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

“You catch us on the crest of the wave,” she tells me. “We are ten feet high. Our minds are blown.”

“How’s that?”

“Tell him, Colley.”

“We found him, Tom,” says Colley portentously. “By George, we found him.”

“Who?”

“He’s alive! He’s come back! After all these years!”

“Who?”

This morning, hauling up a great unclassified beast of a fish, I thought of Christ coming again at the end of the world and how it is that in every age there is the temptation to see signs of the end and that, even knowing this, there is nevertheless some reason, what with the spirit of the new age being the spirit of watching and waiting, to believe that—

Colley’s right hand strays over the tape deck. The smooth shark skin at the back of his neck is pocked with pits that are as perfectly circular as if they had been punched out with a tiny biscuit cutter.

“Last Sunday at 6:55 a.m.,” says Colley calmly, “exactly four miles west of Honey Island I — saw — an — ivory-billed — woodpecker.”

“Is that so?”

“No question about it.”

“That is remarkable.”

“Do you realize what this means?” Fran asks me.

“No. Yes.”

“There has not been a verified sighting of an ivorybill since nineteen-three. Think of it.”

“All right.”

“Wouldn’t that be something now,” muses Fran, breathing on her binoculars, “to turn in a regular Christmas list, you know, six chickadees, twenty pine warblers, two thousand myrtle warblers, and at the end, with photo attached: one ivory-billed woodpecker? Can’t you see the Audubon brass as they read it?”

“Yes.”

“Of course we have to find him again. Wish us luck.”

“Yes. I do.”

Colley asks politely after my family, my practice. I tell him my family is well but my practice is poor, so poor I have to moonlight with a fat clinic. At noon today, in fact, I meet with my fat ladies at the Bantu Country Club.

Fran shakes her head with an outrage tempered by her binocular-polishing. Colley pushes a button. The tape plays a Treasury of the World’s Great Music, which has the good parts of a hundred famous symphonies, ballets, and operas. Colley knows the music and, as he drives, keeps time, anticipating phrases with a duck of head, lilt of chin.

“I don’t get it, Tom,” says Fran, breathing now on the telephoto lens, which is the size of a butter plate. “Everyone knows you’re a marvelous diagnostician.”

“It’s very simple,” I reply, nodding along with the good part of Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet . “The local Bantu medical society won’t let me in, so I can’t use the hospital.”

An awkward silence follows, but fortunately the love theme soars.

“Well,” says Colley presently. “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

“That’s true.”

“These things take time, Tom,” says Fran.

“I know.”

“Rest assured, however, that some of us are working on it.”

“All right.”

The Anvil Chorus starts up. Colley beats time with soft blows of his fist on the steering wheel.

“You’ve got to remember one thing,” says Colley, socking away. “You can sometimes accomplish more by not rocking the boat.”

“I wasn’t rocking the boat. You asked me a question.”

“You’re among friends, Tom,” says Fran. “Who do you think led the fight to integrate the Bantu Audubon Society?”

“Colley.”

“Right!”

Colley lifts his chin toward me. “And who do you think fixed a hundred Christmas baskets for peckerwood children?”

“Fran.”

“Longhu6 baskets, dear,” Fran corrects him. Longhu6 is the Bantu god of the winter solstice.

“Tell me something, Tom,” says Colley quizzically-Amherstly, swaying in time to the good part of “Waltz of the Flowers” from Nutcracker . “Still working on your, ah—”

“Lapsometer? Yes indeed. Now that there is no danger of diabolical abuse, the future is bright.”

“Diab—!” He frowns, missing the beat of Nutcracker . He’s sorry he asked.

But he’s full of Christmas cheer — or triumph over the ivorybill — and presently comes back to it, as if to prove his goodwill. “Some day you’re going to put it all together,” he says, directing Barcarole with one gloved finger.

“Put all what together?”

“Your device. I’m convinced you’re on the right track in your stereotactic exploration of the motor and sensory areas of the cortex. This is where it’s at.”

“That’s not it at all,” I say, hunching forward between them. “I’m not interested in motor and sensory areas. What concerns me is angelism, bestialsm, and other perturbations of the soul.”

“The soul. Hm, yes, well—”

“Just what do you think happened here five years ago?” I ask his smooth punchcarded neck.

“Five years ago?”

“In the Troubles. What do you think caused people to go out of their minds with terror and rage and attack each other?”

Fran looks at Colley.

“The usual reasons, I suppose,” says Colley mournfully. “People resorting to violence instead of using democratic processes to resolve their differences.”

“Bullshit, Colley — beg your pardon, Fran — what about the yellow cloud?”

“Right. Well, here we are!” Colley pulls over to the curb and reaches around the headrest to open my door, which takes some doing.

“Merry Christmas,” I say absently and thank them for the ride.

“Merry Longhu6!” says Fran, smiling but firm-eyed.

The office is lonesome without Ellen. Usually she comes with me, but Saturday is my fat-clinic day and I only spend a couple of hours here. Ellen is taking the kids to see Santy. It is Christmas Eve and I need a bit of cash. Ten dollars wouldn’t hurt.

The solitude is pleasant, however. I open the back door opening onto the ox-lot. English sparrows have taken the martin hotel.

When I prop my foot on the drawer of Bayonne-rayon members, it reminds me of taking a drink. I close the drawer. No drink for six months. One reason is willpower. The other is that Ellen would kill me.

Across the ox-lot Mrs. Prouty comes out on the loading ramp of Sears. She smiles at me and leans against the polished steel pipe-rail.

I smile back. Most Saturdays we exchange pleasantries.

She wrote up my order for the new boots and Ellen’s Christmas present, a brass bed, king-size (60”) with non-allergenic Posture-mate mattress and serofoam polyurethane foundation, Sears Best. The whole works: $603.95.

A year’s savings went into it, mainly from my fat clinic. No Christmas present ever took more thinking about or planning for. Even the delivery required scheming. How to get a bed past a housewife? Ask housewife to take children to plaza to see Santy (Santy is as big with the Bantus as with the Christians).

Did the bed make it? I lift my head in question to Mrs. Prouty. She nods and holds up thumb to forefinger. The bed is on the way.

We’ve slept till now, Ellen and I, on single beds from my old house. A conceit of Doris’s and much prized then, they are “convent” beds, which is to say, not even proper singles, narrower and shorter rather. For thirteen years my feet have stuck out, five with Doris, three alone, five with Ellen. Nuns must have been short. White-iron, chaste, curious, half-canopied the beds were, redolent of a far-off time and therefore serviceable in Doris’s war on the ordinary, because at the time it was impossible to sleep in ORDINARY BEDS.

Did Mrs. Prouty wink at me? Across the weeds we gaze at each other, smiling. Her olive arms hug herself. A nyloned hip polishes a pipe-fitting. Mrs. Prouty is a good-looking good-humored lady. Whenever she used to see me buying a bottle next door at the Little Napoleon, she’d say: “Somebody’s going to have a party. Can I come?” Her lickerish look comes, I think, from her merry eye and her skin, which is as clear and smooth as an olive.