The Last of the Savages (38 page)

After the last guests had gone I took a long walk down the beach with Will, who smoked a joint and held forth on the digitalized, postcorporate future when each of us would take control of our destiny—or, rather, when our children would. On the sunny edge of the continent, laved by the saline breeze off the Pacific, two thousand miles from the Civil War killing grounds of Tennessee and six thousand miles from the Yorkshire estate where Cordell Savage lives with his third wife, it
seemed possible that afternoon to start fresh, to take twelve steps into a brave new life. If we log on to the Internet, eat the right foods and exercise religiously, surely we will forget our differences and begin to love one another. But then the riots break out again in the City of Angels, just a few miles south of this paradise, and sons stand trial for shotgunning their parents.

I think of Will pointing a shotgun at his father. And I ponder those weird hobbyists who dress up in the gray and the blue and shoulder muskets and regimental colors to reenact the battles of Gettysburg and Manassas. Our ghosts walk among us—soldiers and hippies, slaves and tyrants, moaning their griefs and rattling their sins like chains. Robert Johnson Savage will have no choice but to grapple with them. I can only pray that he fires no weapons in that contest.

After flailing so awkwardly against my own modest heritage, I know that my only contribution to the great tides of destiny will be to relay the message of my genes. There be giants … and there be the rest of us, drifting in schools with the dark currents beneath the waves. Passing the midpoint of a lifetime of small triumphs and failures, of pursuing false idols and common virtues, I see that cleaving to Will was the single daring and unpredictable choice I allowed myself along the way. If this has been the story of Will’s life, more than my own, that is because he has lived.

Will wanted to liberate us all; no doubt he’d inherited a taste for lost causes. Yet there have been times—swaying at his side backstage in Boston; racing the wrong way down a predawn street in Memphis; cruising with the top down across the hot skillet of the Mississippi Delta in search of the blues—when I knew, at least for a little while, what it was like to feel free.