The Second Coming (26 page)

“As anyone can plainly see,” said one dullard called in from Asheville by Jack Curl to pinch-hit, “all the signs of Armageddon are present.” And in a droning voice he listed them, including the return of the Jews to Israel. On a beautiful Sunday morning in the mountains of North Carolina no one in the congregation paid the slightest attention—except Will Barrett, who, head slightly cocked to favor his good ear, had listened to every word—just as he had listened to Ewell McBee.

Are not great discoveries also made at the unlikeliest moments, such as listening to a droning preacher? His discovery had been made as Ewell McBee, towering over him in the garage, was going on and on about their childhood, about my daddy and your daddy, how much alike we are, and so forth. Ewell had given him the clue when he said how “smart” he, Will Barrett, was, smarter even than his daddy. “You don't say nothing, Will, you just lay back like you doing now, listening and thinking, like you going to make some great discovery.”

What was the Great Discovery? We may as well say it right out. It dawned on him that his father's suicide was
wasted.
It availed nothing, proved nothing, solved nothing, posed no questions let alone answered questions, did nobody good. It was no more than an exit, a getting up and a going out, a closing of a door.

Most of all, it offended Will Barrett's sense of economy and proportion, of thrift, that so much, a life no less, could be spent with so little return. If one is going to do a dire thing, one may as well put it to dire practical use. In his Trusts and Estates law practice, he had learned that one often does well to attach huge conditions to huge bequests.

I will not waste mine, he thought, smiling.

Redneck Ewell was right, wasn't he? It was his, Will Barrett's, own sly way of “being smart,” that is, of standing aside and keeping quiet, looking on, observing commonplace disaster which everyone else accepts as a matter of course, then figuring something out which converts a necessary evil to an ingenious good.

“You remind me of the fellow in charge of a garbage dump who discovered he could run his car on garbage,” Ewell told him. “That way you do two things, get rid of the garbage and beat the Ayrabs—you like killing two birds with one stone, don't you?”

Yes. Again snapping his fingers softly, he sat down at his desk, a fine colonial pine piece his wife had given him and where he had never sat before. He smiled again. It was a pleasure to sit at a proper desk, take out stationery and pen, hatch out a plan, and write the necessary documents to bring it to pass.

The “documents” were two letters, one to Lewis Peckham, the other to Dr. Sutter Vaught.

Dear Lewis:

This letter is a simple precaution. When you receive it, you can destroy it without reading further, for I intend in fact to see you today before you receive this letter tomorrow.

I take the precaution upon your own advice. In our spelunking days you told me never to enter a cave alone without telling someone where I was going.

In a word I am accepting your invitation to visit you this afternoon and I shall walk down to your farmhouse via Lost Cove cave, entering by the upper Confederate “escape hole” you showed me when I sliced out-of-bounds and exiting at the main entrance near your house in the valley below. Though I am not familiar with the upper reaches of the cave, there is only one way to go, down, and I remember the lower part, the “commercial” cave, very well.

For one thing, I have a sudden hankering to visit the haunt of the saber-tooth tyger you discovered.

Mentioning the “tyger” lair is an essential part of the plan, he thought with a smile. First, it would tickle Lewis's literary fancy. Tyger Tyger and Lewis would have them off in a Blakean exploration of mythic depths. Second, and more important, it would establish a destination, a place in the vast, still not wholly explored, cavern.

The prospect of bourbon and Beethoven is irresistible.

This was the only lie in the letter. The prospect of having a tad of bourbon and branch water, as Lewis would say, and listening to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was not only not irresistible, it was horrendous. The mere thought of it was enough to make him grimace and shiver like a bird dog with the squats.

If I haven't turned up by the time you receive this, send out the St. Bernard with a cask of Wild Turkey.

