Set This House on Fire (3 page)

I paid attention, turning my eyes from the bay. There was something restorative, clean—during an era of surfeit and silence —in hearing this renegade old man at the top of his wrath.

“No, I just won’t talk to them any more,” he said conclusively. “Nossir, they’ve heard the last word from Alfred Leverett, and they can go to hell in a Cadillac for all I care. I’m through with them all!” He grew red as a lobster, and he belched thunderously, and I feared for his heart.

For a while we drove in silence. Billowing white storm clouds loomed up on the far horizon, high up over the Eastern Shore, and a spindrift gray beard of rain swirled beneath them, unloosed in smoky tatters upon the sea. A white sail tilted far out, almost flattened upon the water, came erect slowly and gracefully as the cat’s paw passed, corrugating the blue. And now the car, a 1948 Hudson Hornet tottering toward senescence, had begun to set up a threatful cricketing noise somewhere deep within its vitals (I had noticed it faintly the day before), but my father, brooding still like some Jeremiah reduced to the very ash of impotence and gloom, squinted into the setting sun and paid no heed to the racket. He was a vestryman of the church. His shoulders were stooped. He wore bifocals and his nose was skinny and beaked. I saw his lips struggle and form a soundless syllable. Then just a fledgling, tentative whisper it became:
scum.

“Sometimes I think this is just a nation of children,” he said, “of childish little minds. Now that Supreme Court didn’t have no more right to do what it did than I would have in telling an A-rab or a Chinaman how to run his life. It was a dumb poor thing they did, the way they did it anyway. And everyone’s going to suffer and suffer because of it. But these people down here—they don’t realize that the nigro has
got
to get his just payment, for all those years of bondage. Look out there, son.” He waved toward the sparkling water. “That’s where they came in, in the year 1619. Right out there. It was one of the saddest days in the history of man, and I mean black
or
white. We’re still paying for that day, and we’ll be paying for it from here right on out. And there’ll be blood shed, and tears.” He mopped his brow. I turned my eyes eastward. A cloud passed across the day, then all was clear again; and for an instant I thought I could see those Dutch galleons, with their black bound cargo, lumbering up toward the muddy James.

“Watch out!” I cried. He had come close to running us into a ditch. Gusts of hot dust flooded through the car, and the bird calls beneath the hood became abruptly more chaotic and sick.

“What this country needs,” he went on, regaining command, “what this great land of ours needs is something to happen to it. Something ferocious and tragic, like what happened to Jericho or the cities of the plain—something terrible I mean, son, so that when the people have been through hellfire and the crucible, and have suffered agony enough and grief, they’ll be men again, human beings, not a bunch of smug contented hogs rooting at the trough. Ciphers without mind or soul or heart. Soap peddlers! No, I mean it, son, these are miserable times and I’ve seen all of them. We’ve sold our birthright, and old Tom Jefferson is spinning in his grave. We’ve sold out, right down to the garters, and you know what we’ve sold out for? A bunch of chromium junk from Detroit put together with chewing gum and spit!” Flushing and sweating, he jammed at the floor board with his foot. “Listen to the noisy junk, will you? Absolute unregenerate shameless piece of junk.” He stamped at the floor board again. “What do you imagine’s wrong with it?” he said in a querulous tone.

“Sounds like you might need new rings,” I said, mustering a fake
expertise.

