Up to the time George Webber’s father died, there were some unforgiving souls in the town of Libya Hill who spoke of him as a man who not only had deserted his wife and child, but had consummated his iniquity by going off to live with another woman. In the main, those facts are correct. As to the construction that may be placed upon them, I can only say that I should prefer to leave the final judgment to God Almighty, or to those numerous deputies of His whom He has apparently appointed as His spokesmen on this earth. In Libya Hill there are quite a number of them, and I am willing to let them do the talking. For my own part, I can only say that the naked facts of John Webber’s desertion are true enough, and that none of his friends ever attempted to deny them. Aside from that, it is worth noting that Mr. Webber had his friends.
John Webber was “a Northern man,” of Pennsylvania Dutch extraction, who had come into Old Catawba back in 1881. He was a brick mason and general builder, and he had been brought to Libya Hill to take charge of the work on the new hotel which the Corcorans were putting up on Belmont Hill, in the center of the town. The Corcorans were rich people who had come into that section and bought up tracts of property and laid out plans for large enterprises, of which the hotel was the central one. The railroad was then being built and would soon be finished. And only a year or two before, George Willetts, the great Northern millionaire, had purchased thousands of acres of the mountain wilderness and had come down with his architects to project the creation of a great country estate that would have no equal in America. New people were coming to town all the time, new faces were being seen upon the streets. There was quite a general feeling in the air that great events were just around the corner, and that a bright destiny was in store for Libya Hill.
It was the time when they were just hatching from the shell, when the place was changing from a little isolated mountain village, lost to the world, with its few thousand native population, to a briskly-moving modern town, with railway connections to all parts, and with a growing population of wealthy people who had heard about the beauties of the setting and were coming there to live.
That was the time John Webber came to Libya Hill, and he stayed, and in a modest way he prospered. And he left his mark upon it. It was said of him that he found the place a little country village of clapboard houses and left it a thriving town of brick. That was the kind of man he was. He liked what was solid and enduring. When he was consulted for his opinion about some new building that was contemplated and was asked what material would be best to use, he would invariably answer, “Brick.”
At first, the idea of using brick was a novel one in Libya Hill, and for a moment, while Mr. Webber waited stolidly, his questioner would be silent; then, rather doubtfully, as if he was not sure he had heard aright, he would say, “Brick?”
“Yes, sir,” Mr. Webber would answer inflexibly, “Brick. It’s not going to cost you so much more than lumber by the time you’re done, and,” he would say quietly, but with conviction, “it’s the only way to build. You can’t rot it out, you can’t rattle it or shake it, you can’t kick holes in it, it will keep you warm in Winter and cool in Summer, and fifty years from now, or a hundred for that matter, it will still be here. I don’t like lumber,” Mr. Webber would go on doggedly. “I don’t like wooden houses. I come from Pennsylvania where they know how to build. Why,” he would say, with one of his rare displays of boastfulness, “we’ve got stone barns up there that are built better and have lasted longer than any house you’ve got in this whole section of the country. In my opinion there are only two materials for a house—stone or brick. And if I had my way,” he would add a trifle grimly, “that’s how I’d build all of them.”
But he did not always have his way. As time went on, the necessities of competition forced him to add a lumber yard to his brick yard, but that was only a grudging concession to the time and place. His real, his first, his deep, abiding love was brick.
And indeed, the very appearance of John Webber, in spite of physical peculiarities which struck one at first sight as strange, even a little startling, suggested qualities in him as solid and substantial as the houses that he built. Although he was slightly above the average height, he gave the curious impression of being shorter than he was. This came from a variety of causes, chief of which was a somewhat “bowed” formation of his body. There was something almost simian in his short legs, bowed slightly outward, his large, flat-looking feet, the powerful, barrel-like torso, and the tremendous gorilla-like length of his arms, whose huge paws dangled almost even with his knees. He had a thick, short neck that seemed to sink right down into the burly shoulders, and close sandy-reddish hair that grew down almost to the edges of the cheek bones and to just an inch or so above the eyes. He was getting bald even then, and there was a wide and hairless swathe right down the center of his skull. He had extremely thick and bushy eyebrows, and the trick of peering out from under them with the head out-thrust in an attitude of intensely still attentiveness. But one’s first impression of a slightly simian likeness in the man was quickly forgotten as one came to know him. For when John Webber walked along the street in his suit of good black broadcloth, heavy and well-cut, the coat half cutaway, a stiff white shirt with starched cuffs, a wing collar with a cravat of black silk tied in a thick knot, and a remarkable-looking derby hat, pearl-grey in color and of a squarish cut, he looked the very symbol of solid, middle-class respectability.
