Lancelot

Episcopal rectitude.
    Uncle Harry then and Lily entering a tourist cabin on False River of a sunny wintry afternoon, the frost-bleached levee outside, the raw soughing gas heat striking at leg and eyes, the gracious cold still trapped in Lily’s fur, the sheets slick-cold and sour.
    But now, in the pigeonnier and in the eye of the storm, the sense at last of coming close to it, the sweet secret of evil, the dread exhilaration, the sure slight heart-quickening sense of coming onto something, the dear darling heart of darkness—ah, this was where it was all right.
    You always got it backward: you don’t set out looking for clues to God’s existence, nobody’s ever found anything that way, least of all God. From the beginning you and I were different. You were obsessed with God. I was obsessed with—what? dusky new graygreen money under interwoven argyle socks? Uncle Harry and Lily in the linoleum-cold gas-heat-hot tourist cabin?
    The rising moon grew brighter and smaller. The great bastion of cloud wheeled slowly. Andes peaks and mesas and glaciers revolved slowly past my window. My mouth was open. I became aware of a difficulty in breathing as if I had asthma. I don’t have asthma. I looked at my Abercrombie & Fitch desk weatherstation, Christmas present from Margot. The barometer read 28.96. I went to the open door. Children and youths in their teens were playing in the bright moonlight on the levee. They were exhilarated by the stillness of the great wheeling storm. Some worked seriously on the bonfires, adding willow logs and rubber tires to make smoke. Some somersaulted or lay flat and rolled down the levee. A young girl in a long white dress danced alone a French version of the square dance, a Fais do-do, mincing forward and backward, holding her head first to one side then to the other, curtsying, her hands spreading wide the folds of her skirt. Their cries came to me through the thin dead air, muffled and faraway. I became aware that it was the girl’s voice. She was singing. Her voice carried in the hushed air. It was an old Cajun tune I used to hear at Breaux Bridge.
    Mouton, mouton—et où vas tu?
    A l’abatoire .
    Quand tu reviens?
    Jamais—Baa!
    That was curious. There were no Cajun families here on the English Coast, only a few light-colored Negroes with French names, whom we called freejacks because they were said to have been freed by General Jackson for services rendered in the Battle of New Orleans.
    Where did she come from?
    In 1862 my great-great-grandfather Manson Maury Lamar, infantry captain with the 14 th Virginia, struck up the Shenandoah Valley in A. P. Hill’s corps, which invested Harper’s Ferry, took thirteen thousand prisoners, got news of McClellan’s assault on Lee at Sharpsburg seventeen miles away, hit a jog for the seventeen miles, and arrived just as Lee’s right was giving way, took his company into battle at a dead run. It was the bloodiest day of the war. He would never talk about it, they said. But he would also never talk about anything else. He said nothing. My uncle fought in the Argonne. He said it was too horrible. But he also said he never again felt real for the next forty years.
    My son refused to go to Vietnam, went underground instead in New Orleans, lived in an old streetcar, wrote poetry, and made various sorts of love. Was he right, or was I right, or are you right?
    I went to see Anna this morning. We spoke. She sat in a chair. She’s going to be all right. She speaks slowly and in a monotone, choosing her words carefully like someone recovering from a stroke. But she’s going to be all right. She had combed her hair and wore a skirt and sat on her foot and pulled her skirt over her knee like a proper Georgia girl. I told her I would be leaving the hospital soon and asked her to come with me.
    â€œWhere are you going?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œI see.”
    After a while she said: “And you want me to come with you.”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œIsn’t that enough? I want you to come with me.”
    â€œDo you love me?”
    â€œI’m not sure what that means. But I need you and you need me. I will have Siobhan with me.”
    â€œI see.” She seemed to know all about Siobhan. Did you tell her? She nodded. “A new family. A new life.”
    That’s all she said. She kept on nodding. But I wasn’t sure she was listening. Do