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

“Tom,” says Mother, lowering her voice and rolling her eyes. “I feel that something is about to happen. They are going to do something.”

“I have the same feeling,” I say, watching her curiously. “But what’s your reason for thinking so?” Whenever Mother lowers her voice and rolls her eyes, it means she’s going to talk about them , Negroes.

“I’ve seen them,” Mother whispers, “riding around, looking.”

“Who, the Bantus or the locals?”

“Both. But that’s not the main thing.”

“What’s the main thing?”

“Last Sunday I saw a black cloud with something coiling in it hovering over the Infant Jesus of Prague.”

“You took that to be a sign something is going to happen here soon?”

“Haven’t I always been proved right in the past?”

“What was the ‘something coiling’?”

“Entrails. Which is a sign of the Bantus. They divine and foretell by examining entrails. You think I’m ridiculous.”

“I think you’re right about something happening.”

Mother has a reputation hereabouts as a seer and prophetess. What she is is a Catholic gnostic. Though she believes in God, she also relies on her crystal ball — she actually has a crystal ball, which she looks into — and her gift for seeing signs and divining hidden meanings. But she is quite brisk about it, puts on no psychic airs, has no truck with séances and such. Her clairvoyant powers have rather to do with business and politics. She will not close a deal with a Leo in May. Most of her visions and dreams are about plots of the Lefts against the Knotheads. She predicted four out of the last five assassinations.

“Don’t ask me how it happens!” she chides her admirers. “All I know is it does. Why, I would no more sell a Capricorn to a Cancer than fly to the moon. Because I know what happens when I do. I not only lose the sale but also the deposit.” She is referring to the astrology of the vendor and vendee. “And I also know, without knowing how it happens, that when I’m saying the third decade of the rosary on the third day of a novena and when I come to the third bead, I’m going to see something. Don’t ask me why!” she cries, laughing at herself.

When she says see, she means it. Last year she saw a vision of a dragon fighting a bear over the statue of the Infant Jesus of Prague, to be specific: over the little globe the Infant Jesus held. War between Russia and China broke out the next week.

Her fame is spreading. “Marva, it’s a gift from God,” her friends tell her. “Why don’t you share it with the world?” But she laughs it off.

She doesn’t even interpret her visions, leaving that to others. But the meanings are clear to her friends and they usually have political overtones, auguring ill for conservatives and good for liberals. On the eve of the last national election, for example, she came to the third bead of the third decade of her rosary and she saw Old Glory, the Stars and Stripes, slowly sinking into the waters of the Great Salt Lake. Her friends understood. The new President is an integrationist Mormon from Salt Lake City.

It is only after breakfast that Mother gets around to telling me that I received a telephone call earlier. She makes a face. She disapproves of the caller.

“He said for you to come see him. He said it was urgent. I deliver the message without comment.”

“Who, Mother?”

“Your friend, the Roman priest.”

“Roman?”

“ Father Smith,” she says, accenting Father sarcastically.

“What did he want?”

“He wouldn’t tell me. Only that you were to come to see him.”

“Where?”

“You’d never imagine.”

“Well?”

“He said he’d be down in the Slave Quarters. Now wouldn’t you know it?”

“Know what?”

“That that’s where he’d end up.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know,” says my mother, pushing her hand deep into her waist and arching her back. “I think he’s in with them.”

“Who?” I ask. “You mean the guerrillas?”

“So I told him in my sweetest voice that you were coming over here and going to church with me. I just dared him to say there was anything wrong with our mass.”

“You used to like him.” She did. He was a favorite with the ladies. He had a courtly manner, used to look like Ricardo Montalban playing a lithe priest and saying things like “Do not worry about the bell, my children. God will provide the bell, you will see,” etcetera. “What have you got against him now?” I ask Mother.

“He who is not with you is against you,” says Mother darkly. Her eyes glitter. She’s a bad enemy.

“Yes. Well — hm.” I shiver in the sunlight. I notice that the vines are encroaching. A tendril has twined about Mother’s antique wrought-iron Singer table.

Before we go to church, Dr. Dusty Rhoades hops the hedge. Eukie pours him a cup of coffee.

Dusty and Mother hit it off very well, I notice. Dusty winks at me and feels my bones. Then he’s got nothing against me. They both kid me.

“Marva,” says Dusty to Mother, but at the same time exploring my shoulder with his big freckled hand. “Do you think Tom’s going to invite us white trash up to the big house?” Now he’s gazing at Tara with his fond filmed-over eyes.

“Eh? What’s that?” I ask.

“He better, the scamp!” cries Mother.

“What big house?” I ask them. They both laugh merrily. I find that I am grinning too.

But Dusty goes suddenly serious. He shakes his big lion head slowly.

“You know I’m leaving for Texas in a week. And I feel bad about leaving Lola over there alone. Do you know we haven’t had a servant for a week? You don’t know how lucky you are to have your little nigger.”

Mother rolls her eyes and raises her finger to her lips. “Eukie is a treasure.”

Eukie is worthless, but that is not what bothers me.

“Guess who is going to look after my little Lola when I leave,” says Dusty past me. He and Mother are exchanging all manner of glances over my head.

“I wish the child would move in with me.” Again a regular semaphore of eye messages.

“She’s not about to leave Tara,” muses Dusty. “She says her roots are there.”

“You should have seen her over there this morning, feeding her horses, planting greens—”

“Where is Lola now?” I ask them.

“You’ll see her this afternoon at the fish fry, it’s all settled,” says Mother. “But you should have seen her, standing there in that old garden, her hands potty black, her face glowing. She never looked prettier or more determined.”

“I still don’t like to leave her there alone,” says Dusty, wagging his head.

“Do you remember what Scarlett said about the land?” asks Mother. “Or was it in The Good Earth ?”

“Yes,” says Dusty, popping his great jaw muscles.

Mother squeezes my hand. “We’re making a foursome this evening, Tommy,” she says in a strange soft voice, a rushing low-pitched thrilling voice, the sort women use on solemn occasions, funerals and weddings. “You and I and Dusty and Lola.”

Hm. Is something cooking between Mother and Dusty? And are they cooking up something between me and Lola? Warning signals flash in my brain. Look out! They’re making a match. And yet And yet, despite all, love kindles. Lola is a lovely girl after all. And a brave girl. And what lovely sounds the Guarnerius makes clasped between her lovely knees. There are worse lives, after all, than sitting on the gallery of Tara and … I look at Tara, a preposterous fake house on a fake hill: even the hill is fake, dredged up from the swamp by the state of Louisiana for Vince Marsaglia. The very preposterousness of life in Tara with Lola inflames me with love. — Yes, sitting on the gallery sipping Early Times while Lola plants greens or plays Don Quixote or we hold hands, her cello-callused fingers whispering in my palm. Lovely Lola.