Walker Percy - The Last Gentleman

“How long does Jamie have?”

“Eh? To live— Oh, Rita said months, four months I think she said. But I think longer. Actually he is much better.”

“Jamie tells me you and he are good friends.” Her gaze was still fixed on the tiny amber eye of the towhee, which crouched with its head cocked, paralyzed.

“Yes.”

“He says that you and he may go somewhere together.”

“Jamie changes his mind about that. He was talking earlier about living with Sutter or going down to stay with you.”

“Well, now he wants to go somewhere with you.”

“Do you mean, leave school?”

“Yes.”

“He knows I’m ready to go any time.” Presently he added: “I can understand him wanting to go away.”

“Yes. That was what I want to speak to you about.”

He waited.

“Mr. Barrett—”

“Yes ma’am.”

“It may well happen that it will be you and not one of us who will be with Jamie during the last days of his life and even at his death.”

“I suppose that is true,” said the engineer, taking note of a warning tingle between his shoulder blades.

“Everyone thinks very highly of you — though for strangely diverse, even contradictory reasons. I can’t help noticing. You are evidently quite a fellow. That’s hardly surprising, considering whose son you are.”

“Ah—” began the engineer, frowning and scratching his head.

“Though I can’t say that I agree with your father on his reasons for treating Negroes well rather than beating them up, still I’d rather that he’d won over the current scoundrels even if he’d won for the wrong reasons.”

“Perhaps,” said the engineer uneasily, not wanting to discuss either his father’s “reasons” or her even more exotic reasons.

“But in any case I too can perceive that you are a complex and prescient young man.”

“I certainly appreciate—” began the engineer gloomily.

“Clearly you would do right by Jamie even if you had no affection for him, which I have reason to believe you do have.”

“Yes,” said the other warily. It was still impossible to get a fix on her. He had known very few Catholics and no nuns at all.

“Mr. Barrett, I don’t want Jamie to die an unprovided death.”

“Unprovided?”

“I don’t want him to die without knowing why he came here, what he is doing here, and why he is leaving.”

“Ma’am?” The engineer felt like wringing out his ear but he did not.

“It may fall to you to tell him.”

“Tell him what?”

“About the economy of salvation.”

“Why don’t you tell him?” He was watching her as intently as the towhee watched her. There was no telling what she might do.

She sighed and sat down. The towhee, released from its spell, flew away. “I have told him.”

The engineer, though standing erect, began to lean about five degrees away from her.

“It is curious, Mr. Barrett, but what I told him was absolutely the last thing on earth he would listen to. It was not simply one of a great number of things he might have listened to more or less indifferently. It was, of all things, absolutely the last thing. Doesn’t that strike you as strange?”

“I couldn’t say. But if you can’t tell him what you believe, you his sister, how do you expect me to tell him what I don’t believe?”

But she was at it again, her trick of engaging him then slipping away. “They didn’t ride in carts the last time I was here,” she said, gazing past him at the golfers. Do all nuns banter about salvation? “And yet, there he was, reading all that guff with relish.”

“What guff?”

“That book about radio noise from the galaxies, noise which might not be noise. Did you give it to him?”

“No.”

She ignored his irritation. “I’ve noticed,” she said gloomily and not especially to him, “that it is usually a bad sign when dying people become interested in communication with other worlds, and especially when they become spiritual in a certain sense.”

“Don’t you believe in other worlds and, ah, spirits?”

“It is strange, but I’ve always distrusted so-called spiritual people,” she muttered, mostly ruminating with herself. “You know how women talk about such and such a priest being spiritual?”

“No.” How could he know any such thing?

“I always steer clear of those birds. But no, actually I owe spiritual people, ladies, a great deal — they’re very generous with me when I beg from them. It’s a strange business, isn’t it? The most unlikely people are generous. Last week I persuaded the local Klonsul of the Klan to give us a Seven-Up machine. Do you think it is possible to come to Christ through ordinary dislike before discovering the love of Christ? Can dislike be a sign?”

“I couldn’t say,” said the sleepy engineer.

She brought herself up and looked at him for the first time. “Mr. Barrett, Jamie’s salvation may be up to you.”

“Eh? Excuse me, but apart from the circumstance that I do not know what the word ‘salvation’ means, I would refuse in any case to accept any such commission, Miss, ah—, that is, Sister—”

“Val.”

“Sister Val.”

“No,” she said laughing. “Just Val. I am Sister Johnette Mary Vianney.”

“Is that right?”

His refusal, he noticed, was delivered with a tingle of pleasure, both perverse and familiar. Familiar because — yes, he remembered his father refusing a priest and taking some satisfaction in it even though he, his father, took the Catholics’ side in their troubles with the Klan. “Mr. Barrett,” the priest asked him with the same jolly gall, “I don’t think you realized it but you just fired one of my parishioners, heh-heh, and I want to ask you if you will take her back. She has a family and no husband—” “And who could that be,” said his father, his voice ominously civil. “Souella Johnson.” Souella Johnson, who, being not merely a winehead but, failing to find Gallo sherry in the house, had polished off as a poor substitute some six cases of twenty-year-old bourbon over the years. “I will not, sir,” said his father and bang, down went the telephone.

“I will not,” he told Val with the same species of satisfaction. Perhaps we are true Protestants despite ourselves, he mused, or perhaps it is just that the protest is all that is left of it. For it is in stern protest against Catholic monkey business that we feel ourselves most ourselves. But was her request true Catholic gall, the real article, or was it something she had hit upon through a complicated Vaught dialectic? Or did she love her brother?

He read in her eyes that he looked odd. “What is it?” she asked him smiling. For a split second he saw in her his Kitty, saw it in her lip-curling bold-eyed expression. It was as if his Kitty, his golden girl of summertime and old Carolina, had come back from prison where she had got fat and white as white and bad-complexioned.

“What?” she asked again.

“I was wondering,” said the engineer, who always told the truth, “how you manage to come to the point where you feel free to make requests of people.”

She laughed again. “Jamie was right. You’re a good companion. Well, I can ask you, can’t I?”

“Sure.”

“It’s like the story about the boy who got slapped by quite a few girls but who — well. But it’s extraordinary how you can ask the most unlikely people — you can ask them straight out: say, look, I can see you’re unhappy; why don’t you stop stealing or abusing Negroes, go confess your sins and receive the body and blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ — and how often they will just look startled and go ahead and do it. One reason is that people seldom ask other people to do anything.”