by Walker Percy
If you want and work and wait, you can have. Every man a king. What I want is no longer the Nobel, screw prizes, but just to figure out what I’ve hit on. Some day a man will walk into my office as ghost or beast or ghost-beast and walk out as a man, which is to say sovereign wanderer, lordly exile, worker and waiter and watcher.
Knowing, not women, said Sir Thomas, is man’s happiness.
Learning and wisdom are receding nowadays. The young, who already know everything, hate science, bomb laboratories, kill professors, burn libraries.
Already the monks are beginning to collect books again …
Poor as I am, I feel like God’s spoiled child. I am Robinson Crusoe set down on the best possible island with a library, a laboratory, a lusty Presbyterian wife, a cozy tree house, an idea, and all the time in the world.
Ellen calls from the doorway. Breakfast is ready. She sets a plate of steaming grits and bacon for me on a plain pine table. Like most good cooks, she hasn’t a taste for her own cooking. Instead she pours honey on an old biscuit.
We sit on kitchen chairs in the sunlight. With one hand she absently sweeps crumbs into the other. Her hand’s rough heel whispers over the ribs of pine. She keeps her apron on. When she sits down, she exactly fills the heart-shaped scoop of the chair. Her uptied hair leaves her neck bare save for a few strands.
In my second wife I am luckier than my kinsman Thomas More. For once I have the better of him. His second wife was dour and old and ugly. Mine is dour and young and beautiful. Both made good wives. Sir Thomas’s wife was a bad Catholic like me, who believed in God but saw no reason why one should disturb one’s life, certainly not lose one’s head. Ellen is a Presbyterian who doesn’t have much use for God but believes in doing right and does it.
Sunlight creeps along the tabletop, casting into relief the shiny scoured ridges of pine. Steam rising from the grits sets motes stirring in the golden bar of light. I shiver slightly. Morning is still not the best of times. As far as morning is concerned, I can’t say things have changed much. What has changed is my way of dealing with it. No longer do I crawl around on hands and knees drinking Tang and vodka and duck eggs.
My stomach leaps with hunger. I eat grits and bacon and corn sticks.
After breakfast my heart leaps with love.
“Come sit in my lap, Ellen.”
“Well—”
“Now then. Here.”
“Oh for pity’s sake.”
“Yes. There now.”
“Not now.”
“Give me a kiss.”
“My stars.”
Her mouth tastes of honey.
“Tch. Not now,” she whispers.
“Why not?”
“The children are coming.”
“The children can—”
“Here’s Meg.”
“So I see. Kiss me.”
“Kiss Meg.”
2
Walk up the cliff to catch the bus in Paradise.
Up and down the fairways go carts canopied in orange-and-white Bantu stripes. Golfers dismount for their shots, their black faces inscrutable under the bills of their caps.
Recently Bantu golfers rediscovered knickerbockers and the English golf cap, which they wear pulled down to their eyebrows and exactly level. They shout “Fore!” but they haven’t got it quite right, shouting it not as a warning but as a kind of ritual cry, a karate shout, before teeing off.
English golf pros are in fashion now, the way Austrian ski instructors used to be. Charley Parker moved to Australia.
“Fore!” shouts a driver, though no one is in sight, and whales into it.
“Good shot!”
“Bully, old man!”
“Give me my cleek.”
Paradise has gone 99 percent Bantu. How did the Bantus win? Not by revolution. No, their revolution was a flop; they got beat in the Troubles five years ago and pulled back to the swamp. So how did they win? By exercising their property rights!
Why not? Squatting out in the swamp for twenty years, they came by squatter’s rights to own it. Whereupon oil was struck through the old salt domes. Texaco and Esso and Good Gulf thrust money into black hands. Good old Bantu uncles burned $100 bills like Oklahoma Indians of old.
So they moved out of the swamp and bought the houses in Paradise. Why not? I sold mine for $70,000 and sank the money in my invention like many another nutty doctor.
Willard Amadie bought Tara and was elected mayor.
