Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World

In the Slave Quarters 9 A.M. / CHRISTMAS EVE

HOEING COLLARDS IN MY KITCHEN GARDEN.

A fine December day. It is cold but the winter sun pours into the walled garden and fills it up.

After hoeing a row: sit in the sunny corner, stretch out my legs and look at my boots. A splendid pair of new boots of soft oiled leather, good for hunting and fishing and walking to town. For the first time I understand what the Confederate soldier was always saying: a good pair of boots is the best thing a man can have.

A poor man sets store by good boots. Ellen and I are poor. We live with our children in the old Quarters. Constructed of slave brick worn porous and rounded at the corners like sponges, the apartments are surprisingly warm in winter, cool in summer. They are built like an English charterhouse, a hundred apartments in a row along the bayou, each with a porch, living room or (in my case) library, two bedrooms, kitchen, garden, one behind the other.

Waiting and listening and looking at my boots.

Here’s one difference between this age and the last. Now while you work, you also watch and listen and wait. In the last age we planned projects and cast ahead of ourselves. We set out to “reach goals.” We listened to the minutes of the previous meeting. Between times we took vacations.

Through the open doorway I can see Ellen standing at the stove in a swatch of sunlight. She stirs grits. Light and air flow around her arm like the arm of Velasquez’s weaver girl. Her half apron is lashed just above the slight swell of her abdomen.

She socks spoon down on pot and cocks her head to listen for the children, slanting her dark straight eyebrows. A kingfisher goes ringing down the bayou.

Meg and Thomas More, Jr., are still asleep.

Chinaberries bounce off the tin roof.

The bricks are growing warm at my back. In the corner of the wall a garden spider pumps its web back and forth like a child on a swing.

My practice is small. But my health is better. Fewer shakes and depressions and unnatural exaltations. Rise at six every morning and run my trotline across the bayou. Water is the difference! Water is the mystical element! At dawn the black bayou breathes a white vapor. The oars knock, cypress against cypress, but the sound is muffled, wrapped in cotton. As the trotline is handed along, the bank quickly disappears and the skiff seems to lift and be suspended in a new element globy and white. Silence presses in and up from the vaporish depths come floating great green turtles, blue catfish, lordly gaspergous.

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.

Before the bus comes, a new orange Toyota stops to give me a lift. It is Colley Wilkes, super-Bantu. He and his light-colored wife, Fran, are on their way to Honey Island for the Christmas bird count. A pair of binoculars and a camera with massive telephoto lens lie on the Sunday Times between them. A tape plays Rudolf Friml. The Wilkes are dressed in sports togs. Fran sets around cater-cornered, leg tucked under her, to see me.

“You catch us on the crest of the wave,” she tells me. “We are ten feet high. Our minds are blown.”

“How’s that?”

“Tell him, Colley.”

“We found him, Tom,” says Colley portentously. “By George, we found him.”

“Who?”

“He’s alive! He’s come back! After all these years!”

“Who?”

This morning, hauling up a great unclassified beast of a fish, I thought of Christ coming again at the end of the world and how it is that in every age there is the temptation to see signs of the end and that, even knowing this, there is nevertheless some reason, what with the spirit of the new age being the spirit of watching and waiting, to believe that—

Colley’s right hand strays over the tape deck. The smooth shark skin at the back of his neck is pocked with pits that are as perfectly circular as if they had been punched out with a tiny biscuit cutter.

“Last Sunday at 6:55 a.m.,” says Colley calmly, “exactly four miles west of Honey Island I — saw — an — ivory-billed — woodpecker.”

“Is that so?”

“No question about it.”

“That is remarkable.”

“Do you realize what this means?” Fran asks me.

“No. Yes.”

“There has not been a verified sighting of an ivorybill since nineteen-three. Think of it.”

“All right.”

“Wouldn’t that be something now,” muses Fran, breathing on her binoculars, “to turn in a regular Christmas list, you know, six chickadees, twenty pine warblers, two thousand myrtle warblers, and at the end, with photo attached: one ivory-billed woodpecker? Can’t you see the Audubon brass as they read it?”

“Yes.”

“Of course we have to find him again. Wish us luck.”

“Yes. I do.”

Colley asks politely after my family, my practice. I tell him my family is well but my practice is poor, so poor I have to moonlight with a fat clinic. At noon today, in fact, I meet with my fat ladies at the Bantu Country Club.

