“Mr. Barrett, I don’t want Jamie to die an unprovided death.”
“Unprovided?”
“I don’t want him to die without knowing why he came here, what he is doing here, and why he is leaving.”
“Ma’am?” The engineer felt like wringing out his ear but he did not.
“It may fall to you to tell him.”
“Tell him what?”
“About the economy of salvation.”
“Why don’t you tell him?” He was watching her as intently as the towhee watched her. There was no telling what she might do.
She sighed and sat down. The towhee, released from its spell, flew away. “I have told him.”
The engineer, though standing erect, began to lean about five degrees away from her.
“It is curious, Mr. Barrett, but what I told him was absolutely the last thing on earth he would listen to. It was not simply one of a great number of things he might have listened to more or less indifferently. It was, of all things, absolutely the last thing. Doesn’t that strike you as strange?”
“I couldn’t say. But if you can’t tell him what you believe, you his sister, how do you expect me to tell him what I don’t believe?”
But she was at it again, her trick of engaging him then slipping away. “They didn’t ride in carts the last time I was here,” she said, gazing past him at the golfers. Do all nuns banter about salvation? “And yet, there he was, reading all that guff with relish.”
“What guff?”
“That book about radio noise from the galaxies, noise which might not be noise. Did you give it to him?”
“No.”
She ignored his irritation. “I’ve noticed,” she said gloomily and not especially to him, “that it is usually a bad sign when dying people become interested in communication with other worlds, and especially when they become spiritual in a certain sense.”
“Don’t you believe in other worlds and, ah, spirits?”
“It is strange, but I’ve always distrusted so-called spiritual people,” she muttered, mostly ruminating with herself. “You know how women talk about such and such a priest being spiritual?”
“No.” How could he know any such thing?
“I always steer clear of those birds. But no, actually I owe spiritual people, ladies, a great deal — they’re very generous with me when I beg from them. It’s a strange business, isn’t it? The most unlikely people are generous. Last week I persuaded the local Klonsul of the Klan to give us a Seven-Up machine. Do you think it is possible to come to Christ through ordinary dislike before discovering the love of Christ? Can dislike be a sign?”
“I couldn’t say,” said the sleepy engineer.
She brought herself up and looked at him for the first time. “Mr. Barrett, Jamie’s salvation may be up to you.”
“Eh? Excuse me, but apart from the circumstance that I do not know what the word ‘salvation’ means, I would refuse in any case to accept any such commission, Miss, ah—, that is, Sister—”
“Val.”
“Sister Val.”
“No,” she said laughing. “Just Val. I am Sister Johnette Mary Vianney.”
“Is that right?”
His refusal, he noticed, was delivered with a tingle of pleasure, both perverse and familiar. Familiar because — yes, he remembered his father refusing a priest and taking some satisfaction in it even though he, his father, took the Catholics’ side in their troubles with the Klan. “Mr. Barrett,” the priest asked him with the same jolly gall, “I don’t think you realized it but you just fired one of my parishioners, heh-heh, and I want to ask you if you will take her back. She has a family and no husband—” “And who could that be,” said his father, his voice ominously civil. “Souella Johnson.” Souella Johnson, who, being not merely a winehead but, failing to find Gallo sherry in the house, had polished off as a poor substitute some six cases of twenty-year-old bourbon over the years. “I will not, sir,” said his father and bang, down went the telephone.
“I will not,” he told Val with the same species of satisfaction. Perhaps we are true Protestants despite ourselves, he mused, or perhaps it is just that the protest is all that is left of it. For it is in stern protest against Catholic monkey business that we feel ourselves most ourselves. But was her request true Catholic gall, the real article, or was it something she had hit upon through a complicated Vaught dialectic? Or did she love her brother?
He read in her eyes that he looked odd. “What is it?” she asked him smiling. For a split second he saw in her his Kitty, saw it in her lip-curling bold-eyed expression. It was as if his Kitty, his golden girl of summertime and old Carolina, had come back from prison where she had got fat and white as white and bad-complexioned.
“What?” she asked again.
“I was wondering,” said the engineer, who always told the truth, “how you manage to come to the point where you feel free to make requests of people.”
She laughed again. “Jamie was right. You’re a good companion. Well, I can ask you, can’t I?”
“Sure.”
“It’s like the story about the boy who got slapped by quite a few girls but who — well. But it’s extraordinary how you can ask the most unlikely people — you can ask them straight out: say, look, I can see you’re unhappy; why don’t you stop stealing or abusing Negroes, go confess your sins and receive the body and blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ — and how often they will just look startled and go ahead and do it. One reason is that people seldom ask other people to do anything.”
“I see.”
“Now I have to go see Sutter.”
“Yes ma’am.”
He began nodding in ancient Protestant fuddlement and irony, not knowing whether to bow, shake hands, or look down his nose. But it didn’t matter. She had left without noticing.
Jamie was not in the apartment. There were voices in the room next door. That would be Sutter and Val, he calculated, and perhaps Jamie. The old itch for omniscience came upon him — lost as he was in his own potentiality, having come home to the South only to discover that not even his own homelessness was at home here — but he resisted the impulse to eavesdrop. I will not overhear nor will I oversee, he said, and instead threw a dozen combination punches, for henceforth I shall be what I am no matter how potential I am. Whereupon he dismounted the telescope through which he and Jamie had studied the behavior of golfers who hooked their drives from number 5 tee into the creek. Some cheated. It was with a specific, though unidentified pleasure that one watched the expressions of the men who stood musing and benign and Kiwanian while one busy foot nudged the ball out of the water.
He lay on the bed, feet sticking straight up, and broke out in a cold sweat. What day is this, he wondered, what month, and he jumped up to get his Gulf calendar card from his wallet. The voices in the next room murmured away. A chair scraped back. The vacuum of his own potentiality howled about him and sucked him toward the closet. He began to lean. Another few seconds, and he was holed up as snug as an Englishman in Somerset, closet door closed behind him, Val-Pak on his back like a chasuble.
The hole commanded perhaps a 100 degree view of Sutter’s room. It was furnished in rancho style with a maple couch and chair with wagonwheel arms. There were pictures of famous moments of medical history: First Use of Anesthesia, Dr. Lister Vaccinates, Tapping Ascites. Mrs. Vaught, he remembered, had fixed up the room for Sutter when he was in school.
Sutter was sitting in the wagonwheel chair, idly brandishing an automatic pistol, aiming it here and there, laying the muzzle against his cheek. Val was leaving: he caught no more than a flurry of black skirt and a shoe of cracked leather. At close range Sutter did not look so youthful. His olive skin had a yellowish cast. The high color of his cheeks resolved into a network of venules. His fingertips were wrinkled and stained by chemicals.