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

The baby, as I had reason from experience to expect and had in fact prepared my bag for, suffers from dehydration. He’s dried up like a prune. The treatment is simple and the results spectacular. Slip a needle in his scalp vein and hang a bottle of glucose from a loblolly twig.

Mama watched her baby get well before her eyes, reviving like a wilted hydrangea stuck in a bucket of water. I watched Mama. Ethel is a dark, quick little Pocahontas with hairbraids, blue Keds, jean shorts, and sharp soiled knees. She’s not my type, being a certain kind of Smith girl, a thin moody Smithie who props cheek on knee, doesn’t speak to freshmen, doesn’t focus her eyes, and is prone to quick sullen decisions, leaping onto her little basketed bike and riding off without explanation.

(Hester is my type: post-Protestant, post-rebellion, post-ideology — reading Perry Mason here on a little ideological island! — reverted all the way she is, clear back to pagan innocence like a shepherd girl piping a tune on a Greek vase.)

When the sun clears the hummock, we sit on the bayou bank feeling the warmth on our backs, Ethel holding the baby, Chuck holding the infusion bottle. Hester sits cross-legged and stare-eyed, looking at nothing, smoothing her calves with her hands.

“How about that?” murmurs Chuck, as the baby’s wrinkles disappear. What a lordly youth, with a smooth simple chest, simple large golden arms and legs, the large wrists and boxy knees of a tennis player.

Now the sun, breaking through the morning fog and live oaks, strikes shafts into the tea-colored water. Mullet jump. Two orange-colored warblers fly at each other in the sunlight, claws upraised like cockerels. A swarm of gnats hangs over the water motionless and furious, like a molecule. I eat a scuppernong. It is fat and tart.

“It wouldn’t be bad to live here,” I tell Chuck.

“Why don’t you? Come and live with us.” He turns to Ethel but she gives him her hooded Smithie look.

“Where would I live?”

“Here,” says Hester. “There’s my chickee.”

Does she mean live with her or build my own chickee close by? She’s from Massachusetts or Rhode Island. For car she says c? .

“What have you got to lose, Doc?” asks Chuck.

“Well—”

The glucose bottle is empty. Ethel frowns and takes baby and bottle inside.

“Are you happy over there?”

“Happy?”

“We’re happy here.”

“Good.”

“Everyone here lives a life of perfect freedom and peace.”

“Good.”

“We help each other. We love.”

“Very good.”

“That is, all except Hester. She hasn’t found anyone she likes yet. Eh, Hester?”

“I’m not quite sure,” says Hester, not blushing.

Oh those lovely hollowed-out Holyoke vowels. Her voice is a Congregational bell.

“We’re basically religious here, Doc.”

“Good.”

“We have God every minute.”

“Good.”

“Don’t you see that I am God, you are God, that prothonotary warbler is God?”

“No.”

“We always tell the exact truth. Will you answer me honestly, Doc?”

“All right.”

“What is your life like? Are you happy?”

“No.”

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s hard to say.” For some reason I blush under Hester’s clear gaze.

“But you don’t have a good life.”

“No.”

“Then why do you live it?”

“I don’t know.”

“We have a good life here.”

“Good.”

“There’s nothing wrong with sex, Doc. You shouldn’t put it down.”

“I don’t.”

“It’s not even the most important thing.”

“It’s not?”

“With us it’s far down the list.”

“Hm.” I look at my watch. “You can take me back.”

“O.K. if I pay you later? Or do you want some Choctaw cannab?”

“No thanks. Don’t worry about it.” Some time ago Chuck lit up a calumet of Choctaw or “rabbit” cannabis and has now begun to jump a bit, feet together, kangaroo style. He passes the calumet around. Hester smokes and passes it to me.

“No thanks.”

Ethel, returning from her chickee, also refuses. “Pay the man,” she tells Chuck. “Can’t you tell he wants to be paid?”

“You’re all right, Doc,” says Chuck, jumping. “I’ve always liked you. I’ve always liked Catholics. We’ve got some liberated Catholics here.”

“I’m not a liberated Catholic.”

“What’s this about your invention?”

“Did your father tell you?” I am surprised. Perhaps Chuck and his father have patched things up.

“No. My mother. She said you passed a miracle. Have a drag, Doc?”

“No thanks.”

I tell them briefly about my lapsometer and about the new breakthrough, my ionizer that corrects electrical malfunctions. High though he’s getting, Chuck, what with his three years at M.I.T. and 800 SAT score, is digging me utterly.

“Wow, Doc! Great! Wild!” cries Chuck, jumping straight up and down like a Choctaw at the jibiya dance. “You got to stay! We’ll massage everybody on the mainland with your lapsometer and get rid of the old sad things!”

“Do you mean you can actually treat personality hangups?” asks little Brooklyn-Pocahontas Ethel.

“Well, yes.”

“Do you have it with you?”

“As a matter of fact I do.”

“Give us a reading, Doc!” says Chuck.

Even Hester shows a spark of interest.

“Treat Hester, Doc!” cries Chuck. “She’s still Springfield bourgeois. Look at her! She likes you, Doc.”

“This is the last place I’d treat anybody.”

“Why?” asks Ethel, frowning.

“Too much heavy salt hereabouts.” I pick up a chunk of dirty Confederate salt. “This stuff assays at about point oh-seven percent heavy salt. I wouldn’t dare use my ionizer.”

Chuck snaps his fingers. “You mean sub-chain reaction? Silent implosion? Whssssk?”

“Yes.”

“Wowee! Hot damn!” Now Chuck is jumping like a pogo.

“But you could do the diagnostic part?’ asks Hester in her lovely hollow-throat voice.

“Yes.”

“Do one on me,” says Ethel.

“Doc, tell me the truth now,” says Chuck, capering and jerking his elbows.

“All right.”

“Are you telling me that with that thing you can actually register the knotheadedness of the Knotheads, the nutty objectivity of the scientists, and the mad spasms of the liberals?”

“That’s an odd way of putting it, but yes.”

“And you’re also telling me that you can treat ’em, fry ’em with your ray and make ’em human?”

“With the same qualification, yes.”

“And you’re also telling me that something is afoot with all those nuts over yonder and that today on the glorious Fourth of July something is going to happen and they’re all going to do each other in?”

“Well, not quite but—”

“And finally you’re saying that some of your gadgets have fallen into the wrong hands and there’s a chance the whole swamp might go up in a Heavy-Sodium reaction?”

“Yes.”

“Wow! Whee! Hot damn!” Off he goes in his goat dance.

“Will you sit down, you idiot,” says Ethel crossly. “What’s got into you?”

“It’s so funny . And Doc here. Doc, man you the wildest of all. Doc, you got to stay here with us. Who’s going to believe all that great wild stuff over there?”

“You don’t believe me?”

“Believe? Sure. Because you’re putting down on all of them, including the scientists.”

“I’m a scientist.”

“You’re better. You’re a shaman. The scientists have blown it.”

“Still and all, scientists are after the truth.”

“I believe you,” says Hester suddenly, clear post-Puritan Holyoke eyes full on me.