The Last Gentleman and The Second Coming

by Walker Percy

“Do like me,” said the engineer seriously. “Watch and wait. Keep your eyes open. Meanwhile study how to make enough money so you don’t have to worry about it.

Waiting for war

“I don’t want to be no mortician.” He was David sure enough, of royal lineage and spoiled rotten. He wouldn’t listen to you. Be a sportscaster then.

“Pardon me,” said Rita at last. “Who is it we are talking about? Lucrezia Bori, the opera singer, the Duchess of Ferrara, Lucrezia Borgia, or Catherine de’ Medici?” “I too often get the two of them mixed up,” said the poor sweating engineer. “But not the three,” said Rita. Why did she have to be cruel, though? The engineer sat between the two, transfixed by a not altogether unpleasant horribleness.

couldn’t understand either woman: why one should so dutifully put her head on the block and why the other should so readily chop it off.

The engineer woke listening. Something had happened. There was not a sound, but the silence was not an ordinary silence. It was the silence of a time afterwards. It had been violated earlier. His heart beat a strong steady alarm. He opened his eyes. A square of moonlight lay across his knees.

The engineer rubbed his forehead. “What time is it?” he asked no one in particular. Was this the true flavor of hatred, he wondered, this used, almost comfortable malice sustained between them, with its faint sexual reek? They turned as fondly to him as spent lovers greeting a strange child.

“Because of your deliberate cultivation of destructiveness, of your death-wish, not to mention your outhouse sexuality,” said Rita, still smiling, and addressing Sutter through the engineer. “Every man to his own taste but you can bloody well leave Jamie out of it.” “What do you think I would do?” Sutter asked. “I know what you have done.”

They quarreled with the skillful absent-minded malice of married couples. Instead of taking offense, they nodded sleepily and even smiled.

“Tell me honestly what difference it makes to you whether Jimmy lives or dies.” The engineer was shocked but Rita replied routinely. “You know very well there is no use in my answering you.

“You always said I knew you backwards. Well, I’m telling you now that you are wrong about yourself and wrong about what you think you want. There is nothing wrong with you beyond a certain spitefulness and pride and a penchant for a certain species of bullshit.

His radar sensed it without quite defining it: the connection between the past time and the present insane quarrel over fluoridation. For him it was the other way around! It was the olden time with its sweetness and its great occasions which struck a dread to his heart! It was past fathoming.

Her cheek was flushed and she swung her shoulders in her school blouse like a secretary sitting between three desks. She bustled. No longer was she the solitary girl on the park bench, as inward and watchful as he, who might wander with him through old green Louisiana, perch on the back step of the camper of an evening with the same shared sense of singularity of time and the excellence of place.

There was a grace and a dispensation in the air, an excitement and hope about the game on the morrow and a putting away of the old sad unaccomplished past.

All in order except that he was screaming, his mouth forming a perfect O. His corgi was howling and his children were peeping out from behind the stereo.

At last Sutter turned his head. “What can I do for you?” The naked ceiling bulb cast his eye sockets into bluish shadow. The engineer wondered if Sutter had taken a drug.

“Come over here.” Sutter led him to the card table, which had been cleared of dirty swabs but which still smelled of fruity Hoppe’s gun oil. He fetched two chrome dinette chairs and set them on opposite sides of the table. “Sit down. Now. I think you should go to sleep.”

The engineer experienced a vague disappointment. He too had read the book and, though he had felt very good during the reading, it had not the slightest effect on his life.

No, the game! Everybody had gone to the game or in to their TVs, and the streets and cars and the occasional loiterer had the look of not going to the game

The silence and emptiness of Sutter’s apartment met him at the open door, which had also been fitted with a ruby window.

The perfect pornographer = a man who lives both in anteroom of science (not in research laboratory) and who also lives in twilight of Christianity, e.g., a technician. The perfect pornographer = lapsed Christian Southerner (who as such retains the memory not merely of Christianity but of a region immersed in place and time) who presently lives in Berkeley or Ann Arbor, which are not true places but sites of abstract activity which could take place anywhere else, a map coordinate; who is perhaps employed as psychological tester or opinion sampler or computer programmer or other para-scientific pursuit.

Women, of course, are the natural pornographers today, because they are not only dispossessed by science of the complexus of human relations (all but the orgasm) but are also kept idle in their suburban houses with nothing to do but read pseudo-science articles in the Reader’s Digest and dirty novels (one being the natural preamble of the other).

Sure enough, just over the saddle of the farthest ridge, the last wrinkle of the Appalachians, which overlooked a raw new golf links and a snowfield of marble-chip rooftops of five hundred G.E. Gold Medallion Homes, he found the mailbox and driveway.