And yet, to the surprised incredulity of the whole town, this man deserted his wife. As for the child, another construction can be put on that. The bare anatomy of the story runs as follows:
About 1885, John Webber met a young woman of Libya Hill named Amelia Joyner. She was the daughter of one Lafayette, or “Fate” Joyner, as he was called, who had come out of the hills of Zebulon County a year or two after the Civil War, bringing his family with him. John Webber married Amelia Joyner in 1885 or 1886. In the next fifteen years they had no children, until, in 1900, their son George was born. And about 1908, after their marriage had lasted more than twenty years, Webber left his wife. He had met, a year or two before, a young woman married to a man named Bartlett: the fact of their relationship had reached the proportions of an open scandal by 1908, when he left his wife, and after that he did not pretend to maintain any secrecy about the affair whatever. He was then a man in his sixties; she was more than twenty years younger, and a woman of great beauty. The two of them lived together until his death in 1916.
It cannot be denied that Webber’s marriage was a bad one. It is certainly not my purpose to utter a word of criticism of the woman he married, for, whatever her faults were, they were faults she couldn’t help. And her greatest fault, perhaps, was that she was a member of a family that was extremely clannish, provincial, and opinionated—in the most narrow and dogged sense of the word, puritanical—and she not only inherited all these traits and convictions of her early training, they were so rooted into her very life and being that no experience, no process of living and enlargement, could ever temper them.
Her father was a man who could announce solemnly and implacably that he “would rather see a daughter of mine dead and lying in her coffin than married to a man who drank.” And John Webber was a man who drank. Moreover, Amelia’s father, if anyone had ever dared to put the monstrous suggestion to him, would have been perfectly capable of amplifying the Christian sentiments which have just been quoted by announcing that he would rather see a daughter of his dead and in her grave than married to a man who had been divorced. And John Webber was a man who had been divorced.
That, truly, was calamitous, the cause of untold anguish later—perhaps the chief stumbling block in their whole life together. It also seems to have been the one occasion when he did not deal with her truthfully and honestly in reference to his past life before he came to Libya Hill. He had married a girl in Baltimore in the early Seventies, when he himself had been scarcely more than a stripling old enough to vote. He mentioned it just once to one of his cronies: he said that she was only twenty, “as pretty as a picture,” and an incorrigible flirt. The marriage had ended almost as suddenly as it had begun—they lived together less than a year. By that time it was apparent to them both that they had made a ruinous mistake. She went home to her people, and in the course of time divorced him.
In the Eighties, and, for that matter, much later than that, in a community such as Libya Hill, divorce was a disgraceful thing. George Webber later said that, even in his own childhood, this feeling was still so strong that a divorced person was spoken about in lowered voices, and that when one whispered furtively behind his hand that someone was “a grass widow,” there was a general feeling that she was not only not all she should be, but that she was perhaps just a cut or two above a common prostitute.
In the Eighties, this feeling was so strong that a divorced person was branded with a social stigma as great as that of one who had been convicted of crime and had served a penal sentence. Murder could have been—and was—far more easily forgiven than divorce. Crimes of violence, in fact, were frequent, and many a man had killed his man and had either escaped scot-free, or, having paid whatever penalty was imposed, had returned to take up a position of respected citizenship in the community.
Such, then, were the family and environment of the woman John Webber married. And after he left her to live with Mrs. Bartlett, he became estranged from all the hard-bitten and puritanical members of the Joyner clan. Not long thereafter, Amelia died. After his wife’s death, Webber’s liaison with Mrs. Bartlett continued, to the scandal of the public and the thin-lipped outrage of his wife’s people.
Mark Joyner, Amelia’s older brother, was a man who, after a childhood and youth of bitter poverty, was in the way of accumulating a modest competence in the hardware business. With Mag, his wife, he lived in a bright red brick house with hard, new, cement columns before it—everything about it as hard, new, ugly, bold, and raw as new-got wealth. Mag was a pious Baptist, and her sense of outraged righteousness at the open scandal of John Webber’s life went beyond the limits of embittered speech. She worked on Mark, talking to him day and night about his duty to his sister’s child, until at last, with a full consciousness of the approval of all good people, they took the boy, George, from his father.
The boy had been devoted to his father, but now the Joyners made him one of them. From this time forth, with the sanction of the courts, they kept him.
George Webber’s childhood with his mountain kinsmen was, in spite of his sunny disposition, a dark and melancholy one. His status was really that of a charity boy, the poor relation of the clan. He did not live in the fine new house with his Uncle Mark. Instead, he lived in the little one-story frame house which his grandfather, Lafayette Joyner, had built with his own hands forty years before when he came to town. This little house was on the same plot of ground as Mark Joyner’s new brick house, a little to the right and to the rear, obscured and dwarfed by its more splendid neighbor.
