Walker Percy - The Thanatos Syndrome

It is dusk dark. In the west a red light, probably atop the Grand Mer cooling tower, blinks in the mauve sky.

When I finish, Lucy stops rocking and watches me for a long time, fingers on her lips. She puts her hand lightly on my arm.

“I’ll tell you what. Here’s what we’re going to do. Let’s go have supper. I brought some Popeyes fried chicken and Carrie cooked us some of her own greens. Then I want to show you something upstairs. What do you say?”

“Yes, certainly.”

“By the way.”

“Yes?”

“Do you know what Blue Boy means?”

“Blue Boy? No.”

“I heard someone at the Fedville hospital talking to Van Dorn about Blue Boy. I wasn’t supposed to hear. He looked annoyed.”

We finish our toddies and go inside. The old house is dim and cool. There is a smell in the hall as wrenching as memory, of last winter, a hundred winters, wet dogs, Octagon soap, scoured wood. The weak light in the crystal chandelier is lost in the darkness above. The uncle appears from nowhere, flanking us, slides back the twelve-foot-high doors. Light winks on the silver inset handles polished by two hundred years of use.

“Is it true, Uncle,” I ask him, “that all the hardware of the doors, even the hinges, are silver?”

“That’s true. The Yankees were too dumb to notice. They stole everything else, but missed the silver. You see those handles?”

“Yes.”

“Not a white hand touched those handles until the war.”

“Is that so?”

“That’s so. All you had to do was walk to a door and it would open; go through and it would close.”

“Is that right?”

“The people around here were thick as fleas.”

Lucy makes a sound in her throat.

“You can’t hardly get one of them to do anything these days,” says the uncle.

We eat at one end of the long table in the dark dining room, taking fried chicken from the Popeyes bags. There is a pitcher of buttermilk, cornbread, and a tub of unsalted butter. The greens are thick and tender and strong as meat. The one light bulb winks red and violet in the beveled crystal of the chandelier. Dark paintings the size of a barn door are propped against the walls. They seem to be landscapes and bonneted French ladies swinging in a formal garden. They’ve been propped there since the war, too heavy to hang from the weakened molding. They must have been too big for the Yankees to steal.

I ask the uncle about different duck calls. Lucy makes a sound in her throat. He begins to tell me, but she interrupts him.

“You can have Dupre’s room,” says Lucy. “I cleaned all his stuff out.”

“Fine.”

“He had his own room here his last year here,” she adds without looking at me.

“I see.”

“Do you know who slept in that room?” asks the uncle.

“No.”

“General Earl Van Dorn.”

“Is that right?”

“That’s right. You knew he was from Mississippi — right up the river. One of our people. You know what he did, don’t you?”

“What?”

“After those frogs in New Orleans and those coonasses in Baton Rouge gave up without a fight, the Yankees occupied this place. Beast Butler made his headquarters right here. Buck Van Dorn came in with the Second Cavalry from Texas and ran them off. He stayed here until they ordered him to Arkansas. He slept in that room. He was a fighting fool and the women were crazy about him. Miss Bett’s grandma, the one they called Aunt Bett, like to have run off with him.”

“That’s a lot of foolishness,” says Lucy absently. “Come on upstairs, I have something to show you,” says Lucy, and leaves abruptly.

But the uncle leans close and won’t let me go.

“You know what they’re always saying about war being hell?” he asks.

“Yes.”

He leans closer. “That’s a lot of horseshit.”

“Is that right?”

“Let me tell you something. I never had a better time in my life than in World War Two. When I was at Fort Benning I lived for six months in a trailer with the sweetest little woman in south Georgia. She was an armful of heaven. When I was at Fort Sill, I had two women, one a full-blooded Indian, a real wildcat. She like to have clawed me to death. Do you know who were the finest soldiers in the history of warfare?”

“No.”

“The Roman legionnaire, the Confederate, and the German. I read up on it. The Germans were like us. They beat the shit out of us at Kasserine. Don’t tell me, I was there. We shouldn’t have been fighting them. Patton gave me a field commission. I made colonel by the time we got to Trier. When I was at Trier I lived with a German girl for three weeks. They were putting out for anything you’d give them, but she was crazy about me. A fine woman! But Patton was a fighting fool. We whipped the Germans in the end, but it was because they’d rather us than the Russians. Patton took seven hundred thousand prisoners. I was in the 3d Armored Division of the Third Army. He wanted to take Berlin and Prague and drive to the Oder — the Germans would have helped us — but Roosevelt wouldn’t turn us loose. That son of a bitch Patton was a fighting fool. We could have gone to the Volga.”

“Tom!” Lucy calls angrily from the dim hall.

“If Roosevelt hadn’t stopped us, we’d have gone to the Volga and wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in now. We were fighting the wrong people.”

“Tom!”

Lucy takes me upstairs.

“How much of that was true?” I ask her.

“What? Oh, God, I don’t know. Very little. I stopped listening ten years ago. He made himself a colonel last year. But if I have to listen to that damn duck call another day, and then about Rommel and Patton and Buck Van Dorn another night, I’m going to shoot him. I’m so glad you’re here! Do you know what he’s done in the fifty years since that war?”

“No.”

“Nothing. I mean nothing. But shoot birds and animals and blow that duck call. The only thing he’s learned in fifty years is how to do it with your fingers.”

Upstairs in the hall Lucy hands me a pair of folded blue jeans, a light flannel L. L. Bean shirt, and pajamas. They’re new. The pajamas are still pinned.

“I got these for Uncle Hugh, but they’re too big.” For some reason she blushes.

“Thank you.”

“Get out of that smelly suit,” she says brusquely, gives the lapel a yank. “I’m going to burn it.”

There are four rooms upstairs and a wide hall, arranged exactly as below.

“You stay in here. Did you bring anything?”

“No.”

“I thought so. Tch.” She seizes my coat again between thumb and forefinger, gives it a hard tweak, brushes it back like somebody’s mamma. “Look at you. You look like a jailbird. Thin as a rake. I’ll fatten you up.” She begins to close the door. “You knock on my door right there in exactly fifteen minutes. That’s my office.”

“All right.”

The door closes. The room is empty of everything but a bed and an armoire, which is empty. Buddy Dupre has been cleaned out, all right.

I take a shower and put on my new jeans and Bean shirt. In exactly fifteen minutes I knock on her door. “Come in!” comes her cool hospital voice.

I blink at the fluorescent light. The room could be an office in Fedville. There are desks, data processors, terminals, keyboards, screens, cables, shelves of medical texts and journals, cabinets of discs and cassettes, the whole as brilliantly lit as a laboratory.

We sit side by side at a large particle-board table bare except for a keyboard, screen, black box, telephone.

“How do you like it?”

“It looks expensive.”

“It is, but it’s mostly federal equipment. As their epidemiologist I rate a terminal.”

“Does that mean you’re hooked up to—”