"Then what are you saying?"

"What I'm trying to tell you is that the origins of the Holocaust are a myth-"

"Never mind. I'm leaving."

"Very well. What are you going to tell Father Placide and Dr. Comeaux?"

"I am going to tell Father Placide that you are too disturbed to be of any use to him at St. Michael's. I am going to tell Dr. Comeaux that you are also too disturbed to operate the hospice and that I hope you will sell it to him. Now will you let me out of here?"

"I appreciate your frankness," says the priest, nodding vigorously, hands making and unmaking fists in his pockets. "Shall I be frank with you?"

"Sure, if you'll open this damn door."

"I will. But please allow me to tell you something about yourself for your own good."

"Please do."

"You are an able psychiatrist, on the whole a decent, generous, humanitarian person in the abstract sense of the word. You know what is going to happen to you?"

"What?"

"You are a member of the first generation of doctors in the history of medicine to turn their backs on the oath of Hippocrates and kill millions of old useless people, unborn children, born malformed children, for the good of mankind-and to do so without a single murmur from one of you. Not a single letter of protest in the august New England Journal of Medicine. And do you know what you're going to end up doing? You a graduate of Harvard and a reader of The New York Times and a member of the Ford Foundation's Program for the Third World? Do you know what is going to happen to you?"

"No," I say, relieved to be on a footing of simple hostility, "-even though I did not graduate from Harvard, do not read The New York Times, and do not belong to the Ford Foundation."

The priest aims the azimuth at me, but then appears to lose his train of thought. Again his preoccupied frown comes back.

"What is going to happen to me, Father?" I ask before he gets away altogether.

"Oh," he says absently, appearing to be thinking of something else, "you're going to end up killing Jews."

"Okay," I say. Somehow I knew he was going to say this.

Somehow also he knows that we've finished with each other. He reaches for the trapdoor, turns the rung. "Give my love to Ellen and the kids."

"Sure."

At the very moment of his touching the rung, there is a tapping on the door from below. The door lifts against his hand.

"That's Milton," says Father Smith in his workaday ham-operator voice and lifts the door.

A head of close-cropped iron-gray hair pops up through the opening and a man springs into the room.

To my astonishment the priest pays no attention to the new arrival, even though the three of us are now as close as three men in a small elevator. He takes my arm again.

"Yes, Father?"

"Even if you were a combination of Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, and Charles Kuralt rolled into one-no, especially if you were those guys-"

"As a matter of fact, I happen to know Charlie Kuralt, and there is not a sweeter guy, a more tenderhearted person-"

"Right," says the priest ironically, still paying not the slightest attention to the stranger, and then, with his sly expression, asks, "Do you know where tenderness always leads?"

"No, where?" I ask, watching the stranger with curiosity.

"To the gas chamber."

"I see."

"Tenderness is the first disguise of the murderer."

"Right."

The stranger has sprung up through the opening with no assistance, even though he's carrying a plastic pail of water in one hand and an A&P shopping bag in the other. Evidently he's used to doing this.

"Well-" I say, stepping down. We needn't shake hands.

"Here's the final word," says the priest, taking hold of my arm.

"Good," I say.

Now we three are standing facing in the same direction, the stranger evidently waiting for me to leave, not even having room to set down pail and shopping bag.

"If you are a lover of Mankind in the abstract like Walt Whitman, who wished the best for Mankind, you will probably do no harm and might even write good poetry and give pleasure, right?

"Right."

"If you are a theorist of Mankind like Rousseau or Skinner, who believes he understands man's brain and in the solitariness of his study or laboratory writes books on the subject, you are also probably harmless and might even contribute to human knowledge, right?"

"Right."

"But if you put the two together, a lover of Mankind and a theorist of Mankind, what you've got now is Robespierre or Stalin or Hitler and the Terror, and millions dead for the good of Mankind. Right?"

"Right," I say indifferently.

Now the stranger places the pail in a corner and lines up items from the bag on the table next to the azimuth: two bars of soap, a pack of small Hefty bags, a double roll of Charmin toilet paper, three large boxes of Sunkist raisins, half a dozen cans of food, including, I notice, Vienna sausage and Bartlett pears.

The priest introduces me. "Dr. Thomas More, this is Milton Guidry, my indispensable friend and assistant. He keeps me in business, brings me the essentials, removes wastes, serves Mass. Unlike me, he is able to live a normal life down there in the world. He used to run the hospice almost single-handedly, plus milk the cows. He still milks the cows. Now he works as a janitor at the A&P. Between his small salary there and my small salary from the forestry service and selling the milk, we make out very well, don't we, Milton?"