Here John Webber’s little boy was growing up, under the guardianship of a rusty crone of fate, Aunt Maw, a spinstress, his mother’s oldest sister, old Lafayette’s first child. Born thirty years before Amelia, Aunt Maw was in her seventies, but like some weird sister who preaches doom forever but who never dies, it seemed that she was ageless and eternal. From this dark old aunt of doom, and from the drawling voices of his Joyner kin, a dark picture of his mother’s world, his mother’s time, all the universe of the Joyner lives and blood, was built up darkly, was wrought out slowly, darkly, with an undefined but overwhelming horror, in the memory, mind, and spirit of the boy. On Winter evenings, as Aunt Maw talked in her croaking monotone by the light of a greasy little lamp—they never had electric lights in his grandfather’s cottage—George heard lost voices in the mountains long ago, the wind-torn rawness, the desolate bleakness of lost days in March along clay-rutted roads in the bleak hills a hundred years ago:
Someone was dead in a hill cabin long ago. It was night. He heard the howling of the wind about the eaves of March. He was within the cabin. The rude, bare boards creaked to the tread of feet. There was no light except the flickering light of pine, the soft, swift flare of resinous wood, the crumbling ash. Against the wall, upon a bed, lay a sheeted figure of someone who had died. Around the flickering fire flame at the hearth, the drawling voices of the Joyners, one hundred years ago. The quiet, drawling voices of the Joyners who could never die and who attended the death of others like certain doom and prophecy. And in the room again there was a soft and sudden flare of pine flame flickering on the faces of the Joyners, a smell of camphor and of turpentine—a slow, dark horror in the blooded memory of the boy he could not utter.
In these and in a thousand other ways, from every intonation of Aunt Maw’s life and memory, he heard lost voices in the hills long, long ago, saw cloud shadows passing in the wilderness, listened to the rude and wintry desolation of March winds that howl through the sere grasses of the mountain meadows in the month before the month when Spring is come. It came to him at night, in Winter from a room before a dying fire, in Summer from the porch of his grandfather’s little house, where Aunt Maw sat with other rusty, aged crones of her own blood and kin, with their unceasing chronicle of death and doom and terror and lost people in the hills long, long ago. It came to him in all they said and did, in the whole dark image of the world they came from, and something lost and stricken in the hills long, long ago.
And they were always right, invincibly right, triumphant over death and all the miseries they had seen and known, lived and fed upon. And he was of their blood and bone, and desperately he felt somehow like life’s criminal, some pariah, an outcast to their invincible rightness, their infallible goodness, their unsullied integrity. They filled him with a nameless horror of the lost and lonely world of the old-time, forgotten hills from which they came, with a loathing, with a speechless dread.
His father was a bad man. He knew it. He had heard the chronicle of his father’s infamy recounted a thousand times. The story of his father’s crimes, his father’s sinfulness, his father’s lecherous, godless, and immoral life was written on his heart. And yet the image of his father’s world was pleasant and good, and full of secret warmth and joy to him. All of the parts of town, all of the places, lands, and things his father’s life had touched seemed full of happiness and joy to him. He knew that it was wicked. He felt miserably that he was tainted with his father’s blood. He sensed wretchedly and tragically that he was not worthy to be a death-triumphant, ever-perfect, doom-prophetic Joyner. They filled him with the utter loneliness of desolation. He knew he was not good enough for them, and he thought forever of his father’s life, the sinful warmth and radiance of his father’s world.
He would lie upon the grass before his uncle’s fine new house in the green-gold somnolence of afternoon and think forever of his father, thinking: “Now he’s here. At this time of the day he will be here.” Again:
“He will be going now along the cool side of the street—uptown—before the cigar store. Now he’s there—inside the cigar store. I can smell the good cigars. He leans upon the counter, looking out into the street and talking to Ed Battle, who runs the store. There is a wooden Indian by the door, and there are the people passing back and forth along the cool and narrow glade of afternoon. Here comes Mack Haggerty, my father’s friend, into the cigar store. Here are the other men who smoke cigars and chew strong and fragrant plugs of apple tobacco....
“Here is the barber shop next door, the snip of shears, the smell of tonics, of shoe polish and good leather, the incessant drawling voices of the barbers. Now he’ll be going in to get shaved. I can hear the strong, clean scraping of the razor across the harsh stubble of his face. Now I hear people speaking to him. I hear the hearty voices of the men, all raised in greeting. They are all men who come out of my father’s world—the sinful, radiant, and seductive world, the bad world that I think about so much. All the men who smoke cigars and chew tobacco and go to Forman’s barber shop know my father. The good people like the Joyners go along the other side of the street—the shadeless side of afternoon, that has the bright and light....
“Now he has finished at the barber’s. Now he goes around the corner quickly to O’Connell’s place. The wicker doors flap back together as he passes in. There is a moment’s malty reek of beer, a smell of sawdust, lemon, rye, and Angostura bitters. There is the lazy flapping of a wooden fan, a moment’s glimpse of the great, polished bar, huge mirrors, bottles, the shine of polished glasses, the brass foot-rail, dented with the heel-marks of a thousand feet, and Tim O’Connell, thick-jowled, aproned, leaning on the bar....