Uru, baffled by Southern ways, left in disgust, returned to Ann Arbor, and rejoined the Black Studies department of the U. of M., where life is simpler.
Others left. Many Knotheads, beside themselves with rage, driven mad by the rain of noxious particles, departed for safe Knothead havens in San Diego, Cicero, Hattiesburg, and New Rochelle. Many Lefts, quaking with terror and abstracted out of their minds, took out for Berkeley, Cambridge, Madison, and Fairfax County, Virginia, where D.C. liberals live.
Some stayed, mostly eccentrics who don’t fit in anywhere else. I stayed because it’s home and I like its easygoing ways, its religious confusion, racial hodgepodge, misty green woods, and sleepy bayous. People still stop and help strangers lying in ditches having been set upon by thieves or just plain drunk. Good nature usually prevails, even between enemies. As the saying goes in Louisiana: you may be a son of a bitch but you’re my son of a bitch.
Only one woman to my name now, a lusty tart Presbyterian, but one is enough. Moira married Buddy Brown and removed to Phoenix, where he is director of the Big Corral, the Southwest Senior Citizens Termination Center. Lola, lovely strong-backed splendid-kneed cellist, married Barry Bocock, the clean West-Coast engineer, and removed to Marietta, Georgia, where Barry works for Lockheed and Lola is President of Colonial Dames, shows three-gaited horses, and plays cello for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.
I say Paradise is 99 percent Bantu. My mother is the remaining 1 percent. She stayed and made a second fortune selling astrological real estate to the Bantus, who are as superstitious as whites. Most of the younger and smarter Bantus are, to tell the truth, only nominally Bantu, having lost their faith at the Ivy League universities they habitually attend.
3
Borrow a newspaper from a tube near the bus stop. ATROCITIES SOLVED says the headline.
Read the story in the sunny quarter of a golf shelter. Hm. It seems the murderers who have terrorized this district for the past ten years turned out to be neither black guerrillas nor white Knotheads but rather a love community in the swamp. The leader is quoted as saying his family believes in love, the environment, and freedom of the individual.
4
Before the bus comes, a new orange Toyota stops to give me a lift. It is Colley Wilkes, super-Bantu. He and his light-colored wife, Fran, are on their way to Honey Island for the Christmas bird count. A pair of binoculars and a camera with massive telephoto lens lie on the Sunday Times between them. A tape plays Rudolf Friml. The Wilkes are dressed in sports togs. Fran sets around cater-cornered, leg tucked under her, to see me.
“You catch us on the crest of the wave,” she tells me. “We are ten feet high. Our minds are blown.”
“How’s that?”
“Tell him, Colley.”
“We found him, Tom,” says Colley portentously. “By George, we found him.”
“Who?”
“He’s alive! He’s come back! After all these years!”
“Who?”
This morning, hauling up a great unclassified beast of a fish, I thought of Christ coming again at the end of the world and how it is that in every age there is the temptation to see signs of the end and that, even knowing this, there is nevertheless some reason, what with the spirit of the new age being the spirit of watching and waiting, to believe that—
Colley’s right hand strays over the tape deck. The smooth shark skin at the back of his neck is pocked with pits that are as perfectly circular as if they had been punched out with a tiny biscuit cutter.
“Last Sunday
at 6:55 a.m.,” says Colley calmly, “exactly four miles west of Honey Island I—saw—an—ivory-billed—woodpecker.”
“Is that so?”
“No question about it.”
“That is remarkable.”
“Do you realize what this means?” Fran asks me.
“No. Yes.”
“There has not been a verified sighting of an ivorybill since nineteen-three. Think of it.”
“All right.”
“Wouldn’t that be something now,” muses Fran, breathing on her binoculars, “to turn in a regular Christmas list, you know, six chickadees, twenty pine warblers, two thousand myrtle warblers, and at the end, with photo attached: one ivory-billed woodpecker? Can’t you see the Audubon brass as they read it?”
“Yes.”
“Of course we have to find him again. Wish us luck.”
