what is wrong with him?) as a sanction. Christmas is sanctioned. Our love is sanctioned. Willard’s nutty good manners (something is up, I know that, like the vines sprouting, but what?) are part of the singing, life made to lilt.

  “Let’s go outside,” I say, to go outside but mainly to get away from Willard, and take her again by the hand, her left hand, her fingering hand, calluses whispering in my palm.

  Out into the gloaming we go.

  It was a warm Christmas Eve. A south wind blows fat little calypso clouds over a new moon.

  We kiss in the grassy bunker. She kisses oddly, stooping to it, developing a torque and twisting down and away, seeming to grow shorter. Her breath catches. What she puts me in mind of is not a Texas girl at all but a smart Northern girl, a prodigy who has always played the cello ten hours a day, then one day finds herself at a summer festival and twenty-one and decides it is time to be kissed. So she stoops to it with an odd, shy yet practiced movement, what I fancy to be the Juilliard summer-festival style of kissing.

  Now her hands are clasped in the small of my back. My hands are clasped in the small of her back. She hisses Dvorak. My hot chicken blood sings with albumen molecules. Her hand is warm and whispery as a horn.

  We lie in the grassy bunker, she gazing at the winter constellations wheeling in their courses, I singing like a cello between her knees. Fiery Betelgeuse hangs like a topaz in the south. We kiss hungrily, I going around after her.

  “Doris,” I whisper, forgetting she is Lola. Fortunately my breath whistles in my throat and she doesn’t hear me.

  She is like Doris, except for her Juilliard torque and her odd going-away persimmon-tasting kisses. A big lovely girl, big and white and cool-warm, a marble Venus with a warm horned hand.

  Her callused fingertips strew stars along my flanks. Hot wheats of love leap forth at her touch.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Lola asks, leaning out of the moon’s shadow to inspect my bumps.

  “I’ve got hives.”

  “You’ve got bobos on your shoulder,” she says, minding my bobos attentively and curiously like a child.

  When I look sideways, the wedge of sky is narrower.

  “Hold still, hon,” she whispers, from Tyler Texas now, Juilliard forgotten. “You’ll be all right. Lola’ll hold you tight.”

  “I have to go.”

  “Where you going?”

  “For a walk. Stay here, I’ll be right back.”

  I can’t hold still. Why? The longing is back. Longing for what? I don’t know. For Doris? For the Valley of Virginia and sycamore trees and cicadas unwinding in October? I don’t know. God knows.

  Now running down 18 fairway, knowing it in the black dark (for the “old” 18 is the terrain of my youth), to the tee and back, eyes squeezed shut like a Chinaman’s. Back to the bunker to lie at Lola’s breast a blind babe. My scalp quilts and pops. Lymph engorges me. Love returns. Again I sing between Lola’s knees, blind as a bat.

  Go now, I try to tell her, you better leave, but my larynx squeaked shut.

  So it was that Lola, noble cellist, saved my life at the cost of her reputation. She could have gone, left me to die in the bunker, swell up and die and be found stiff as a poker in the foggy dew. But she fetched her brother, who fetched Willard Amadie, and they both fetched me home, finding me in some disarray, I think, for Lola, putting first things first, had thought only to save my life.

  Did I dream it or do I have a recollection of Willard Amadie bending over me, his Santa hood pushed back on his shoulders like a Carmelite’s, his face no longer farcical but serious and tender but also risible in his old style. “—If you ain’t something now,” did he not say, bending over to pick me up and seeming in the same motion to adjust my clothes before Dusty came up.

  So it was not even a great scandal but just enough to allow the possibility that Dusty could have been offended, though perhaps not, and the possibility that my name was dropped by the medical society, though perhaps it wasn’t. I did receive the anonymous Hippocratic oath, however. But I was in love and Lola was not my patient at the time.

  Dusty saved my life, finding me without breath, shot me full of epinephrine, helped Willard carry me home, where he, Dusty, put a tube in my nose and stayed with me until I came to myself.

