The Thanatos Syndrome

children.
    â€œTom,” he says, holding the door in one hand and shaking my hand with the other, “take care of yourself.”
    â€œI will.”
    â€œLet me say this, Tom,” he says in a low voice, not letting go of my hand, pulling me close.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI think you’re on to something extremely important. I know more than you think.”
    I look at him. The white fiber around his pupils seems to be spinning.
    â€œI have great confidence in you, Tom. I shall pray for you.”
    â€œThanks.” I am working my hand free.
    â€œDid I ever tell you that I had spent a year in Germany before the war in the household of an eminent psychiatrist whose son was a colonel in the Schutzstaffel?”
    â€œYes, you did. Goodbye, Father.”
    â€œLast night I dreamed of lying in bed in Tübingen and listening to church bells. German church bells make a high-pitched, silvery sound.”
    â€œGoodbye, Father.”
    â€œGoodbye, Tom.” He lets go. Both he and Milton stand clear. They are smiling and nodding cheerfully. “There are dangers down there, Tom, you may not be aware of. Be careful.”
    â€œI will,” I say, stepping down, wanting only to be on my way.

III
    1. OUT OLD I-12 and into the sun toward Baton Rouge and the river. A short hop, but the old interstate, broken and rough as it is, is nevertheless clogged with truckers of all kinds, great triple tandems and twenty-six-wheelers thundering along at eighty who like nothing better than terrorizing private cars like my ancient Caprice. There are many hitchhikers, mostly black and Hispanic. The rest stops are crowded by pitched tents, seedy Winnebagos, and Michigan jalopies heading west from the cold smokestacks and the dried-up oil wells.
    I fancy I catch sight of the Cox Cable van, but he is ahead of me, so how could he be following? But just in case. Just in case, I squeeze in between two tandems in the right lane, duck past the trucker and into an exit so fast that he gives me the bird and an angry air-horn blast.
    Take to the blue highways, skirting Baton Rouge and the deserted Exxon and Ethyl refineries, picking my way through a wasted countryside of tank farms, chemical dumps, befouled bayous. The flat delta land becomes ever greener with a pitch-dark green, as if the swamp grass had been nourished by oil slicks. The air smells like a crankcase.
    Upriver and into West Feliciana, the first low loess bluffs of St. Francisville, and into the pleasant deciduous hills where Audubon lived with rich English planters, painted the birds, and taught dancing for a living. Out of the hills and back toward the river and Grand Mer, the great widening of the river into a gulf where the English landed with their slaves from the Indies, took up indigo farming, and lived the happy life of Feliciana, free of the seditious Americans to the north, the corrupt French to the south, and in the end free even to get rid of the indolent Spanish and form their own republic.
    Down to the old river and the great house, Pantherburn, once on Grand Mer itself, left high and dry by one of the twists and turns of the river now some miles to the west, leaving behind not a worn-out plantation but a fecund bottomland, Lucy’s two thousand acres of soybeans, straight clean rows now in full leaf gray-green as new money. A tractor pulling a silver tank trails a rooster tail of dust. The tractor stops. The driver dismounts and picks up one end of the tank.
    The alley of great oaks which used to run from house to landing now ends in the middle of a field. The first house inside the gate is not Pantherburn but a new mobile home propped on cinder blocks and fenced by white plastic pickets. A Ford Galaxy, older than my Caprice, is parked under a chinaberry tree.
    Pantherburn is a graceful box, a perfect cube flanked all around by wide galleries and Doric columns. Some colonial architect knew what he was doing. The plastered columns, as thick as oak trunks, are worn to the pink of the bricks and from a distance look as rosy as stick candy. The siding is unpainted, silvery lapped cypress. The house, lived in by Lipscombs for two hundred years, looks hard used but serviceable. It has not been restored like the showplaces on the River Road. An old-fashioned Sears chest freezer, big enough to hold a steer, hums away on the side gallery.
    Inside, the house is simple and not large. The great galleries and columns give it its loom and spread.