The Moviegoer - Walker Percy [35]
“The lodge was here, Roaring Camp they called it,” I tell Sharon. She stands blinking and inviolate, a little rared back and entrenched within herself. Not for her the thronging spirit-presence of the place and the green darkness of summer come back again and the sadness of it. She went to Eufala High School and it is all the same to her where she is (so she might have stood in the Rotunda during her school trip to Washington) and she is right, for she is herself sweet life and where is the sadness of that? “I came here once with my father and great uncle. They wouldn’t have beds, so we slept on the floor. I slept between them and I had a new Ingersoll watch and when I went to bed, I took it out and put it on the floor beside my head. During the night my uncle rolled over on it and broke it. It became a famous story and somehow funny, the way he rolled over on my watch, and they would all laugh—haw haw haw—like a bunch of Germans. Then at Christmas he gave me another watch which turned out to be a gold Hamilton.” Sharon stands astraddle, as heavy of leg as a Wac. “I remember when my father built the lodge. Before that he had read the works of Fabre and he got the idea of taking up a fascinating scientific hobby. He bought a telescope and one night he called us outside and showed us the horsehead nebula in Orion. That was the end of the telescope. After that he began to read Browning and saw himself in need of a world of men. That was when he started the duck club.”
“Grow old along with me.
The best is yet to be,” says Sharon.
“That’s right.”
Mr. Sartalamaccia has become restless; he works his hat behind him. His fingernails are large and almost filled with white moons. “Your father didn’t build it. Judge Anse was the one that built it.”
“Is that right? You knew them? I didn’t know you—”
Mr. Sartalamaccia tells it forlornly, without looking up—knowing no more than the facts pure and simple and hardly believing that we don’t know. Everybody knows. “I built it for him.”
“How did you know him?”
“I didn’t. One morning before Christmas I was just about finished with my store over there and Judge Anse come in and started talking to me. He said—uh—” Mr. Sartalamaccia smiles a secret little smile and his head sinks even lower as he makes bold to recall the very words. “—what’s your name? Yes: what’s your name? I told him. He said—uh: you built this store? I said, yessir. We talked. So he looked at me and he said—uh: I’m going tell you what I want you to do. He writes this check. He said—uh: Here’s a check for a thousand dollars. I want you to build me a lodge and come on, I’ll show you where. So I said, all right. So he said—uh—” Mr. Sartalamaccia waits until the words, the very words, speak themselves—“Let’s go, Vince, like him and me, we were going to have us a big time. He never saw me before in his life and he walks in my store and writes me a check on the Canal Bank for a thousand dollars. And he didn’t come back for six weeks.”
“Did he like the lodge?”
“I mean he liked it.”
“I see.” I see. There was such a time and there were such men (and Mr. Sartalamaccia smiles to remember it), men who could say to other men, here do this, and have it done and done with pleasure and remembered with pleasure. “Have you always been here?”
“Me?” Mr. Sartalamaccia looks up for the first time. “I had only been here three weeks! Since November.”
“Where are you from?”
“I was raised in Ensley, near Birmingham, but in nineteen thirty-two times was so hard I started moving around. I visited forty-six states, all but Washington and Oregon, just looking around and I never went hungry. In nineteen thirty four I come to stay with my brother in Violet and started trapping.”
It turns out that Mr. Sartalamaccia is a contractor and owns the housing development next door. He has done well and he wants my duck club for an addition. I ask about the houses.
“You want to see one?”
We follow him along a hog trail to a raw field full of pretty little flat-topped houses. He must show us one abuilding. I