  All this, if you can believe it, in less than an hour’s time from the moment I hoisted the first gin fizz until I opened my Chinaman’s eyes in my own bed.

  Christmas Eve fell out thereafter as planned. With the last of my strength I pressed the button on the headboard and saw Perry Como’s Christmas show after all.

  There came Perry, seventy years young and snowy-thatched but hale as old Saint Nick himself, still wearing his open cardigan, color off a bit, face orange, lips violet, but all in good 3-D.

  He sang Silent Night sitting on his stool.

  It was during the following week, between Christmas and New Year, that I became ill, suffering simultaneous depressions and exaltations, assaulted at night by longings, succubi, and the hideous shellfire of Verdun, and in the morning by terror of unknown origin. One morning—was it Christmas morning after listening to Perry Como?—my wrists were cut and bleeding. Seeing the blood, I came to myself, saw myself as itself and the world for what it is, and began to love life. Hm, better stop the bleeding in that case. After all, why not live? Bad as things are still when all is said and done, one can sit on a doorstep in the winter sunlight and watch sparrows kick leaves. So, hugging myself, I stuck a wrist in each armpit like a hobo, squeezed the arteries shut, and walked to Max’s house. Max mostly sewed me up without making much over it, fetched a surgeon to suture a tendon, and at my request allowed me to commit myself to the federal hospital.

  4

  Going to see Max. Is the sniper following?

  As I walk across the pool apron, powdered by chlorine dust and littered by dirty cakes of Styrofoam, I try to collect my wits, badly scattered by memories of Lola and by Dusty Rhoades’s plans for me. Lola did not come to see me in the hospital. But perhaps she returned to Texas A & M without knowing I was ill.

  Two things to do today—no, three things: (1) see Max Gottlieb, who knows the value of my discovery, and ask him to speak to the Director about sponsoring my article in Brain and my application for funding from N.I.M.H.; (2) complete arrangements for a trysting place at the ruined Howard Johnson motel for my date with Moira on the Fourth; (3) go to my office where, undisturbed by patients or my shrewish nurse (it is Saturday), I can put the finishing touches on my article, sip a toddy or two, listen to music, and watch the martins fly home in the evening.

  Shortest and safest route is by foot. Across the fairways of the old 18 waist-high in Johnson grass, past the old Bledsoe house, a streaked Spanish stucco from the thirties, in the dogleg of number 5. Here for fifty years lived the Bledsoes, locked in, while golf balls caromed around the patio, richocheted off Spanish balconies and window grills.

  Clink clink. Clink clink.

  A great thunderhead hides the sun, but it is dry on the fairways. The anthills are abandoned, worn away to a comb of cells.

  Clink clink. Clink clink.

  Stop and listen.

  Someone is following me. But there is no sound but the whir and snap of grasshoppers.

  Clink clink.

  There it is again: a sound very much like—yes, the very sound my caddy Willard Amadie used to make when he’d hump it for the angle of the dogleg to watch the drive, running level and flat out and holding the clubheads in the crook of his arm so they wouldn’t rattle and disturb the drivers already poised over their balls, but even so the faces of the irons would slap clink clink.

  There is no one. I stop on a h
igh bald green dotted with palmetto. The flagpole flies a pennant of wistaria.

  Now into a dry wash out of bounds and among the flared bladed trunks of tupelo gums. Clink clink, it’s ahead of me.

  Stop and calculate: really it seems unlikely that anyone is trying to shoot you here or even following you or, if he is, that he would be carrying a golf bag.

  Nevertheless, suppose that he is. Suppose he has seen me and, knowing me, knows where I am going and is going ahead to wait Where would he go?

  One place: the “island” of number 11, a sporty hole where the drive has to carry a neck of the swamp, which the golfers cross by two Chinese footbridges connecting a little loess lump in the swamp. Here I’d cross if I were going to the Center and here on the island stands a pagoda shelter that commands both bridges.

  Instead of using the bridge, drop down the soft cliff, using a boy’s trick of walking along the face dropping two steps for every step forward.

