Walker Percy - Love in the Ruins - The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World

“You were included. All of us here are hypocritical sons of bitches.”

“I see.”

“He told me he knew for a fact that niggers come up from the swamp at night and eat soybean meal off the greens. Now you know that’s a lie.”

“Well, I’ve never heard—”

“In the first place, we haven’t used soybean meal since last summer. Tifton 451 doesn’t need it. As a matter of fact, I’ve got a whole barnful left over I’ve got to get rid of.”

“I see.”

I shook the paperweight again and in the end succeeded in getting Charley to tell me about his first tour when he had to borrow a hundred dollars to qualify at Fort Worth because Ramona had spent their last money on Sears sport clothes for him so he wouldn’t look like a caddy. But he was a caddy and wore sneakers instead of spiked shoes.

He told me about placing at Augusta. His deep pineal reading got up to 6 mmv.

“Doc, have you ever played thirty-six holes on three Baby Ruths?”

“No.”

“Do you think I’m a hypocritical son of a bitch?”

“No.”

“What do you think I am?”

What do I think? The mystery of evil is the mystery of limited goodness. Charley is a good man. Then how did things turn out so badly? What went wrong? I gave the paperweight a shake and sent snow swirling around Lookout Mountain.

Charley wanted to talk about whether the niggers were starving or not, etcetera, but what interested me and where my duty lay was with Charley. I saw how his life was and what he needed. Charley was a tinkerer, like GM’s famous Charley Kettering, a fellow who has to have one idea to worry with twenty-four hours a day. Without it he’s blown up. Charley’s the sort of fellow who retires to Florida hale and hearty and perishes in six months.

Here’s what happened.

Some months later I made my second breakthrough and added the ionizer to my lapsometer. I was able to treat an area as well as “listen” to it. It worked. Accordingly, a few days ago — when was it? a day? two days? dear Lord, how much has happened — I gave him a pineal massage and he came to himself, his old self, and began to have one idea after another. One idea: an electronic unlosable golf ball that sends signals from the deepest rough. Another: a “golfarama,” a mystical idea of combining a week of golf on a Caribbean island with the Greatest Pro of Them All — a week of revivals conducted by a member of the old Billy Graham team, the same revivalist, incidentally, who is in Paradise this weekend.

The interstate swelters in the sun.

My eyes are almost swelled shut, breath whistles in my throat, but my heart is full of love. Love of what? Women. Which women? All women. The first night I ever spent on the acute ward, a madman looked at me and said, not knowing me from Adam: “You want to know your trouble? You don’t love God, you love pussy.”

It might be true. Madmen like possessed men usually tell the truth. At any rate, through a crack of daylight I catch sight of a face, a blurred oval in the window of room 203. Lola.

The question is: if worst comes to worst, what is the prospect of a new life in a new dead world with Lola Rhoades, to say nothing of Moira Schaffner and Ellen Oglethorpe? Late summer and fall lie ahead, but will they be full of ghosts? That was the trouble with long summer evenings and the sparkling days of fall, they were haunted. What broke the heart was the cicadas starting up in the sycamores in October. Everyone was happy but our hearts broke with happiness. The golf links canceled themselves. Happy children grew up with haunted expressions and ran away. No more of that. Vines sprout in the plaza now. Fletcher Christian began a new life with three wives on faraway Pitcairn, green as green and unhaunted by old Western ghosts. I shall be happy with my three girls. Only Ellen, a Presbyterian, may make trouble.

Late last night a love couple crept up out of the swamp and appeared in my “enclosed patio.” This often happens. Even though I am a psychiatrist, denizens of the swamp appear at all hours suffering from malaria, dengue, flukes, bummers, hepatitis, and simple starvation. Nobody else will treat them.

I saw them from my bedroom window. It was three o’clock. I had been reading my usual late-night fare, Stedmann’s History of World War I . For weeks now I’ve been on the Battle of Verdun, which killed half a million men, lasted a year, and left the battle lines unchanged. Here began the hemorrhage and death by suicide of the old Western world: white Christian Caucasian Europeans, sentimental music-loving Germans and rational clear-minded Frenchmen, slaughtering each other without passion. “The men in the trenches did not hate each other,” wrote Stedmann. “As for the generals, they respected or contemned each other precisely as colleagues in the same profession.”

Comes a tap at the door. Is it guerrilla, drughead, Ku Kluxer, Choctaw, or love couple?

Love couple.

What seems to be the trouble? It seems their child, a love child, is very sick. I know you’re not a pediatrician but the other doctors won’t come, etcetera. Will I come? O.K.

Grab my bag, and down through the azaleas and into a pirogue, I squatting amidships, boy and girl paddling as expertly as Cajuns. A sinking yellow moon shatters in the ripples.

They speak freely of themselves. He’s a tousled blond lad with a splendid fan-shaped beard like Jeb Stuart (I can tell he’s from these parts by the way he says fo’teen for fourteen, Bugaloosa for Bogalusa ), gold-haired, gray-jeaned, bare-chested and — footed. She’s a dark little Pocahontas from Brooklyn (I judge, for she speaks of hang-gups ). They’ve given up city, home, family, career, religion, to live a perfect life of love and peace with a dozen others on a hummock with nothing else for a shelter in the beginning than an abandoned Confederate salt mine. There they’ve revived a few of the pleasanter Choctaw customs such as building chickees and smoking rabbit cannab, a variety of Cannabis indica that grows wild in the swamp.

“You don’t remember me, Dr. More.” The boy speaks behind me.

“No.”

“I’m Chuck.”

“Chuck?”

“Chuck Parker.”

“Yes of course. I know your father very well.”

“My poor father.”

How is it that children can be more beautiful than the sum of their parents’ beauty? Ramona is a stork-legged, high-hipped, lacquer-headed garden-clubber from Spartanburg. Charley is a pocked-nosed, beat-up, mashed-down Gene Sarazen. And here is golden-haired golden-limbed Chuck looking like Phoebus Apollo or Sir Lancelot in hip-huggers.

When we reach the hummock, the sky in the east has turned sickly and tentative with dawn.

They’re camping near the mouth of old Empire Number Two, the salt mine that supplied Dick Taylor during the Red River campaign. Except for an ember or two there is no sign of the others. In a swale spring with cypress needles Chuck has built a chickee of loblolly chinked with blue bayou clay.

As we enter the chickee, fragrant with bayberry smoke, a tall brown-haired girl rises and closes a book on her finger, for all the world like a baby-sitter in Paradise when the folks come home — except that her reading light is a candle made from wax myrtle and bayberries. Chuck stops her and introduces us. Her name is Hester. Instead of leaving, she squats cross-legged on the cypress needles.

Afterwards Chuck tells me in her hearing, “Hester has her own chickee.”

“Is that so,” I answer, scratching my head.

I take a look at Hester’s book, still closed on her finger. A good way to size up people. It is not what you might think, Oriental or revolutionary. It is, of all things under the sun, Erle Stanley Gardner’s first novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws .