Moderately obese young colored female, circa 13
Skin: vaccination 1. thigh; stellate keloid scar under chin.
Head: massive cmpd depressed fracture right parietal and
right zygomatic arch. Brain: frank blood in subdural space, extensive laceration
right cortex; brick shards. Thorax: comminuted cmpd fractures, right ribs 1 through
8; frank blood in pleural space; extensive lacerations
RML,RLL, brick shards. Heart: neg. Abdomen: neg. Gen.: neg.
Cops report subject discovered in basement toilet of Emmanuel Baptist Church following explosion. Church tower fell on her.
But never mind the South.
It is you who concerns me. You are wrong and you deceive yourself in a more serious way. Do you know what you have managed to do? You have cancelled yourself. I can understand what you did in the beginning. You opted for the Scandalous Thing, the Wrinkle in Time, the Jew-Christ-Church business, God’s alleged intervention in history. You acted on it, left all and went away to sojourn among strangers. I can understand this even though I could never accept the propositions (1) that my salvation comes from the Jews, (2) that my salvation depends upon hearing news rather than figuring it out, (3) that I must spend eternity with Southern Baptists. But I understand what you did and even rejoiced in the scandal of it, for I do not in the least mind scandalizing the transcending scientific assholes of Berkeley and Cambridge and the artistic assholes of Taos and La Jolla.
But do you realize what you did then? You reversed your dialectic and cancelled yourself. Instead of having the courage of your scandal-giving, you began to speak of the glories of science, the beauty of art, and the dear lovely world around us! Worst of all, you even embraced, Jesus this is what tore it, the Southern businessman! The Southern businessman is the new Adam, you say, smart as a Yankee but a Christian withal and having the tragical sense, etc., etc., etc. — when the truth of it is, you were pleased because you talked the local Coca-Cola distributor into giving you a new gym.
But what you don’t know is that you are cancelled. Suppose you did reconcile them all, the whites and the niggers, Yankees and the K.K.K., scientists and Christians, where does that leave you and your Scandalous Thing? Why, cancelled out! Because it doesn’t mean anything any more, God and religion and all the rest. It doesn’t even mean anything to your fellow Christians. And you know this: that is why you are where you are, because it means something to your little Tyree dummies (and ten years from now it won’t even mean anything to them: either they’ll be Muslims and hate your guts or they’ll be middle-class and buggered like everybody else).
The reason I am more religious than you and in fact the most religious person I know: because, like you, I turned my back on the bastards and went into the desert, but unlike you I didn’t come sucking around them later.
There is something you don’t know. They are going to win without you. They are going to remake the world and go into space and they couldn’t care less whether you and God approve and sprinkle holy water on them. They’ll even let you sprinkle holy water on them and they’ll even like you because they’ll know it makes no difference any more. All you will succeed in doing is cancelling yourself. At least have the courage of your revolt.
Sutter’s notebook had the effect of loosening his synapses, like a bar turning slowly in his brain. Feeling not unpleasantly dislocated, he turned off the light and went to sleep to the sound of the lashing willows and a Spanish-language broadcast to Cuban refugees from WWL in New Orleans.
The next morning he walked the levee into Ithaca, curving into town under a great white sky. New grass, killed by the recent frost, had whitened and curled like wool. Grasshoppers started up at his feet and went stitching away. Below where the town was cradled in the long curving arm of the levee, the humpy crowns of oaks, lobules upon lobules, were broken only by steeples and the courthouse cupola. There arose to him the fitful and compassed sound of human affairs, the civil morning sounds of tolerable enterprise, the slap of lumber, a back-door slam, the chunk of an engine, and the routine shouts of a work crew: ho; ho; ho now!
Here he used to walk with his father and speak of the galaxies and of the expanding universe and take pleasure in the insignificance of man in the great lonely universe. His father would recite “Dover Beach,” setting his jaw askew and wagging’ his head like F.D.R.:
for the world which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain—
or else speak of the grandfather and the days of great deeds: “And so he looked down at him where he was sitting in his barber chair and he said to him: ‘I’m going to tell you one time you son of a bitch, and that’s all, so hear me well; if anything happens to Judge Hampton, I’m not asking any questions, I’m not calling the police, I’m coming to look for you, and when I find you I’m going to kill you.’ Nothing happened to Judge Hampton.”
Beyond the old brown roiled water, the bindings and lacings of water upon water, the Louisiana shore stretched misty and perfunctory. When he came abreast of the quarterboat of the U.S. Engineers, his knee began to leap and he sat down in the tall grass under a river beacon and had a little fit. It was not a convulsion, but his eyes twittered around under his eyeballs. He dreamed that old men sat in a circle around him, looking at him from the corners of their eyes.
“Who’s that?” he cried, jumping to his feet and brushing off his Macy’s Dacron. Someone had called to him. But there was no one and nothing but the white sky and the humpy lobuled oaks of the town.
He went down into Front Street, past the Syrian and Jewish dry goods and the Chinese grocery, and turned quickly into Market and came to the iron lion in front of the bank. It was a hollow lion with a hole between his shoulders which always smelled of pee.
Spicer CoCo and Ben Huger, two planters his own age, stood in line behind him at the teller’s window and began to kid him in the peculiar reflected style of the deep Delta.
“Reckon he’s going to get all his money out and go on back off up there?” said Spicer CoCo.
“I notice he got his box-back coat on. I think he be here for a while,” said Ben Huger.
He had to grin and fool with them, fend them off, while he asked the teller about the check. “Doris,” he said to the pretty plump brunette, remembering her before he could forget, “can I stop payment on a certified check?”
She gave him a form to fill in. “Hello, Will. It’s good to see you.”
“Just fine.” He scratched his head. “No, ah— You see, it’s not my check and it’s not on this bank. It was a check endorsed to me. I — it was misplaced.” He hoped he didn’t have to tell the amount.
“Then have the payer make a stop-payment order,” she said, gazing at him with an expression both lively and absent-minded. “How long ago did you lose it?”
“I don’t remember — ah, two days.”
“Same old Will.”
“What?”
“You haven’t changed a bit.”
“I haven’t?” he said, pleased to hear it. “I thought I was worse.” I’ll call Poppy then, he said to himself and fell to wondering: how strange that they seem to know me and that I never supposed they could have, and perhaps that was my mistake.