  Now behind the “Quarters,” a long rowhouse, a ruin of soft warm brick which housed sugar-plantation slaves and which, set just above water level on the bayou, was thought of by the Paradise developers as a kind of Natchez-under-the-Hill and so restored and reroofed for domestic servants, even a chapel added so that strains of good old spirituals would come floating up to our patios in the evening, but the domestic preferred their Hollow, dank and fetid though it was. So back to the jungle went the Quarters, new tin roof and all.

  A crashing in the vines ahead of me. My heart stops: if it is a sniper, there’s an army of them. Wait. Yes, whew. I spot Colley’s pith helmet and Gottlieb’s fishing cap. It is the Audubon Society, on the trail of the lordly ivorybill.

  Moving swiftly in deep shade and without sound on the moss bank of the bayou, I reach the hogback of the island, high and dry now, and climb its gentlest slope, angling for the path and keeping an eye peeled for the roof of the pagoda.

  There it is, directly above, but the loess loam, soft as meal, has eroded badly under the near quadrant of the pagoda so that one may no longer walk into it but has to climb up through the vines. Thunder rumbles. A big sour drop spatters on my hand. The wind smells of trees. It is a simple matter to climb into the quadrant, put bag on seat, hold pistol, stand on seat to see over the partition.

  Is anyone there?

  The two adjacent quadrants are empty. The opposite quadrant? It is difficult to see because the angle between partitions is choked with potato vine and dirt-dauber nests. The space between the eaves and the intersecting rafters allows a view of a stretch of the coast with a church steeple and parade ground. There the Kaydettes are drilling, the sun is shining. By a trick of light and distance, the field seems to be tilted like an Andes farm. Tiny figures march up and down. The twirling batons make silver coins in the sunlight.

  Safe in the thunder and wrapped in potato vine, I wait The wind is sour with raindrops but the storm is veering off.

  In a brief quiet between thunder rolls, close as close, a man clears his throat So close that I feel my head incline politely as if he were addressing me. In a panic I grip the center post and hollow my throat to keep breathing quiet

  “That’s a pretty sight now.” The voice is so close that the dry wood of the partition vibrates like a sounding board.

  “They fixing to parade.” A second voice, the sentence uttered civilly, an observation.

  “They’ll parade all right.” A third voice, even closer, grim, rich in ironies.

  Thunder rolls, covering the voices. Dropping slowly, I sit in the angle, feeling behind me the press and creak of wood as bodies shift weight

  “What do we need with him?” asks the third voice.

  “Victor’s all right now. He know how to get along with people. Victor what you call our contract man.” First voice: a familiar two-layered voice, one layer speaking to meaning, the other risible, soliciting routine funniness: we might as well be funny as not.

  “Contract? Do you mean contact?”

  “Contract, contact.”

  I recognize two voices but not the third.

  The rolling thunder becomes more discrete, coming after lightning cracks. I count the intervals. Two seconds, three. The storm is going away. At the next crack I count four and stand up in the thunder.

  Use the potato vine as screen, crane up and over into it, far enough to see through the leaves but not be seen.

  The man sitting at the end of the seat, facing the path toward the club, is, I know already, Willard Amadie. Bent forward, forearms on knees, he can look up and see the others, see the path, only by wrinkling his low wide welted forehead. He wears a Marine camouflage coverall. Beside him, propped against the bench, butts grounded, are a rifle and shotgun fitted with straps. Then it was they, not golf irons, that clinked.

  Stretched out on the bench, only its forequarters visible, head lolling to the ground, tongue smeared with dust, is a young buck deer.

  “No reason why people can’t get along,” says the first voice in the style of uttering platitudes agreeably.

  “People?” Voice number three. “What people? I’ll tell the truth, I never know what he’s talking about.”

  I know what he’s talking about. People uttered so, in a slight flatting of tone, means white people. Uttered another way, it means black. A third way means people in general.

  “I’ll tell you this!” exclaims the first voice, shouting a platitude. “I’m not going have anything to do with people”—second meaning—“who looking to hurt other people.” First meaning. “That’s not what the good Lord intend.”

