Lancelot

taking my hand across the table, “is that the sheriff is performing an out-and-out sexist act of aggression and treats the black girl as a sex object.”
    â€œI see.” I was looking at Ellis Buell, who was passing the crawfish étouffé. His eyes caught mine. But they were shuttered and did not signify.
    After supper I paid my usual visit to Tex and Siobhan. They were in the library on the third floor where my father used to keep his books of Romantic English poetry, Southern history, Robert E. Lee biographies (Robert E. Lee was his saint; he loved him the way Catholics love St. Francis. If the South were Catholic, we’d have long since had an order of St. Robert E. Lee, a stern military Christian order like the monks of Mont-Saint-Michel—hell, I’m not sure we don’t), Louisiana history, Feliciana Parish history, Episcopal Church history, the Waverley novels, Jean Christophe, Saint-Exupéry, Admiral Byrd’s Alone, H. G. Wells’s The Science of Life, the Life of James Bowie —a strange collection in which I could detect no common denominator except a taste for the extraordinary and marvelous, the sentimental, the extraordinary experience, the extraordinary adventure undertaken by a brave few, the extraordinary life of genius, the extraordinary stunt of H. G. Wells in taking on all of life, the extraordinary glory of a lost cause which becomes more extraordinary as it recedes in time and in fact Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia had long since become for him as legendary and mythical as King Arthur and the Round Table. Do you think I was named Lancelot for nothing? The Andrewes was tacked on by him to give it Episcopal sanction, but what he really had in mind and in his heart wanted to be and couldn’t have been more different from was that old nonexistent Catholic brawler and adulterer, Lancelot du Lac, King Ban of Benwick’s son, knight of the Round Table and—here was the part he could never get over—one of only two knights to see the Grail (you, Percival, the other); and above all the extraordinariness of those chaste and incorrupt little Anglican chapels set down in this violent and corrupt land besieged on all sides by savage Indians, superstitious Romans, mealy-mouthed Baptists, howling Holy Rollers.
    Siobhan was cross and nervous. She was a bright thin wiry perfect little blonde(!), her beauty spoiled only by clouded eyes and a petulant expression.
    Tex fancied they were close, that she couldn’t get along with her mother, that he had saved her from the niggers. Actually he got on her nerves and she’d have been better off with the niggers. He had a fond insistent yet inattentive way with her which parodied affection and didn’t fool her. Indeed, it was as if he were out to irritate her.
    She ran to give me a hug and a kiss. I hugged and kissed her back, feeling her thin little bones in her grownup full-length nylon nightgown. She hugged me too hard, making her arms tremble; her clouded blue eyes didn’t quite focus on me. She had learned Tex’s trick of parody. They had been watching a cartoon on TV. “What do you think of that cute little fawn?” he asked several times in his mindless singsong, reaching out for her. He too liked to feel her little bones. At seven she was as sexual a creature as her mother but in a dim clouded approximation of it, as if she had forgotten something or was about to remember it. She could curve her lips richly but her eyes were as opaque as a doll’s. She liked to show her body and would sit, dress pulled up, arms clasping knees, her little biscuit showing.
    Did I love Margot? I’m not sure what you mean, what that word means, but it was good between us. The best times were the sudden unprovided times: leaving the office at ten o’clock, three o’clock, any time at all, going home to Belle Isle to pick her up, snatching her out over protests from her restorations, her as sweaty and plaster-powdered as the workmen restoring Belle Isle to a splendor it had never known; she frowning and fussing and reluctant at first, even then torn a little between me and Belle Isle. In the end we both lost out, the house and I, but she happy as I to be in the old Buick convertible beside me, top down, headed anywhere and nowhere, maybe up the Natchez Trace, singing through dark and bright, the perpetual twilight of the deep loess cuts smelling of earth, and out into the