Walker Percy - The Second Coming

Perhaps she had not sunk deep enough into her Sirius self. If one sinks deep enough there is surely company waiting. Otherwise, if one does not have a home and has not sunk into self, and seeks company, the company is lonesome. Silence takes root, sprouts. Looks dart.

On the other hand, look what happens to home if one is too long at home. Rather than go home to Williamsport, she’d rather live in a stump hole even though her parents’ home was not only registered with the National Registry but restored and written up in Southern Living. Rather than marry and have a life like her mother, she’d rather join the navy and see the world. Why is a home the best place and also the worst? How can the best place become the worst place? What is a home? A home is a place, any place, any building, where one sinks into one’s self and finds company waiting. Company? Who’s company? oneself? somebody else? That’s the problem. The problem is not the house. People are the problem. But it was their problem. She could wait.

4

The man watched her from the bunk but she didn’t mind. His look was not controlling or impaling but son and gray and going away. Her back felt his and the dog’s eyes following her, but when she faced them, their eyes rolled up into their eyebrows. The mornings grew cold. It was a pleasure to rise shivering from her own potting-table bunk and kneel at the Grand Crown stove and start a fat-pine fire for its quick blazing warmth and busy crackle-and-pop which peopled the room. Outside, the great dark rhododendrons dripped and humped in close, still hiding croquet balls knocked “galley west” in 1890 tournaments. This dreary cold clime is not getting me down!

The first morning the man said: “You gave me a bath.”

“Yes. And washed your clothes.” She dropped the clothes on him. “You can put them on.” She was stiff. She had slept with the dog on croker sacks. From the army surplus store she bought two scratchy Italian NATO blankets and made a bed of pine needles on a slatted flat, which she propped on four upended big pots.

They talked about the once cool-feeling now warm-feeling cave air blowing above them. He told her how Judge Kemp had saved the cost of kerosene for the greenhouse but think what you could save. Your overhead is zero. (It made her feel good that her overhead was not over head and pressing down on her but was nought, had gone away.) You could grow produce all winter and sell at one hundred percent profit. Grow what and sell where, she asked. I don’t know, he said, but we can find out — is that what you want to do, make a living here? I don’t know, she said.

One morning when she returned from her woods latrine, a comfortable fork in the chestnut fall, which she used and where she deposited his excretions from a Clorox bottle and a neatly folded packet of newspaper, she found him sitting in the doorway in the morning sun. His swellings had gone down except for the knee, the scrapes had dry scabs, and his eyes were all right, not the inturning Khe Sanh white eyes but gray and clear and focused on the dog. His scruffy yellow beard looked odd against his smooth platinum-and-brown hair. Was he nodding because he knew what he was going to do? He nodded toward the other doorjamb as if it were the chair across his desk. She took it, sat down.

“Now, you’ve done a great deal for me. I would thank you for it but won’t, for fear of upsetting your balance sheet of debits and credits. I know you are particular about owing somebody something, but maybe you will learn that’s not so bad. I don’t mind being in your debt. You won’t mind my saying that I would do the same for you, and take pleasure in it, and furthermore can easily see our positions reversed. What I wish to tell you is that I accept what you’ve done for me and that I have other things to ask of you. I don’t mind asking you. There are things that need to be done and only you can do them. Will you?”

“I will,” she said. I will, she thought, because now he knew exactly what had to be done just as she had known what to do when he lay knocked out on her floor. I’d do anything he asks me, she thought, hoist anything. Why is that?

“Do you have a calendar?” he asked.

She gave him her Gulf card.

He looked at it, looked up at her, smiled. (Smiled!) “Wrong year.” She shrugged. She was afraid to ask what year it was.

“What is today?”

“The fifteenth.”

“Hm. It seems I’ve been gone two weeks.” His gray eyes met hers. She didn’t mind. “How much money do you have?”

“One hundred and eleven dollars and thirty-one cents.”

“What are you going to do when your money runs out?”

She shrugged. “Find employment.”

“Doing what?”

“Hoisting maybe. Also gardening.”

“Hoisting? Hoisting what?”

“Anything.”

“I see. You wouldn’t consider my paying you something, or lending, until you get paid for your ah hoisting.”

“How much money do you have?” she asked.

“On me?”

“On you and off you.”

“About fifty or sixty million.”

“Gollee.”

“That’s enough to employ you.”

“No, that would throw things off-balance and render my Sirius unserious.”

“Why shouldn’t I pay for my room and board?” he asked her.

“To give one reason if not others, you don’t have a dime. I had to go through your pockets before washing your clothes.”

He laughed then winced and put a hand to his side. “I can get some.”

“When you do, there will be time for a consideration of remuneration. The only thing in your pockets was a slip of paper which said Help! With tiger, fifty feet above. I was wondering about the nature of the tiger you were over and above.”

“It doesn’t matter. Could you do the following things for me in town? Do you have pencil and paper?”

She opened her notebook.

“Go to Western Union, which is at the bus station, and send the following telegram to Dr. Sutter Vaught, 2203 Los Flores, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Send this message: Plans changed. Forget about letter. Read it if you like but tear it up. Don’t act on it. Will write. Barrett. Send it straight message.”

“Straight message,” she repeated, hoping he would explain but he didn’t. Probably he meant send it straight to Albuquerque and not roundabout by way of Chicago. “Is that all?”

“No. Go to Dr. Vance Battle’s office. See him alone. Tell him I want to see him. Tell him where I am, tell him I want to see him today and ask him not to tell anybody or bring anybody with him.”

“Anything else?”

“Go by the library and get a book on hydroponic gardening.”

“Okay.”

“Then go behind the bus station and see if my car is still there. A silver Mercedes 450 SEL. My keys are under the seat. Drive it to the country-club parking lot. Park at the far end, which is nearest to here.”

“Okay.” She swallowed. Very well. Drive a car? His car? Very well. If he asked her to drive the car, she could drive the car. “Okay. Why were you in the cave?”

“What? Oh.” Now he was walking up and down the greenhouse not limping badly, shouldering, hands in pockets. Does he notice how clean and smooth the concrete is? She felt the floor with both hands; it was cool and iron-colored and silky as McWhorter’s driveway. She wished he would notice her concrete, the best-cured concrete in North Carolina. “I go down in caves sometimes,” she said. He told her about the tiger.

“But the tiger wasn’t there.”

“No.”

“Then—?”

“Then what?”

“Then there was more than the tiger?”

“Yes.”

“You were trying to find out something besides the tiger.”

“Yes.”

“What?”