The Web and the Root Read online

  “L-l-let! Fault! How do you mean, Bras?”

  “Why,” Nebraska said patiently, but with just a shade of resignation, “I mean it won’t happen to you if you’re careful.”

  “C-c-careful? How do you mean careful, Bras?”

  “Why, Monk,” Nebraska now spoke with a gruff, though kind, impatience, “I mean if you’re careful not to let yourself be killed! Look at my old man, now!” he proceeded with triumphant logic—“Here he’s been killin’ people in one way or ’nother goin’ on to thirty years now—leastways way before both you an’ me was born! An he’s never been killed his-self one time!” he triumphantly concluded. “And why? Why, Monk, because my old man always took good care to kill the other feller before the other feller could kill him. As long as you do that, you’ll be all right.”

  “Y-y-yes, Bras. But if you g-g-get yourself in trouble?”

  “Trouble?” said Nebraska, staring blankly. “Why what trouble is there to get into? If you kill the other feller before he kills you, he’s the one who gets in trouble. You’re all right; I thought anyone could see that much!”

  “Y-y-yes, Bras. I do see that. But I was thinking about getting arrested…and being locked up…and having to go to jail—that kind of trouble.”

  “Oh, that kind of trouble!” Nebraska said a little blankly, and considered the question for a moment. “Well, Monk, if you get arrested, you get arrested—and that’s all there is to that! Why, pshaw, boy—anyone can get arrested; that’s likely to happen to anybody. My old man’s been arrestin’ people all his life. I reckon he wouldn’t have any notion how many people he’s arrested and locked up!…Why yes, and he’s even been arrested and locked up a few times himself, but he never let that bother him a bit.”

  “F-f-for what, Bras? What did he get arrested for?”

  “Oh—for killin’ people, an’ doin’ things like that! You know how it is, Monk. Sometimes the relatives or neighbors, or the wives and children of people that he killed would raise a rumpus—say he didn’t have no right to kill ’em—some such stuff as that! But it always come out all right—it always does!” cried Nebraska earnestly. “And why? Why because, like the old man says, this is America, an’ we’re a free country—an’ if someone gets in your way an’ bothers you, you have to kill him—an’ that’s all there is to it!…If you have to go to court an’ stand trial, you go to court an’ stand trial. Of course, it’s a lot of trouble an’ takes up your time—but then the jury lets you off, an’ that’s all there is to it!…I know my old man always says that this is the only country in the world where the poor man has a chance! In Europe he wouldn’t have the chance a snowball has in hell! And why? Why because, as my old man says, in Europe the laws are all made for the rich, a poor man never can get justice there—what justice there is is all for the kings an’ dukes an’ lords an’ ladies, an’ such people as that. But a poor man—why, Monk,” Nebraska said impressively, “if a poor man in Europe went an’ killed a man, almost anything might happen to him—that’s just how rotten an’ corrupt the whole thing is over there. You ask my old man about it sometime! He’ll tell you!…But, pshaw, boy!” he now continued, with a resumption of his former friendly and good-humored casualness, “you got nothing in the world to worry about! If any of that West Side gang comes back an’ tries to bother you, you let me know, and I’ll take care of ’em! If we’ve got to kill someone, we’ll have to kill someone—but you oughtn’t even to let it worry you!…And now, so long, Monk! You let me know if anything turns up and I’ll take care of it!”

  “Th-thanks, Bras! I sure appreciate…”

  “Pshaw, boy! Forget about it! We got to stick together on our side of town. We’re neighbors! You’d do the same for me, I knew that!”

  “Yes, I would, Bras. Well, good-bye.”

  “Good-bye, Monk. I’ll be seein’ you ’fore long.”

  And quiet, steady, unperturbed, moving along at even steps, his calm, brave face and Indian eyes fixed forward, his baseball bat held firmly on his shoulder, the Cherokee boy moved off, turned right into his alley, and was lost from sight.

