The Web and The Root (24 page)

The winter when he was fifteen years of age, on Sundays and in the afternoons after school, George would go for long walks with his uncle on the mountains above the town and in the coves and valleys on the other side. There had always been a quality of madness in his uncle, and his years of living bound to Mag had sharpened it, intensified it, built it up and held it to the point of passion and demonic fury where at times he shook and trembled with the frenzy of it and had to get away, out of that house, to calm his tortured soul. And when this happened to Mark Joyner, he hated all his life and everything about it, and sought the desolation of the mountains. There, in bleak and wintry winds, he found as nowhere else on earth some strange and powerful catharsis.

T
HESE EXPEDITIONS WROUGHT
upon the spirit of the boy the emotions of loneliness, desolation, and wild joy with a strong and focal congruence of desire, a blazing intensity of sensual image, he had never known before. Then as never before, he saw the great world beyond the wintry hills of home, and felt the huge, bitter conflict of those twin antagonists, those powers discrete that wage perpetual warfare in the lives of all men living—wandering forever and the earth again.

Wild, wordless, and unutterable, but absolutely congruent in his sense of their irreconcilable and inexplicable coherence, his spirit was torn as it had never been before by the strange and bitter unity of that
savage conflict, that tormenting oneness of those dual and contending powers of home and hunger, absence and return. The great plantation of the earth called him forth forever with an intolerable longing of desire to explore its infinite mystery and promise of glory, power, and triumph, and the love of women, its magic wealth and joy of new lands, rivers, plains, and mountains, its crowning glory of the shining city. And he felt the strong, calm joy of evening for doors and fences, a light, a window, and a certain faith, the body and the embrace of a single and unwearied love.

The mountains in the Wintertime had a stern and demonic quality of savage joy that was, in its own way, as strangely, wildy haunting as all of the magic and the gold of April. In Spring, or in the time-enchanted spell and drowse of full, deep Summer, there was always something far and lonely, haunting with ecstasy and sorrow, desolation and the intolerable, numb exultancy of some huge, impending happiness. It was a cow bell, drowsy, far and broken in a gust of wind, as it came to him faintly from the far depth and distance of a mountain valley; the receding whistle-wail of a departing train, as it rushed eastward, seaward, towards the city, through some green mountain valley of the South; or a cloud shadow passing on the massed green of the wilderness, and the animate stillness, the thousand sudden, thrumming, drumming, stitching, unseen little voices in the lyric mystery of tangled undergrowth about him.

His uncle and he would go toiling up the mountain side, sometimes striding over rutted, clay-baked, and frost-hardened roads, sometimes beating their way downhill, with as bold and wild a joy as wilderness explorers ever knew, smashing their way through the dry and brittle undergrowth of barren Winter, hearing the dry report of bough and twig beneath their feet, the masty spring and crackle of brown ancient leaves, and brown pine needles, the elastic, bedded compost of a hundred buried and forgotten Winters.

Meanwhile, all about them, the great trees of the mountain side, at once ruggedly familiar and strangely, hauntingly austere, rose grim and
barren, as stern and wild and lonely as the savage winds that warred forever, with a remote, demented howling, in their stormy, tossed, and leafless branches.

And above them the stormy wintry skies—sometimes a savage sky of wild, torn grey that came so low its scudding fringes whipped like rags of smoke around the mountain tops; sometimes an implacable, fierce sky of wintry grey; sometimes a sky of rags and tatters of wild, wintry light, westering into slashed stripes of rugged red and incredible wild gold at the gateways of the sun—bent over them forever with that same savage and unutterable pain and sorrow, that ecstasy of wild desire, that grief of desolation, that spirit of exultant joy, that was as gleeful, mad, fierce, lonely, and enchanted with its stormy and unbodied promises of flight, its mad swoopings through the dark over the whole vast sleeping wintriness of earth, as that stormy and maniacal wind, which seemed, in fact, to be the very spirit of the joy, the sorrow, and the wild desire he felt.

That wind would rush upon them suddenly as they toiled up rocky trails, or smashed through wintry growth, or strode along the hardened, rutted roads, or came out on the lonely, treeless bareness of a mountain top. And that wind would rush upon him with its own wild life and fill him with its spirit. As he gulped it down into his aching lungs, his whole life seemed to soar, to swoop, to yell with the demonic power, flight, and invincible caprice of the wind’s huge well until he no longer was nothing but a boy of fifteen, the nephew of a hardware merchant in a little town, one of the nameless little atoms of this huge, swarming earth whose most modest dream would have seemed ridiculous to older people had he dared to speak of it.