“Nossir,” he said, “we’ve got to start from scratch again, build from the ground floor up. What has happened to this country would shame the Roman Empire at its lowest ebb. The founding fathers had noble dreams, you know, and for a while I guess they were almost fulfilled. Except maybe for the nigro, the common man found freedom in a way he never knew or dreamed of—freedom, and a full belly, and a right to pursue his own way of happiness. I guess it was the largest and noblest dream ever dreamed by man. But somewhere along the line something turned sour. Godalmighty!” he exclaimed, leaning forward, ear cocked. “Something turned sour. The common man he had his belly stuffed, but what was he? He wasn’t God’s noble creature no more, he was just plain common. He hadn’t grown in dignity or wisdom. All he had grown in was his gut and his pocketbook. He forswore his Creator, paying this kind of nasty mealy-mouthed lip service every Sunday to the true God while worshiping with all his heart nothing but the almighty dollar. He plundered a whole continent of its resources and wildlife and beauty. The wisdom of all the ages, all the precious teachings of his ancestors, they were lost upon him. He spat on his nigro brother and wore out his eyes looking at TV and fornicated with his best friend’s wife at the country club. He had all these here wonder drugs to prolong his life, and what happened? At the age of seventy he was an empty husk, saddled with a lot of ill-gotten lucre and a pile of guilt, terrified of death and laying down there on the sand at Miami Beach pitying himself. A
husk,
son! I know what I’m talking about! And do you know what? Come Judgment Day … come Judgment, the good Lord’s going to take one look at this empty husk, and He’s going to say, ‘How do
you
lay claim to salvation, My friend?’ Then He’s going to heave him out the back door and He’s going to holler after him: ‘That’s what you get, friend, for selling out to Mammon! That’s what you get for trading your soul for a sawbuck, and forswearing My love!’” His sad and sagging jowls were quivering with wrath, and tears of indignation swam at the corners of his eyes. I consoled him with a pat on the arm and cautioned him to take it easy; and then, at a filling station adjacent to a new housing development, I made him turn in, and we rattled to a stop with an aviary shrilling and chirping.

It was not the rings, it was the oil—the old man had let it run dry. And, “Can’t run no car without oil, Mr. Leverett,” said the garageman, with a knowing wink at me, as my father got out and as I eased back in the seat, stung with memory at these surroundings. My father’s words had left me jaded and depressed. I felt unaccountably weary and worn out—old before my time—and I had a sudden sharp pang of total estrangement, as if my identity had slipped away, leaving me without knowledge of who I was and where I had been and where I was ever going. The mood lingered, filling me with lassitude, weariness, discontent. Later than I had thought now, the hour had grown dusky and faded and the pale rind of a new moon floated high up over the bay, above Norfolk and the blinking lights of beacons and great ships moored in the outbound tide. I heard tugboat whistles and now, behind me, the dull rumble and fuss of the swollen town which once long ago, even at this hour of homeward-going, was all serenity and stillness. And as I sat there, watching my father chat with the garageman (“Cousins?” he was saying in that kindly old passionate voice. “You from Nansemond too? Why, that would make the two of us cousins indeed!”) it occurred to me in a sudden burst of recollection just where it was that we had come. Because here, long before these acres of salt marsh had been reclaimed, before the coming of the gypsum-white treeless boulevards and the ranch houses and the children-crowded green suburban lawns, right here, several fathoms beneath the foundations of this Esso Servicenter, I had once been up to my knees in the cool sand-gray salt water, hunting for crawfish, and right here at the age of twelve I had almost drowned.

On this very spot I had gone down, down in a cataclysm of bubbles trailing frantic handfuls of seaweed, and shot floundering to surface way out on the tidal creek, spouting water like a whale and strangling with sudden tumultuous love for my fleeting life, until a colored crab fisherman, poised in his boat like some black merciful and sweating Christ above the deep, hauled me in by the hair. I got a beating, and for days I leaked water from my ears; my father repaid the fisherman with a country ham and five silver dollars—which even to reward a savior in those depression years was more than he could afford—but though I was warned thereafter to stay away from the place I sneaked back here, alone, during the summer days. For now everything about the place—the creek and the scuttling crawfish, salt swamp and sunlight and flashing gulls, and the streetcar trestle astride the reeds and the chiming uproar of the trolley as it swayed through the marsh, rattled across the trestle and was gone in a shower of popping sparks, its electric singsong monotone receding as if into infinity or time itself and leaving all behind with a quality of noontime and seaside and an insectstrumming drowsy yellow solitude—all of these seemed to be informed by a sense of mysteriousness and brevity. Like that moment when a long-familiar scrap of music is suddenly heard as if with new ears, and crashes in upon you no longer a simple tune or melody but a pure and wordless overflowing of the heart, so this scene for me had more lights and darks than I had ever imagined, and titanic new dimensions, and I stole up upon it with trembling and fascination. Here there had been taken away from me that child’s notion that I would live forever; here I had learned the fragility not so much as of my own as of all being, and for that reason if it seemed a cruel scary place it also possessed a new and fathomable beauty. So, packing a secret lunch, I went back there day after day. Lying on my belly in the reeds I would poke the crawfish with a stick, and watch them scuttle away, and brood and dream in the hot sun. The streetcar would come with a metallic whir and jangling, and recede into the stillness of noon. The gulls would flash against the sky. In their boats the black fishermen, far out, would call for the wind in hymning voices and suddenly all would be still. And in that stillness, with the yellow new world spread out before my eyes, gorged upon mayonnaise and soda pop, I shivered with the knowledge of mortality.

