The Last Gentleman (41 page)

“Hey, Merum!”

Uncle Fannin was walking up and down the back porch, his face narrow and dark as a piece of slab bark, carrying in the crook of his arm the Browning automatic worn to silver, with bluing left only in the grooves of the etching. The trigger guard was worn as thin as an old man's wedding ring.

“Mayrom! Where's that Ma'am?”

He was calling his servant Merriam but he never called him twice by the same name.

It was characteristic of the uncle that he had greeted his nephew without surprise, as if it were nothing out of the ordinary that he should come hiking up out of nowhere with his artillery binoculars, and after five years. He hardly stopped his pacing.

“We're fixing to mark some coveys up on Sunnyside,” he said, as if it were he who owed the explanations.

The engineer blinked. They might have been waiting for him.

The Trav-L-Aire was nowhere in sight and Uncle Fannin knew nothing about it or any company of “actors,” as the engineer called them (calculating that a mixture of blacks and whites was somehow more tolerable if they were performers).

Merriam came round the corner of the house with two pointers, one an old liver-and-white bitch who knew what was what and had no time for foolery, trotting head down, dugs rippling like a curtain; the other pointer was a fool. He was a young dog named Rock. He put his muzzle in the engineer's hand and nudged him hard. His head was heavy as iron. There were warts all over him where Uncle Fannin had shot him for his mistakes. Merriam, the engineer perceived, was partial to Rock and was afraid the uncle was going to shoot him again. Merriam was a short heavy Negro whose face was welted and bound up through the cheeks so that he was muffle-jawed in his speech. Blackness like a fury seemed to rush forward in his face. But the engineer knew that the fury was a kind of good nature. He wore a lumpy white sweater with stuffing sticking out of it like a scarecrow.

It was not a real hunt they were setting out on. Uncle Fannin wanted to mark coveys for the season. Later in the fall, businessmen would come down from Memphis and up from New Orleans and he would take them out. The engineer refused the gun offered to him, but he went along with them. They drove into the woods in an old high-finned De Soto whose back seat had been removed to make room for the dogs. A partition of chicken wire fenced off the front seat. The dogs stuck their heads out the windows, grinning and splitting the wind, their feet scrabbling for purchase on the metal seat bed. The car smelled of old bitter car metal and croker sacks and the hot funky firecracker smell of dry bird dogs.

Merriam sat with the two Barretts on the front seat, but swiveled around to face them to show he was not sitting with them, not quite on or off the seat, mostly off and claiming, in a nice deprecation, not more than an inch of seat, not through any real necessity but only as the proper concession due the law of gravity. It was not hard to believe that Merriam could have sat in the air if it had been required of him.

The De Soto plunged and roared, crashing into potholes not with a single shock but with a distributed and mediated looseness, a shambling sound like throwing a chain against a wall, knocking the dogs every whichway. When Uncle Fannin slammed on the brakes, the dogs were thrust forward, their chins pushing against the shoulders of the passengers, but already back-pedaling apologetically, their expressions both aggrieved and grinning.

They hunted from an old plantation dike long since reclaimed by the woods and now no more than a high path through thickets. The engineer, still dressed in Dacron suit and suede oxfords, followed along, hands in pockets. Rock got shot again, though with bird shot and from a sufficient distance so that it did no more harm than raise a new crop of warts.

“Meroom!”

“Yassuh.”

Merriam was carrying a brand-new single-shot nickel-plated sixteen-gauge from Sears Roebuck which looked like a silver flute.

“Look at that son of a bitch.”

“I see him.”

Below and ahead of them the bitch Maggie was holding a point, her body bent like a pin, tail quivering. Rock had swung wide and was doubling back and coming up behind her, bounding up and down like a springbok to see over the grass. He smelled nothing.

“He's sho gon' run over her,” said the uncle.

“No suh, he ain't,” said Merriam, but keeping a fearful weather eye on Rock.

“What's he doing then?”

The engineer perceived that the uncle was asking the question ironically, taking due notice of the magic and incantatory faculty that Negroes are supposed to have—they know what animals are going to do, for example—but doing it ironically.

“Goddamn, he is going to run over her!”—joking aside now.

“He ain't stuttn it,” said Merriam.

Of course Rock, damn fool that he was, did run over Maggie, landing squarely in the middle of the covey and exploding quail in all directions—it coming over him in mid-air and at the last second, the inkling of what lay below, he braking and back-pedaling wildly like Goofy. Uncle Fannin shot three times, twice at quail and once at Rock, and, like all dead shots, already beginning to talk as he shot as if the shooting itself were the least of it. “Look at that cock, one, two, and—”
Wham.
He got three birds, one with one shot and two crossing with the other shot. The third shot hit Rock. The engineer opened his mouth to say something but a fourth shot went off.

“Lord to God,” groaned Merriam. “He done shot him again.” Merriam went to look after Rock.

The uncle didn't hear. He was already down the levee and after a single who had gone angling off into the woods, wings propped down, chunky, teetering in his glide. Uncle Fannin went sidling and backing into the underbrush, reloading as he went, the vines singing and popping around his legs. When he couldn't find the single, even though they had seen where he landed, Merriam told the two Barretts that the quail had hidden from the dogs.