No. Under the immense intoxication of that great, demented wind, he would become instantly triumphant to all this damning and overwhelming evidence of fact, age, prospect, and position. He was a child of fifteen no longer. He was the overlord of this great earth, and he looked down from the mountain top upon his native town, a conqueror. Not from the limits of a little, wintry town, lost in remote and
lonely hills from the great heart, the time-enchanted drone and distant murmur of the shining city of this earth, but from the very peak and center of this world he looked on his domains with the joy of certitude and victory, and he knew that everything on earth that he desired was his.

Saddled in power upon the wild back of that maniacal force, not less wild, willful, and all-conquering than the steed that carried him, he would hold the kingdoms of the earth in fee, inhabit the world at his caprice, swoop in the darkness over mountains, rivers, plains, and cities, look under roofs, past walls and doors, into a million rooms, and know all things at once, and lie in darkness in some lonely and forgotten place with a woman, lavish, wild, and secret as the earth. The whole earth, its fairest fame of praise, its dearest treasure of a great success, its joy of travel, all its magic of strange lands, the relish of unknown, tempting foods, its highest happiness of adventure and love—would all be his: flight, storm, wandering, the great sea and all its traffic of proud ships, and the great plantation of the earth, together with the certitude and comfort of return—fence, door, wall, and roof, the single face and dwelling-place of love.

B
UT SUDDENLY THESE
wild, demonic dreams would fade, for he would hear his uncle’s voice again, and see the gaunt fury of his bony figure, his blazing eye, the passionate and husky anathema of his trembling voice, as, standing there upon that mountain top and gazing down upon the little city of his youth, Mark Joyner spoke of all the things that tortured him. Sometimes it was his life with Mag, his young man’s hopes of comfort, love, and quiet peace that now had come to nought but bitterness and hate. Again his mind went groping back to older, deeper-buried sorrows. And on this day as they stood there, his mind went back, and, turning now to George and to the wind that howled there in his face, he suddenly brought forth and hurled down from that mountain top the acid of an ancient rancor, denouncing now the memory of old Fate, his father. He told his hatred
and his loathing of his father’s life, the deathless misery of his own youth, which lived for him again in all its anguish even after fifty years had passed.

“As each one of my unhappy brothers and sisters was born,” he declared in a voice so husky and tremulous with his passionate resentment that it struck terror to the boy’s heart, “I cursed him—cursed the day that God had given him life! And still they came!” he whispered, eyes ablaze and furious, in a voice that almost faltered to a sob. “Year after year they came with the blind proliferation of his criminal desire—into a house where there was scarcely roof enough to shelter us—in a vile, ramshackle shamble of a place.” he snarled, “where the oldest of us slept three in a bed, and where the youngest, weakest, and most helpless of us all was lucky if he had a pallet of rotten straw that he could call his own! When we awoke at morning our famished guts were aching!—
aching
!” he howled, “with the damnable gnawing itch of hunger!—My dear child, my dear, dear child!” he exclaimed, in a transition of sudden and terrifying gentleness—“May
that
, of all life’s miseries, be a pang you never have to suffer!—And we lay down at night always unsatisfied—oh always!
always! always!
” he cried with an impatient gesture of his hand—“to struggle for repose like restless animals—crammed with distressful bread—swollen with fatback and boiled herbs out of the fields, while your honored grandfather—the
Major!
…The
Major
!” he now sneered, and suddenly he contorted his gaunt face in a grotesque grimace and laughed with a sneering, deliberated, forced mirth.