Take care,
Will

He addressed the envelope, licked the flap, sealed it, stamped it, felt and admired the heavy creamy embossed stationery, which Marion had given him and which he had never used. Why was it no longer possible to sit at a desk and write a proper letter like a character in an old-fashioned novel who as a matter of course might write any number of such letters to friends, members of family? If his daughter should receive such a letter from him, or he from her, each would faint.

It is only possible to write a letter now, he reflected, if it is part of a larger plan which could settle things once and for all, for himself, his daughter—and everyone else, for that matter.

The second letter was addressed, on a larger envelope, to Dr. Sutter Vaught, 2203 Los Floras Boulevard, Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Dear Sutter,

I have a favor to ask of you. One reason I ask you is that there is no one else I would trust to do it. Another reason is that the nature of the favor is such that, though somewhat burdensome, I am confident you will grant it.

Knowing you perhaps better than you think, I have reason to believe that aside from the urgency of my appeal it is the very strangeness of my request which will insure its being carried out.

You told me once that nowadays no one knew anything with sufficient certitude that he could tell anyone anything, and that if a man ever came along who really knew and could speak with authority—do this, do that—millions would follow him.

I tell you, not millions, to do this one thing for me. I do not ask you, I tell you: do this.

I am enclosing a stamped sealed envelope addressed to one Lewis Peckham of Linwood, North Carolina. Do this. After you receive this letter, wait three weeks. If by this time you have not heard to the contrary from me, proceed as follows: Come to Linwood, North Carolina. Go to the post office, fold and soil the letter to Lewis Peckham, and drop it in the mail slot marked “local.” It will be assumed by the addressee that the letter was mislaid by a postal employee, dropped behind a radiator, kicked under a table, belatedly discovered, sneaked into the “local” bin by the guilty clerk, and so belatedly postmarked. It will be assumed by the postal authorities, should it come to this, that the letter was dropped inadvertently outside the post office, discovered, and mailed by some helpful soul.

After you do this, leave town immediately and say nothing of this to anyone.

Be assured that you are not being asked to become a party to a fraud or worse crime.

This is a good deal of trouble, I realize, to get from Albuquerque to Linwood, North Carolina, without a car, since you did not replace your Edsel, but I am confident that you will do it. Please believe me when I tell you that it is absolutely necessary that you do this, that you destroy this letter and that you never speak of this matter again.

Of course it may come to pass that you will hear from me before the deadline, in which case your mission is to be abandoned. In this event, I shall explain further.

Perhaps I owe you some explanation of this unusual request. I shall give you a partial one, at the risk of offending and alarming you. But at least you will see that no harm can come to anyone but me, and possibly not even to me, but that there is nothing you can do to prevent it in any case—and that a great good may come to many people.

If you do not hear from me in three weeks I shall be dead by the time Lewis Peckham receives the letter you will mail in Linwood. There is nothing you can do to prevent this. In fact, the only chance of preventing it will depend upon your carrying out these instructions to the letter. If you will recall, I once performed a similar service for you.

The purpose of the delayed mailing is to make sure that my body will be found and found under such circumstances as to preclude suicide and the nonpayment of my life insurance.

Fraud is not involved—though a case for it would undoubtedly be made by the insurance company, since a payment of one million is involved. Under the law, life insurance must be paid in the event of death by natural causes, accidents, or acts of God. My death, if it occurs, shall occur not by my own hand but by the hand of God. Or rather the handlessness or inaction of God.

If I die, it will not be by my own hand but through the dereliction of another. It is not my intention to die but to live. Therefore, should I die, it will not be suicide.

This is what you might call the ultimate scientific experiment in contrast to dreary age-old philosophical and religious disputations which have no resolution. I say “ultimate” because God is the subject under investigation.

I aim to settle the question of God once and for all.

The Prudential Life Insurance Company quite properly did not pay me, the beneficiary of my father's policy, since he died by his own hand. I freely acknowledge this, even though I was sole beneficiary and could have used the money. Nevertheless I feel euchred out of that million. He paid for it and I could have used it. Without it, his death made no sense.

