The Last Gentleman

sir.”
    â€œThat’s Dr. Moon Mullins. He’s a fine little fellow.”
    The illness must be serious, thought the engineer. He is too fond of everyone.
    The stranger was so wrapped up in cigar smoke and the loving kindness of the hospital that it was possible to look at him. He was old and fit. Ruddy sectors of forehead extended high into iron-colored hair. Though he was neatly dressed, he needed a shave. The stubble which covered his cheeks had been sprinkled with talcum powder and was white as frost. His suit, an old-fashioned seersucker with a broad stripe, gave off a fresh cotton-and-ironing-board smell that pierced the engineer’s memory. It reminded him of something but he could not think what.
    The engineer cleared his throat.
    â€œExcuse me, sir, but are you from Alabama?” He had caught a lilt in the old man’s speech, a caroling in the vowels which was almost Irish. And the smell. The iron-washpot smell. No machine in the world had ever put it there and nobody either but a colored washwoman working in her own back yard and sprinkling starch with a pine switch.
    â€œI was.” The old man took a wadded handkerchief from his pocket and knocked it against his nose.
    â€œFrom north Alabama?”
    â€œI was.” His yellow eye gleamed through the smoke. He fell instantly into the attitude of one who is prepared to be amazed. There was no doubt in his mind that the younger man was going to amaze him.
    â€œBirmingham? Gadsden?”
    â€œHalfway between,” cried the old man, his eye glittering like an eagle’s. “Wait a minute,” said he, looking at the engineer with his festive and slightly ironic astonishment. “Don’t I know you? Aren’t you—” snapping his fingers.
    â€œWill Barrett. Williston Bibb Barrett.”
    â€œOver in—” He shook his hand toward the southwest
    â€œIthaca. In the Mississippi Delta.”
    â€œYou’re Ed Barrett’s boy.”
    â€œYes sir.”
    â€œLawyer Barrett. Went to Congress from Mississippi in nineteen and forty.” Now it was his turn to do the amazing. “Trained pointers, won at Grand Junction in—”
    â€œThat was my uncle, Fannin Barrett,” murmured the engineer.
    â€œFannin Barrett,” cried the other, confirming it. “I lived in Vicksburg in nineteen and forty-six and hunted with him over in Louisiana.”
    â€œYes sir.”
    â€œChandler Vaught,” said the old man, swinging around at him. The hand he gave the engineer was surprisingly small and dry. “I knew I’d seen you before. Weren’t you one of those fellows that ate over at Mrs. Hall’s in Hattiesburg?”
    â€œNo sir.”
    â€œWorked for the highway department?”
    â€œNo sir.”
    â€œHow did you know I wasn’t from Georgia? I spent many a year in Georgia.”
    â€œYou don’t sound like a Georgian. And north Alabama doesn’t sound like south Alabama. Birmingham is different from Montgomery. We used to spend the summers up in Mentone.”
    â€œSho. But now you don’t talk like—”
    â€œNo sir,” said the engineer, who still sounded like an Ohioan. “I’ve been up here quite a while.”
    â€œSo you say I’m from somewhere around Gadsden and Birmingham,” said the old man softly in the way the old have of conferring terrific and slightly spurious honors on the young. “Well now I be damn. You want to know exactly where I come from?”
    â€œYes sir.”
    â€œAnniston.”
    â€œYes sir.”
    â€œHe don’t even act surprised,” the old man announced to the hospital at large. “But hail fire, I left Anniston thirty years ago.”
    â€œYes sir. Did you know my father?” asked the engineer, already beginning to sound like an Alabamian.
    â€œ Know him! What are you talking about?”
    â€œYes sir.”
    â€œWe used to hunt together down at Lake Arthur,” he cried as if he were launching into a reminiscence but immediately fell silent. The engineer guessed that either he did not really know his father or they were on different sides of the political fence. His cordiality was excessive and perfunctory. “I got my youngest boy in there,” he went on in the same tone. “He got sick just before his graduation and we been up here ever since. You know Jamie?” For all he knew, the engineer knew everything.
    â€œNo