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By Root 5976 0

in the cool evergreens, and later hopping freights. In fact this was what I was sure I wanted to do. But in no time at all I became depressed. The times we did have fun, like sitting around a fire or having a time with some girls, I had the feeling they were saying to me: “How about this, Binx? This is really it, isn’t it, boy?”, that they were practically looking up from their girls to say this. For some reason I sank into a deep melancholy. What good fellows they were, I thought, and how much they deserved to be happy. If only I could make them happy. But the beauty of the smoky blue valleys, instead of giving us joy, became heartbreaking. “What’s the matter with you, Binx?” they said at last. “My dear friends,” I said to them. “I will say good-by and wish you well. I think I will go back to New Orleans and live in Gentilly.” And there I have lived ever since, solitary and in wonder, wondering day and night, never a moment without wonder. Now and then my friends stop by, all gotten up as young eccentrics with their beards and bicycles, and down they go into the Quarter to hear some music and find some whores and still I wish them well. As for me, I stay home with Mrs. Schexnaydre and turn on TV. Not that I like TV so much, but it doesn’t distract me from the wonder. That is why I can’t go to the trouble they go to. It is distracting, and not for five minutes will I be distracted from the wonder.

4

Walter offers to drive Uncle Jules to town. Through the living-room doors I can see my aunt sitting by the fire, temple propped on her fingers. The white light from the sky pours into her upturned face. She opens her eyes and, seeing me, forms a soundless word with her lips.

I find Kate in the ground-level basement, rubbing an iron fireplace. Since Christmas she and Walter have taken to cleaning things, removing a hundred years’ accumulation of paint from old walls and cupboards to expose the cypress and brick underneath. As if to emphasize her sallowness and thinness, she has changed into shirt and jeans. She is as frail as a ten year old, except in her thighs. Sometimes she speaks of her derrière, sticks it out Beale Street style and gives it a slap and this makes me blush because it is a very good one, marvellously ample and mysterious and nothing to joke about.

To my relief she greets me cheerfully. She clasps one leg, rests her cheek on a knee and rubs an iron welt with steel wool. She has the advantage of me, sitting at her ease in a litter of summers past, broken wicker, split croquet balls, rotting hammocks. Now she wipes the welt with solvent; it begins to turn pale. “Well? Aren’t you supposed to tell me something?”

“Yes, but I forget what it was.”

“Binx Binx. You’re to tell me all sorts of things.”

“That’s true.”

“It will end with me telling you.”

“That would be better.”

“How do you make your way in the world?”

“Is that What you call it? I don’t really know. Last month I made three thousand dollars—less capital gains.”

“How did you get through a war without getting killed?”

“It was not through any doing of yours.”

“Anh anh anh.” It is an old passage between us, more of a joke now than a quarrel. “And how do you appear so reasonable to Mother?”

“I feel reasonable with her.”

“She thinks you’re one of her kind.”

“What kind is that?”

“A proper Bolling. Jules thinks you’re a go-getter. But you don’t fool me.”

“You know.”

“Yes.”

“What kind?”

“You’re like me, but worse. Much worse.”

She is in tolerable good spirits. It is not necessary to pay too much attention to her. I spy the basket-arm of a broken settee. It has a presence about it: the ghost of twenty summers in Feliciana. I perch on a bony spine of wicker and prop hands on knees.

“I remember what I came for. Will you go to Lejiers and watch the parade?”

Kate stretches out a leg to get at her cigarettes. Her ritual of smoking stands her in good stead. She extracts the wadded pack, kneads the warm cellophane, taps a cigarette violently and accurately against her thumbnail, lights it with a Zippo worn smooth and yellow as a pocket watch. Pushing