Walker Percy: The Second Coming

My own memory as I write this is far from perfect. There are, however, a few things of recent memory that you will need to know when you read this.

One thing in particular is important. You will have to know it to know what to do next. Do you remember Miss Sally Kemp? Aunt Sally?

No. Yes.

She died. I found out this morning, a week before you read this.

She left you her estate, which is much larger than anyone expected. In her will she said I was nice to her. This meant that I listened to her. Nobody else did. This is true. I, you, always listen closely to people.

It, the estate, is some money (I don’t know how much), an island off the Georgia coast, and a piece of land with an old house on it, I think, near Linwood. Do you remember her joking about her island which was nothing but a sandspit and three pine trees and worthless unless the treasure Captain Kidd was supposed to have buried there was ever dug up and which nobody took seriously enough even to try, yet which you thought of often, not so much to get the treasure but to find it, to find a sign or a gold bug or a map?

Treasure. Yes.

Well, there’s no Captain Kidd’s treasure, but the Arabs want to buy it.

The place near Linwood should not be far from where you are presently reading this.

Find out where it is.

Walk there.

Move in.

Take possession. It is yours.

Live there.

Don’t tell your parents or Dr. Duk where you are. They will find you soon enough.

Don’t tell anybody where you are.

Find a lawyer you can trust. This is a problem. I’ve thought about this a lot. Aunt Sally died at home, so the will will be probated (?) there. There will be the question of your legal competence and whether or not Mother and Father should be your guardians. I’ve thought about this a lot. You could just walk into the first lawyer’s office on the street. But it would be better to ask someone’s advice. You could ask a doctor. Go see a doctor with a minor complaint (muscle soreness — tell him you fell off a mountain, in a way you did) and ask him what lawyer he trusts.

Don’t be angry at Father and Mother. They love you as well as they understand that word, or as well as most people love. Come to think of it, who or what do you “love”? Do you “love” them? What is “love”? I am saying the word aloud. It sounds like something dark and furry which makes a lowing sound.

There is one thing you must not forget, or if you have forgotten, be reminded of it here and now. It is the discovery I made last week (you made? we made?). Do you remember?

It took me (you? us?) all my life to make the discovery. Why so long? And then I (you, we) had to go crazy to do it. Why was the discovery so difficult? Because it is the very nature of the thing to be discovered and the very nature of the seeking that it could not be found by asking somebody or by reading a book. Imagine being born with gold-tinted corneas and undertaking a lifelong search for gold. You’d never find it.

What was my (your, our) discovery? That I could act. I was free to act. Is this something everyone knows or thinks he knows or, if he knows, knows in the wrong way? With gold-tinted corneas everything looks like gold but it’s fool’s gold.

Here was the kind of gold-tinted corneas I had: Dr. Duk told me many times I should be free to act for myself. I believed him. Just as I believed him when he suggested I take up bird-watching. So, clever straight-A student that I was, I set forth to act for myself. Which, of course, is not doing so at all. I was following instructions. Then how does one ever make the discovery that one can actually be free to act for oneself? I don’t know. I don’t even know how many people, if any, do it.

In my case I had to go crazy to make the discovery. It’s like that man in West Virginia who walked away from the airplane crash. He walked through the woods until he came to a highway. Do you know what I think? That he felt absolutely free to turn right or turn left or sit down on the culvert.

At any rate, I acted for myself and here you are, we are, doing it.

Good luck.

For some reason she felt a need to count her money. Her wallet contained $326. There was seventy-six cents in change in the pocket of her new jeans. She folded her wallet and put it and the notebook and the knife in the deep pocket of her camouflage jacket. After thinking a moment, she packed the candles and the can of neat’s-foot oil in her knapsack, between the sleeping bag and the wedge of cheese. She hung the knapsack on the back of the bench. Now only the map remained on the bench.

Drumming her fingers on her knees, she watched the ants carrying their little green sails toward the policeman. Rising suddenly, she took half a dozen steps and tapped him on the shoulder and in the same moment (this was wrong) asked him a question. He did not give a start but turned, his head already inclined and nodding as if he were prepared for her question. Many people must ask him questions. His eyes were darting around the concrete of the sidewalk.

“What’s that?” he said, putting his great hairy ear close to her mouth.

She had asked her question too soon and in too much of a rush. Yet before she could repeat it, it seemed to her that he was backtracking and listening to her first question again.

“Whose place?” he asked.

“Miss Sally Kemp” She wanted to ask him to come to the bench, sit down, and look at the map. Instead, she found that she was giving a tug at his sleeve. “Would you—”

It was surprising how quickly he understood. In an instant they were sitting on the bench with the map between them. He went on nodding and gazing down at the map instead of the sidewalk. It was not a good map. A few trails crisscrossed. In the blank spaces between the trails were drawings of chipmunks and whiskey stills and mountaineers carrying jugs of “mountain dew” and wearing overalls with one shoulder strap.

In his eagerness to be helpful and even before he knew where she wanted to go, his forefinger began tracing the trails on the map. His fingernail was as large and convex as a watch crystal and, surprisingly, polished. The nail made a slight sound on the paper as it passed up and down the trails. As their heads bent close over the map, she could not hear him breathe in but his exhalations came out whistling and strong as a bellows. The sight of his large polished nail on the map and the sound of his breathing so diverted her that she could not collect her thoughts.

“I know where old Judge Kemp’s summer place used to be. He used to come up here when I was a boy. I even worked in his greenhouse.”

“Greenhouse?” she said drowsily.

“His daddy got the idea a long time ago of growing orchids and selling them to the rich people at the old Grove Park Inn where they used to have dances every night.”

“That’s him,” she said but not really remembering.

“This is where it used to be.” The gleaming watch-glass fingernail strayed off a trail into a blank space.

“Used to be?”

“It burned down years ago.”

“It all burned?”

“The main house. Must have been bums or hippies living out there. Ain’t nobody been out there for years.”

“Show me how to get there.” After she said it, she realized she had said it. She had uttered not a question, not a statement, but a request. How long had it been since she had said to someone: Do this, do that? Perhaps the secret of talking was to have something to say.

“Take this trail.” The watch-glass nail glided, hesitated, then stopped like a Ouija in a white space. “It’s just the other side of the golf course.”

“How far is it from here?”

“Three, four miles.”

“Do you mind telling how old you are?” It would help if she knew whether he was forty-five or sixty-five. But he went on nodding and didn’t reply. Her question, she saw, was inappropriate, but he let it go.