Yet here on the identical spot, years later, I thought that nothing could be victim of such obliteration. My great-grandchildren’s cleverest archaeology will strive in vain to unlock that sun-swept marsh, that stream, those crawfish, that singing trolley car. Everything was gone. Not just altered or changed or modified, not just a place whose outlines may have shifted and blurred (new growth here, no growth there, a new-fledged willow, a deepened cove) but were still recognizable, dependable, fixed—my marsh had vanished, a puff into thin air, and nothing of it remained. How many tons of earth, sand, rock, rubble, rubbish, and plain old Port Warwick garbage had gone into this stupendous unmaking would be hard to say; the job had been thorough and complete. Beneath it all, one seascape, entombed forever. Around us now in eccentric loopings, upon terraced lawns row on row, a horde of diminutive houses called (why?) Glendora Manor squatted in the twilight. Tail-finned cars larger than the dwellings themselves cruised ponderously through the tiny streets, scattering cocker spaniels, and coming to rest alongside lawns where sprinklers whirled, and motorized lawnmowers towed their masters through the greenly churning dusk, and globes on pillars glittered like silver basketballs. The trees, so far, were small but they appeared to be trying. And here, I calculated, drop a plumb line straight down from the Esso Extra pump and you’d hit the spot where I sank beneath the foaming brine.

So much for my childhood. In times of stress and threat, I’ve heard it said, in times of terror and alarms, of silence and clinging, people tend to hold on to the past, even to imitate it: taking on old fashions and humming old songs, seeking out historic scenes and reliving old ancestral wars, in an effort to forget both the lackluster present and a future too weird and horrible to ponder. Perhaps one of the reasons we Americans are so exceptionally nervous and driven is that our past is effaced almost before it is made present; in our search for old avatars to contemplate we find only ghosts, whispers, shadows: almost nothing remains for us to feel or see, or to absorb our longing. That evening I was touched
to
the heart: by my father’s old sweetness and decency and rage, but also by whatever it was within me—within life itself, it seemed so intense—that I knew to be irretrievably lost. Estranged from myself and from my time, dwelling neither in the destroyed past nor in the fantastic and incomprehensible present, I knew that I must find the answer to at least several things before taking hold of myself and getting on with the job. “You mean Miss Minnie Morehouse, from Whaleyville?” my father was saying, in that slurred Tidewater accent which I too had had once, and lost. “Why, of
co’se
I was. I was there indeed. And put flowers on her grave!”

For a moment I believe I must have shut my eyes, then opened them again, thinking that somehow by such a ritual I might come miraculously to, amid the reeds once more, surveying the place where life had left me dumb-struck, shorn of illusions and innocence. But here in the changing present all was shadow: I saw nothing, heard nothing, except in my own mind again, where gulls flashed overhead and that trolley car swayed, chiming, as if through the light of centuries, and like a phantom. …

That evening I sent a wire to Cass Kinsolving in Charleston, telling him I would be coming down the next day. I had rarely done so rash a thing before, and I knew I had to take a chance on his good will. But without knowing about Cass I could never learn about what happened in Sambuco—about Mason, and my part in the matter.

Two years before, I had never laid eyes on Cass. Our meeting was not terribly auspicious, you might say—although even then he seemed to be an unusual sort—and he might have passed right on out of my life had I not, only a few hours later that same day, gotten myself situated on the periphery of those events of which he was the dead center. I would like to describe that meeting, and the circumstances which led up to it, if only so you will be able to understand why I went to Sambuco in the first place, thereby getting myself mixed up in the whole wretched business.