“Now how in the hell is he going to hide from the dogs,” said the disgusted uncle.

“He hiding now,” said Merriam, still speaking to the engineer. “They has a way of hiding so that no dog in the world can see or smell them.”

“Oh, Goddamn, come on now. You hold that dog.”

“I seen them!”

“How do they hide, Merriam?” the engineer asked him.

‘They hits the ground and grab ahold of trash and sticks with both feets and throws theyselfs upside down with his feets sticking up and the dogs will go right over him ever' time.”

“Hold that goddamn dog now, Mayrim!”

After supper they watched television. An old round-eyed Zenith and two leatherette recliners, the kind that are advertised on the back page of the comic section, had been placed in a clearing that had been made long ago by pushing Aunt Felice's good New Orleans furniture back into the dark corners of the room. Merriam watched from a roost somewhere atop a pile of chairs and tables. The sentient engineer perceived immediately that the recliner he was given was Merriam's seat, but there was nothing he could do about it. Uncle Fannin pretended the recliner had been brought out for the engineer (how could it have been?) and Merriam pretended he always roosted high in the darkness. But when they, Uncle Fannin and Merriam, talked during the programs, sometimes the uncle, forgetting, would speak to the other recliner:

“He's leaving now but he be back up there later, don't worry about it.”

“Yes suh,” said Merriam from the upper darkness.

“He's a pistol ball now, ain't he?”

“I mean.”

“But Chester, now. Chester can't hold them by himself.”

“That Mist' Chester is all right now,” cried Merriam.

“Shoot.”

Whenever a commercial ended, Uncle Fannin lifted himself and took a quick pluck at his seat by way of getting ready.

“That laig don't hold him!”

“It ain't his leg that's holding him now,” said the uncle, and, noticing that it was his nephew who sat beside him, gave him a wink and a poke in the ribs to show that he didn't take Merriam seriously.

Merriam didn't mind. They argued about the Western heroes as if they were real people whose motives could be figured out. During a commercial, Merriam told the engineer of a program they had seen last week. It made a strong impression on him because the hero, their favorite, a black knight of a man, both gentleman and brawler, had gotten badly beat up. It was part one of a series and so he was still beat up.

“I told Mist' Fanny”—Merriam spoke muffle-jawed and all in a rush as if he hoped to get the words out before they got bound up in his cheeks—“that the onliest way in the world they can catch him is to get in behind him. Mist' Fanny, he say they gon' stomp him. I say they got to get in behind him first. What happened, some man called his attention, like I say ‘look here!' and he looked and they did get in behind him and Lord, they stomped him, bad, I mean all up in the head. He lay out there in the street two days and folks scared to help him, everybody scared of this one man, Mister errerr—, errerr—” Merriam snapped his fingers. “It slips my mind, but he was a stout man and low, lower than you or Mist' Fanny, he brush his hair up in the front like.” Merriam showed them and described the man so that the engineer would recognize him if he happened to see him. “They taken his money and his gun and his horse and left him out there in the sun. Then here come this other man to kill him. And I said to Mist' Fanny, there is one thing this other man don't know and that is he got this little biddy pistol on him and they didn't take it off him because he got it hid in his bosom.”

“Man, how you going to go up against a thirty-thirty with a derringer,” said the uncle disdainfully, yet shyly, watchful of the engineer lest he, the engineer, think too badly of Merriam. His uncle was pleading with him!

“I'd like to see how that comes out,” said the engineer. “Is the second part coming on tonight?” he asked Merriam.

“Yessuh.”

“That fellow's name was Bogardus,” said the uncle presently. “He carried a carbine with a lever action and he can work that lever as fast as you can shoot that automatic there.”

“Yessuh,” said Merriam, but without conviction.

Still no sign of the Trav-L-Aire, and at midnight the engineer went to bed—without taking thought about it, going up to the second-floor room he used to have in the summertime, a narrow cell under the eaves furnished with an armoire, a basin and ewer and chamber pot, and an old-style feather bed with bolster. The skull was still there on the shelf of the armoire, property of his namesake, Dr. Williston Barrett, the original misfit, who graduated from old Jefferson Medical College, by persuasion an abolitionist but who nevertheless went to fight in Virginia and afterwards having had enough, he said, of the dying and the dead and the living as well, the North and the South, of men in sum, came home to the country and never practiced a day in his life, took instead to his own laudanum and became a philosopher of sorts, lived another sixty years, the only long-lived Barrett male. The skull had turned as yellow as ivory and was pencil-marked by ten generations of children; it was sawed through the dome and the lid securely fastened by silver hinges; undo that and the brain pan was itself sectioned and hinged, opening in turn into an airy comb of sinus cells.

It was cold but he knew the feather bed, so he stripped to his shorts, and after washing his T-shirt in the ewer and spreading it on the marble stand to dry, he climbed into bed. The warm goosedown flowed up around him. It was, he had always imagined, something like going to bed in Central Europe. He pulled the bolster up to his shoulders and propped Sutter's casebook on its thick margin.