Walker Percy - Lancelot

But a woman? She is your omega point. Take such a species, the human, give it a two-hour work week and a life expectancy of a hundred years and it doesn’t take a genius to see what God has in mind for man.

What hath God wrought? Hm yes.

Suddenly things became clear. The pornography of American life is not the work of evil men. No, it is the sensible work of clever men who have at last fathomed God’s design for man.

By the way, it is not true that Americans are by nature the most pornographic people on earth. The Russians and the Chinese are simply behind times, busy catching up. Ha, wait till those buggers get the forty-hour week.

THE GREAT SECRET OF LIFE

God’s secret design for man is that man’s happiness lies for men in men practicing violence upon women and that woman’s happiness lies in submitting to it.

The secret of life is violence and rape, and its gospel is pornography. The question is, Can we bear to discover the secret?

Do we have to accept the verdict of evolution, that the omega point is sexual aggression, the giving of it or the taking of it?

The Jews in the Old Testament knew the secret: that man is conceived in sin.

Then what shall we do about it?

You say we are redeemed. Look out there. Does it look like we are redeemed?

The storm? You don’t like my theology. I see. Oh, you want to know what happened that night. Yes. Well, I can tell you that quickly. It doesn’t really matter now.

When I woke, the eye had passed and the south wall slammed in with what must have been a line of tornadoes. Under the rising keening of the wind came a new sound as of a thousand diesel towboats rumbling down the river. Wind whistled through the holes of the pigeonnier like an organ loft. In a flash of lightning I saw Belle Isle. The oaks were turned inside out, white as birches, but Belle Isle stood steady and serene. I thought of the heavy old fourteen-inch attic timbers straining and creaking against their iron straps and bolts.

The woman was still there. She stood up. I noticed without much interest that she looked different. Now she looked less like an obscure relative, a voluptuous middle-aged aunt who has survived some forgotten disgrace, than — my mother! Or rather a photograph of my mother which I remember studying as a child. She gazed at me with a mild, equable, even a slightly puckish expression. The snapshot showed some V.M.I, cadets and their dates grouped around, sitting in, leaning on, a 1925 Franklin touring car. It was after graduation and a military wedding. The bride and groom are facing the photographer. She wears a loose-fitting dress which comes exactly to her kneecaps and a wide lace collar. Her hair falls to her shoulders, where it curls up. The other girls’ mouths are painted in bows but my mother’s mouth is pale. Her wide brows are unplucked. In her prankish way she is proferring an unsheathed sword (her date’s? the groom’s?) to the photographer. The sword is upright, the blade held in her hands, the hand guard making a cross. Is she doing an imitation of Joan of Arc leading her army, cross borne aloft? Whenever my mother’s friends spoke of her, they used words like “wonderful sense of humor,” the “class clown.” “imp,” and so on. She had two close friends. They called themselves the three Musketeers.

The woman stood. It was the same woman. She was saying something, her lips were moving, but in the storm I could not hear her. Her expression meant something routine and self-deprecating like: Thank you so much, but I don’t want to be a bother. She turned and tried to open the door, but it wouldn’t open. It was then she gave me the sword—

The sword? Ha ha. It was the Bowie knife.

Then she looked like my mother again, and when she gave me the Bowie knife, she picked it up from the desk and thrust it at me point first in the same insistent joking way my mother would bore her sharp fist into my ribs.

Again she tried to open the door. It must be the wind, I thought, holding it shut. But when I tried to open it. I saw that an oak limb, a thicket of leaves and branches, had blown against it.

Ah, she gave me the knife to cut the branches and free the door.

You can’t go now, I yelled above the shriek of the wind and the roar of the diesels on the river. Her shrug and nod I took to mean: Very well, I’ll stay at Belle Isle.

Very well, I’ll take you over. But then I thought of something. No, you stay here, it’s safer, there are fewer trees and it’s safer here under the levee.

Yet all the while I was doing what she asked me to do, in the obliging way, you know, that you do something when Miss So-and-So asks you to, trying to open the door, my face down and getting my shoulder into it.

I’m sorry, I said, but—

But when I stood up, she was gone. Not wanting to be a bother, she must have stepped past me.

I was standing, thinking, and looking down at the knife in my hand. It was three o’clock. There was an orange cannonade of lightning in the southern sky but you couldn’t hear the thunder. As I watched, the last bonfire blew away, a very strong symmetrical one built of heavy notched willows like a log cabin, tapering to a point, the four corners secured by thirty-foot tree trunks as straight as telephone poles. It blew away, exploded silently and slowly, the timber springing apart like a toothpick toy.

I was sitting at my desk fiddling with the knife. My head felt light and there was the feeling of freedom you have when you recover from a high fever. It is possible, one realizes, to stand up, walk in any direction, and do anything. Did the sensation have something to do with the low pressure? The barometer Margot gave me now read 27.65 inches. That’s very low, I thought, as I fiddled with the pencil. No wonder I felt queer.

Presently I got up and found a hunting coat with big side pockets and a pouch in the back for game. I put a flashlight in the side pocket. By opening the door a few inches, it was possible to use the knife as a machete and hack through the oak branch sprung against the door. How did the woman get out? The knife flashed gold in the lightning. I felt its edge. It was sharp as a razor. Who had sharpened it? I looked at the knife and put it in the game pouch of the hunting coat, the point of the blade stuck down in a comer, and tied the drawstring tight across the flat of the blade.

I stepped outside. The noise was bad but the wind was not bad until I reached the corner of the pigeonnier. Then it blew my mouth open, hollowed out my cheek, and made a sound across my mouth as if I were shouting. I fell down. Above me I could hear the organ sounds of the wind in the holes of the loft. The glazing must have blown out. After several tries at getting up, I discovered it was possible to walk by turning sideways to the wind and planting a foot forward. It was like walking down a steep mountain. Something was cutting my cheek. It must have been rain because it was not cold. My mouth blew open and again I fell down but managed to crawl into the lee of a big oak stump. I didn’t remember the stump. The keening and roaring was not a sound any more. It had turned into a lack of pressure, a vacuum, a silence. I sat in the roaring silence for a while. The stump was tall. I didn’t remember the tree. It must have been one of the oaks in the alley. It looked as if it had been sheared off fifteen feet above the ground by an artillery shell. I turned on my flashlight and looked at the sign in the tourist parking area, ADMISSION $5.00. A pine needle had blown through it. I sat for some seconds trying to understand the physics of it, how a limber pine needle can blow through a board.

The doors to the cellar were on the north lee side of the house, so it was possible to open one. I went down into the darkness, not using the flashlight at first. The two-foot brick walls were like earthworks. The storm died suddenly to a muted uproar, a long steady exhalation. But there was another sound, a creaking and groaning, like the timbers of a ship in a heavy sea. I realized it was the fourteen-by-fourteens in the attic far above.