I see now that while I was living with your family I was trying too hard to adapt myself to my environment and to score on interpersonal relationships.”

“Who?” he asked again, but she was gone. Coming to a lamp, he took out his plastic Gulf Oil calendar card and held it up to see what day of the month it was. He had forgotten and it made him feel uneasy.

The dawn of discovery, the imminent sense of coming at last upon those secrets closest to one and therefore most inaccessible, broke over him. “But why is it—?” he asked aloud,

Soap opera is overtly decent and covertly lewd. The American theater is overtly lewd and covertly homosexual.

If I were a Christian as well as being lewd and cheerful, I’d be the new Johnny Appleseed.

My God, what is all this stuff, thought the poor bemused shivering engineer and with a sob flung out of the cab and began running up and down

“Oh, where is this place?” he groaned aloud, hoping that if he heard a question he might answer it. “Where am I bound and what is my name?” When no answer came, he reached for his wallet. But even before his hand arrived, he had felt the ominous airiness and thinness of fabric of his back pocket. It was empty and the flap unbuttoned.

He did not dare examine the contents of his pockets, for fear he would not recognize what he found there, or for fear rather that, confronted with positive proof of himself, he still would not know and would lose the tenuous connection he had. He was like a man shot in the bowels: he didn’t dare look down.

There was no one around, but at last he found a woman dressed in black, feeding entrails to a hawk in a chicken coop.

“He’s feeling sorry for himself and has taken to reading Kahlil Gibran, a bad sign even in healthy people. Did you give it to him—I know Sutter wouldn’t.”

Since he couldn’t give her money, ransom himself, he had to pay her out by listening to her, since, goofy as he was, he knew two things not many people know. He knew how to listen and he knew how to get at that most secret and aggrieved enterprise upon which almost everyone is embarked. He’d give her the use of his radar.

Christ is my lord and I love him but I’m a good hater and you know what he said about that. I still hope my enemies fry in hell. What to do about that? Will God forgive me?” “I don’t know.

Why did you stay?” “That was a fluke too.” She draped two feet of gut over the perch and the hawk cocked his eye.

When they do suddenly break into the world of language, it is something to see. They are like Adam on the First Day. What’s that? they ask me. That’s a hawk, I tell them, and they believe me.

I tell them that God made them to be happy and that if they love one another and keep the commandments and receive the Sacrament, they’ll be happy now and forever. They believe me. I’m not sure anybody else does now. I have more influence than the Pope.

“That certainly is interesting,” said the engineer, who was now leaving, actually setting a foot toward the camper. He had done his duty and was ready to be on his way. He had a fix on her at last.

She struck him as an enthusiast of a certain sort who becomes wry as a countermeasure to her own outlandishness, like a collector of 1928 Model-T radiator caps who exhibits his trophies with a wry, rueful deprecation of their very oddness.

Down flew the Trav-L-Aire into the setting sun, down and out of the last of the ancient and impoverished South of red hills and Cardui signs and God-is-Love crosses.

Dead trees shrouded in kudzu vines reared up like old women.

The courteous engineer, the last man on earth to inflict a snub, nodded and smiled in turn even though he didn’t know them from Adam. Or did he? Ah, the dread tug of the past not quite remembered!

The green Chevrolet sent his mind spinning back but there stood Kitty like a lion in the path. God in heaven, he groaned, I’ve left Kitty. Dear Jesus,

It was not a convulsion, but his eyes twittered around under his eyeballs. He dreamed that old men sat in a circle around him, looking at him from the corners of their eyes.

The sentient engineer, who had been having trouble with his expression today, now felt his own lips come together in a triumphant fit. Perhaps he should be an actor!

“Wonderful,” said the playwright. The playwright’s joy, the engineer perceived, came from seeing life unfold in the same absurd dramatic way as a Broadway play—it was incredible that the one should be like the other after all.

It was pitch dark under the stadium, but his muscles remembered the spacing of the ties. The open rear of the bleachers exhaled a faint odor of cellar earth and urine.

It was on such an evening—he passed his hand over his eyes and stretching it forth touched the sibilant corky bark of the water oak—that his father had died. The son watched from the step, old Brahms went abroad, the father took a stroll and spoke to a stranger of the good life and the loneliness of the galaxies.

You may be in a fix and I know that but what you don’t know and won’t believe and must find out for yourself is that I’m in a fix too and you got to get where I am before you even know what I’m talking about and I know that and that’s why there is nothing to say now. Meanwhile I wish you well.

Uncle Fannin went sidling and backing into the underbrush, reloading as he went, the vines singing and popping around his legs.