Strange: I am older, yet there seems to be more time, time for watching and waiting and thinking and working. All any man needs is time and desire and the sense of his own sovereignty. As Kingfish Huey Long used to say: every man a king. I am a poor man but a kingly one. If you want and wait and work, you can have.
Despite the setbacks of the past, particularly the fiasco five years ago, I still believe my lapsometer can save the world — if I can get it right. For the world is broken, sundered, busted down the middle, self ripped from self and man pasted back together as mythical monster, half angel, half beast, but no man. Even now I can diagnose and shall one day cure: cure the new plague, the modern Black Death, the current hermaphroditism of the spirit, namely: More’s syndrome, or: chronic angelism-bestialism that rives soul from body and sets it orbiting the great world as the spirit of abstraction whence it takes the form of beasts, swans and bulls, werewolves, blood-suckers, Mr. Hydes, or just poor lonesome ghost locked in its own machinery.
If you want and work and wait, you can have. Every man a king. What I want is no longer the Nobel, screw prizes, but just to figure out what I’ve hit on. Some day a man will walk into my office as ghost or beast or ghost-beast and walk out as a man, which is to say sovereign wanderer, lordly exile, worker and waiter and watcher.
Knowing, not women, said Sir Thomas, is man’s happiness.
Learning and wisdom are receding nowadays. The young, who already know everything, hate science, bomb laboratories, kill professors, burn libraries.
Already the monks are beginning to collect books again …
Poor as I am, I feel like God’s spoiled child. I am Robinson Crusoe set down on the best possible island with a library, a laboratory, a lusty Presbyterian wife, a cozy tree house, an idea, and all the time in the world.
Ellen calls from the doorway. Breakfast is ready. She sets a plate of steaming grits and bacon for me on a plain pine table. Like most good cooks, she hasn’t a taste for her own cooking. Instead she pours honey on an old biscuit.
We sit on kitchen chairs in the sunlight. With one hand she absently sweeps crumbs into the other. Her hand’s rough heel whispers over the ribs of pine. She keeps her apron on. When she sits down, she exactly fills the heart-shaped scoop of the chair. Her uptied hair leaves her neck bare save for a few strands.
In my second wife I am luckier than my kinsman Thomas More. For once I have the better of him. His second wife was dour and old and ugly. Mine is dour and young and beautiful. Both made good wives. Sir Thomas’s wife was a bad Catholic like me, who believed in God but saw no reason why one should disturb one’s life, certainly not lose one’s head. Ellen is a Presbyterian who doesn’t have much use for God but believes in doing right and does it.
Sunlight creeps along the tabletop, casting into relief the shiny scoured ridges of pine. Steam rising from the grits sets motes stirring in the golden bar of light. I shiver slightly. Morning is still not the best of times. As far as morning is concerned, I can’t say things have changed much. What has changed is my way of dealing with it. No longer do I crawl around on hands and knees drinking Tang and vodka and duck eggs.
My stomach leaps with hunger. I eat grits and bacon and corn sticks.
After breakfast my heart leaps with love.
“Come sit in my lap, Ellen.”
“Well—”
“Now then. Here.”
“Oh for pity’s sake.”
“Yes. There now.”
“Not now.”
“Give me a kiss.”
“My stars.”
Her mouth tastes of honey.
“Tch. Not now,” she whispers.
“Why not?”
“The children are coming.”
“The children can—”
“Here’s Meg.”
“So I see. Kiss me.”
“Kiss Meg.”
Walk up the cliff to catch the bus in Paradise.
Up and down the fairways go carts canopied in orange-and-white Bantu stripes. Golfers dismount for their shots, their black faces inscrutable under the bills of their caps.
Recently Bantu golfers rediscovered knickerbockers and the English golf cap, which they wear pulled down to their eyebrows and exactly level. They shout “Fore!” but they haven’t got it quite right, shouting it not as a warning but as a kind of ritual cry, a karate shout, before teeing off.
English golf pros are in fashion now, the way Austrian ski instructors used to be. Charley Parker moved to Australia.
“Fore!” shouts a driver, though no one is in sight, and whales into it.
“Good shot!”
“Bully, old man!”
“Give me my cleek.”
Paradise has gone 99 percent Bantu. How did the Bantus win? Not by revolution. No, their revolution was a flop; they got beat in the Troubles five years ago and pulled back to the swamp. So how did they win? By exercising their property rights!
Why not? Squatting out in the swamp for twenty years, they came by squatter’s rights to own it. Whereupon oil was struck through the old salt domes. Texaco and Esso and Good Gulf thrust money into black hands. Good old Bantu uncles burned $100 bills like Oklahoma Indians of old.
So they moved out of the swamp and bought the houses in Paradise. Why not? I sold mine for $70,000 and sank the money in my invention like many another nutty doctor.
Willard Amadie bought Tara and was elected mayor.
Uru, baffled by Southern ways, left in disgust, returned to Ann Arbor, and rejoined the Black Studies department of the U. of M., where life is simpler.
Others left. Many Knotheads, beside themselves with rage, driven mad by the rain of noxious particles, departed for safe Knothead havens in San Diego, Cicero, Hattiesburg, and New Rochelle. Many Lefts, quaking with terror and abstracted out of their minds, took out for Berkeley, Cambridge, Madison, and Fairfax County, Virginia, where D.C. liberals live.
Some stayed, mostly eccentrics who don’t fit in anywhere else. I stayed because it’s home and I like its easygoing ways, its religious confusion, racial hodgepodge, misty green woods, and sleepy bayous. People still stop and help strangers lying in ditches having been set upon by thieves or just plain drunk. Good nature usually prevails, even between enemies. As the saying goes in Louisiana: you may be a son of a bitch but you’re my son of a bitch.
Only one woman to my name now, a lusty tart Presbyterian, but one is enough. Moira married Buddy Brown and removed to Phoenix, where he is director of the Big Corral, the Southwest Senior Citizens Termination Center. Lola, lovely strong-backed splendid-kneed cellist, married Barry Bocock, the clean West-Coast engineer, and removed to Marietta, Georgia, where Barry works for Lockheed and Lola is President of Colonial Dames, shows three-gaited horses, and plays cello for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.
I say Paradise is 99 percent Bantu. My mother is the remaining 1 percent. She stayed and made a second fortune selling astrological real estate to the Bantus, who are as superstitious as whites. Most of the younger and smarter Bantus are, to tell the truth, only nominally Bantu, having lost their faith at the Ivy League universities they habitually attend.
Borrow a newspaper from a tube near the bus stop. ATROCITIES SOLVED says the headline.
Read the story in the sunny quarter of a golf shelter. Hm. It seems the murderers who have terrorized this district for the past ten years turned out to be neither black guerrillas nor white Knotheads but rather a love community in the swamp. The leader is quoted as saying his family believes in love, the environment, and freedom of the individual.