“Now he is out again. See him go along the street. Now he is at the livery stable. I see the great, raw shape of rusty, corrugated tin, the wooden incline, pulped by many hoofs, as it goes down, the great hoofs clumping on the wooden floors, the hoofs kicked swiftly, casually, against the stalls, the wooden floors bestrewn with oaty droppings, the clean, dry whiskings of coarse tails across great polished rumps of glossy brown, the niggers talking gruffly to the horses in the stalls, the low, dark voices, gruff and tender, hoarse voices full of horseplay, the horse smell, and horse knowingness, men and horses both together, close: ‘Get over dar! Whar you goin’!’ The rubber tires of carriages and buggies, the smooth rumble of the rubber tires upon the battered wooden floors.... The little office to the left where my father likes to sit and talk with the livery-stable men, the battered little safe, the old roll-top desk, the creaking chairs, the little, blistered, cast-iron stove, the dirty windows, never washed, the smell of leather, old, worn ledgers, harness....”
So did he think forever of his father’s life, his father’s places, movements, the whole enchanted picture of his father’s world.
His was, in fact, a savagely divided childhood. Compelled to grow up in an environment and a household which he hated with every instinctive sense of loathing and repulsion of his being, he found himself longing constantly for another universe shaped in the colors of his own desire. And because he was told incessantly that the one he hated was good and admirable, and the one for which he secretly longed was evil and abominable, he came to have a feeling of personal guilt that was to torment him for many years. His sense of place, the feeling for specific locality that later became so strong in him, came, he thought, from all these associations of his youth—from his overwhelming conviction, or prejudice, that there were “good” places and “bad” ones. This feeling was developed so intensely in his childhood that there was hardly a street or a house, a hollow or a slope, a backyard or an alleyway in his own small world that did not bear the color of this prejudice. There were certain streets in town that he could scarcely endure to walk along, and there were certain houses that he could not pass without a feeling of bleak repulsion and dislike.
By the time he was twelve years old, he had constructed a kind of geography of his universe, composed of these powerful and instinctive affections and dislikes. The picture of the “good” side of the universe, the one the Joyners said was bad, was almost always one to which his father was in one way or another attached. It was a picture made up of such specific localities as his father’s brick and lumber yard; Ed Battle’s cigar and tobacco store—this was a place where he met and passed his father every Sunday morning on his way to Sunday School; John Forman’s barber shop on the northwest corner of the Square, and the grizzled, inky heads, the well-known faces, of the negro barbers—John Forman was a negro, and George Webber’s father went to his shop almost every day in the week; the corrugated tin front and the little dusty office of Miller and Cashman’s livery stable, another rendez-vous of his father’s; the stalls and booths of the City Market, which was in a kind of great, sloping, concrete basement underneath the City Hall; the fire department, with its arched doors, the wooden stomping of great hoofs, and its circle of shirt-sleeved men—firemen, baseball players, and local idlers—sitting in split-bottom chairs of evenings; the look and feel of cellars everywhere—for this, curiously, was one of his strong obsessions—he always had a love of secret and enclosed places; the interiors of theatres, and the old Opera House on nights when a show was in town; McCormack’s drug store, over at the southwest corner of the Square opposite his uncle’s hardware store, with its onyx fountain, its slanting wooden fans, its cool and dark interior, and its clean and aromatic smells; Sawyer’s grocery store, in one of the old brick buildings over on the north side of the Square, with its groaning plenty, its crowded shelves, its great pickle barrels, flour bins, coffee grinders, slabs of bacon, and its aproned clerks with straw cuffs on their sleeves; any kind of carnival or circus grounds; anything that had to do with railway stations, depots, trains, engines, freight cars, station yards. All of these things, and a thousand others, he had connected in a curious but powerful identity with the figure of his father; and because his buried affections and desires drew him so strongly to these things, he felt somehow that they must be bad because he thought them “good,” and that he liked them because he was wicked, and his father’s son.
His whole picture of his father’s world—the world in which his father moved—as he built it in his brain with all the naïve but passionate intensity of childhood, was not unlike a Currier and Ives drawing, except that here the canvas was more crowded and the scale more large. It was a world that was drawn in very bright and very innocent and very thrilling colors—a world where the grass was very, very green, the trees sumptuous and full-bodied, the streams like sapphire, and the skies a crystal blue. It was a rich, compact, precisely executed world, in which there were no rough edges and no bleak vacancies, no desolate and empty gaps.
In later years, George Webber actually discovered such a world as this in two places. One was the small countryside community in southern Pennsylvania from which his father had come, with its pattern of great red barns, prim brick houses, white fences, and swelling fields, some green with the perfection of young wheat, others rolling strips of bronze, with red earth, and with the dead-still bloom of apple orchards on the hills—all of it as exactly rich, precise, unwasteful, and exciting as any of his childhood dreams could have imagined it. The other was in certain sections of Germany and the Austrian Tyrol—places like the Black Forest and the Forest of Thuringia, and towns like Weimar, Eisenach, old Frankfort, Kufstein on the Austrian border, and Innsbruck.
