4
“Going hunting?”
“No.” It was Lewis Peckham standing in the doorway behind him. He wondered if anything could surprise him.
“I got an old cornfield the hogs have been into. It’s full of doves. You could come down this afternoon.”
“No thanks.” He unlatched the forestock of the gun, broke the breech, replaced the parts carefully in the plush cavities of the heavy fitted case.
“What’s the matter?”
“What?”
“I said what’s the matter?”
“What do you mean what’s the matter?”
“Something’s been the matter with you.”
“It’s okay now.” He laughed.
“You do seem better. What was it?
He looked at Lewis. It was unusual for him to ask questions.
“It was something I didn’t know that was bothering me. Now I know.”
“I could tell you how to correct your slice, but that’s not it, is it?”
“No.”
Lewis Peckham’s face, narrow and dark as a piece of slab bark, was as usual slightly averted.
“But the slice is part of it, isn’t it? I’ll tell you a funny thing. I can watch a man swing a golf club and tell you more about him than a psychiatrist after a hundred hours on the couch.”
It was probably true. Lewis had a shrewd grave watchful intelligence which, however, was almost spoiled by a restlessness under the quietness. He was not what he appeared. It had at first appeared that Lewis was a natural man, one of the few left, a grave watchful silent courteous man, a Leatherstocking. But he was not. He was a discontent golf pro. He looked like a Cherokee scout but his family was old-line Tidewater and he had played golf at the University of Virginia. He was an unhappy golf pro. Maybe books had ruined him. What a shock to learn from this grave silent man that he wrote poetry in secret! Imagine Leatherstocking a poet. Lewis knew a great many things, could read signs like an Indian but unlike an Indian he did not know what he could not do. He thought he was a good poet but he was not. He thought books could tell him how to live but they couldn’t. He was a serious but dazed reader. He read Dante and Shakespeare and Nietzsche and Freud. He read modern poetry and books on psychiatry. He had taken a degree in English, taught English, fought in a war, returned to teach English, couldn’t, decided to farm, bought a goat farm, managed a Confederate museum in a cave on his property, wrote poetry, went broke, became a golf pro. Lewis showed him some of his poetry once. It was not good. There was one poem called “New Moon over Khe Sanh,” which was typed in the shape of a new moon:
How could Lewis who could locate others so well, so misplace himself? How could he read signs and people so well, yet want to be a third-rate Rupert Brooke with his rendezvous with death at Khe Sanh? Why would he even want to be a first-rate Rupert Brooke? On the other hand, what was Lewis supposed to do? be an Indian scout? goatherd? English teacher? golf pro? run a Confederate cave? Lewis didn’t seem to know. But what was good about him was that he remained himself despite himself. Books had not spoiled him. He knew a great deal he hadn’t learned from books. The trouble was he didn’t set store by it.
Will Barrett smiled. All at once he knew what Lewis was supposed to do and what would make him happy. After all the local Angles and Jutes and Saxons have driven each other crazy over niggers and gone to war for lack of anything better to do, Lewis is the fellow who keeps his head and goes around picking up people with his pickup and saving a remnant in his cave.
“You’re sure you’re okay, Will?”
“Sure.”
“You want to know what I think?”
“Yes.”
“I think you’re in a clinical depression. I believe you might do with some counseling. Have you heard of logotherapy?”
Logotherapy. Jesus Christ. What’s he been reading now? English teacher, goatherd, spelunker, poet, golf pro, now a psychiatrist.
Lewis inclined his head gravely. “The trouble is you and I share something that sets us apart.”
“What’s that?”
“We’re the once-born in a world of the twice-born. We have to make our way without Amazing Grace. It’s a lonely road but there are some advantages along the way. The company, when you find it, is better. And the view, though bleak, is bracing. You see things the way they are. In fact, don’t you feel sometimes like the one-eyed in the land of the blind?”
He frowned. Why was Lewis’s unbelief so unpleasant? It was no better than the Baptists’ belief.
If belief is shitty and unbelief is shitty, what does that leave?
No, Lewis was even more demented than the believers. Unbelieving Lewis read Dante for the structure. At least, believers were consistent. They might think Dante is a restaurant in Asheville but they don’t read Marx for structure.
“Have you considered analysis, Will?”
“Analysis of what?”
“Of you. Psychoanalysis.”
“I did that. Three years of it.”
“Analysis? No kidding.” Lewis brightened. Lewis thought better of him! Lewis envied him! Lewis wanted to be analyzed! “Then you of all people should know that depression is eminently treatable, right?”
Lewis waited, not quite watching him, as grave and courteous as if he were waiting for a putt.
“Maybe you’re right.”
“Of course I’m right. What is more, you know as well as I do that such a reaction is quite common following the death of a spouse.”
A spouse. Marion was a spouse. But did Marion’s death depress him or mystify him?
“Also, if you want to know the truth. Will, I think you retired too soon.”
“May be,” he said absently.
“Early retirement is one of the major causes of depression.”
“Is that right?”
He took a good look at Lewis, at the dark slab-sided face and straight black hair which was too long for a golf pro and too short for a poet. There was a space in him where a space shouldn’t be, where parts were not glued together. What it was was that there is nothing wrong with being a goatherd-poet-golf-pro but there was something wrong with the way Lewis did it. What?
“After all. Will, you got it all. You got everything a man needs. And you’re a good athlete. You could play scratch golf if you put your mind to it.”
“What would you do if you had it all, Lewis?”
“I’d raise beef cattle, listen to Beethoven and Wagner, read and write,” said Lewis without hesitation.
Two fingers strayed along the greasy steel of the Greener barrel.
“You don’t enjoy such things, Will?”
“Sure.”
Lewis touched his arm, a rare thing. Leatherstocking didn’t touch anybody. “Tell you what, Will. They don’t need the father of the bride around here. Let’s me and you cut out, go down to my spread, crack a bottle, and put on the Ninth Symphony.”
“No thanks, Lewis.” Dear Jesus. Sitting with Lewis in his farmhouse, listening to the Ninth Symphony.
“Name one thing better than the Ninth Symphony.”
Kitty’s ass. “I’m not in the mood.” He looked at his watch. What did Kitty have in mind?