The Web and the Rock - Thomas Wolfe Read online

  We're all tellin' the truth--and I can prove it.'--Why yes, didn't it turn out then that the preacher and all the folks at church had seen him and were willin' to testify that he was there?--'Now I don't know what it is you saw,' said father, 'but whatever it was, it wasn't Rance.

  At least, it wasn't the Rance you see here, for he's been with us every moment.' And then Bill looked at him and saw that he was tellin' him the truth, and they say Bill Joyner's face was a study.

  "'Well,' he said, 'this is a strange thing! God only knows what will come out of it! Rance has been Seen!"'

  She paused; then turned to look straight and silent at George. In a moment she shook her head slightly, with boding premonition.

  "And let me tell you something," she whispered. "'That wasn't the only time, either!"

  There were, in fact, from this time on, an increasing number of such apparitions. The news of the first one had spread like wildfire through the whole community: the uncanny story of the boy's discovery in the wool-box when his corporeal body was two miles distant at the church became instantly common property, and inflamed the wonder and imagination of all who heard it.

  And, as seems to be almost the invariable practice in these cases, the public did not question at all the evidence which was dubious; they questioned only that which was indubitable, and, finding it to be con firmed beyond the shadow of a doubt, swallowed the whole, hook, line, and sinker! They took it instantly for granted that Bill Joyner had seen the boy, or "at least, seen something, now--that's one thing sure."

  But was Rance really present at the church that day? Had he been with the other members of his family from first to last? Had there been any opportunity for him to "slip away" and leave them without their knowing it? To all this there was only one answer--testified to by a hundred people. He had been present at the church from first to last; he had been seen, greeted, and remembered by minister, sexton, deacons, choir, and congregation, not only before, but also after services.

  Therefore, the fact was now established in their minds with an unshakable conviction. There was no longer any possible doubt about it-

  Rance had been Seen.

  Then, about eight months after this, when the story of this ghostly apparition was still fresh in people's minds, and made matter for awed conversation when they gathered, another extraordinary incident occurred!

  One evening, towards the end of a harsh and ragged day in March, a neighbor of the Joyner's was driving hard into the backwoods village of Blankenship, which stood about two miles distant from his home.

  Night was coming on fast; it was just the few minutes of brief, fading grey that end a Winter's day, and the man, whose name was Roberts, was driving along the hard, clay-rutted road as fast as the rickety rig in which he sat, and the old grey horse he drove, could carry him. His wife had been seized suddenly by a cramp or colic, or so they called it, and now lay at home in bed in mortal pain until Roberts should reach town and fetch help back to her.

  Just outside of town as the troubled man was urging on his nag to greater speed, he encountered Rance Joyner. The boy was trudging steadily along the road in the grey light, coming from town and going towards home, and, according to the story Roberts told, Rance was carrying a heavy sack of meal which he had plumped over his right shoulder and supported with his hand. As the man in the buggy passed him, the boy half turned, paused, looked up at him, and spoke. In this circumstance there was nothing unusual. Roberts had passed the boy a hundred times coming or going to the town on some errand.

  On this occasion, Roberts said he returned the boy's greeting some what absently and curtly, weighted down as his spirit was with haste and apprehension, and drove on without stopping. But before he had gone a dozen yards the man recalled himself and pulled up quickly, intending to shout back to the boy the reason for his haste, and to ask him to stop at his house on the way home, do what he could to aid the stricken woman, and wait there till the man returned with help. Accordingly, Roberts pulled up, turned in his seat, and began to shout his message down the road. To his stupefaction, the road was absolutely bare. Within a dozen yards the boy had vanished from his sight, "as if," said Roberts, "the earth had opened up and swallered him."

  But even as the man sat staring, gape-mouthed with astonishment, the explanation occurred to him: "Thar were some trees that down the road a little piece, a-settin' at the side of the road, and I jest figgered," he said delicately, "that Rance had stepped in behind one of 'em for a moment, so I didn't stop no more. Hit was gettin' dark an' I was in a hurry, so I jest drove on as hard as I could."

