The Thanatos Syndrome

a rap: “Didn’t I tell you that ol’ boy was too damn smart to catch up with?”
    Lucy, to tell the truth, would not in the least mind being first lady of Louisiana and presiding over the great mansion in Baton Rouge. She is one of those women who can carry off being wife, doctoring, and running a plantation—doing it all well, albeit somewhat abstractedly.
    It is just as well. I’d have gotten into trouble with Lucy for sure, lovely as she is in her bossy-nurturing, mothering-daughtering way, always going tch and fixing something on me, brushing off dandruff with quick rough brushes of her hand, spitting on her thumb to smooth my eyebrows. The one time she came to my bed, coming somewhat over and onto me in an odd, agreeable, early-morning incubus centering movement, I registered, along with the pleasant centered weight of her, the inkling that she was the sort who likes the upper hand.
    It is just as well Ellen came home and Buddy came home. She, Lucy, gave signs of wanting to marry me, and how could I not have, lovely large splendid big-assed girl that she is, face as bruisy-ripe as a plum, with a splendid old house and Ellen having run off with Van Dorn? An unrelieved disaster it would have been, what with the uncle calling ducks night and day and what with Ellen coming home eventually. I’d have ended up for sure like our common ancestor, Lucy’s and mine, with one wife too many in a great old house, sunk in English Tory melancholy, nourishing paranoid suspicions against his neighbors, fearful of crazy Yankee Americans coming down the river (Como and company) and depraved French coming up the river (Buddy Dupre and the Cajuns)—in the end seeing no way out but to tie a sugar kettle on his head and jump into the river.
    What a relief all around.
    Lucy deserved her good fortune, restored Pantherburn without prettying it up, replaced rotten joists and moldings, hung her English landscapes for the first time since the War, replaced the silver stolen by the Yankees and General Benjamin F. “Silver Spoons” Butler.
    Vergil Bon was toolpusher for the Exxon well, and made enough money to return to L.S.U. for his graduate degree in petroleum geology.
    The uncle won the Arkansas National Duck Call for the eleventh time.

6. THE EFFECTS OF the heavy-sodium additive are gradually wearing off in Feliciana.
    In the universities, for example, one sees fewer students lying about the campus grooming each other.
    There are fewer complaints from parents about “human fly” professors scaling the walls of the women’s dormitories. Fewer professors complain of women students presenting rearward during tutorials.
    L.S.U. football had a losing season.
    Writers-in-residence, as well as local poets who for years have been writing two-word sentences like the chimp Washoe and during readings uttering exclamations, howls, and routinely exposing themselves, have begun writing understandable novels and genuine poetry in the style of Robert Penn Warren, formerly of Feliciana.
    But my practice is still dormant. Still, no one complains of depression, anxiety, guilt, obsessions, or phobias. People hereabouts still suffer from physical illnesses, mainly liver damage and arterial clogging, but, mentally speaking, appear to have subsided into a pleasant funk, saying very little, drinking Dixie beer, fishing, hunting, watching sports on stereo-V, eating crawfish and sucking the heads thoughtfully.
    I report this state of affairs to Leroy Ledbetter at the Little Napoleon over a drink of Early Times. Taking his invisible drink during a wipe, he replies only, “So what else is new, Doc?”

7. MY TWO OLD FRIENDS , ex-Jesuit Kev Kevin and ex Maryknoller Debbie Boudreaux, who had long since abandoned belief in God, Jesus, the Devil, the Church, and suchlike in favor of belief in community, relevance, growth, and interpersonal relations, have now abandoned these beliefs as well.
    They went their separate ways.
    Debbie works quietly as full-time bookkeeper at her father’s new Nissan agency in Thibodaux.
    Kev has given up writing political tracts and now writes commercially successful paperback novels about nuns and ex-nuns, priests and ex-priests who engage in a variety of political and sexual activities, both heterosexual and homosexual, gay and lesbian, Marxist and Fascist.
    We remain friends. They are in fact quite solicitous of me and my troubles. They call regularly. In turn I call on