The newcomer nods cheerfully and stands almost at attention, as if waiting for an order. Milton Guidry is a very thin but wiry man of an uncertain age. He could be a young-looking middle-aged man or a gray-haired young man. His face is unlined. His neat flat-top crewcut, squared at the temples, frames his octagonal rimless glasses, which flash in the sun. The bare spot at the top of his head could be the result of a beginning of balding or a too-close haircut. He wears a striped, long-sleeved shirt and a bow tie-he could have bought both at the A&P-neatly pressed jeans, and pull-on canvas shoes. He is of a type once found in many rectories who are pleased to hang around and help the priest. In another time, I suppose, he would be called a sacristan. He listens intently while the priest gives him instructions. It does not seem to strike him as in the least unusual that Father Smith is perched atop a hundred-foot tower in the middle of nowhere and giving him complicated instructions about getting cruets, hosts, and wine. This, Milton's attentive attitude seems to say, is what Father does.

"Do you say Mass here?" I ask the priest. We stand at close quarters, our eyes squinted against the sun now blazing in the west.

"Oh yes. Every morning at six. And Milton has not been late yet, have you, Milton?"

Milton nods seriously, hands at his sides. "It is easy," Milton explains to me, "because I have an alarm clock and I live in the shed below." He points to the floor. "I set the alarm for five-thirty."

"I see."

"I used to set my alarm for five-forty-five, but I felt rushed. I like to give myself time."

"I see." I really have to get out of here.

"Milton has to work mornings next week," says the priest, eyeing me. "Would you like to assist?"

"No thanks."

The priest seems not to mind. In the best of humors now, he holds the trapdoor open for me and again sends his love to Ellen and the children.

"Tom," he says, holding the door in one hand and shaking my hand with the other, "take care of yourself."

"I will."

"Let me say this, Tom," he says in a low voice, not letting go of my hand, pulling me close.

"What?"

"I 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.

"I have great confidence in you, Tom. I shall pray for you."

"Thanks." I am working my hand free.

"Did 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?"

"Yes, you did. Goodbye, Father."

"Last night I dreamed of lying in bed in Tubingen and listening to church bells. German church bells make a high-pitched, silvery sound."

"Goodbye, Father."

"Goodbye, 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."

"I 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. There are four rooms downstairs and up, divided by a hall as wide as a dogtrot.

Lucy and her uncle are waiting for me on the lower gallery, Lucy is in shirt-sleeves and jeans, hands in pockets, eyeing me, lip tucked. She reaches up and gives me a hug and, to my surprise, a frank kiss on the mouth. What a splendid, by no means small, woman. Again the smell of her cotton gives me a deja vu. I know if I choose to know, but don't of course, what will happen next. And yet I do.

The uncle shakes hands, giving one pump country-fashion, not meeting my eye, and stands off a ways, snapping his fingers and socking fist into hand. He is silent but agreeable. His face is as narrow and brown as a piece of slab bark. He wears an old duck-hunting cap and a loose bloodstained camouflage army jacket, with special pockets for shells and game. The cap is folded like a little tent on his narrow head.

We stroll around the front yard and to the back, which contains a tiny graveyard. The sun has reached the trees. It is cooler. Lucy walks like a housewife going abroad, arms folded, stooping with each step. The uncle keeps up, but in a flanking position, some twenty feet away. His old liver-and-white pointer, Maggie, follows at his heel, her nose covered with warts, nuzzling him when he stops, burrowing under his hand. He talks, I think, to us. He speaks of his bird boxes and points them out. "Ain't been a bluebird in these parts for forty years. I got six pair this summer. I got me twenty pair of wood ducks down in the flats. You want to see them?"

"Sure," I say.

"Not now, Uncle," says Lucy, stooping over her folded arms as she walks.

The uncle, flanking, keeps talking, paying no attention to Lucy nor she to him. "Most folks don't know how the ducklings get out of the boxes twenty feet high. Some say they climb down the bark using a special toenail. Some say mamma duck helps them down. Not so. I saw them. You know what those little sapsuckers do? They climb out of the hole and fall, flat fall out and hit the ground pow, bounce like a rubber ball, and head for the water."

The graveyard is a tiny enclosure, fenced by rusty iron spikes and chest-high in weeds. "I can't cut in there with a tractor, so it doesn't get cut," says Lucy.

"I heard they used to cut it with scissors," says the uncle. "Did you know once there were forty people here not counting field people?" By "they" and "people," he means slaves.

Lucy, paying no attention, shows me the grave of our common ancestor, an English army officer on the wrong side of the Revolution. It is a blackened granite block surmounted by an angel holding an urn.

"Do you remember that in his will he left his daughter, who was thirteen, an eleven-year-old mulatto girl named Laura for her personal use." Lucy jostles me. "I wish somebody would leave me one."

"You seem to be doing fine."

"He suffered spells of terrible melancholy and harbored the delusion that certain unnamed enemies were after him, all around him, coming down the river and up the river to put an end to the happy life in Feliciana."

"It was probably the Americans."

"We come from a melancholy family. Are you melancholy?" she asks. "No, you don't look melancholy; me either." I notice that her cheeks are flushed. "He married a beautiful American girl half his age, only to have his first, English wife show up. Both women lived here at Pantherburn for a while." Lucy gives me a sideways look.

"No wonder he jumped in the river. Which wife are we descended from?" I ask her.

"I'm from the English, the legitimate side; you from the American."

"Then we're not close kin."

"Hardly kin at all. I'm glad," says Lucy.