Christopher Buckley - Boomsday

“May I-might I-interject?”

“Please,” Waddowes said.

“Ms. Devine is ironically named. Because her scheme to kill off America ’s most sacred resource-her respected elders-is nothing short of demonic.”

“At least”-Cassandra smiled-“I’d be willing to give my mother a choice whether she lives or dies.”

Across the country, fifteen million viewers gasped.

Cass’s assault on Gideon Payne put her back on the nation’s front pages, not that she had been off them for long. It also put Gideon Payne’s past back in the present, not that anyone had quite forgotten it. It was a matter of some delicacy.

Gideon’s great-great-great-grandfather had, indeed, been the Confederate sharpshooter who put a.55-caliber miniй ball into Randy’s great-great-great-uncle at Spotsylvania in 1864. For this conspicuous bit of marksmanship-General Sedgwick was one of the better Union generals and a favorite of Grant’s-Gideon’s ancestor was given an engraved gold watch and $100.

After the war, he used the money to buy a hundred acres of timberland in Alabama and an old sawmill. (Cheap, in 1865.) He worked hard, prospered, and handed it over to his sons, and within half a century the family business owned tens of thousands of acres of timber forest in the South and saw and paper mills. At one time, all the Scrabble tiles, tongue suppressors, and Popsicle sticks in the United States were made from Payne pine. They also made inexpensive coffins.

Gideon’s father was a kindly, rotund man who preferred to sit on the front porch and drink mint juleps rather than busy himself overly in the family business. He loved Gideon, who was born corpulent and remained so, and would dangle him endlessly on his knee and make up stories about mythical ancestors who, like the real ancestor, had performed heroic deeds on battlefields. His wife, Gideon’s mother, Cassiopeia Idalia Clampp-she could hardly wait to marry and get rid of the name-was very different in nature from her husband: tall, slender, fine-looking, and angry. (“ Born angry,” her father used to say, “and she’ll probably die angry.”) Her own family fortunes dwindling, and determined not to live a life of poverty, she met her future husband one day at the Colonial Cup in Camden, South Carolina, and determined to marry him. It is not especially hard to seduce an amiable, rotund, and feckless pleasure seeker. All you have to do is lead him to the lotus patch and then to the altar while the poor beast is still in a daze. This she did with efficiency and in due course provided him an heir in the form of Gideon and a few perfunctory sisters.

She had hoped for a son in the traditional southern mold, which is to say Yankee-hating, manly, attractive, good on the back of a horse, and reasonably sober. Gideon possessed none of these qualities, except for the last. His favorite children’s book was Ferdinand the Bull, the story of the Spanish bull who didn’t want to fight in the ring and preferred to sit in a field all by himself smelling flowers. His great joy, oddly, for one of his generation (and wealth), was reading the Bible, a pastime that took root one day at age five, when his father, nestling him on his lap, read him from Judges 6, chapter 11.

“And there came an angel of the Lord, and sat under an oak which was ”-Gideon would giggle at his father’s rendition of the oddly emphasized verbs in the King James version-“in Ophrah…Gideon threshed wheat by the winepress, to hide it from the Midianites.”

Gideon was hooked. But then it is pleasant to find your own name in a book that everyone in the world owns.

His father died when he was twelve. When the bereft child asked his rather dry-eyed mother what had caused his papa’s death-it was a heart attack-his mother replied, “Eating and drinking and not getting off that porch .” This was delivered with an icy stare, the implication being that her son was somehow complicit in his death. And that was the end of Elysium for young Gideon.

A few weeks later, she handed him a rifle and said, “It’s about time you killed something.” Gideon was horrified. He was sent off whimpering with one of the plantation hands with instructions not to come back without a kill.

The hand, an old colored man-as they were called then-took pity on the poor boy and shot a possum. He proudly told the evidently suspicious Cassiopeia that her son had by his very own self shot the creature off the highest limb of a sparkleberry tree by the creek.

For weeks afterward, Cassiopeia referred to her son at the dinner table, in front of guests, as “our own little Lee Harvey Oswald.” Shortly thereafter, Gideon was sent off to a military academy in Mississippi, where his physique and temperament were not in step with those of the young savages. His torments were great. He was dangled from windows, had his head immersed in toilet bowls. His knowledge of the Bible made him a figure of ridicule and earned him the nickname “Preacher Boy.” One day he escaped. It could not have been called a heroic attempt inasmuch as he was found shortly, tucking into an enormous ice-cream sundae at a soda fountain in town. But he refused, absolutely, to return to what he called “that place of desolation.” Cassiopeia really had no choice but to take him back. Still, she was determined to make a man of him.

To that end, she sent him to work the night shift at the Payne paper mill on the Coosoomahatchie River. In those pre-environmentalist days, paper mills emitted a noxious stink redolent of rotten eggs, sulfur, and vomit. The very thought of toiling away in this mephitic inferno appalled Gideon. He begged for reprieve. Cassiopeia would have none of it.

To compound Gideon’s misery, she had him chauffeur-driven to the plant every evening. The spectacle of this butterball Fauntleroy emerging from a black Lincoln caused sniggers among his co-workers, even outright hooting. Gideon was mortified but determined to show that he had some steel inside, along with the blubber.

Every morning before setting off in the Lincoln, he saturated a handkerchief with cologne (Eau de Joie). He would hold it to his assaulted nostrils when the stench of the mill overwhelmed him. This occasioned louder hooting among his colleagues, and the nickname “Rose of Coosoomahatchie.”

Gideon soldiered on bravely like a forlorn character in an Edwin Arlington Robinson poem. He learned quickly and soon worked his way up to assistant night foreman. Then, some years later, came the incident that became known ever after as “the incident.”

Cassiopeia, a traditional southern lady of a certain era, enjoyed being taken on Sunday afternoon drives. This chauffeuring duty fell to her young son, Gideon, now seventeen. After Sunday dinner (lunch, in the North), the two of them would drive off in Cassiopeia’s 1955 Cadillac Eldorado convertible with red leather upholstery, she in the back, holding her parasol in white-gloved hands, waving in a matriarchal fashion at the farmers and workers of the estate. These drives traditionally culminated at a promontory high above the Coosoomahatchie that looked out on a spectacular view of the Payne timberlands.

Gideon’s account, sobbed out to Payne County sheriff Jubiliah Stipps, was as follows. He parked the Cadillac, as usual, on the sandy bluff, set the parking brake, and got out of the car in order to answer an urgent call of nature. While doing this, he said that he heard “an awful sound.” He turned and saw the car rolling forward toward the edge of the cliff with a wide-eyed, shrieking Cassiopeia in the back. He ran (“with all my lungs, I ran”) to intercept the car but was unable to reach the vehicle in time. It rolled off the bluff and came to a crunchy end three hundred feet below. Gideon’s imitation of the sound of the Cadillac landing was said by all who heard it to be a masterpiece of onomatopoeia.