Twenty-five years ago or thereabouts, one afternoon in May, George Webber was lying stretched out in the grass before his uncle’s house in Old Catawba.
Isn’t Old Catawba a wonderful name? People up North or out West or in other parts of the world don’t know much about it, and they don’t speak about it often. But really when you know the place and think about it more and more its name is wonderful.
Old Catawba is much better than South Carolina. It is more North, and “North” is a much more wonderful word than “South,” as anyone with any ear for words will know. The reason why “South” seems such a wonderful word is because we had the word “North” to begin with: if there had been no “North,” then the word “South” and all its connotations would not seem so wonderful. Old Catawba is distinguished by its “Northness,” and South Carolina by its “Southness.” And the “Northness” of Old Catawba is better than the “Southness” of South Carolina. Old Catawba has the slants of evening and the mountain cool. You feel lonely in Old Catawba, but it is not the loneliness of South Carolina. In Old Catawba, the hill boy helps his father building fences and hears a soft Spring howling in the wind, and sees the wind snake through the bending waves of the coarse grasses of the mountain pastures. And far away he hears the whistle’s cry wailed back, far-flung and faint along some mountain valley, as a great train rushes towards the cities of the East. And the heart of the hill boy will know joy because he knows, all world-remote, lonely as he is, that some day he will meet the world and know those cities too.
But in South Carolina the loneliness is not like this. They do not have the mountain cool. They have dusty, sand-clay roads, great mournful cotton fields, with pine wood borders and the nigger shacks, and something haunting, soft, and lonely in the air. These people are really lost. They cannot get away from South Carolina, and if they get away they are no good. They drawl beautifully. There is the most wonderful warmth, affection, heartiness in their approach and greeting, but the people are afraid. Their eyes are desperately afraid, filled with a kind of tortured and envenomed terror of the old, stricken, wounded “Southness” of cruelty and lust. Sometimes their women have the honey skins, they are like gold and longing. They are filled with the most luscious and seductive sweetness, tenderness, and gentle mercy. But the men are stricken. They get fat about the bellies, or they have a starved, stricken leanness in the loins. They are soft-voiced and drawling, but their eyes will go about and go again with fear, with terror and suspicion. They drawl softly in front of the drug store, they palaver softly to the girls when the girls drive up, they go up and down the streets of blistered, sun-wide, clay-dust little towns in their shirt-sleeves, and they are full of hearty, red-faced greetings.
They cry: “How are y’, Jim? Is it hot enough fer you?”
And Jim will say, with a brisk shake of the head: “Hotter’n what Sherman said war was, ain’t it, Ed?”
And the street will roar with hearty, red-faced laughter: “By God! That’s a good ’un. Damned if ole Jim didn’t have it about right too!”—but the eyes keep going back and forth, and fear, suspicion, hatred, and mistrust, and something stricken in the South long, long ago, is there among them.
And after a day before the drug stores or around the empty fountain in the Courthouse Square, they go out to lynch a nigger. They kill him, and they kill him hard. They get in cars at night and put the nigger in between them, they go down the dusty roads until they find the place that they are going to, and before they get there, they jab little knives into the nigger, not a long way, not the whole way in, but just a little way. And they laugh to see him squirm. When they get out at the place where they are going to, the place the nigger sat in is a pool of blood. Perhaps it makes the boy who is driving the car sick at his stomach, but the older people laugh. Then they take the nigger through the rough field stubble of a piece of land and hang him to a tree. But before they hang him they saw off his thick nose and his fat nigger lips with a rusty knife. And they laugh about it. Then they castrate him. And at the end they hang him.
This is the way things are in South Carolina; it is not the way things are in Old Catawba. Old Catawba is much better. Although such things may happen in Old Catawba, they do not belong to the temper and character of the people there. There is a mountain cool in Old Catawba and the slants of evening. The hill men kill in the mountain meadows—they kill about a fence, a dog, the dispute of a boundary line. They kill in drunkenness or in the red smear of the murder lust. But they do not saw off niggers’ noses. There is not the look of fear and cruelty in their eyes that the people in South Carolina have.
Old Catawba is a place inhabited by humble people. There is no Charleston in Old Catawba, and not so many people pretending to be what they are not. Charleston produced nothing, and yet it pretended to so much. Now their pretense is reduced to pretending that they amounted to so much formerly. And they really amounted to very little. This is the curse of South Carolina and its “Southness”—of always pretending you used to be so much, even though you are not now. Old Catawba does not have this to contend with. It has no Charleston and it does not have to pretend. They are small, plain people.
