The Moviegoer - Walker Percy [51]
Thérèse is telling about her plans to write her Congressman about the Rivers and Harbors bill. Thérèse and Mathilde are something like loan and Jane in the Civics reader.
“Isn’t that Tessie a case?” my mother cries as she disappears into the kitchen, signifying that Tessie is smart but also that there is something funny about her precocity.
“Where’s Roy? We didn’t see a car. We almost didn’t walk over.”
“Playing poker!” they all cry. This seems funny and everybody laughs. Lonnie’s hand curls. If our arrival had caused any confusion, we are carried quickly past by the strong current of family life.
“Do you have any more crabs, Mother?”
“Any more crabs! Ask Lonnie if we weren’t just wondering what to do with the rest. You haven’t had your supper?”
“No’m.”
Mother folds up the thick layer of newspaper under the crab carcasses, making a neat bundle with her strong white hands. The whole mess comes away leaving the table dry and clean. Thérèse spreads fresh paper and Mathilde fetches two cold bottles of beer and two empty bottles for hammering the claws and presently we have a tray apiece, two small armies of scarlet crabs marching in neat rows. Sharon looks queer but she pitches in anyhow and soon everybody is making fun of her. Mathilde shows her how to pry off the belly plate and break the corner at the great claw so that the snowy flesh pops out in a fascicle. Sharon affects to be amazed and immediately the twins must show her how to suck the claws.
Outside is the special close blackness of night over water. Bugs dive into the tight new screen and bounce off with a guitar thrum. The children stand in close, feeling the mystery of the swamp and the secrecy of our cone of light. Clairain presses his stomach against the arm of my chair. Lonnie tries to tune his transistor radio; he holds it in the crook of his wrist, his hands bent back upon it. Once his lip falls open in the most ferocious leer. This upsets Sharon. It seems to her that a crisis is at hand, that Lonnie has at last reached the limit of his endurance. When no one pays any attention to him, she grows fidgety—why doesn’t somebody help him?—then, after an eternity, Mathilde leans over carelessly and tunes in a station loud and clear. Lonnie turns his head, weaving, to see her, but not quite far enough.
Lonnie is dressed up, I notice. It turns out that Aunt Ethel, Roy’s sister, was supposed to take him and the girls to a movie. It was not a real date, Mother reminds him, but Lonnie looks disappointed.
“What is the movie?” I ask him.
“Fort Dobbs.” His speech is crooning but not hard to understand.
“Where is it?”
“At the Moonlite.”
“Let’s go.”
Lonnie’s head teeters and falls back like a dead man’s.
“I mean it. I want to see it.”
He believes me.
I corner my mother in the kitchen.
“What’s the matter with Lonnie?”
“Why nothing.”
“He looks terrible.”
“That child wont drink his milk!” sings out my mother.
“Has he had pneumonia again?”
“He had the five day virus. And it was bad bad bad bad bad. Did you ever hear of anyone with virus receiving extreme unction?”
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“He wasn’t in danger of death. The extreme unction was his idea. He said it would strengthen him physically as well as spiritually. Have you ever heard of that?”
“Yes. But is he all right now?”
She shrugs. My mother speaks of such matters in a light allusive way, with the overtones neither of belief nor disbelief but rather of a general receptivity to lore.
“Dr. Murtag said he’d never seen anything like it. Lonnie got out of bed in half an hour.”
Sometimes when she mentions God, it strikes me that my mother uses him as but one of the devices that come to hand in an outrageous man’s world, to be put to work like all the rest in the one enterprise she has any use for: the canny management of the shocks of life. It is a bargain struck at the very beginning in which she settled for a general belittlement of everything, the good and the bad. She is as wary of good fortune as she is immured against the bad, and sometimes I seem to catch sight of it in her eyes, this radical mistrust: an old knowledgeable gleam, as old and sly as Eve herself. Losing Duval, her favorite, confirmed her in her election of the ordinary. No more heart