Fran shakes her head with an outrage tempered by her binocular-polishing. Colley pushes a button. The tape plays a Treasury of the World’s Great Music, which has the good parts of a hundred famous symphonies, ballets, and operas. Colley knows the music and, as he drives, keeps time, anticipating phrases with a duck of head, lilt of chin.

“I don’t get it, Tom,” says Fran, breathing now on the telephoto lens, which is the size of a butter plate. “Everyone knows you’re a marvelous diagnostician.”

“It’s very simple,” I reply, nodding along with the good part of Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet. “The local Bantu medical society won’t let me in, so I can’t use the hospital.”

An awkward silence follows, but fortunately the love theme soars.

“Well,” says Colley presently. “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

“That’s true.”

“These things take time, Tom,” says Fran.

“I know.”

“Rest assured, however, that some of us are working on it.”

“All right.”

The Anvil Chorus starts up. Colley beats time with soft blows of his fist on the steering wheel.

“You’ve got to remember one thing,” says Colley, socking away. “You can sometimes accomplish more by not rocking the boat.”

“I wasn’t rocking the boat. You asked me a question.”

“You’re among friends, Tom,” says Fran. “Who do you think led the fight to integrate the Bantu Audubon Society?”

“Colley.”

“Right!”

Colley lifts his chin toward me. “And who do you think fixed a hundred Christmas baskets for peckerwood children?”

“Fran.”

“Longhu6 baskets, dear,” Fran corrects him. Longhu6 is the Bantu god of the winter solstice.

“Tell me something, Tom,” says Colley quizzically-Amherstly, swaying in time to the good part of “Waltz of the Flowers” from Nutcracker. “Still working on your, ah—”

“Lapsometer? Yes indeed. Now that there is no danger of diabolical abuse, the future is bright.”

“Diab—!” He frowns, missing the beat of Nutcracker. He’s sorry he asked.

But he’s full of Christmas cheer — or triumph over the ivorybill — and presently comes back to it, as if to prove his goodwill. “Some day you’re going to put it all together,” he says, directing Barcarole with one gloved finger.

“Put all what together?”

“Your device. I’m convinced you’re on the right track in your stereotactic exploration of the motor and sensory areas of the cortex. This is where it’s at.”

“That’s not it at all,” I say, hunching forward between them. “I’m not interested in motor and sensory areas. What concerns me is angelism, bestialsm, and other perturbations of the soul.”

“The soul. Hm, yes, well—”

“Just what do you think happened here five years ago?” I ask his smooth punchcarded neck.

“Five years ago?”

“In the Troubles. What do you think caused people to go out of their minds with terror and rage and attack each other?”

Fran looks at Colley.

“The usual reasons, I suppose,” says Colley mournfully. “People resorting to violence instead of using democratic processes to resolve their differences.”

“Bullshit, Colley — beg your pardon, Fran — what about the yellow cloud?”

“Right. Well, here we are!” Colley pulls over to the curb and reaches around the headrest to open my door, which takes some doing.

“Merry Christmas,” I say absently and thank them for the ride.

“Merry Longhu6!” says Fran, smiling but firm-eyed.

The office is lonesome without Ellen. Usually she comes with me, but Saturday is my fat-clinic day and I only spend a couple of hours here. Ellen is taking the kids to see Santy. It is Christmas Eve and I need a bit of cash. Ten dollars wouldn’t hurt.

The solitude is pleasant, however. I open the back door opening onto the ox-lot. English sparrows have taken the martin hotel.

When I prop my foot on the drawer of Bayonne-rayon members, it reminds me of taking a drink. I close the drawer. No drink for six months. One reason is willpower. The other is that Ellen would kill me.

Across the ox-lot Mrs. Prouty comes out on the loading ramp of Sears. She smiles at me and leans against the polished steel pipe-rail.

I smile back. Most Saturdays we exchange pleasantries.

She wrote up my order for the new boots and Ellen’s Christmas present, a brass bed, king-size (60”) with non-allergenic Posture-mate mattress and serofoam polyurethane foundation, Sears Best. The whole works: $603.95.