So Old Catawba is better because it is more “North.” Even as a child, George Webber realized that in a general way it was better to be more North than South. If you get too North, it gets no good. Everything gets frozen and dried up. But if you get too South, it is no good either, and it also gets rotten. If you get too North, it gets rotten, but in a cold, dry way. If you get too South, it gets rotten not in a dry way—which if you’re going to get rotten is the best way to get rotten—but in a horrible, stagnant, swampy, stenchlike, humid sort of way that is also filled with obscene whisperings and ropy laughter.
Old Catawba is just right. They are not going to set the world on fire down there, neither do they intend to. They make all the mistakes that people can make. They elect the cheapest sort of scoundrel to the highest offices they are able to confer. They have Rotary Clubs and chain gangs and Babbitts and all the rest of it. But they are not bad.
They are not certain, not sure, in Old Catawba. Nothing is certain or sure down there. The towns don’t look like New England towns. They don’t have the lovely white houses, the elm green streets, the sure, sweet magic of young May, the certainty and purpose of it all. It is not like that. First there are about two hundred miles of a coastal plain. This is a mournful flat-land, wooded with pine barrens. Then there are two hundred miles or thereabouts of Piedmont. This is rolling, rugged, you can’t remember it the way that you remember the lavish, sweet, and wonderful farm lands of the Pennsylvania Dutch with their great red barns which dominate the land. You don’t remember Old Catawba in this way. No; field and fold and gulch and hill and hollow, rough meadow land, bunched coarsely with wrench grass, and pine land borderings, clay bank and gulch and cut and all the trees there are, the locusts, chestnuts, maples, oaks, the pines, the willows, and the sycamores, all grown up together, all smashed-down tangles, and across in a sweet wilderness, all choked between with dogwood, laurel, and the rhododendron, dead leaves from last October and the needles of the pine—this is one of the ways that Old Catawba looks in May. And then out of the Piedmont westward you will hit the mountains. You don’t hit them squarely, they just come to you. Field and fold and hill and hollow, clay bank and cut and gulch and rough swell and convolution of the earth unutterable, and presently the hills are there.
A certain unknown, unsuspected sharpness thrills you. Is it not there? You do not know, for it cannot be proved. And yet the shifting engines switch along the tracks, you see the weed growth by the track-side, the leak-grey painting of a toolshed hut, the bleak, unforgettable, marvelous yellow of a station of the Southern Railway. The huge black snout of a mountain engine comes shifting down the track to take you up behind, and suddenly you know the hills are there. The heavy coaches ride up past mountain pastures, a rail fence, a clay road, the rock-bright clamors of a mountain water. You feel upon your neck the hot, the thrilling, the immensely intimate, the strange and most familiar breath of the terrific locomotive. And suddenly the hills are there. You go twisting up the grades and snake round curves with grinding screech. How near, how homely, how common and how strange, how utterly familiar—the great bulk of the Blue Ridge bears imminent upon you and compels you. You can put your hand out of the slow, toiling train and touch it. And all life is near, as common as your breath, as strange as time.
The towns aren’t much to look at. There is no lovely, certain thing the way there is in New England. There are just plain houses, nigger shacks, front porches, most of the current bungalow and country-club atrocities, a Public Square, some old buildings that say “The Weaver Block, 1882,” some new ones for Ford agencies, cars parked around the Square.
Down in the East, in Old Catawba, they have some smack of ancientry. The East got settled first and there are a few old towns down there, the remnants of plantations, a few fine old houses, a lot of niggers, tobacco, turpentine, pine woods, and the mournful flatlands of the coastal plain. The people in the East used to think they were better than the people in the West because they had been there a little longer. But they were not really better. In the West, where the mountains sweep around them, the people have utterly common, familiar, plain, Scotch-Irish faces, and names like Weaver, Wilson, Gudger, Joyner, Alexander, and Patton. The West is really better than the East. They went to war in the West, and yet they didn’t want to go to war. They didn’t have anything to go to war about: they were a plain and common people and they had no slaves. And yet they will always go to war if Leaders tell them to—they are made to serve. They think long and earnestly, debatingly; they are conservative; they vote the right way, and they go to war when big people tell them to. The West is really a region of good small people, a Scotch-Irish place, and that, too, is undefined, save that it doesn’t drawl so much, works harder, doesn’t loaf so much, and shoots a little straighter when it has to. It is really just one of the common places of the earth, a million or two people with nothing very extraordinary about them. If there had been anything extraordinary about them, it would have come out in their houses, as it came out in the lovely white houses of New England; or it would have come out in their barns, as it came out in the great red barns of the Pennsylvania Dutch. They are just common, plain, and homely—but almost everything of America is in them.
