The Last of the Savages by Jay McInerney Page A

would say, so that eachSunday I approached the altar rail, a would-be apostate terrified of the sacrilege of taking communion unshriven. Now, on Christmas Eve, I was faced with a new dilemma; as the ushers moved backward down the aisle toward our pew, I found myself with a painful erection, which persisted as the rows immediately in front of us each emptied, until finally my mother and father and Aunt Colleen were rising and I was forced to a decision.
    “Aren’t you coming to communion,” little Jimmy asked loudly, from the aisle.
    The next morning, opening presents my parents could barely afford—including the London Fog raincoat I’d requested—I found myself weighed down with shame for all my betrayals and denials, from asking my mother to change her dress as we were about to drive to school that September, to passing my father off as a General Electric executive. And my ears still rang with what my father had said, driving back from church—“Preppies don’t take communion?” I solemnly vowed to be a better son in the coming year.
    I was under the influence of this resolution and still miffed at Will when he called to wish me a rockin’ good Christmas and to invite me down to “the farm”—his homey euphemism for Bear Track, the Mississippi plantation where his father had been born. Though I badly wanted to go, I heard myself telling him, with a defiant pride in my station in life, that I was grateful for the kind invitation, but I didn’t have the money for a plane ticket.
    I knew my mother would be crushed to lose me again, so soon. Going away to school had been my own idea—and she was clearly delighted to have me in the house again.
    Will solved the first problem immediately; he’d pay the fare out of his ill-gotten numbers gains. When I coldly informed him that I didn’t want his money, he claimed he needed my help and explained that I could work off the debt. That, somehow, made all the difference. I didn’t cloud the issue by asking him what it was he needed me to do.
    The other obstacle was more difficult to surmount, but over the nextcouple of days I managed to imply to my folks that I knew they weren’t the kind of parents who’d want to deny their son the broadening travel and social opportunities that his expensive prep school education had opened up for him—thanks to their generosity and sacrifice—which they themselves could not necessarily afford to provide. I was almost brought short by the look in my mother’s eyes when she told me I could go, a look that indicated she knew she was losing me. My father, too, became misty-eyed as he drove me to the airport. In his relations with me he seemed to lurch between the poles of stern disciplinarian and moist sentimentalist, with no comfortable middle ground. It was all very Irish. I wanted to comfort him in some way, but we had no history of verbal intimacy, and my excitement at escaping the cramped sphere of his influence was only too palpable.

VI
    W e left Memphis behind us on the high ground and suddenly I was confronted by the vast bottomland of the Mississippi Delta. In its dusty brown winter cloak it seemed almost featureless, but under the irrigation of Will’s rambling commentary fabulous growth sprang forth on the fruitless plain: a lost jungle of cypress, tupelo, sycamore and sweet gum flowered again out of a rich stew of flood-water, alluvial sediments and decomposing vegetation, stitched together by a chaos of vines and cane, trafficked by deer, bears, panthers, water moccasins, alligators and black clouds of disease-bearing mosquitoes. The Choctaw camped on the sedimented high ground near the banks of the river, but the fecund interior languished well into the last century until white men from Tennessee and the Carolinas arrived in flatboats from the river, having worn out the cotton lands to the north and the east, lured by the rumor of the richest soil on the planet. No yeoman farmers, these—the clearing and farming of