A year’s savings went into it, mainly from my fat clinic. No Christmas present ever took more thinking about or planning for. Even the delivery required scheming. How to get a bed past a housewife? Ask housewife to take children to plaza to see Santy (Santy is as big with the Bantus as with the Christians).

Did the bed make it? I lift my head in question to Mrs. Prouty. She nods and holds up thumb to forefinger. The bed is on the way.

We’ve slept till now, Ellen and I, on single beds from my old house. A conceit of Doris’s and much prized then, they are “convent” beds, which is to say, not even proper singles, narrower and shorter rather. For thirteen years my feet have stuck out, five with Doris, three alone, five with Ellen. Nuns must have been short. White-iron, chaste, curious, half-canopied the beds were, redolent of a far-off time and therefore serviceable in Doris’s war on the ordinary, because at the time it was impossible to sleep in ORDINARY BEDS.

Did Mrs. Prouty wink at me? Across the weeds we gaze at each other, smiling. Her olive arms hug herself. A nyloned hip polishes a pipe-fitting. Mrs. Prouty is a good-looking good-humored lady. Whenever she used to see me buying a bottle next door at the Little Napoleon, she’d say: “Somebody’s going to have a party. Can I come?” Her lickerish look comes, I think, from her merry eye and her skin, which is as clear and smooth as an olive.

When I ordered the brass bed, she swung the catalogue round on its lectern, leaned on it, and tapped her pencil on the counter.

“I know where I’d spend Christmas, huh, Docky?”

“What? Oh,” I say, laughing before I take her meaning. Did she say Docky or ducky?

After I ordered the boots, she leaned on the catalogue again.

“These can go under mine any day,” she says, merry eye roving past me carelessly.

“Ma’am? Eh? Right! Har har!”

These = my boots?

Mine = her bed?

Nowadays when a good-looking woman flirts with me, however idly, I guffaw like some ruddy English lord, haw haw, har har, harrr harrr.

Three patients come. Two Bantu businessmen, one with ulcers, the other with hypertension. Their own docs did ’em no good, so they want me to make magic passes with my machine. I oblige them, do so, take readings, hoard up data. They leave, feeling better.

The third is old P.T. Bledsoe. Even though he lost everything, including his wife, when the Bantus took Paradise and Betterbag Paper Company, he didn’t leave and go to the Outback after all. Instead, he moved out to his fishing camp and took to drinking Gallo muscatel and fishing for speckles. All he comes to me for is to get his pan-vitamin shot to keep his liver going. Out he goes rubbing his shiny butt and rattling off in his broken-down Plymouth.

Hm. Eleven dollars. Not a bad haul. My patients fork over cash, knowing I need it, five from each Bantu and one dollar from P.T., who also brings me a sack of mirlations and a fifth of Early Times. Not good. But he didn’t know I had stopped drinking.

Mrs. Prouty is still on the ramp.

Now she points to her wristwatch.

Does she mean it is almost noon and she’ll be off and why not have a little Christmas drink?

For she’s spotted the Early Times. Rising, I unshuck gift box from bottle.

Comes again the longing, the desire that has no name. Is it for Mrs. Prouty, for a drink, for both: for a party, for youth, for the good times, for dear good drinking and fighting comrades, for football-game girls in the fall with faces like flowers? Comes the longing and it has to do with being fifteen and fifty and with the winter sun striking down into a brickyard and on clapboard walls rounded off with old hard blistered paint and across a doorsill onto linoleum. Desire has a smell: of cold linoleum and gas heat and the sour piebald bark of crepe myrtle. A good-humored thirty-five-year-old lady takes the air in a back lot in a small town.

Insert thumbnail into plastic seal between glass rim and stopper. The slight pop is like a violation.

Comes a knock. Patient number four.

Put away the Early Times in the drawer of Bayonne-rayons.

It is a new patient, a young coffee-colored graduate student with intense eyes and a high bossed forehead like the late Harry Belafonte. Seems he has a private complaint. Nothing for it but to close the back door. He leans forward in a pleasant anxious way. I know what is wrong with him before he opens his mouth, but he tells me anyway.

Chief complaint: a feeling of strangeness, of not feeling himself, of eeriness, dislocation, etcetera etcetera.

Past history: native of Nassau, graduate of U. of Conn. and Syracuse. He tells me it is his plan to “unite in his own life the objective truths of science with the universal spiritual insights of Eastern religion.”