“Yes. I do.”
Colley asks politely after my family, my practice. I tell him my family is well but my practice is poor, so poor I have to moonlight with a fat clinic. At noon today, in fact, I meet with my fat ladies at the Bantu Country Club.
Fran shakes her head with an outrage tempered by her binocular-polishing. Colley pushes a button. The tape plays a Treasury of the World’s Great Music, which has the good parts of a hundred famous symphonies, ballets, and operas. Colley knows the music and, as he drives, keeps time, anticipating phrases with a duck of head, lilt of chin.
“I don’t get it, Tom,” says Fran, breathing now on the telephoto lens, which is the size of a butter plate. “Everyone knows you’re a marvelous diagnostician.”
“It’s very simple,” I reply, nodding along with the good part of Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet. “The local Bantu medical society won’t let me in, so I can’t use the hospital.”
An awkward silence follows, but fortunately the love theme soars.
“Well,” says Colley presently. “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
“That’s true.”
“These things take time, Tom,” says Fran.
“I know.”
“Rest assured, however, that some of us are working on it.”
“All right.”
The Anvil Chorus starts up. Colley beats time with soft blows of his fist on the steering wheel.
“You’ve got to remember one thing,” says Colley, socking away. “You can sometimes accomplish more by not rocking the boat.”
“I wasn’t rocking the boat. You asked me a question.”
“You’re among friends, Tom,” says Fran. “Who do you think led the fight to integrate the Bantu Audubon Society?”
“Colley.”
“Right!”
Colley lifts his chin toward me. “And who do you think fixed a hundred Christmas baskets for peckerwood children?”
“Fran.”
“Longhu6 baskets, dear,” Fran corrects him. Longhu6 is the Bantu god of the winter solstice.
“Tell me something, Tom,” says Colley quizzically-Amherstly, swaying in time to the good part of “Waltz of the Flowers” from Nutcracker. “Still working on your, ah—”
“Lapsometer? Yes indeed. Now that there is no danger of diabolical abuse, the future is bright.”
“Diab—!” He frowns, missing the beat of Nutcracker. He’s sorry he asked.
But he’s full of Christmas cheer—or triumph over the ivorybill—and presently comes back to it, as if to prove his goodwill. “Some day you’re going to put it all together,” he says, directing Barcarole with one gloved finger.
“Put all what together?”
“Your device. I’m convinced you’re on the right track in your stereotactic exploration of the motor and sensory areas of the cortex. This is where it’s at.”
“That’s not it at all,” I say, hunching forward between them. “I’m not interested in motor and sensory areas. What concerns me is angelism, bestialsm, and other perturbations of the soul.”
“The soul. Hm, yes, well—”
“Just what do you think happened here five years ago?” I ask his smooth punchcarded neck.
“Five years ago?”
“In the Troubles. What do you think caused people to go out of their minds with terror and rage and attack each other?”
Fran looks at Colley.
“The usual reasons, I suppose,” says Colley mournfully. “People resorting to violence instead of using democratic processes to resolve their differences.”
“Bullshit, Colley—beg your pardon, Fran—what about the yellow cloud?”
“Right. Well, here we are!” Colley pulls over to the curb and reaches around the headrest to open my door, which takes some doing.
“Merry Christmas,” I say absently and thank them for the ride.
“Merry Longhu6!” says Fran, smiling but firm-eyed.
5
The office is lonesome without Ellen. Usually she comes with me, but Saturday is my fat-clinic day and I only spend a couple of hours here. Ellen is taking the kids to see Santy. It is Christmas Eve and I need a bit of cash. Ten dollars wouldn’t hurt.
The solitude is pleasant, however. I open the back door opening onto the ox-lot. English sparrows have taken the martin hotel.
When I prop my foot on the drawer of Bayonne-rayon members, it reminds me of taking a drink. I close the drawer. No drink for six months. One reason is willpower. The other is that Ellen would kill me.