George Webber must have known all these things twenty-five years ago as he lay on the grass one afternoon before his uncle’s house. He really knew the way things were. People sometimes pretend they don’t know the way things are, but they really do. George lay in the grass and pulled some grass blades and looked upon them contentedly and chewed upon them. And he knew the way the grass blades were. He dug bare toes into the grass and thought of it. He knew the way it felt. Among the green grass, he saw patches of old brown, and he knew the way that was too. He put out his hand and felt the maple tree. He saw the way it came out of the earth, the grass grew right around it, he felt the bark and got its rough, coarse feeling. He pressed hard with his fingers, a little rough piece of the bark came off; he knew the way that was too. The wind kept howling faintly the way it does in May. All the young leaves of the maple tree were turned back, straining in the wind. He heard the sound it made, it touched him with some sadness, then the wind went and came again.
He turned and saw his uncle’s house, its bright red brick, its hard, new, cement columns, everything about it raw and ugly; and beside it, set farther back, the old house his grandfather had built, the clapboard structure, the porch, the gables, the bay windows, the color of the paint. It was all accidental, like a million other things in America. George Webber saw it, and he knew that this was the way things were. He watched the sunlight come and go, across backyards with all their tangle of familiar things; he saw the hills against the eastern side of town, sweet green, a little mottled, so common, homely, and familiar, and, when remembered later, wonderful, the way things are.
George Webber had good eyes, a sound body, he was twelve years old. He had a wonderful nose, a marvelous sense of smell, nothing fooled him. He lay there in the grass before his uncle’s house, thinking: “This is the way things are. Here is the grass, so green and coarse, so sweet and delicate, but with some brown rubble in it. There are the houses all along the street, the concrete blocks of walls, somehow so dreary, ugly, yet familiar, the slate roofs and the shingles, the lawns, the hedges and the gables, the backyards with their accidental structures of so many little and familiar things as hen houses, barns. All common and familiar as my breath, all accidental as the strings of blind chance, yet all somehow fore-ordered as a destiny: the way they are, because they are the way they are!”
There was a certain stitch of afternoon while the boy waited. Bird chirrupings and maple leaves, pervading quietness, boards hammered from afar, and a bumbling hum. The day was drowsed with quietness and defunctive turnip greens at three o’clock, and Carlton Leathergood’s tall, pock-marked, yellow nigger was coming up the street. The big dog trotted with him, breathing like a locomotive, the big dog Storm, that knocked you down with friendliness. Tongue rolling, heavy as a man, the great head swaying side to side, puffing with joy continually, the dog came on, and with him came the pock-marked nigger, Simpson Simms. Tall, lean, grinning cheerfully, full of dignity and reverence, the nigger was coming up the street the way he always did at three o’clock. He smiled and raised his hand to George with a courtly greeting. He called him “Mister” Webber as he always did; the greeting was gracious and respectful, and soon forgotten as it is and should be in the good, kind minds of niggers and of idiots, and yet it filled the boy somehow with warmth and joy.
“Good day dar, Mistah Webbah. How’s Mistah Webbah today?”
The big dog swayed and panted like an engine, his great tongue lolling out; he came on with great head down and with the great black brisket and his shoulders working.
Something happened suddenly, filling that quiet street with instant menace, injecting terror in the calm pulse of the boy. Around the corner of the Potterham house across the street came Potterham’s bulldog. He saw the mastiff, paused; his forelegs widened stockily, his grim-jowled face seemed to sink right down between the shoulder blades, his lips bared back along his long-fanged tusks, and from his baleful red-shot eyes fierce lightning shone. A low snarl rattled in the folds of his thick throat, the mastiff swung his ponderous head back and growled, the bull came on, halted, leaning forward on his widened legs, filled with hell-fire, solid with fight.
And Carlton Leathergood’s pock-marked yellow negro man winked at the boy and shook his head with cheerful confidence, saying:
“He ain’t goin’ to mix up wid my dawg, Mistah Webbah! ... No, sah! ... He knows bettah dan dat! ... Yes, sah!” cried Leathergood’s nigger with unbounded confidence. “He knows too well fo’ dat!”
The pock-marked nigger was mistaken! Something happened like a flash: there was a sudden snarl, a black thunderbolt shot through the air, the shine of murderous fanged teeth. Before the mastiff knew what had happened to him, the little bull was in and had his fierce teeth buried, sunk, gripped with the lock of death, in the great throat of the larger dog.
What happened after that was hard to follow. For a moment the great dog stood stock-still with an eloquence of stunned surprise and bewildered consternation that was more than human; then a savage roar burst out upon the quiet air, filling the street with its gigantic anger. The mastiff swung his great head savagely, the little bull went flying through the air but hung on with embedded teeth; great drops of the bright arterial blood went flying everywhere across the pavement, and still the bull held on. The end came like a lightning stroke. The great head flashed over through the air and down: the bull, no longer dog now—just a wad of black—smacked to the pavement with a sickening crunch.
From Potterham’s house a screen door slammed, and fourteen-year-old Augustus Potterham, with his wild red hair aflame, came out upon the run. Up the street, paunch-bellied, stiff-legged, and slouchy-uniformed, bound for town and three o’clock, Mr. Matthews, the policeman, pounded heavily. But Leathergood’s nigger was already there, tugging furiously at the leather collar around the mastiff’s neck, and uttering imprecations.
