The Last Gentleman

This very month marked the hundredth anniversary of the reduction of the fort by Admiral Foote’s gunboats. It was part of the preparation for the Centennial! No doubt they would, at the proper time, imprison the “Confederates” behind the fence.
    But as he dropped past the fort, he was surprised to see “sentinels” patrolling the fence and even a few prisoners inside, but as unlikely a lot of Confederates as one could imagine—men and women! the men bearded properly enough, but both sexes blue-jeaned and sweat-shirted and altogether disreputable. And Negroes! And yonder, pacing the parapet—Good Lord!—was Milo Menander, the politician, who was evidently playing the role of Beast Banks, the infamous federal commandant of the infamous federal prison into which the fort was converted after its capture. Capital! And hadn’t he got himself up grandly for the occasion: flowing locks, big cigar, hand pressed Napoleonically into his side, a proper villainous-looking old man if ever there was one.
    But hold on! Something was wrong. Were they not two years later with their celebration? The fort was captured early in the war, and here it was 19— What year was this? He wrang out his ear and beat his pockets in vain for his Gulf calendar card. Another slip: if Beast Banks had reduced and occupied the fort, why was the Stars and Bars still flying?
    It was past figuring even if he’d a stomach for figuring. Something may be amiss here, but then all was not well with him either. Next he’d be hearing singing ravening particles. Besides, he had other fish to fry and many a mile to travel. British wariness woke in him and, putting his head down, he dropped below the fort as silently as an Englishman slipping past Heligoland.
    He put in at the old ferry landing, abandoned when the bridge at Vicksburg was built and now no more than a sloughing bank of mealy earth honeycombed by cliff swallows. Disassembling and packing his boat, he stowed it in a cave-in and pulled dirt over it and set out up the sunken ferry road, which ran through loess cuts filled now as always with a smoky morning twilight and the smell of roots (here in Louisiana across the river it was ever a dim green place of swamps and shacks and Negro graveyards sparkling with red and green medicine bottles, the tree stumps were inhabited by spirits), past flooded pin-oak flats where great pileated woodpeckers went ringing down the smoky aisles. Though it was only two hundred yards from home, Louisiana had ever seemed misty and faraway, removed in time and space. Over yonder in the swamps lived the same great birds Audubon saw. Freejacks, Frenchman, and river rats trapped muskrat and caught catfish. It was a place of small and pleasant deeds.
    â€œHey, Merum!”
    Uncle Fannin was walking up and down the back porch, his face narrow and dark as a piece of slab bark, carrying in the crook of his arm the Browning automatic worn to silver, with bluing left only in the grooves of the etching. The trigger guard was worn as thin as an old man’s wedding ring.
    â€œMayrom! Where’s that Ma’am?”
    He was calling his servant Merriam but he never called him twice by the same name.
    It was characteristic of the uncle that he had greeted his nephew without surprise, as if it were nothing out of the ordinary that he should come hiking up out of nowhere with his artillery binoculars, and after five years. He hardly stopped his pacing.
    â€œWe’re fixing to mark some coveys up on Sunnyside,” he said, as if it were he who owed the explanations.
    The engineer blinked. They might have been waiting for him.
    The Trav-L-Aire was nowhere in sight and Uncle Fannin knew nothing about it or any company of “actors,” as the engineer called them (calculating that a mixture of blacks and whites was somehow more tolerable if they were performers).
    Merriam came round the corner of the house with two pointers, one an old liver-and-white bitch who knew what was what and had no time for foolery, trotting head down, dugs rippling like a curtain; the other pointer was a fool. He was a young dog named Rock. He put his muzzle in the engineer’s hand and nudged him hard. His head was heavy as iron. There were warts all over him where Uncle Fannin had shot him for his mistakes. Merriam, the engineer perceived, was partial to Rock and was afraid the uncle was going to shoot him again. Merriam was a short heavy Negro