Walker Percy Turn After Illness

The dust came up in sheets from the tires and coated the windshield so that the road ahead looked like a pale streak through a dirty pane. I kept one hand on the door handle and the other around the thermos as Shelby drove and Walker sat beside him with the map open on his knees. We had left the last paved stretch two hours earlier and the only sound for miles was the engine laboring against the grade and the wind pushing against the side of the car.

Walker had been quiet since Santa Fe. He folded the map and set it on the dash without looking at it again.

We stopped at a turnout where the land fell away into a wide basin of rock and low scrub. Shelby cut the engine and the silence came down hard. Walker got out first and walked a few yards along the edge. He stood with his hands in his coat pockets and his shoulders pulled forward against the cold.

I stayed by the car and watched him. He had come out of the sanatorium thinner than when he went in and the weight never came back the way it should. Two years at Trudeau had left him with a habit of pausing before he spoke, as if he were still listening for the sound of his own lungs.

He turned back toward us. His face was the same one I had known since Greenville, but something in the eyes had shifted. He said he was not going any farther west. He said he needed to go back to New Orleans and settle what had been left unsettled. Shelby looked at him across the hood and did not answer at once. The wind moved the dry grass at their feet.

The road back ran through the same empty country we had crossed coming out. Walker slept for stretches and woke to ask if we had passed a certain junction. He spoke little of the months at Saranac or the relapse that sent him to Connecticut. He mentioned only that a man in the next bed had left a copy of Aquinas on the chair between them and that he had read it through twice before the nurses moved the beds.

We reached the city after dark and the streetlights threw long shadows across the porch where we set the bags. Walker stood for a moment with one hand on the railing before he went inside.

In the weeks that followed he kept regular hours with the priest who gave instruction. Bunt Townsend came by most evenings after her shift at the hospital. She had trained as a nurse in the same wards where Walker once walked as an intern and she carried that same steady way of moving through a room. They were married in a small ceremony at the courthouse and afterward received into the Church together on a Saturday morning when the rain held off just long enough for the walk back to the car.

Walker took a job writing copy for a trade magazine and kept at it without complaint. He rose early and worked at the kitchen table until the light changed. When the first chapters of a novel began to take shape he showed them only to Shelby and to me. He never spoke of the old plan to practice medicine.