Walker Percy - The Moviegoer

“He didn’t like to fish?”

“He thought he did!”

I stretch out at full length, prop my head on a two-by-four. It is possible to squint into the rising sun and at the same time see my mother spangled in rainbows. A crab spider has built his web across a finger of the bayou and the strands seem to spin in the sunlight.

“But he didn’t really?”

“Unh un—” she says, dragging it out to make up for her inattention. Every now and then she wedges the rod between her stomach and the rail and gives her nose a good wringing.

“Why didn’t he?”

“Because he didn’t. He would say he did. And once he did! I remember one day we went down Little Bayou Sara. He had been sick and Dr Wills told him to work in the morning and take off in the afternoons and take up fishing or an interesting hobby. It was the prettiest day, I remember, and we found a hole under a fallen willow — a good place for sac au lait if ever I saw one. So I said, go ahead, drop your line right there. Through the tree? he said. He thought it was a lot of humbug — he wasn’t much of a fisherman; Dr Wills and Judge Anse were big hunters and fishermen and he pretended he liked it but he didn’t. So I said, go ahead, right down through the leaves — that’s the way you catch sac au lait. I be John Brown if he didn’t pull up the fattest finest sac au lait you ever saw. He couldn’t believe his eyes. Oh he got himself all wound up about it. Now isn’t this an ideal spot, he would say over and over again, and: Look at such and such a tree over there, look how the sunshine catches the water in such and such a way — we’ll have to come back tomorrow and the next day and all summer — that’s all we have to do!” My mother gives her rod a great spasming jerk, reels in quickly and frowns at the mangled shrimp. “Do you see what that scoun’l beast—! Do you know that that ain’t anything in the world but some old hardhead sitting right on the bottom.”

“Did he go back the next day?”

“Th. No indeed. No, in, deed,” she says, carving three cubes of shrimp. Again she lays back her arm. The shrimp gyrates and Mother holds still. “What do you think he says when I mention sac au lait the next morning?”

“What?”

“‘Oh no. Oh no. You go ahead.’ And off he goes on his famous walk.”

“Walk?”

“Up the levee. Five miles, ten miles, fifteen miles. Winter or summer. I went with him one Christmas morning I remember. Mile after mile and all of it just the same. Same old brown levee in front, brown river on one side, brown fields on the other. So when he got about a half a mile ahead of me, I said, shoot. What am I doing out here humping along for all I’m worth when all we going to do is turn around and hump on back? So I said, good-by, Mister, I’m going home — you can walk all the way to Natchez if you want to.” It is my mother’s way to see life, past and present, in terms of a standard comic exaggeration. If she had spent four years in Buchenwald, she would recollect it so: “So I said to him: listen, Mister, if you think I’m going to eat this stuff, you’ve got another think coming.”

The boards of the dock, warming in the sun, begin to give off a piney-winey smell. The last tendril of ground fog burns away, leaving the water black as tea. The tree is solitary and mournful, a poor thing after all. Across the bayou the egret humps over, as peaked and disheveled as a buzzard.

“Was he a good husband?” Sometimes I try, not too seriously, to shake her loose from her elected career of the commonplace. But her gyroscope always holds her on course.

“Good? Well I’ll tell you one thing — he was a good walker!”

“Was he a good doctor?”

“Was he! And what hands! If anyone ever had the hands of a surgeon, he did.” My mother’s recollection of my father is storied and of a piece. It is not him she remembers but an old emblem of him. But now something occurs to her. “He was smart, but he didn’t know it all! I taught him a thing or two once and I can tell you he thanked me for it.”

“What was that?”

“He had lost thirty pounds. He wasn’t sick — he just couldn’t keep anything down. Dr Wills said it was amoeba (that year he thought everything was amoeba; another year it was endometritis and between you and me he took out just about every uterus in Feliciana Parish). At the breakfast table when Mercer brought in his eggs and grits, he would just sit there looking at it, white as a sheet. Me, it was all I could do not to eat, my breakfast and his. He’d put a mouthful of grits in his mouth and chew and chew and he just couldn’t swallow it. So one day I got an idea. I said listen: you sat up all night reading a book, didn’t you? Yes, I did, he said, what of it? You enjoyed it, didn’t you? Yes, I did. So I said: all right. Then we’ll read it. The next morning I told Mercer to go on about his business. I had my breakfast early and I made his and brought it to him right there in his bed. I got his book. I remember it — it was a book called The Greene Murder Case. Everybody in the family read it. I began to read and he began to listen, and while I read, I fed him. I told him, I said, you can eat, and I fed him. I put the food in his mouth and he ate it. I fed him for six months and he gained twenty five pounds. And he went back to work. Even when he ate by himself downstairs, I had to read to him. He would get downright mad at me if I stopped. ‘Well go on!’ he would say.”

I sit up and shade my eyes to see her.

Mother wrings her nose. “It was because—”

“Because of what?” I spit over into the water. The spit unwinds like a string.

She leans on the rail and gazes down into the tea-colored bayou. “It was like he thought eating was not— important enough. You see, with your father, everything, every second had to be—”

“Be what, Mother?”

This time she gives a real French shrug. “I don’t know. Something.”

“What was wrong with him?”

“He was overwrought,” she replies at once and in her regular mama-bee drone and again my father disappears into the old emblem. I can hear echoes of my grandfather and grandmother and Aunt Emily, echoes of porch talk on the long summer evenings when affairs were settled, mysteries solved, the unnamed named. My mother never got used to our porch talk with its peculiar license. When someone made a spiel, one of our somber epic porch spiels, she would strain forward in the dark, trying to make out the face of the speaker and judge whether he meant to be taken as somberly as he sounded. As a Bolling in Feliciana Parish, I became accustomed to sitting on the porch in the dark and talking of the size of the universe and the treachery of men; as a Smith on the Gulf Coast I have become accustomed to eating crabs and drinking beer under a hundred and fifty watt bulb — and one is as pleasant a way as the other of passing a summer night.

“How was he overwrought?”

She plucks the hook clean, picks up a pink cube, pushes the barb through, out, and in again. Her wrists are rounded, not like a young girl’s but by a deposit of hard fat.

“It was his psychological make-up.”

Yes, it is true. We used to talk quite a bit about psychological make-ups and the effect of glands on our dismal dark behavior. Strangely, my mother sounds more like my aunt than my aunt herself. Aunt Emily no longer talks of psychological make-ups.

“His nervous system was like a high-powered radio. Do you know what happens if you turn up the volume and tune into WWL?”

“Yes,” I say, unspeakably depressed by the recollection of the sad little analogies doctors like to use. “You mean he wasn’t really cut out to be an ordinary doctor, he really should have been in research.”