Walker Percy - The Last Gentleman

“That certainly is interesting,” said the engineer, who was now leaving, actually setting a foot toward the camper. He had done his duty and was ready to be on his way. He had a fix on her at last. She struck him as an enthusiast of a certain sort who becomes wry as a countermeasure to her own outlandishness, like a collector of 1928 Model-T radiator caps who exhibits his trophies with a wry, rueful deprecation of their very oddness. He understood this. And was it not also the case that her offhandedness was a tactic and that she had her hooks out for him? He didn’t mind if she had, and was even prepared to put on a thoughtful expression, as much as to say: you do give me pause, Sister; that is something to think about. But he was ready to go.

He was not to escape so easily. Changing her manner completely, she became cordial and brisk and took him on the “ten-dollar tour” of her foundation. For some fifty minutes he was towed helplessly around the outbuildings scattered through the cancerous pines. More than ever, it reminded him of a lunar installation, with silvery globes supplying nourishment to each building, a place of crude and makeshift beginnings on some blasted planet. Later there remained in his poor addled memory only a blurred impression of Seven-Up machines, plastic crucifixes, and worn, gnawed-at woodwork such as is found in old gymnasiums. Life indeed, thought he. Another hour in this gloomy cancerous wood and I’d be laid out stiff as a corpse, feet sticking up.

But she would not let him go, and when for the second or third time she led him past the wooden privies and the last time opened the door of one so that he might catch a whiff of the acuteness of the need, he got the idea. With trembling fingers he thrust hand into pocket and brought forth a disorderly clutch of bills, leaving him, as he discovered later, $1.36 in silver. “A small donation for your building fund,” he murmured, blushing.

“I’ll pray for you,” she said absently. “Will you pray for me to receive sufficient grace in order not to hate the guts of some people, however much they deserve it?”

“Certainly,” said the engineer heartily, who would have consented to anything.

She took the money with only perfunctory gratitude and, slipping it skillfully into a black-leather pouch she wore at her belt, lapsed instantly into her old smiling thrumming. Papal inwardness, wherein she dispensed herself so that she might take note of God’s creatures, small objects, and such. She went back to the hawk and he left.

Down flew the Trav-L-Aire into the setting sun, down and out of the last of the ancient and impoverished South of red hills and Cardui signs and God-is-Love crosses. Down through humpy sugarloaves and loess cliffs sliced through like poundcake. Dead trees shrouded in kudzu vines reared up like old women. Down and out at last and onto the vast prodigal plain of the Delta, stretching away misty and fecund into the October haze. The land hummed and simmered in its own richness. Picking was still going on, great $25,000 McCormicks and Farmalls browsing up and down the cotton rows. Bugs zoomed and splashed amber against the windshield; the Trav-L-Aire pushed like a boat through the heavy air and the rich protein smells, now the sweet ferment of alfalfa, now the smell of cottonseed meal rich as ham in the kitchen. There had been the sense ever since leaving New York and never quite realized until now of tarrying in upland places and along intermediate slopes and way stations (My Lord, where had he stopped? Where had he spent the last month? He cudgeled his brain.) and now at last of coming sock down to the ultimate alluvial floor, the black teeming Ur-plain. He stopped the Trav-L-Aire and got out. Buzzards circled, leaning into the heavy mothering air, three, four tiers of buzzards riding round a mile-high chimney of air. A shrike, the Negro’s ghost bird, sat on a telephone wire and looked at him through its black mask. It was a heedless prodigal land, the ditches rank and befouled, weeds growing through the junk: old Maytags, Coke machines, and a Hudson Supersix pushed off into a turnrow and sprouting a crop all its own. But across the ditches and over the turnrows — here they got down to business — stretched the furrows of sifted mealy earth clean as a Japanese garden but forty miles long and going away, straight as a ruler, into the smoky distance. The cotton leaves were a dusky gray-green, as dusky as new money. Cotton wagons were on the road and the gins were humming. The little towns were squalid and rich. From the storefronts, tin roofs sagged across the sidewalk to the muddy Cadillacs. Across the road from a decaying mustard-colored I.C. depot stretched a line of great glittering harvesters and pickers parked in echelon like a squadron of Sherman tanks.

Straight across the Delta he flew and down into the tongue of the Yazoo plain to Ithaca, so named by a Virginian who admired Pericles more than Abraham and who had had his fill of the Bethels and the Shilohs of the Scotch-Irish. Yonder in the haze rose the brownish back of the Chickasaw Bluffs, and just beyond, the old wormy concrete towers of the Vicksburg battlefield.

When he stopped at Roscoe’s Servicenter, Roscoe spoke as if he had never been away.

“What you say there, Will? — ” holding nozzle to spout and all the while taking in the Trav-L-Aire, acknowledging it with a quirk of his mouth but not willing to make a fuss over it or even to speak of it directly.

“All right. What you say, Roscoe?”

“You been camping or going?”

“Camping? Oh, I’m going.”

“Do you know those niggers over there?”

“Who? No.”

“They seem to know you.”

Beyond the pumps sat a bottle-green Chevrolet, a stout old Bel Aire two-door, round as a turtle and filled with Negroes and what appeared to be a couple of Syrians. Sure enough the driver, a stately bun-headed preacher-type Negro seemed to be making signs and grimaces at him. The courteous engineer, the last man on earth to inflict a snub, nodded and smiled in turn even though he didn’t know them from Adam. Or did he? Ah, the dread tug of the past not quite remembered! Then, even as he nodded, an aching vista opened in his head and he remembered — not them but Kitty! The green Chevrolet sent his mind spinning back but there stood Kitty like a lion in the path. God in heaven, he groaned, I’ve left Kitty. Dear Jesus, he said, and began to slap his pocket again. The check for $100,000—I’ve lost it. Yet even as he groaned he was giving a final cheery nod and now he gunned the Trav-L-Aire out into traffic. Oh, my lovely strapping wealthy Chi O ’Bama bride, he thought, and gave his leaping knee a few hard socks. I must call her immediately.

But after half a dozen blocks he noticed that the green Chevrolet had drawn abreast of him on the left, the passengers on the front seat pressing back to clear a view for the driver, who was motioning frantically. “Barrett!” The Chevrolet began to yaw like a tender on the high seas. He still can’t drive, thought the engineer, even though he did not yet know that he knew the pseudo-Negro. At the same moment he caught sight of a commotion in front of the new courthouse. Pickets bearing signs were marching on one side of the street and a crowd watched from the other. Troopers directed traffic with electric batons. Somewhere to his rear, a siren growled. Having had enough of ruckuses and police sirens and especially of this particular carload of importuning Negroes, he swung the Trav-L-Aire without slowing into a lane between Club 85 and Krystal Hamburgers. The cabin swayed dangerously, dishpans clattering into the sink. The lane was a segment of the abandoned river road which turned at this very point into the lee of the levee. Not hesitating a second, the sturdy G.M.C. swarmed straight up and over the levee out onto the batture and dove into a towhead of willows.