Ah me. Another Orientalized heathen Englishman.

“Well, let’s see,” I say, and take out my lapsometer.

When he’s gone, I open the back door. The Sears ramp is empty.

Ah well. To my fat ladies, to the A & P for a turkey, to the toy store and home.

“Fore!”

“Good mashie, old man!”

In a bunker I notice that, December or not, weeds are beginning to sprout.

A tractor pulling a gang mower stops beside me. The driver is greenskeeper Moon Mullins, a fellow Knight of Columbus, Holy Name man, ex-Pontiac salesman. Moon stayed because he owns half the shacks in Happy Hollow, now inhabited by peckerwoods, and can’t sell them.

“How goes it, Moon?”

The greenskeeper shakes his head dolefully. Really, though, he’s fit as can be. What he doesn’t remember is his life as a Pontiac salesman in a Toyota town, standing around the showroom grinning and popping his knuckles while his colon tightened and whitened, went hard and straight as a lead pipe.

“You want to know where it all began to go wrong?” Moon asks me, nodding toward a foursome of sepia golfers.

“Where?”

“It started when we abandoned the Latin mass.”

“You think?”

“Sure. You think about it.”

“All right.”

Off he roars, whistling a carol and showering me in a drizzle of grass cuttings.

“See you tonight!” he hollers back.

He comes down to the chapel now. Most A.C.C. (Cicero) Catholics have moved away. Monsignor Schleifkopf was transferred to Brooklyn. Moon and others who stayed have drifted back to Father Smith.

After holding fat clinic at the club, I am served lunch in the hall. The placing of my table in the hall between the men’s bar crowded with golfers and the dining room overflowing with Mah-Jongg ladies is nicely calculated not to offend me.

I eat with the English pro.

From one side comes the click of Mah-Jongg tiles, from the other the rattle of poker dice in cup. My Bantu ladies, the weight watchers, are a hefty crew. They are all dressed in the fashion of the day, in velveteen, mostly green and wine-colored with hats to match, hats with tall stove-in crowns and large cloche-shaped brims.

The food is good — it comes straight from the rib room and is the same roast beef and Yorkshire pudding everyone is served. I eat heartily. Better still, I don’t have to listen to “Christmas gif, Doc!” and I don’t have to worry about tipping. Instead I get tipped. Beside my plate I find an envelope with check for $25 and poem attached. From my fat ladies.

Merry Longhu6 for our Doc

Who tries to keep us slim.

Don’t get discouraged, Doc, we’ll try harder

More power to him.

Reading poem and nodding and chewing roast beef.

The bell rings for midnight mass. Ellen decides to come with me.

“Thanks again for the bell, my son,” says Father Smith on the tiny porch of the chapel. With his deep tan from fire-watching and his hairy Spanish futbol wrists he looks more than ever like Ricardo Montalban.

The bell is the plantation bell from Tara. It is the original bell provided by David O. Selznick for the original Tara. Lola hid it in the well before the Bantus came.

There is some confusion in the chapel. The Jews are leaving — it is their Sabbath. The Protestants are singing. Catholics are lined up for confession. We have no ecumenical movement. No minutes of the previous meeting are read. The services overlap. Jews wait for the Lord, Protestants sing hymns to him, Catholics say mass and eat him.

Bessie Charles is singing a spiritual:

He’s got the little bitty baby in his hands,

He’s got the whole world in his hands.

Catholics join in self-consciously and off-key.

Father Smith looks at his watch as usual and as usual says: “Time to get locked in the box. Coming?”

“Very well.”

Blinking with surprise, he lets out a groan and looks at his watch again. Must he hear my confession in the few minutes he allots to polishing off the week’s sins of his practicing Catholics? Well, he will if he must.

“Don’t worry, Father. It won’t take a minute.”

He nods, relieved. Perhaps I’ve been slipping off to confess elsewhere.

My turn comes at last. I kneel in the sour darkness of the box, which smells of sweat and pullman curtain.

The little door slides back. There is Father Smith, close as close, cheek propped on three fingers, trying to keep awake. He’s cross-eyed from twelve hours of fire-watching. A hundred brushfires flicker across his retina. These days people, convinced of world-conspiracies against them, go out and set the woods afire to get even.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” I say and fall silent, forgetting everything.