Across the ox-lot Mrs. Prouty comes out on the loading ramp of Sears. She smiles at me and leans against the polished steel pipe-rail.
I smile back. Most Saturdays we exchange pleasantries.
She wrote up my order for the new boots and Ellen’s Christmas present, a brass bed, king-size (60”) with non-allergenic Posture-mate mattress and serofoam polyurethane foundation, Sears Best. The whole works: $603.95.
A year’s savings went into it, mainly from my fat clinic. No Christmas present ever took more thinking about or planning for. Even the delivery required scheming. How to get a bed past a housewife? Ask housewife to take children to plaza to see Santy (Santy is as big with the Bantus as with the Christians).
Did the bed make it? I lift my head in question to Mrs. Prouty. She nods and holds up thumb to forefinger. The bed is on the way.
We’ve slept till now, Ellen and I, on single beds from my old house. A conceit of Doris’s and much prized then, they are “convent” beds, which is to say, not even proper singles, narrower and shorter rather. For thirteen years my feet have stuck out, five with Doris, three alone, five with Ellen. Nuns must have been short. White-iron, chaste, curious, half-canopied the beds were, redolent of a far-off time and therefore serviceable in Doris’s war on the ordinary, because at the time it was impossible to sleep in ORDINARY BEDS.
Did Mrs. Prouty wink at me? Across the weeds we gaze at each other, smiling. Her olive arms hug herself. A nyloned hip polishes a pipe-fitting. Mrs. Prouty is a good-looking good-humored lady. Whenever she used to see me buying a bottle next door at the Little Napoleon, she’d say: “Somebody’s going to have a party. Can I come?” Her lickerish look comes, I think, from her merry eye and her skin, which is as clear and smooth as an olive.
When I ordered the brass bed, she swung the catalogue round on its lectern, leaned on it, and tapped her pencil on the counter.
“I know where I’d spend Christmas, huh, Docky?”
“What? Oh,” I say, laughing before I take her meaning. Did she say Docky or ducky?
After I ordered the boots, she leaned on the catalogue again.
“These can go under mine any day,” she says, merry eye roving past me carelessly.
“Ma’am? Eh? Right! Har har!”
These = my boots?
Mine = her bed?
Nowadays when a good-looking woman flirts with me, however idly, I guffaw like some ruddy English lord, haw haw, har har, harrr harrr.
Three patients come. Two Bantu businessmen, one with ulcers, the other with hypertension. Their own docs did ’em no good, so they want me to make magic passes with
my machine. I oblige them, do so, take readings, hoard up data. They leave, feeling better.
The third is old P.T. Bledsoe. Even though he lost everything, including his wife, when the Bantus took Paradise and Betterbag Paper Company, he didn’t leave and go to the Outback after all. Instead, he moved out to his fishing camp and took to drinking Gallo muscatel and fishing for speckles. All he comes to me for is to get his pan-vitamin shot to keep his liver going. Out he goes rubbing his shiny butt and rattling off in his broken-down Plymouth.
Hm. Eleven dollars. Not a bad haul. My patients fork over cash, knowing I need it, five from each Bantu and one dollar from P.T., who also brings me a sack of mirlations and a fifth of Early Times. Not good. But he didn’t know I had stopped drinking.
Mrs. Prouty is still on the ramp.
Now she points to her wristwatch.
Does she mean it is almost noon and she’ll be off and why not have a little Christmas drink?
For she’s spotted the Early Times. Rising, I unshuck gift box from bottle.
Comes again the longing, the desire that has no name. Is it for Mrs. Prouty, for a drink, for both: for a party, for youth, for the good times, for dear good drinking and fighting comrades, for football-game girls in the fall with faces like flowers? Comes the longing and it has to do with being fifteen and fifty and with the winter sun striking down into a brickyard and on clapboard walls rounded off with old hard blistered paint and across a doorsill onto linoleum. Desire has a smell: of cold linoleum and gas heat and the sour piebald bark of crepe myrtle. A good-humored thirty-five-year-old lady takes the air in a back lot in a small town.