  Roberts drove in to town, got the woman's sister whom he had come to fetch, and then returned with her as hard as he could go. But even as he reached home and drove up the rutted lane, a premonition of calamity touched him. The house was absolutely dark and silent: there was neither smoke nor sound nor any light whatever, and, filled with a boding apprehension, he entered. He called his wife's name in the dark house, but no one answered him. Then, he raised the smoky lantern which he carried, walked to the bed where his wife lay, and looked at her, seeing instantly that she was dead.

  That night the people from the neighborhood swarmed into the house. The women washed the dead woman's body, dressed her, "laid her out," and the men sat round the fire, whittled with knives, and told a thousand drawling stories of the strangeness of death and destiny. As Roberts was recounting for the hundredth time all of the circumstances of the death, he turned to Lafayette Joyner, who had come straightway when he heard the news, with his wife and several of his brothers: "... and I was jest goin' to tell Rance to stop and wait here till I got back, but I reckon it was just as well I didn't--she would have been dead a-fore he got here, and I reckon it might have frightened him to find her."

  Fate Joyner looked at him slowly with a puzzled face.

  "Rance?" he said.

  "Why, yes," said Roberts, "I passed him comin' home just as I got to town--and I reckon if I hadn't been in such a hurry I'd a-told him to stop off and wait till I got back."

  The Joyners had suddenly stopped their whittling. They looked upward from their places round the fire with their faces fixed on Roberts' face in a single, silent, feeding, fascinated stare, and he paused suddenly, and all the other neighbors paused, feeling the dark, pre monitory boding of some new phantasmal marvel in their look.

  "You say you passed Rance as you were goin' in to town?" Fate Joyner asked.

  "Why, yes," said Roberts, and described again all of the circumstances of the meeting.

  And, still looking at him, Fate Joyner slowly shook his head.

  "No," said he, "you never saw Rance. It wasn't Rance that you saw."

  The man's flesh turned cold.

  "What do you mean?" he said.

  "Rance wasn't there," said Fate Joyner. "He went to visit Rufus Alexander's people a week ago, and he's fifty miles away from here right now. That's where he is tonight," said Fate quietly.

  Roberts' face had turned grey in the firelight. For several moments he said nothing. Then he muttered: "Yes. Yes, I see it now. By God, that's it, all right."

  Then he told them how the boy had seemed to vanish right before his eyes a moment after he had passed him--"as if--as if," he said, "the earth had opened up to swaller him."

  "And that was it?" he whispered.

  "Yes," Fate Joyner answered quietly, "that was it."

  He paused, and for a moment all the feeding, horror-hungry eyes turned with slow fascination to the figure of the dead woman on the bed, who lay, hands folded, in composed and rigid posture, the fire flames casting the long flicker of their light upon her cold, dead face.

  "Yes, that was it," Fate Joyner said. "She was dead then, at that moment--but you--you didn't know it," he added, and quietly there was feeding a deep triumph in his voice.

  Thus, this good-hearted and simple-minded boy became, without his having willed or comprehended it, a supernatural portent of man's fate and destiny. Rance Joyner, or rather, his
spiritual substance, was seen by dusk and darkness on deserted roads, was observed crossing fields and coming out of woods, was seen to toil up a hill along a narrow path at evening--and then to vanish suddenly. Often, these apparitions had no discernible relation to any human happening; more often, they were precedent, coincident, or subsequent to some fatal circumstance. And this ghostly power was not limited to the period of his boyhood. It continued, with increasing force and frequency, into the years of his manhood and maturity.

  Thus, one evening early in the month of April, 1862, the wife of Lafayette Joyner, coming to the door of her house--which was built on the summit of a hill, or ledge, above a little river--suddenly espied Rance toiling up the steep path that led up to the house. In his soiled and ragged uniform, he looked footsore, unkempt, dusty, and unutterably weary--"as if," she said, "he had come a long, long ways"- as indeed, he must have done, since at that moment he was a private soldier in one of Jackson's regiments in Virginia.