  NEBRASKA CRANE WAS the best boy in the town, but Sid Purtle was poor white trash and a mountain grill. If Sid Purtle had been any good, his people never would have named him Sid. George Webber’s uncle had said that they were nothing but mountain grills no matter if they did live out upon Montgomery Avenue on the West Side of town; that’s all that they had been to start with, that’s what he called them, and that’s what they were, all right. Sid! That was a fine name, now! A rotten, dirty, sneering, treacherous, snot-nosed, blear-eyed, bitch of a name! Other rotten sneering names were Guy, Clarence, Roy, Harry, Victor, Carl and Floyd.

  Boys who had these names were never any good—a thin-lipped, sneer-mouthed, freckled, blear-eyed set of hair-faced louts, who had unpleasant knuckly hands, and a dry, evil, juiceless kind of skin. There was always something jeering, ugly, unwholesome, smug, complacent, and triumphant about these people. Without knowing why, he always wanted to smash them in the face, and not only hated everything about them, but he hated the “very ground they walked on,” the houses they lived in, the streets on which they lived, the part of town they came from, together with their fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, cousins, aunts, and close companions.

  He felt that they were not only foully different from the people that he liked in all the qualities that made for warmth, joy, happiness, affection, friendship, and the green-gold magic of enchanted weather—he felt there was also in them a physical difference, so foul and hateful that they might be creatures of another species. In blood, bone, brains, white-haired, juiceless-looking flesh, in sinew, joint, and tissue, in the very spittle of their mouths—which would be a vilely ropy, glutinously murky stuff of the very quality of their blear eyes and their sneering lips—as well as in all the delicate combining nerves, veins, jellies, cements, and fibrous webs that go to knit that marvelous tenement, that whole integument of life that is a human body, these people whose very names he hated would be found to be made of a vile, base, incalculably evil stuff. It was a substance that was as different from the glorious stuff of which the people that he liked were made as a foul excrement of fecal matter from the health and relish of sound, wholesome, life-begetting food. It was a substance not only of the mind and spirit but of the very texture of the body, so that it seemed they had been begot from acid and envenomed loins, and nurtured all their lives on nameless and abominable rations. He could not have eaten of the food their mothers cooked for them without choking and retching at each mouthful, feeling that he was swallowing some filth or foulness with every bite he took.

  And yet, they seemed to score an evil and unfathomable triumph everywhere he met them. It was a triumph of death over life; of sneering mockery and ridicule over gaiety, warmth, and friendly ease; of wretchedness, pain, and misery over all the powerful music of joy; of the bad, sterile, and envenomed life over the good life of hope, happiness, and the glorious belief and certitude of love.

  They were the dwellers in accursed streets, the very bricks of which you hated so you had to fight your way along each grim step of the hated pavement. They were the walkers underneath accursed skies, who evilly rejoiced in the broad, wet, wintry lights of waning March, and in all the cruel, houseless, hopeless, viscous, soul-engulfing lights and weathers of misery, weariness, and desolation.

  They were the people that you never met in all the green-gold magic of enchanted weather. They were the accursed race who never came to you in places where strong joy was—in sorceries of gladed green by broken, rock-cold waters starred by the poignant and intolerable enchantments of the dandelions. No! They were the bathers in the humid, shadeless waters where the soul sank down. They came to no encircled pools of greenery; the brave shout was not in them, and they sang no songs.

  In a thousand barren and desolate places, a thousand lights and weathers of the soul’s grey horror, in the brutal, weary heat of August in raw concrete places, or across rude path
s of gluey clay beneath the desolate wintry reds of waning Sunday afternoons in March, they moved forever with the triumphant immunity of their evil lives. They breathed without weariness, agony, or despair of soul an accursed air from which your own life recoiled with a shuddering revulsion; they sneered at you forever while you drowned.

  They were the vultures of the world, who swoop forever over stricken fields, and, with an evil and unfailing prescience of woe, they always come upon you at your life’s worst hour. If your bowels were wretched, queasy, sick, and diarrheic; if your limbs were feverish, feeble, watery, and sick; your skin, dry, loose, and itchy; your stomach retching with disgusting nausea, your eyes running, your nose leaking snottily, and your guts stuffed full of the thick, grey, viscous misery of a cold—then, certain as death and daylight they would be there, gloating on your wretchedness with the evil and triumphant superiority of their sneering faces.