But in my case, if I die, it will be God or the absence of God which is responsible. Neither God nor the absence of God are listed as causes of death in my Prudential policy. Nor are they listed as the causes of suicide. Therefore the policy must be paid to my beneficiary, and my claim is not fraudulent.

The Rock will pay because the law requires it. The purpose of my request to you is to insure that the law not be circumvented.

It is not in your interest to know what I plan to do. Suffice it to say that for once in my life I know what is what, what I know, what I don't know, what needs to be done, and what I shall do. If you remember, it was your constant complaint that I was forever looking to you for “all the answers.” However much you find yourself inconvenienced by this request, it should at least please you to know that I have at last understood you. One must arrive at one's own answers.

I may not know the answer, but I know the question. And I know how to put the question so that it must be answered. So certain am I of my own course of action that I do not require your approval. What I require from you is that you do what I say, and I charge you to do so on the pain of having my death on your conscience.

I will say only that the action I propose to take comes as a consequence of my belated recognition of my lifelong dependency on this or that person, like my father or yourself (who I supposed knew more than I did) or on this or that book or theory like Dr. Freud's (which I thought might hold the Great Secret of Life, as if there were such a thing). My equally belated discovery is the total failure, recklessness, and assholedness of people in general and in particular just those people I had looked to. This includes you. Maybe you most of all—for it was you, it seemed to me—if you recall, I had good detection devices, excellent radar for knowing who knew what—it was you of all the pleasant prosperous gregarious denizens of our dear old Southland (to say nothing of the even more fucked-up remainder of the U.S.A.) who seemed to be on to something.

My father seemed to know what was what and ended up distributing his brain cells over the attic—after trying to take me with him.

Perhaps he was right. I aim to find out. I have found out how to find out.

You seemed to know what was what and you end up how? Marking time with the V.A. and watching M*A*S*H. Toward what end? So you can retire on your pension and watch the soaps all day?

Quite properly, you refused to give me any answers. Perhaps you didn't have any. It doesn't matter now. But I have a question and a way of asking it which requires an answer. A non-answer is not possible. But this does not concern you.

So much for you. My quarrel with the others can be summed up as a growing disgust with two classes of people. These two classes between them exhaust the class of people in general. That is to say, there are only two classes of people, the believers and the unbelievers. The only difficulty is deciding which is the more feckless.

My belated discovery of the bankruptcy of both classes has made it possible for me to take action. Better late than never.

Take Christians. I am surrounded by Christians. They are generally speaking a pleasant and agreeable lot, not noticeably different from other people—even though they, the Christians of the South, the U.S.A., the Western world have killed off more people in recent centuries than all other people put together. Yet I cannot be sure they don't have the truth. But if they have the truth, why is it the case that they are repellent precisely to the degree that they embrace and advertise that truth? One might even become a Christian if there were few if any Christians around. Have you ever lived in the midst of fifteen million Southern Baptists? (Of course you have. You're from Alabama.) No doubt the same might be said of Irish Catholics and Miami Jews. The main virtue of Episcopalians is their gift for reticence. Seldom can an Episcopalian (or an Anglican) be taken for a Christian. Perhaps that is what I like about them. A mystery: If the good news is true, why is not one pleased to hear it? And if the good news is true; why are its public proclaimers such assholes and the proclamation itself such a weary used-up thing?

If the good news is true, the God of the good news must be a very devious fellow indeed, fond of playing tricks.

But perhaps two can play at that game.

As unacceptable as believers are, unbelievers are even worse, not because of the unacceptability of unbelief but because of the nature of the unbelievers themselves who in the profession and practice of their unbelief are even greater assholes than the Christians.

The present-day unbeliever is a greater asshole than the present-day Christian because of the fatuity, blandness, incoherence, fakery, and fatheadedness of his unbelief. He is in fact an insane person. If God does in fact exist, the present-day unbeliever will no doubt be forgiven because of his manifest madness.