  But Lafayette Joyner's wife could see him plainly as he paused for a moment to push open a long gate that gave upon the road below her, halfway down the hill. She turned, she said, in her excitement for a moment, to shout the news of his approach to others in the house, and in that instant he had vanished from her sight. When she looked again, no one was there; the scene was fading into night and stillness, and the woman wrung her hands in her despair, saying: "Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord! What's to become of us? What's happened now?"

  Such was her story. And, as always, it confirmed a fatal event. On that day in April, more than two hundred miles to the westward, the bloody battle of Shiloh had been fought in Tennessee, and at that moment, although the news did not get back to them for several weeks, one of the brothers, John, was lying on the field, his shattered face turned upward, dead.

  Such, then, were some of the stories Aunt Maw told to George.

  And always, when she spoke so in the night, as the coal-fire flared and crumbled in the grate, and the huge demented winds of darkness howled around them and the terror of strong silence fed forever at his heart--he could hear the thousand death-devouring voices of the Joy ners speaking triumphantly from the darkness of a hundred years, the lost and lonely sorrow of the hills, and somehow smell incredibly- always and forever!--the soft, fragrant ash of the pine blaze, the pungent sharpness of the whittled wood, the winy warmth and fullness of mellow apples. And horribly, somehow, to these odors were always added the death-evoking smells of turpentine and camphor- which were a lost memory of infancy, when his mother had taken him, a child of two, to such a room--warmth, apples, Joyner room, and all- to see his grandfather the night before he died.

  Upon a thousand lost and lonely roads in the ever-lost and ever lonely hills he heard the unctuous, drawling voices of the Joyners. He saw them toiling up a wooded hill in sad, hushed, evening light to vanish like a wraith into thin air; and the terrible prophecies of old wars and battles, and of all the men who had that day been buried in the earth, were in that instant apparition and farewell! He saw them in a thousand little houses of the wilderness, in years more far and lonely than the years of Vercingetorix, coming in at darkness always to watch the night away beside the dead, to sit in semi-darkness in some neighbor's ill-starred house, to sit around the piny fire-flame's dance of death, and with triumphant lust to drawl and whittle night away while the pine logs flamed and crumbled to soft ash and their voices spoke forever their fated and invincible auguries of sorrow.

  What was it Aunt Maw thus evoked by the terrific weavings of her memory? In the boy's vision of that world, the Joyners were a race as lawless as the earth, as criminal as nature. They hurled their prodigal seed into the raw earth of a mountain woman's body, bringing to life a swarming progeny which lived or died, was extinguished in its in fancy or fought its way triumphantly to maturity against the savage enemies of poverty, ignorance, and squalor which menaced it at every step. They bloomed or perished as things live or die in nature--but the triumphant Joyners, superior to all loss or waste, lived forever as a river lives. Other tribes of men came up out of the earth, flourished for a space, and then, engulfed and falling, went back into the earth from which they came. Only the Joyners--these horror-hungry, time-devour ing Joyners--lived, and would not die.

  And he belonged to that fatal, mad, devouring world from whose prison there was no escape. He belonged to it, even as three hundred of his blood and bone had belonged to it, and must unweave it from his brain, distill it from his blood, unspin it from his entrails, and escape with demonic and exultant joy into his father's world, new lands and mornings and the shining city--or drown like a mad dog, die!

  From the first years of coherent memory, George had the sense of the overpowering immanence of the golden life. It seemed to him that he was always on the verge of finding it. In his childhood it was all around him, impending numbly, softly, filling him with an intolerable excultancy of wordless joy. It wrenched his heart with its wild pain of ecstasy and tore the sinews of his life asunder, but yet it filled his soul with the triumphant sense of instant release, impending discovery- as if a great wall in the air would suddenly be revealed and sundered, as if an enormous door would open slowly, awfully, with the tremendous majesty of an utter and invisible silence. He never found a word for it, but he had a thousand spells and prayers and images that would give it coherence, shape, and meanings that no words could do.

