The Last Gentleman

dam at Muscle Shoals. He had been night watchman for the construction company when Mr. Vaught built his castle. Mr. Vaught liked him and hired him. But he was still a country Negro and had country ways. Sometimes Jamie and David would get him in a card game just to see him play. The only game he knew was a strange south Georgia game called pitty-pat. You played your cards in turn and took tricks but there was not much rhyme or reason to it. When John Houghton’s turn came, he always stood up, drew back, and slapped the card down with a tremendous ha-a-a-a-umph!, just as if he were swinging a sledge hammer, but pulling up at the last second and setting the card down soft as a feather. David couldn’t help laughing ts-ts-ts. “ What game we gon’ play, John?” he would ask the gardener to get him to say pitty-pat. “Lessus have a game of pitty-pat,” John Houghton would say, standing up also to shuffle the cards, which he did by chocking them into each other, all the while making terrific feints and knee-bends like a boxer. “Pitty-pat,” cried David and fell out laughing. But John Houghton paid no attention and told them instead of his adventures in the city, where, if the police caught you playing cards, they would sandbag you and take you to jail.
    â€œWhat do you mean, sandbag?” asked the puzzled engineer.
    â€œThat’s what I mean!” cried John Houghton. “I mean they sandbag you.”
    Of an evening John Houghton would don his jacket, an oversize Marine drawstring jacket with deep patch pockets, turn the collar up around his ears so that just the top of his gnarled puckered head showed above it, thrust his hands deep into the patch pockets, and take a stroll down the service road which wound along the ridge behind the big houses. There he met the maids getting off work.
    At night and sometimes all night long there arose from the room below the engineer’s the sounds of scuffling and, it seemed to him, of flight and pursuit; of a chair scraped back, a sudden scurry of feet and screams, he could have sworn more than one voice, several in fact, screams both outraged and risible as pursuer and quarry rounded the very walls, it seemed like.
    4 .
    They sat in the garden, the three students, on the last day of summer and leafed through their new textbooks. The whitethroat sparrows had come back early and were scratching in the sour leaves. The October sunlight was blinding on the white glazed pages, which smelled like acetate and the year ahead. The chemistry text seemed to exhale the delicate effluvium of new compounds. From the anthology there arose a subtler smell, both exotic and businesslike, of the poet’s disorder, his sweats and scribblings, and of the office order of the professor and the sweet ultimate ink. By contrast, everything else seemed untidy, the summer past, the ruined garden, one’s own life. Their best hope lay in the books themselves, the orderly march of chapter and subheading, the tables, the summaries, the index, the fine fat page of type.
    The old spurious hope and elegance of school days came back to him. How strange it was that school had nothing whatever to do with life. The old talk of school as a preparation for life—what a bad joke. There was no relation at all. School made matters worse. The elegance and order of school had disarmed him for what came later.
    Jamie had a queer-looking physical-chemical reference, as stubby and thick as a German handbook. Hefting it, you felt like a German: a whole body of knowledge, a Wissenschaft, here in your hand, a good chunky volume. Kitty had a great $15 atlas-size anthology of World Literature from Heraclitus to Robert Frost—the whole works. The engineer was content with a thin tight little volume, The Theory of Large Numbers, that and his slide rule, which he wore in a scabbard like a dagger. Sitting in the funky tannin smell of the fall garden, he slid the window of his rule and read off cube roots and cosigns. He for artifacts, bright pretty useful objects like slide rules, and you can have your funky gardens and jaybirds crying down October.
    Each believed privately that he was taking the best course, had hit on the real thing, the meat of the university, and that the other two were deceiving themselves. Imagine what a chemistry student thinks of an anthology.
    Son Junior, Lamar Thigpen’s son, came out to join them and stood around fiddling with his Thunderbird