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

The shots, three of them, came from the direction of the swamp. I was eating breakfast in my “enclosed patio.” First there was the sound of the shot heard through the glass, not close, not alarming, not even noteworthy. Undoubtedly a gunshot, though it is too early for squirrel season. Then, more or less at the same time as the second shot, the glass panel shattered. I say more or less at the same time because I did not infer a connection between the two, the shot and the glass shattering.

The third shot was lower, closer, louder. It made a hole in the glass, and in my mind the shot bore a relation to the hole. Somebody is shooting at me, I thought as I drank a warm orange drink named Tang. As I am considering this at the top of my head, something at the heart of me knew better and I found myself diving for the corner even as I ruminated. Saved by a reflex learned with the First Air Cav in the fifteen-year war in Ecuador.

The corner is a good choice, flanked as it is by two low walls of brick that support the glass panels, high enough for protection and low enough to see over if I crane up. But I don’t have to crane up. There is a fenestration in the bricks at eye level.

Here I used to tell Samantha the story of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, how the cobra got into the house by crawling through a hole in the bricks. Samantha shivered with delight and stopped up the hole with newspapers.

A description of my wife: the sort of woman who would name our daughter Samantha though there was no one in our families with this name.

A plan takes shape. Wait a few minutes, get the Smith & Wesson, leave the house by the lower “woods” door, circle the yard under cover of the sumacs, and get behind the sniper.

Is someone after my invention? By craning my head I can catch a glimpse of the box in the hall, the lovely crafted crate from Osaka Instruments. It is the first shipment of the More Qualitative-Quantitative Ontological Lapsometer, the stethoscope of the spirit, one hundred compact pocket-sized machines of brushed chrome. I’ve come a long way since my Brownie model.

I am lying on the floor drinking warm Tang to which two duck eggs have been added plus two ounces of vodka plus a dash of Tabasco.

The reason the Tang is warm is that the refrigerator doesn’t work. Nothing works. All my household motors are silent: air-conditioner, vacuum, dishwasher, dryer, automobile. Appliances and automobiles are more splendid than ever, but when they break down nobody will fix them. My car broke down at the A & P three weeks ago and nobody would come fix it so I abandoned it. Paradise is littered with the rusting hulks of splendid Pontiacs, Olds, and Chryslers that developed vapor locks and dead batteries and were abandoned. Nowadays people buy cars, drive them until they break down, abandon them and buy another. Most of my friends have switched to Toyotas, which have one moving part.

Don’t tell me the U.S.A. went down the drain because of Leftism, Knotheadism, apostasy, pornography, polarization, etcetera etcetera. All these things may have happened, but what finally tore it was that things stopped working and nobody wanted to be a repairman.

The bricks smell of old wax. After all these years particles of Pledge wax still adhere to the cindery pits that pock the glaze. Doris used to wax the bricks once a week. “Annie Mae,” she’d tell the maid, “Go Pledge the bricks.”

I polish off the Tang-plus-vodka-plus-duck-eggs-plus-Tabasco. I feel better.

Another peep through the cobra hole: nothing moves in the swamp, but there is a flash of light. A telescopic sight?

By moving back a few inches I can see the curving loess slope on which my house stands. The house next door has been abandoned, its slab cracked and reclaimed by the swamp, by creeper and anise with its star-shaped funky-smelling flower. Wild grape festoons the carport.

Honeysuckle has invaded Doris’s azaleas. A particularly malignant vine with rank racemose leaves has laid hold of her Saint Francis, who appears to be lifting his birdbath above these evil serpents. Titmice and cardinals used to drink here. Saint Francis was Doris’s favorite saint, not because he loved Christ but because he loved titmice.

The evil vine, I notice, has reached the house. A tendril pokes through the cobra hole and curls up looking for purchase.

Wait! Something moves.

But it is only a swamp bird, a gloomy purplish-green heron that flaps down out of a cypress and lights on Saint Francis’s bird-limed head. There he perches, neck drawn into his shoulders, yellow bill pointed straight up. He looks as frowsty and ill-conceived as a bird drawn by a child.

Now I’ve got my revolver, by crawling to the closet and back. The carbine is downstairs.

No sign of the sniper. Has he gone?

Directly above my head on the glass-topped coffee table are Doris’s favorite books just as she left them in the “enclosed patio.” That was before I roofed it, and the books are swollen by old rains to fat wads of pulp, but still stacked so:

Siddhartha

Atlas Shrugged

ESP and the New Spirituality

Books matter. My poor wife, Doris, was ruined by books, by books and a heathen Englishman, not by dirty books but by clean books, not by depraved books but by spiritual books. God, if you recall, did not warn his people against dirty books. He warned them against high places. My wife, who began life as a cheerful Episcopalian from Virginia, became a priestess of the high places. I loved her dearly and loved to lie with her and would and did whene’er she would allow it, but most especially in the morning, at breakfast, in the nine o’clock sunlight out here on the “enclosed patio.” But books ruined her. Beware of Episcopal women who take up with Ayn Rand and the Buddha and Dr. Rhine formerly of Duke University. A certain type of Episcopal girl has a weakness that comes on them just past youth, just as sure as Italian girls get fat. They fall prey to Gnostic pride, commence buying antiques, and develop a yearning for esoteric doctrine.

Doris stood on these black pebbles, which we brought from Mexico, and told me she was leaving me.

Samantha had been dead some months. Doris began talking of going to the Isle of Jersey or New Zealand where she hoped to recover herself, learn quiet breathing in a simple place, etcetera etcetera, perhaps in the bright shadow of a ’dobe wall or perhaps in a stone cottage under a great green fell. She wanted to leave the bad thing here and go away and make a fresh start. That was all right with me. I was ready to go. I wanted out from the bad thing too. What I didn’t know at the time was that I was for her part of the bad thing.

“I’m leaving, Tom.”

“Where are you going?”

She did not reply.

The morning sun, just beginning to slant down into the “enclosed patio,” struck the top of her yellow hair, sending off fiery aureoles like sunflares. I never got over the splendor of her person in the morning, her royal green-linen-clad self, fragrant and golden-fleshed. Her flesh was gold amorphous stuff. Though it was possible to believe that her arm had the usual layers of fat, muscle, artery, bone, these gross tissues were in her somehow transformed by her girl-chemistry, bejeweled by her double-X chromosome. Those were the days of short skirts, and she looked like long-thighed Mercury, god of morning. Her heels had wings. Her legs were long and deep-fleshed, bound laterally in the thigh by a strap of fascia that flattened the triceps. Was it her slight maleness, long-leggedness — perhaps 10 percent tunic-clad Mercury was she — that set my heart pounding over breakfast?

No, that’s foolishness. I loved her, that’s all.

“Where are you going?” I asked again, buttering the grits and watching her hair flame like the sun’s corolla.