  Similarly, if the grey and humid skies of desolation pressed down upon your spirit; if the broad, wet lights of shame were eating nakedly into your unhoused, unwalled, unprotected flesh; if the nameless and intolerable fear—huge, soft, grey, and shapeless—was pressing at you from the immense and planetary vacancy of timeless skies; if grey horror drowned you, and every sinew, power, exultant strength and soaring music of your life, together with the powerful, delicate, and uncountable fabric of the nerves lay snarled, palsied, and unedged, leaving you stricken, wrecked, impotent, and shuddering in the hideous shipwreck of your energies: then they, they—Sid, Carl, Guy, Harry, Floyd, Clarence, Victor, Roy, that damned, vile, sneering horde of evil-loving, pain-devouring, life-destroying names—would be there certain as a curse, to dip their dripping beaks into your heart, to feed triumphant on your sorrow while you strangled like a mad dog in your wretchedness, and died!

  And oh! to die so, drown so, choke and strangle, bleed so wretchedly to death—and die! die! die! in horror and in misery, untended and unfriended by these ghouls of death! Oh, death could be triumphant—death in battle, death in love, death in friendship and in peril, could be glorious if it were proud death, gaunt death, lean, lonely, tender, loving, and heroic death, who bent to touch his chosen son with mercy, love, and pity, and put the seal of honor on him when he died!

  Yes, death could be triumphant! Death could come sublimely if it came when the great people of the living names were with you. Heroic fellowship of friendship, joy, and love, their names were John, George, William, Oliver, and Jack; their names were Henry, Richard, Thomas, James, and Hugh; their names were Edward, Joseph, Andrew, Emerson, and Mark! Their names were George Josiah Webber and Nebraska Crane!

  The proud, plain music of their names itself was anthem for their glorious lives, and spoke triumphantly to him of the warmth, the joy, the certitude and faith of that heroic brotherhood. It spoke to him of great deeds done and mighty works accomplished, of glorious death in battle, and a triumph over death himself if only they were there to see him greet him when he came. Then might he say to them, with an exultant cry: “Oh brothers, friends, and comrades, dear rivals with me in the fellowship of glorious deeds, how dearly I have loved my life with you! How I have been your friendly rival and your equal in all things! How proudly and sublimely have I lived!—Now see how proudly and sublimely I can die!”

  To die so, in this fellowship of life, would be glory, joy, and triumphant death for any man! But to die wretchedly and miserably, unfed, famished, unassuaged; to die with queasy guts and running bowels, a dry skin, feeble limbs, a nauseous and constricted heart; to die with rheumy eyes, and reddened, running nostrils; to die defeated, hopeless, unfulfilled, your talents wasted, your powers misused, unstruck, palsied, come to naught—the thought of it was not to be endured, and he swore that death itself would die before he came to it.

  To die there like a dull, defeated slave in that ghoulish death-triumphant audience of Sid, Roy, Harry, Victor, Carl, and Guy!—to die defeated with those sneering visages of scorn-maker’s pride upon you, yielding to that obscene company of death-in-life its foul, final victory—oh, it was intolerable, intolerable! Horror and hatred gripped him when he thought of it, and he swore that he would make his life prevail, beat them with the weapons of certitude, nail their grisly hides upon the wall with the shining and incontrovertible nails of joy and magic, make their sneering mouths eat crow, and put the victorious foot of life upon the proud, bowed neck of scorn and misery forever.

  NEBRASKA CRANE WAS a fellow that he liked. That was a queer name, sure enough, but there was also something good about it. It was a square, thick, muscular, brawny, browned and freckled, wholesome kind of name, plain as an old shoe and afraid of nothing, and yet it had some strangeness in it, too. And that was the kind of boy Nebraska Crane was.

