Free The Second Coming by Walker Percy

became a sign of something else. This fence was a sign of another fence he had climbed through. The hawk was a sign of another hawk and of a time when he believed there were fabulous birds. The tiger? Whatever he was, he was gone. Even the wheeling blackbirds signified not themselves but a certain mocking sameness. They flew up, flustered and wheeling and blown about by the same fitful wind just as they had thirty, forty years ago. There is no mystery. The only mystery is that nothing changes. Nothing really happens. Marriages, births, deaths, terrible wars had occurred but had changed nothing. War is not a change but a poor attempt to make a change. War and peace are not events.
    Only one event had ever happened to him in his life. Everything else that had happened afterwards was a non-event.
    The guitar sound of the fence wire stretched above him and the singing and popping of the vines against his body were signs of another event. Stooping now, he was trying to make his body remember what had happened. Suddenly it crossed his mind that nothing else had ever happened to him.
    The boy had gone through the fence first, holding the new Sterlingworth Fox double-barreled twenty-gauge ahead of him, while the man pulled up the top strand of barbed wire. He had gone through the fence, but before he could stand up, the man had grabbed his shoulder from the other side of the fence in a grip that surprised him not so much for the pain as for the suddenness and violence and with the other hand grabbed the gun up and away from him, swung him around and cursed him. Goddamn you, haven’t I told you how to go through a fence with a loaded shotgun? Don’t you know what would happen if— suddenly the man stopped.
    Now on the golf links years later he recognized the smell. It was the funky tannin rot of the pin-oak swamp as sharp in his nostrils as wood smoke.
    The boy, who had already gotten oven the pain but not the surprise, stood looking at the man across the fence holding the two shotguns, still too surprised to feel naked and disarmed without his gun. Nothing would ever surprise him again. Once the surprise was gone and his heart slowed, he began to feel the first hint of the coolness and curiosity and watchfulness of the rest of his life. Is it possible that his eyes narrowed slightly (he wasn’t sure of this) as he put his empty hands in his pockets (he was sure of this) and said:
    If what?
    They had gone into the woods after singles. The dog had run over the covey instead of pointing it, and the covey had flushed too soon and too far away for a shot, the fat birds getting up with their sudden heart-stop thunder, then angling off tilt-winged and planing into the trees. The man, white-faced with anger, cursed the guide, shot the dog instead of the birds, to teach the dog never to do that again, he said, not to hurt the dog bad what with the distance and the number-eight bird shot. The dog and the guide disappeared.
    When the man handed the shotgun back to him, his eyes glittered but not in the merry way they did when a hunt went well. He had given the boy the new shotgun for Christmas and he had just finished trying an important lawsuit in Thomasville close by and this was the very place, the very woods where he, the man, once had had a great hunt, perhaps even a fabled hunt, with his own father. But this hunt had gone badly. The Negro guide was no good. The dog had been trained badly. The lawsuit was not going well. They, the man and the boy, had spent a bad sleepless night in an old hotel (the same hotel where the man had spent the night before the great Thomasville hunt). The hotel was not at all as the man had remembered it.
    Here, said the man, handing him the shotgun and stretching up the top strand of barbed wire. The wire creaked. I trust you now.
    Thank you. The boy was watchful as he took the gun.
    Do you trust me? asked the man.
    Yes. No.
    You have to trust me now.
    Why?
    I’m going to see to it that