Read Online The Last Gentleman by Walker Percy - Free Book Online

gave the engineer was surprisingly small and dry. “I knew I’d seen you before. Weren’t you one of those fellows that ate over at Mrs. Hall’s in Hattiesburg?”
    â€œNo sir.”
    â€œWorked for the highway department?”
    â€œNo sir.”
    â€œHow did you know I wasn’t from Georgia? I spent many a year in Georgia.”
    â€œYou don’t sound like a Georgian. And north Alabama doesn’t sound like south Alabama. Birmingham is different from Montgomery. We used to spend the summers up in Mentone.”
    â€œSho. But now you don’t talk like—”
    â€œNo sir,” said the engineer, who still sounded like an Ohioan. “I’ve been up here quite a while.”
    â€œSo you say I’m from somewhere around Gadsden and Birmingham,” said the old man softly in the way the old have of conferring terrific and slightly spurious honors on the young. “Well now I be damn. You want to know exactly where I come from?”
    â€œYes sir.”
    â€œAnniston.”
    â€œYes sir.”
    â€œHe don’t even act surprised,” the old man announced to the hospital at large. “But hail fire, I left Anniston thirty years ago.”
    â€œYes sir. Did you know my father?” asked the engineer, already beginning to sound like an Alabamian.
    â€œ Know him! What are you talking about?”
    â€œYes sir.”
    â€œWe used to hunt together down at Lake Arthur,” he cried as if he were launching into a reminiscence but immediately fell silent. The engineer guessed that either he did not really know his father or they were on different sides of the political fence. His cordiality was excessive and perfunctory. “I got my youngest boy in there,” he went on in the same tone. “He got sick just before his graduation and we been up here ever since. You know Jamie?” For all he knew, the engineer knew everything.
    â€œNo sir.”
    â€œDo you know Sutter, my oldest boy? He’s a doctor like you.”
    â€œI’m not a doctor,” said the engineer, smiling.
    â€œIs that so,” said the other, hardly listening.
    Now, coming to himself with a start, Mr. Vaught took hold of the engineer’s arm at the armpit and the next thing the latter knew he had been steered into the sickroom where Mr. Vaught related his “stunt,” as he called it.
    It seemed to be a roomful of women. There were only three, he determined later, but now with Mr. Vaught gripping him tight under the armpit and five pairs of eyes swinging round to him and shooting out curious rays, he felt as if he had been thrust onto a stage.
    â€œAnd listen to this,” said Mr. Vaught, still holding him tightly. “He didn’t say Gadsden and he didn’t say Birmingham, he said halfway between.”
    â€œActually I didn’t say that,” began the engineer.
    â€œThis is Ed Barrett’s boy, Mama,” he said after pointing the engineer in several different directions.
    A pince-nez flashed at him. There was a roaring in his ears. “Lord, I knew your mother, Lucy Hunicutt, the prettiest little thing I ever saw!”
    â€œYes ma’am. Thank you.”
    The women were taken up for a while with tracing kinships. (Again he caught a note of rueful eagerness in their welcome: were they political enemies of his father?) Meantime he could catch his breath. It was a longish room and not ordinarily used, it seemed, for patients, since one end was taken up with medical appliances mounted on rubber casters and covered by plastic envelopes. At the other end, between the women, a youth lay in bed. He was grinning and thrashing his legs about under the covers. The Handsome Woman stood at his bedside, eyes vacant, hand on his pillow. As the engineer looked at her he became aware of a radiance from another quarter, a “certain someone” as they used to say in old novels. There was the same dark-browed combed look he