  Nebraska’s father had been a policeman, was now a captain on the force; he came from back in Zebulon County; he had some Cherokee in him. Mr. Crane knew everything; there was nothing that he could not do. If the sun came out the fourteenth day of March, he could tell you what it meant, and whether the sun would shine in April. If it rained or snowed or hailed or stormed three weeks before Easter, he could prophesy the weather Easter Sunday. He could look at the sky and tell you what was coming; if an early frost was on its way to kill the peach trees, he could tell you it was on its way and when it would arrive; there was no storm, no sudden shift in weather that he could not “feel in his bones” before it came. He had a thousand signs and symptoms of foretelling things like these—the look of the moon or the look of a cloud, the feel of the air or the direction of the wind, the appearance of the earliest bird, the half-appearance of the first blade of grass. He could feel storm coming, and could smell the thunder. It all amounted to a kind of great sixth sense out of nature, an almost supernatural intuition. In addition to—or as a consequence of—all these things, Mr. Crane raised the finest vegetables of anyone in town—the largest, perfectest tomatoes, the biggest potatoes, the finest peas and greens and onions, the most luscious strawberries, the most beautiful flowers.

  He was, as may be seen, a figure of some importance in the community, not only as a captain of police, but as a sort of local prophet. The newspaper was constantly interviewing him about all kinds of things—changes in weather, prospects for a cold Winter, a hot Summer, or a killing frost, a state of drought, or an excess of rain. He always had an answer ready, and he rarely failed.

  Finally—and this, of course, made his person memorably heroic to the boys—he had at one time in his life been a professional wrestler (a good one too; at one time, it was said, “the champion of the South”), and although he was now approaching fifty, he occasionally consented to appear in local contests, and give an exhibition of his prowess. There had been one thrilling Winter, just a year or two before, when Mr. Crane, during the course of a season, had met a whole series of sinister antagonists—Masked Marvels, Hidden Menaces, Terrible Turks, Mighty Swedes, Demon Dummies, and all the rest of them.

  George Webber remembered all of them; Nebraska had always taken him on passes which his father gave him. The thought of the very approach of these evenings was enough to put the younger boy into a fever of anticipation, a frenzy of apprehension, an agonized unrest. He could not understand how Mr. Crane or Nebraska could face one of these occasions, with all of its terrible moments of conflict, victory or defeat, injury or mutilation, broken bones or fractured ligaments, with no more perturbation than they would show when sitting down to eat their evening meal.

  And yet it was true! These people—son and father both—seemed to have come straight from the heart of immutable and unperturbed nature. Warmth they had, staunch friendliness, and the capacity for savage passion, ruthless murder. But they had no more terror than a mountain. Nerve they had, steel nerve; but as for the cold anguish of the aching and constricted pulse, the dry, hard ache and tightness of the throat, the hollow numbness of the stomach pit, the dizzy lightness of the head, the feeling of an unreal buoyancy before the moment of attack—they seemed to know no more about these t
hings than if they had been made of oak!

  Time after time on days when Mr. Crane was due to wrestle at the City Auditorium, the boy had watched him pass the house. Time after time he had searched the policeman’s square-cut face for signs of anguish or tension to see if the strange, hard features showed any sign of strain, if the square, hard jaw was grimly clenched, the hard eyes worried, if there were any signs of fear, disorder, apprehension in his step, his look, his tone, his movement, or his greeting. There was none. The policeman never varied by a jot. A powerful, somewhat shambling figure of a man, a little under six feet tall, with a thick neck, coarsely seamed and weathered with deep scorings, long arms, big hands, gorillalike shoulders, and a kind of shambling walk, a little baggy at the knees—a figure of an immense but rather worn power—he passed by in his somewhat slouchy uniform, seamed down the trouser-legs with stripes of gold, turned in at his house and mounted the front porch steps, with no more excitement than he would show on any other day of the week. And yet the male population of the whole town would be buzzing with excited speculation on the outcome of the match, and the hearts of boys would thud with apprehensive expectation at the very thought of it.

  Later on, when dark had come, a half hour or so before the time scheduled for the match, Mr. Crane would leave his house, bearing underneath his arm a bundle wrapped up in a newspaper, which contained his old wrestling trunks and shoes; and with the same deliberate, even, bag-kneed stride, turn his steps in the direction of the town and the City Auditorium—and, Great God! his approaching and now terribly imminent encounter with the Bone-Crushing Swede, the Masked Marvel, or the Strangler Turk!

  A few minutes later Nebraska would come by Monk’s house and whistle piercingly; the Webber boy would rush out of the house and down the steps still gulping scalding coffee down his aching throat—and then the two of them would be off on their way to town!