  He thought that he could twist his hand a certain way, or turn his wrist, or make a certain simple movement of rotation into space (as boys will learn the movement to unsolve a puzzle of linked chains, or as an expert in the mysteries of locks can feel the bearings faintly, softly, rolling through his finger tips, and know the instant that he finds the combination to unlock the safe)--and that by making this rotation with his hand, he would find the lost dimension of that secret world, and instantly step through the door that he had opened.

  And he had other chants and incantations that would make that world reveal itself to him. Thus, for a period of ten years or more, he had a spell for almost everything he did. He would hold his breath along a certain block, or take four breaths in pounding down the hill from school, or touch each cement block upon a wall as he went past, and touch each of the end-blocks where the steps went up two times, and if he failed to touch them twice, go back and touch the whole wall over from the start.

  And on Sunday he would always do the second thing: he would never do the first on Sunday. All through the day, from midnight Saturday until midnight Monday morning, he would always do the second thing he thought about and not the first. If he woke up on Sunday morning and swung over to the left side to get out of bed, he would swing back and get out on the right. If he started with the right sock, he would take it off and pull the left one on instead. And if he wanted first to use one tie, he would discard it and put on another.

  And so it went the whole day through on Sunday. In every act and moment of his life that day he would always do the second thing he thought about instead of the first. But then when midnight came again, he would, with the same fanatic superstition, do the first thing that he thought about; and if he failed in any detail of this ritual, he would be as gloomy, restless, and full of uneasy boding doubts as if all the devils of mischance were already out in force against him, and posting on their way to do him harm.

  These spells, chants, incantations, and compulsions grew, interwove, and constantly increased in the complexity and denseness of their web until at times they governed everything he did--not only the way he touched a wall, or held his breath while pounding down a hill from school, or measured out a block in punctual distances of breathing, or spanned the cement blocks of sidewalks in strides of four, but even in the way he went along a street, the side he took, the place he had to stop and look, the place he strode by sternly even when he wanted bitterly to stay and look, the trees out in his uncle's orchard that he climbed until he had to climb a certain tree four times a day and use four movements to get up the trunk.

 
And this tyrannic mystery of four would also get into the way he threw a ball, or chanted over Latin when preparing it, or muttered ????????? four times in the Subjunctive of the First Aorist, or ????? in the Indicative Active of the First. And it was also in the way he washed his neck and cars, or sat down at a table, split up kindling (using four strokes of the axe to make a stick), or brought up coal (using four scoops of the shovel to fill the scuttle).

  Then there were also days of stern compulsion when he could look at only a single feature of people's faces. On Monday he would look upon men's noses, on Tuesday he would stare into their teeth, on Wednesday he would peer into their eyes, save Thursday for their hands, and Friday for their feet, and sternly meditate the conformation of their brows on Saturday, saving Sunday always for the second feature that occurred to him--eyes when feet were thought of, teeth for eyes, and foreheads when his fine first rapture had been noses. And he would go about this duty of observing with such a stern, fanatical devotion, peering savagely at people's teeth or hands or brows, that sometimes they looked at him uneasily, resentfully, wondering what he saw amiss in their appearance, or shaking their heads and mutter ing angrily as they passed each other by.

  At night, he said his prayers in rhymes of four--for four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two were somehow the key numbers in his arithmetic of sorcery. He would say his one set prayer in chants of four times four, until all the words and meanings of the prayer (which he had composed himself with four times four in mind) were lost, and all that he would follow would be the rhythm and the number of the chant, muttered so rapidly that the prayer was just a rapid blur- but muttered always sixteen times. And if he failed to do this, or doubted he had got the proper count, then he could not sleep or rest after he got into bed, and would get up instantly and go down upon his knees again, no matter how cold or raw the weather was, no matter how he felt, and would not pause until he did the full count to his satisfaction, with another sixteen thrown in as penalty. It was not piety he felt, it was not thought of God or reverence or religion: it was just superstitious mystery, a belief in the wizard-charm of certain numbers, and the conviction that he had to do it in this way in order to have luck.