When her lawyer called to inform me that Thelma had died, he also notified me that she had bequeathed The Neon Bible to me "in trust." Having promised to abide by her wishes, however imperious and uncompromising they might appear to others, I was for the next three years involved in various lawsuits brought against her estate. The final outcome, of course, was the defeat of Thelma Toole's attempt to control the fate of her son's first novel from beyond the grave. In 1987 a New Orleans judge ruled for partition of the novel, which in effect would have put it up for public auction if the litigants could not reach some settlement. Rather than allow such a spectacle, I conceded the defeat of Thelma's wishes and my desire to respect them, and The Neon Bible was freed for publication.
The novel you are about to read is the extraordinary creation of a teenage author whose life, which should have been full and rich, ended by his own choice, for reasons none of us perhaps will ever know, fifteen years after The Neon Bible was written. His story naturally promotes speculation and nagging questions. Were there other works by John Kennedy Toole? What might he have accomplished had he only lived longer? The question of his unfulfilled promise remains unanswered, of course, as the cause or causes of his wasteful suicide remain unknown. As to the existence of other written works, when we went through Thelma's effects -- her papers, the cherished foreign editions of Confederacy, the gifts and mementos from more than eight decades of life, and, most important of all to her, the carefully treasured possessions of her son and his letters to her -- no manuscripts were found save for an unimpressive poem written during his army days and numerous essays and examination papers from his college career. Whatever fiction John may have written in the decade between The Neon Bible and A Confederacy of Dunces he must himself have destroyed, since it is unthinkable that his mother, given her conviction of his genius and her devotion to his every word and deed, could have disposed of or lost any document.
Thus the legacy of John Kennedy Toole is confined to his two brilliant novels, one a broad satirical view of the modern world, the other, this sensitive and remarkable portrait by a very young author of a small, claustrophobic world oppressed by narrow religious bigotry. The Neon Bible, written thirty-five years ago, is powerfully relevant to a world in which such bigotry has not been frustrated by reason and tolerance but rather seems to have grown stronger. Only two novels, but in their breadth and depth, they constitute testament to a genius.
W. KENNETH HOLDITCH
New Orleans, Louisiana
One
This is the first time I've been on a train. I've sat in this seat here for about two or three hours now. I can't see what's passing by. It's dark now, but when the train left, the sun was just beginning to set, and I could see the red and brown leaves and the tanning grass all along the hillside.
I feel a little better the further the train gets from the house. The tingling that has been running up and down the inside of my legs is stopping, and my feet feel like they're really there now, and not like two cold things that don't really belong to the rest of my body. I'm not as scared anymore.
There's a colored fellow coming through between the seats. He's snapped off every one of the lights over the seats. There's just a tiny red one glowing at the end of the coach, and I'm sorry it isn't bright here anymore by my seat, because I start to think too much in the dark about what's back in the house. They must have turned the heat off too. It's cold in here. I wish I had a blanket to throw over my knees and something to put over this seat so the plush wouldn't scratch the back of my neck.
If it was day outside, I could see where I was. I've never been this far from home in my life. We must be almost two hundred miles away now. With nothing to see, you have to listen to the click-click-click of the train. Sometimes I hear the whistle sounding far ahead. I've heard it plenty times, but I never thought I'd be riding with it. And I don't mind the clicking. It sounds like the rain on a tin roof at night when it's quiet and still and the only thing you can hear is the rain and the thunder.
But I had a train of my own. It was a toy one I got for Christmas when I was three. That was when Poppa was working at the factory and we lived in the little white house in town that had a real roof you could sleep under when it rained, and not a tin one like the place on the hill had that leaked through the nail holes too.
People came to see us that Christmas. We always had some people in the house, coming in blowing and rubbing their hands together and shaking out their coats like it was snowing outside. But there was no snow. Not that year. But they were nice, and brought me things. I remember the preacher gave me a book of Bible stories. But that was most likely because my mother and father were paying church members then, with their names on the rolls and both of them in the Adult Study Class that met every Sunday at nine and Wednesday night at seven for a social. I was in the Pre-School Play section, but we never played like the name said. We had to listen to stories some old woman read to us out of a grownup book that we didn't understand.
Mother was very hospitable that year I got the train. Everybody got some of her fruitcake that she was proud of. She said it was from an old family recipe, but I found out later she got the cake through a mail order from some company in Wisconsin called the Olde English Baking Company, Limited. I found that out when I learned to read and saw it in the mail a few Christmases later when we didn't have any people over and we had to eat it ourselves. No one ever knew, though, that she didn't make it, except me and Mother and maybe the man at the post office, but he was a deaf mute and couldn't tell anybody.
I don't remember any children my age coming around that Christmas. As a matter of fact, there weren't any children my age living around us at all. After Christmas was over, I stayed in the house and played with my train. It was too cold outside, and about January it began to snow. Heavy snows that year, although everyone thought they'd never come.
It was that spring that Mother's Aunt Mae came to live with us. She was heavy but not fat, and about sixty, and came from out of state somewhere where they had nightclubs. I asked Mother why her hair wasn't shiny and yellow like Aunt Mae's, and she said some people were just lucky, and I felt sorry for her.
Next to the train, I remember Aunt Mae most. She smelled so strong of perfume that sometimes you couldn't get near her without your nose stinging and having a hard time getting air. I never saw anybody with hair and clothes like that, and I sat and just looked at her sometimes.
When I was four Mother gave a party for some of the wives of the factory workers, and Aunt Mae came into the living room in the middle of the party wearing a dress that showed almost all her front, except for the nipples, which I knew you never could show. The party ended soon after that, and as I was sitting on the porch, I heard the women talking to each other as they left. And they were calling Aunt Mae all sorts of names like I had never heard before and really didn't know the meaning of until I was almost ten years old.