  “The good Lord,” says the third voice. “What is it with this dude? Jesus.”

  “Victor is all right. He’s with us. In fact, we couldn’t do without him,” says Willard, looking up from his black welted brow. “He’s for the plan, he’s for the school, don’t worry. Aren’t you, Brother?” The brother too I recognize, though I doubt if number three does. This is Baptist brother: Victor is a deacon in Starlight Baptist Church.

  “Sure I’m for it! Education is good for everybody and everybody is entitled to it!”

  “I’ll tell you this, Uru,” says Willard. “We need Victor more than he needs us. Where do you think we get our medicine? People respect him.” All kind of people.

  “I don’t understand anybody down here. This dude sounds like some old uncle from Memphis.”

  “Those old uncles in Memphis are tougher than you think,” says Willard, grinning.

  Victor Charles sits opposite Willard, feet planted flat on the ground, hands prone on his knees. A strong, grave, heavy-thighed man, he is purple-black and of an uncertain age. He could be forty and looking older for his dignity. Or he could be sixty and flat-bellied from his life as a laborer. Dressed like a hospital attendant in white duck trousers, white shirt, white interne shoes, he does in fact work in the animal shelter as caretaker. A black belt circles his wide, flat hips, buckle worn to the side and I recall why: so the buckle won’t scrape against the high metal table when he holds the big dogs.

  “Look like he not coming,” says Willard after a pause, squeezing his fist in his hand.

  Who’s not coming? Me? A corkscrew tightens in my sacrum.

  “Where are they going now?” asks the third man.

  The other two look toward the coast.

  “They marching over to the club for a show this evening,” says Willard. Willard has a slight stammer. Once in a while the words hang in his throat, he touches his eye and out they come, hooting.

  “All right Now you know the route Tuesday.”

  “Sure I know the route,” hoots Willard.

  “How about the brother here?”

  Willard and Victor look at each other and laugh.

  “I know,” says Victor gravely. “Here,” says Willard, bending over. Something scrapes in the dirt. He’s drawing a map. “Intercept the bus here. Brother, we counting on you to watch them.”

  “I’m going to be watching more than them,” says Victor, spreading his fingers over h
is knees.

  “What does he mean?” asks the third man.

  “He means you, Brother Uru,” says Willard, laughing.

  “Ain’t nobody going to hurt anybody long as I got anything to do with it!” cries Victor. “I mean nobody!”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t know,” mutters number three to himself. “What kind of damn country is this?”

  “Victor’s going to lead them to Honey Island.”

  “That’s right and I’m staying there.”

  “What you worrying about, old man?”

  “You.”

  “Me?”

  “Ain’t nobody bothering those little ladies.”

  “What in the hell—”

  Willard opens his mouth, touches his eye: “Listen!”

  There is a crackling in the swamp, a sound that becomes louder and more measured. It is the little safari of birdwatchers.

  “See. I told you,” says Willard softly. “They pass here every Saturday this time of day, and on Tuesday the Fourth they’ll do the same.”

  “Well well well,” says the third man, pleased for the first time. “Here come our teachers.”

  “Teachers?” says Victor Charles. “What you talking about. They the doctors from the Center out for a walk. With their spyglasses.”

  “They going too,” says Willard quietly. “We need teachers at the school.”

  “You mean they going out to Honey Island too!” cries Victor.

  “That’s right, Brother. Some of them, anyhow.”

  “Lord to God. Now I done heard it all.”

  “Why not, Uncle,” says the third man. “I think it proper and fitting that our children be taught by Ph.D.’s.”

  “I think ever’body entitled to an education!” exclaims Victor in his singsong.

  The crashing grows louder as the safari works around the hogback. Presently, by standing at the end of the bench, I can see them: Colley and Gottlieb still in the lead, Colley in pith helmet, bermuda shorts, and bush jacket; Gottlieb in his long-billed meshtop hat, the sort retirees wear in Fort Lauderdale. There follow a dozen or so behaviorists, physicians, Love counselors, plus a NASA engineer or two.