“When was your last confession?” asks the priest patiently.

“Eleven years ago.”

Another groan escapes the priest. Again he peers at his watch. Must he listen to an eleven-year catalogue of dreary fornications and such? Well, he’ll do it.

“Father, I can make my confession in one sentence.”

“Good,” says the priest, cheering up.

“I do not recall the number of occasions, Father, but I accuse myself of drunkenness, lusts, envies, fornication, delight in the misfortunes of others, and loving myself better than God and other men.”

“I see,” says the priest, who surprises me by not looking surprised. Perhaps he’s just sleepy. “Do you have contrition and a firm purpose of amendment?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? You don’t feel sorry for your sins?”

“I don’t feel much of anything.”

“Let me understand you.”

“All right.”

“You have not lost your faith?”

“No.”

“You believe in the Catholic faith as the Church proposes it?”

“Yes.”

“And you believe that your sins will be forgiven here and now if you confess them, are sorry for them, and resolve to sin no more?”

“Yes.”

“Yet you say you do not feel sorry.”

“That is correct.”

“You are aware of your sins, you confess them, but you are not sorry for them?

“That is correct.”

“Why?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“Pity.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You are?”

“Yes.”

“For what?”

“For not being sorry.”

The priest sighs. “Will you pray that God will give you a true knowledge of your sins and a true contrition?”

“Yes, I’ll do that.”

“You are a doctor and it is your business to help people, not harm them.”

“That is true.”

“You are also a husband and father and it is your duty to love and cherish your family.”

“Yes, but that does not prevent me from desiring other women and even contriving plans to commit fornication and adultery.”

“Yes,” says the priest absently. “That’s the nature of the beast.”

Damn, why doesn’t he wake up and pay attention?

“But you haven’t recently,” says the priest.

“Haven’t what?”

“Actually committed adultery and fornication.”

“No,” I say irritably. “But—”

“Hm. You know, Tom, maybe it’s not so much a question at our age of committing in the imagination these horrendous sins of the flesh as of worrying whether one still can. In the firetower on such occasions I find it useful to imagine the brushfires as the outer circle of hell, not too hot really, where these sad sins are punished, and my toes toasting in the flames. Along comes Our Lady who spies me and says: ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, you here? This is ridiculous.’”

Damn, where does he come off patronizing me with his stock priestly tricks — I can tell they’re his usual tricks because he reels ’em off without even listening. I can smell the seminary and whole libraries of books “for the layman” with little priest-jokes. How can he lump the two of us together, him a gray ghost of a cleric and me the spirit of the musical-erotic?

More tricks:

“For your drinking you might find it helpful, at least it is in my case, to cast your lot with other drunks. Then, knowing how much trouble you’re going to put your friends to if you take a drink, you’re less apt to — though it doesn’t always work.”

“Thank you,” I say coldly.

“Now let’s see.” He’s nodding again, drifting off into smoke and brushfires. “Very well. You’re sorry for your sins.”

“No.”

“That’s too bad. Ah me. Well—” He steals a glance at his watch. “In any case, continue to pray for knowledge of your sins. God is good. He will give you what you ask. Ask for sorrow. Pray for me.”

“All right.”

“Meanwhile, forgive me but there are other things we must think about: like doing our jobs, you being a better doctor, I being a better priest, showing a bit of ordinary kindness to people, particularly our own families — unkindness to those close to us is such a pitiful thing — doing what we can for our poor unhappy country — things which, please forgive me, sometimes seem more important than dwelling on a few middle-aged daydreams.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry,” I say instantly, scalded.

“You’re sorry for your sins?”

“Yes. Ashamed rather.”

“That will do. Now say the act of contrition and for your penance I’m going to give you this.”

Through the little window he hands me two articles, an envelope containing ashes and a sackcloth, which is a kind of sleeveless sweater made of black burlap. John XXIV recently revived public penance, a practice of the early Church.

While he absolves me, I say an act of contrition and pull the sackcloth over my sports coat.

“Go in peace. I’ll offer my mass for you tonight.”

“Thank you,” I say, dumping the ashes in my hair.

After hearing confessions, the priest gets ready to say mass. The pious black seminarian, who looks like Saint Aloysius Gonzaga, who never entertained a dirty thought, assists him.

Some of the Protestants stay, including Leroy Ledbetter and Victor Charles and his wife.