“Now, my boy,” he went on presently in a more tranquil tone of patronizing tolerance, “you have no doubt often heard your good Aunt Maw speak with the irrational and incondite exuberance of her sex,” he continued, smacking his lips together audibly with an air of relish as he pronounced these formidable words—“of that paragon of all the moral virtues—her noble sire, the
Major
!” Here he paused to laugh sneeringly again. “And perhaps, boylike, you have conceived in your imagination a picture of that distinguished gentleman that is
somewhat more romantic than the facts will stand!…Well, my boy,” he went on deliberately, with the birdlike turn of his head as he looked at the boy, “lest your fancy be seduced somewhat by illusions of aristocratic grandeur, I will tell you a few facts about that noble man…. He was the self-appointed Major of a regiment of backwoods volunteers, of whom no more be said than that they were, if possible, less literate than he!…You are descended, it is true,” he went on with his calm precise deliberation, “from a warlike stock—but none of them my dear child, were Brigadiers—no, not even Majors,” he sneered, “for the highest genuine rank I ever heard of them attaining was the rank of corporal—and that proud dignity was the office of the Major’s pious brother—I refer, of course, my boy, to your great-uncle, Rance Joyner!…

“Rance! Rance!”—here he contorted his face again—“Gods! What a name! No wonder he smote fear and trembling to the Yankee heart!…The
sight
of him was certainly enough to make them stand stock-still at the height of an attack! And the
smell
of him would surely be enough to strike awe and wonder in the hearts of mortal men—I refer, of course,” he said sardonically, “to the average run of base humanity, since, as you well know, neither your grandfather nor his brother, Holy Rance, nor any other Joyner that I know,” he jeered, “could be compared to mortal men. We admit that much ourselves. For all of us, my boy, were not so much conceived like other men as willed here by an act of God, created by a visitation of the Holy Ghost, trailing clouds of glory as we came,” he sneered, “and surely you must have discovered by this time that it is our unique privilege to act as prophets, messengers, and agents, of the deity here on earth—to demonstrate God’s ways to man—to reveal the inmost workings of His providence and all the mysterious secrets of the universe to other men who have not been so sanctified by destiny as we….

“But be that as it may,” he went on, with one of his sudden and astonishing changes from howling fury to tolerant and tranquil admis-siveness. “I believe there was no question of your holy great-uncle’s valor. Yes, sir!” he continued, “I have heard them say that he could kill
at fifty or five hundred yards, and always wing his bullet with a gospel text to make it holy!…Why, my dear child,” the boy’s uncle cried, “there was as virtuous a ruffian as ever split a skull! He blew their brains out with a smile of saintly charity, and sang hosannas over them as they expired! He sanctified the act of murder, and assured them as they weltered in their blood that he had come to them as an angel of mercy bearing to them the gifts of immortal life and everlasting happiness in exchange for the vile brevity of their earthly lives, which he had taken from them with such sweet philanthropy. He shot them through the heart and promised them all the blessings of the Day of Armageddon with so soft a tongue that they fairly wept for joy and kissed the hand of their redeemer as they died!…

“Yes,” he went on tranquilly, “there is no question of your great-uncle’s valor—or his piety—but still, my boy, his station was a lowly one—he never reached a higher rank than corporal! And there were others, too, who fought well and bravely in that war—but they, too, were obscure men! Your great-uncle John, a boy of twenty-two, was killed in battle on the bloody field of Shiloh…. And there are many others of your kinsmen, who fought, died, bled, were wounded, perished, or survived in that great war—but none of them, my dear child, was a Major!…There was only one
Major
!” he bitterly remarked. “Only your noble grandsire was a
Major
!”

Thus, for a moment, in the fading light of that Winter’s day, he paused there on the mountain top above the town, his gaunt face naked, lonely, turned far and lost, into the fierce wintry light of a flaming setting sun, into the lost and lonely vistas of the western ranges, among those hills which had begotten him. When he spoke again his voice was sad and quiet and calmly bitter, and somehow impregnated with that wonderful remote and haunting quality that seemed to come like sorcery from some far distance—a distance that was itself as far and lonely in its haunting spatial qualities as those fading western ranges where his face was turned.

“The Major,” he quietly remarked, “my honored father—Major
Lafayette Joyner!—Major of Hominy Run and Whooping Holler, the martial overlord of Sandy Mush, the Bonaparte of Zebulon County and the Pink Beds, the crafty strategist of Frying Pan Gap, the Little Corporal of the Home Guards who conducted that great operation on the river road just four miles east of town,” he sneered, “where two volleys were fired after flying hooves of two of General Sherman’s horse thieves—with no result except to hasten their escape!…The Major!” his voice rose strangely on its note of husky passion. “That genius with the master talent who could do all things—except keep food in the cupboard for a week!” Here he closed his eyes tightly and laughed deliberately again.