But it was all too late. The little dog was dead the moment that he struck the pavement—back broken, most of his bones broken, too; in Mr. Matthews’ words, “He never knowed what hit him.” And the big dog came away quietly enough, now that the thing was done: beneath the negro’s wrenching tug upon his neck, he swung back slowly, panting, throat dripping blood in a slow rain, bedewing the street beneath him with the bright red flakes.
Suddenly, like a miracle, the quiet street was full of people. They came from all directions, from everywhere: they pressed around in an excited circle, all trying to talk at once, each with his own story, everyone debating, explaining, giving his own version. In Potterham’s house, the screen door slammed again, and Mr. Potterham came running out at his funny little bandy-legged stride, his little red apple-cheeks aglow with anger, indignation, and excitement, his funny, chirping little voice heard plainly over all the softer, deeper, heavier, more Southern tones. No longer the great gentleman now, no longer the noble descendant of the Dukes of Potterham, no longer the blood-cousin of belted lords and earls, the possible claimant of enormous titles and estates in Gloucestershire when the present reigning head should die—but Cockney Potterham now, little Potterham minus all his aitches, little Potterham the dealer in nigger real estate and the owner of the nigger shacks, indomitable little Potterham forgetting all his grammar in the heat and anger of the moment:
“ ’Ere now! Wot did I tell you? I always said ’is bloody dog would make trouble! ’Ere! Look at ’im now! The girt bleedin’, blinkin’ thing! Big as a helefant, ’e is! Wot chance ’ud a dog like mine ’ave against a brute like that! ’E ought to be put out of the way—that’s wot! You mark my words—you let that brute run loose, an’ there won’t be a dog left in town—that’s wot!”
And Leathergood’s big pock-marked nigger, still clutching to the mastiff’s collar as he talks, and pleading with the policeman almost tearfully:
“Fo’ de Lawd, Mistah Matthews, my dawg didn’t do nuffin! No, sah! He don’t bothah nobody—my dawg don’t! He wa’nt even noticin’ dat othah dawg—you ask anybody!—ask Mistah Webbah heah!”—suddenly appealing to the boy with pleading entreaty—“Ain’t dat right, Mistah Webbah? You saw de whole thing yo’se’f, didn’t you? You tell Mistah Matthews how it was! Me an’ my dawg was comin’ up de street, a-tendin’ to ouah business, I jus’ tu’ned my haid to say good-day to Mistah Webbah heah, when heah comes dis othah dawg aroun’ de house, jus’ a-puffin’ an’ a-snawtin’, an’ befo’ I could say Jack Robinson he jumps all ovah my dawg an’ grabs him by de throat—you ask Mistah Webbah if dat ain’t de way it happened.”
And so it goes, everyone debating, arguing, agreeing, and denying, giving his own version and his own opinion; and Mr. Matthews asking questions and writing things down in a book; and poor Augustus Potterham blubbering like a baby, holding his dead little bulldog in his arms, his homely, freckled face contorted piteously, and dropping scalding tears upon his little dead dog; and the big mastiff panting, dripping blood upon the ground and looking curious, detached from the whole thing, and a little bored; and presently the excitement subsiding, people going away; Mr. Matthews telling the negro to appear in court; Augustus Potterham going away into the house blubbering, with the little bulldog in his arms; Mr. Potterham behind him, still chirping loudly and excitedly; and the dejected, pock-marked nigger and his tremendous dog going away up the street, the big dog dropping big blood-flakes on the pavement as he goes. And finally, silence as before, the quiet street again, the rustling of young maple leaves in the light wind, the brooding imminence of three o’clock, a few bright blood-flakes on the pavement, and all else the way that it had always been, and George Webber as before stretched out upon the grass beneath the tree there in his uncle’s yard, chin cupped in hands, adrift on time’s great dream, and thinking:
“Great God, this is the way things are, I see and know this is the way things are, I understand this is the way things are: and, Great God! Great God! this being just the way things are, how strange, and plain, and savage, sweet and cruel, lovely, terrible, and mysterious, and how unmistakable and familiar all things are!”
Three o’clock!
“Child, child!—Where are you, child?”
So did he always know Aunt Maw was there!
“Son, son!—Where are you son?”
Too far for finding and too near to seek!
“Boy, boy!—Where is that boy?”
Where you, at any rate, or any other of the apron-skirted kind, can never come.
“You can’t take your eye off him a minute....”
Keep eye on, then; it will do no good.
“The moment that your back is turned, he’s up and gone....”
And out and off and far away from you—no matter if your back is turned or not!
“I can never find him when I need him....”
Need me no needs, sweet dame; when I need you, you shall be so informed!
“But he can eat, all right.... He’s Johnny-on-the-spot when it is time to eat....”
And, pray, what is there so remarkable in that? Of course he eats