There is a flick of eyes as people notice my sackcloth. Ellen’s cheek radiates complex rays of approval-disapproval. Approval that I will now “do right,” be a better husband, cultivate respectable patients, remain abstemious, etcetera. What she disapproves is not that I am doing public penance. No, what bothers her is an ancient Presbyterian mistrust of things, things getting mixed up in religion. The black sweater and the ashes scandalize her. Her eyelid lowers — she almost winks. What have these things, articles, to do with doing right? For she mistrusts the Old Church’s traffic in things, sacraments, articles, bread, wine, salt, oil, water, ashes. Watch out! You know what happened before when you Catholics mucked it up with all your things, medals, scapulars, candles, blood statues! when it came finally to crossing palms for indulgences. Watch out!

I will. We will.

Father Smith says mass. I eat Christ, drink his blood.

At the end the people say aloud a prayer confessing the sins of the Church and asking for the reunion of Christians and of the United States.

Outside the children of some love couples and my own little Thomas More, a rowdy but likable lot, shoot off firecrackers.

“Hurray for Jesus Christ!” they cry. “Hurrah for the United States!”

After mass, Victor Charles wishes me merry Christmas and tells me he’s running for Congress.

“The U.S. Congress?”

“Why not?”

He wants me to be his campaign manager.

“Why me?”

“I got the Bantu vote. They’ve fallen out with each other and are willing to go with me. Chuck Parker’s helping me with the swamp people. Max is working on the liberals. Leroy Ledbetter’s got the peckerwoods. You could swing the Catholics.”

“I doubt that. Anyhow, I’m not much of a politician.” I have to laugh. He sounds exactly like a politician from the old Auto Age.

“You organized the SOUP chapter here, didn’t you?”

SOUP is Southerners and Others United to Preserve the Union in Repayment of an old Debt to the Yankees Who Saved It Once Before and Are Destroying It Now.

For, in fact, much of the North is pulling out. The new Hanseatic League of Black City-States — Detroit, New York, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, Washington — refused last year to admit federal election commissioners. D.C. had to remove to Virginia, home of Jefferson.

“You’re a good doctor, Doc. People respect you.”

“What’s that got to do with politics?”

“Everything, man!”

“You running as Knothead or Left?”

“Doc, I’m running under the old rooster.” In Louisiana the rooster stood for the old Democratic Party.

I laugh. Victor laughs and claps his hands. It’s the same old funny fouled-up coalition. Kennedy, Evers, Goldberg, Stevenson, L. Q. C. Lamar.

“All right.”

“All right, what?”

“I will.”

We laugh. Why are we laughing?

“Merry Christmas, Doc.”

“Merry Christmas.”

Barbecuing in my sackcloth.

The turkey is smoking well. The children have gone to bed, but they’ll be up at dawn to open their presents.

The night is clear and cold. There is no moon. The light of the transmitter lies hard by Jupiter, ruby and diamond in the plush velvet sky. Ellen is busy in the kitchen fixing stuffing and sweet potatoes. Somewhere in the swamp a screech owl cries.

I’m dancing around to keep warm, hands in pockets. It is Christmas Day and the Lord is here, a holy night and surely that is all one needs.

On the other hand I want a drink. Fetching the Early Times from a clump of palmetto, I take six drinks in six minutes. Now I’m dancing and singing old Sinatra songs and the Salve Regina, cutting the fool like David before the ark or like Walter Huston doing a jig when he struck it rich in the Sierra Madre.

The turkey is ready. I take it into the kitchen and grab Ellen from behind. She smells of flour and stuffing and like a Georgia girl.

“Oh, for pity’s sake,” says Ellen, picking up a spoon.

“You’re lovely here.”

“You’ve been drinking.”

“Yes.”

“Put my dress down.”

“All right.”

“What are you doing?”

“Picking you up.”

“Put me down.”

I’m staggering with her, a noble, surprisingly heavy, Presbyterian armful.

“You’re drunk.”

“Yes.”

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“In here. Put the spoon down.”

She puts the spoon down and I put her down on her new $600 bed.

To bed we go for a long winter’s nap, twined about each other as the ivy twineth, not under a bush or in a car or on the floor or any such humbug as marked the past peculiar years of Christendom, but at home in bed where all good folk belong.