Walker Percy - The Second Coming

The guide doesn’t live far from here. We passed the cabin. The Negro boy ran home when the man cursed him and shot the dog.

Now he was standing up and looking carefully around. He even made out a speckled quail lying in the speckled leaves. As he waited for the dizziness to clear, he watched the man.

Don’t worry, I’m going to get us both out of here. He knew with certainty that he could.

Later, after it was over, his stepmother had hugged them both. Thank God thank God thank God she said in her fond shouting style. You could have both been killed!

So it had come to pass that there were two accounts of what had happened, and if one was false the other must be true; one which his stepmother had put forward in the way that a woman will instantly and irresistibly construe the world as she will have it and in fact does have it so: that the man had had one of his dizzy spells — he knows with his blood pressure he shouldn’t drink and hunt! — and fell; that in falling he discharged the double-barrel, which wounded the boy and nearly killed the man. The boy almost came to believe her, especially when she praised him. We can thank our lucky stars that this child had the sense and bravery to know what to do. And you a twelve-year-old-mussing up his hair in front in a way she thought of as being both manly and English— We’re so proud of you. My fine brave boy!

But it was not bravery, he thought, eyes narrowing, almost smiling. It was the coldness, the hard secret core of himself that he had found.

The boy and his father knew better. With a final hug after he was up and around and the boy had recovered, except for a perforated and permanently deafened left middle ear and a pocked cheek like a one-sided acne, the man was able to speak to him by standing in the kitchen and enlisting D’Lo the cook in the conversation and affecting a broad hunter’s lingo not at all like him: I’m going to tell yall one damn thing— Yall? He never said yall. Talking to D’Lo, who stood at the stove with her back to them? I’m getting rid of that savage. He nodded to the Greener on the pantry table. I had no idea that savage had a pattern that wide! So wide it knicked you — did you know that, D’Lo? Hugging the boy, he asked D’Lo. D’Lo must either have known all about it or, most likely, had not been listening closely, for she only voiced her routine but adequate hnnnonnhHM! Now ain’t that something else! — which was what the man wanted her to say because this was the man’s way of telling the boy, through D’Lo, what had happened and soliciting and getting her inattentive assent to the routineness and even inevitability of it. Such things happen! And I’ll tell you something else, the man told D’Lo. When a man comes to the point that all he can think about is tracking a bird and shuts everything out of his mind to the point of shooting somebody, it’s time to quit! D’Lo socked down grits spoon on boiler rim. You right, Mister Barrett! Was she even listening? And now the man finally looking down his cheek at him hugged alongside: Right?

Yes sir. He waited only to be released from the hug.

There was silence. They spoke no more of it. We know, don’t we, the silence said, that the man was somehow wounded by the same shot and there is nothing to be said about it.

But how did he miss the bird? How did he wound himself?

While the sheriff was taking care of the man in the swamp, the guide brought the two shotguns, a dead quail, and three empty shells into the dark clean room smelling of coal oil and newspaper and flour paste where the Negro woman was washing his face. She dried it and patted something light and feathery — spiderwebs? — on his cheek. He didn’t feel bad but his ear still roared. “H ere dey,” said the black youth. They yours and hisn. He looked down at the kitchen table at the two shotguns, the three empty Super-X shells, and the dead quail. This black boy was no guide. What guide would pick up empty shotgun shells? You didn’t see the other bird? he asked the guide. Ain’t no other bird, said the black boy. The white boy said: There were two singles and he shot twice and he never misses. The black boy said: Well he done missed this time. The white boy heard himself saying: You just didn’t find the bird, and getting angry and wondering: Why am I worrying about the second bird? Nawsuh, said the woman, whose black arms were sifted with flour. John sho find your bird if he was there. Look, he even found your bullets. Must have been the dogs got him.

He looked at the Greener on the kitchen table in the shotgun cabin, sat down, broke the breech, and took out the one empty shell and set it next to the shells the guide had found. As he gazed he put one hand to his cheek, which had begun to bleed again, and covered his roaring ear.

Now in a green forest glade near a pretty pink-and-green golf links, he touched his deafened ear. Did it still roar a little or was it the seashell roar of the silence of forest? Holding the three-iron in both hands he tested the spring of its steel shaft.

It was as if the thirty years had passed and he had not ever left the Negro cabin but, strange to say, had only now got around to saying what he had not said for thirty years. Again he smelled the close clean smell of kerosene and warm newspaper.

Now in Carolina in a glade in the white pines he said aloud: There was only one shell in the Greener, for some reason smiling a little and examining the three-iron closely as if it had a breech which could be broken, revealing the missing shell. But he only saw the green Winchester Super-X with its slightly wrinkled cylinder smelling of cordite. What happened to the other shell? Nothing. There was no other shell. I broke the breech of the Greener and there was only one shell. Why? Because he reloaded after the first shot. He shot the first single. Then there was a pause. It was then that I heard the geclick of the Greener breech opening and the gecluck of its closing. But why reload with one good shell left? That was all he needed for the second single if I missed it. Because he always liked to be ready. He liked to shoot quick and on the rise. And why, after the second shot, did he reload with only one shell?

Because— He smiled at the three-iron which he held sprung like a bow in front of him.

Because when he reloaded the last time, he knew he only needed one shot.

But why reload at all? He had reloaded before the second shot. After the second shot, he still had a good shell in the second chamber.

Wait a minute. Again he saw the sun reflected from something beyond the chestnut deadfall.

What happened? Here’s what happened.

He fired once at the first single. Geclick. Eject one shell and replace it. Gecluck.

He fired the second time at the second single and also hit me. Geclick. Reload. Gecluck.

Why reload if he knew he only needed one more shot? He still had a good shell in the second chamber.

In the Carolina pine forest he closed his eyes and saw green Super-X shells lined up on the clean quilt in the Negro cabin.

There were four shells.

Faraway the golfers were shouting, their voices blowing away like me killdeer on the high skyey fairways. It was close and still in the glade. He was watching the three-iron as, held in front of him like a divining rod, it sank toward the earth. Ah, I’ve found it after all. The buried treasure, he draught smiling.

Strange to say, there rose in his throat the same sweet terror he had felt long ago when his father’s old bitch Maggie (not the sorry pointer dog his father shot at Thomasville) pointed, bent like a pin, tail quivering, and they went slowly past her to kick up the covey, knowing as certainly as you can know anything that any second it would happen again, the sudden irruption at one’s very feet, the sudden heart-stop thunder from the very earth where one stood.