The Web and The Root (25 page)

“Why, my dear boy!” his uncle said, “he could discourse for hours on end most learnedly—oh!
most
learnedly!” he howled derisively, “on the beauty and perfection of the Roman Aqueducts while the very roof above us spouted water like a sieve!…Was it the secret of the Sphinx, the sources of the Nile, what songs the sirens sang, the exact year, month, week, day, hour, and moment of the Field of Armageddon with the Coming of the Lord upon the earth, together with all judgments, punishments, rewards, and titles he would mete to us—and particularly to his favored son, the
Major
!” sneered the boy’s uncle. “Oh, I can assure you, my dear child, he knew about it all! Earth had no mysteries, the immortal and imperturbable skies of time no secrets, the buried and sunken life of the great ocean no strange terrors, nor the last remotest limits of the sidereal universe no marvels which that mighty brain did not at once discover, and would reveal to anyone who had the fortitude to listen!…

“Meanwhile,” his uncle snarled, “we lived like dogs, rooting into the earth for esculent herbs that we might stay our hunger on, gorging ourselves on wild berries plucked from roadside hedges, finding a solitary ear of corn and hugging it to our breasts as we hurried home with it as if we had looted the golden granaries of Midas, while the
Major
—the
Major
—surrounded by the rabble-rout of all his progeny, the youngest of whom crawled and scrambled in their dirty rags about
his feet while the great man sat enthroned on the celestial lights of his poetic inspiration, his great soul untainted by all this earthly misery about him, composing verses,” sneered his uncle, “to the lady of his dreams. ‘My lady’s hair!’” he howled derisively. “My lady’s
hair
!” And for a moment, blind with his gaunt, tortured grimace, he kicked and stamped one leg convulsively at the earth—“Oh, sublime!
Sublime
!” he howled huskily at length. “To see him there lost in poetic revery—munching the cud of inspiration and the frayed end of a pencil—his eyes turned dreamily upon the distant hills—slowly stroking his luxuriant whiskers with the fingers of those plump white hands of which he was so justly proud!” his uncle sneered—“dressed in his fine black broadcloth suit and white boiled shirt that
she
—poor, patient, and devoted woman that she was—who never owned a store dress in her whole life—had laundered, starched, and done up for her lord and master with such loving care….

“My dear child,” he went on in a moment, in a voice that had become so husky, faint, and tremulous that it scarcely rose above a whisper. “My dear, dear child!” he said, “may your life never know the anguish, frenzy, and despair, the hideous mutilations of the soul, that passion of inchoate hatred, loathing, and revulsion, that I felt towards my father—my own
father
!—with which my own life was poisoned in my youth!—Oh! To see him sitting there so smug, so well-kept and complacent, so invincibly assured in his self-righteousness, with his unctuous, drawling voice of limitless self-satisfaction, his pleased laughter at his own accursed puns and jests and smart retorts, his insatiable delight in all that he—he
alone
—had ever seen, done, thought, felt, tasted, or believed—perched there on the mountainous summit of his own conceit—while the rest of us were starving—writing poems to his lady’s hair—his lady’s
hair
—while
she
, poor woman—that poor, dead, lost, and unsung martyr of a woman that I have the honor to acknowledge as my mother,” he said huskily, “did the drudgery of a nigger as he sat there in his fine clothes writing verses—kept life in us somehow, those of us who managed to survive,” he said bitterly,
“when she had so little of her own to spare—scrubbed, sewed, mended, cooked—when there was anything at all to cook—and passively yielded to that sanctimonious lecher’s insatiable and accursed lust—drudging, toiling, drudging to the very moment of our birth—until we dropped full-born out of our mother’s womb even as she bent above her labors at the tub…. Is it any wonder that I came to hate the very sight of him—venerable whiskers, thick lips, white hands, broadcloth, unctuous voice, pleased laughter, smug satisfaction, invincible conceit, and all the tyranny of his narrow, vain, inflexible, small soul?—why, damn him,” the boy’s uncle whispered huskily. “I have seen the time I could have taken that fat throat and strangled it between my hands, blood, bone, body, father of my life though he might be—oh!” he howled, “damn’bly, indubitably,
was
!”

And for a moment his gaunt face burned into the western ranges, far, lost, and lonely in the red light, westering to wintry dark.

“The Major!” he muttered quietly at length. “You have heard your good Aunt Maw speak, no doubt, about the Major—of his erudition and intelligence, the sanctified infallibility of all his judgments, of his fine white hands and broadcloth clothes, the purity of his moral character, of how he never uttered a profane word, nor allowed a drop of liquor in his house—nor would have let your mother marry your father had he known that your father was a drinking man. That paragon of morals, virtues, purities, and manners—that final, faultless, and inspired judge and critic of all things!—Oh, my dear boy!” he howled faintly, with his husky and contemptuous laugh—“she is a woman—therefore governed by her sentiment; a woman—therefore blind to logic, the evidence of life, the laws of ordered reason; a woman—therefore at the bottom of her heart a Tory, the slave of custom and conformity; a woman—therefore cautious and idolatrous; a woman—therefore fearful for her nest; a woman—therefore the bitter enemy of revolt and newness, hating change, the naked light of truth, the destruction of time-honored superstitions, however cruel, false, and shameful they may be. Oh! she is a woman and she does not know!…

“She does not
know
!” the boy’s uncle howled with his contemptuous laugh. “My dear child, I have no doubt that she has told you of her father’s wisdom, erudition, and his faultless elegance of speech…. Pah-h!” he sneered. “He was a picker-up of unconsidered trifles—a reader of miscellaneous trash—the instant dupe for every remedy, nostrum, cure-all that any traveling quack might offer to him, and the gullible believer of every superstitious prophesy, astrological omen, ghost-story, augury, or portent that he heard…. Why, my boy,” his uncle whispered, bending towards him with an air of horrified revelation, “he was a man who used big words when he had no sense of their real meaning—a fellow who would try to impress some backwoods yokel with fine phrases which he didn’t understand himself. Yes! I have heard him talk so even in the presence of people of some education and intelligence—I have seen them nudge and wink at one another over the spectacle he was making of himself—and I confess to you I had to turn my head away and blush for shame,” his uncle whispered fiercely, his eyes blazing, “for
shame
to think my own father could expose himself in that degrading fashion.”

And for a moment he stared gauntly into the fading ranges of the west, and was silent. When he spoke again, his voice had grown old and weary, bitter with quiet fatality:

“Moral virtues—purity of character—piety—fine words—no profanity—yes! I suppose my father had them all,” said Uncle Mark wearily. “No liquor in the house—yes, that was true enough—and also it is true there was no food, no human decency, no privacy. Why, my dear boy,” he whispered suddenly, turning to the boy again with that birdlike tilt of the head and that abrupt and startling transition to a shamefaced intimacy of whispered revelation—“do you know that even after I had reached the age of twenty years and we had moved to Libya Hill, we all slept together—eight of us—in the same room where my mother and my father slept?—And for three days!” he cried suddenly and savagely—“Oh! for three damnable, never-to-be-forgotten days of shame and horror that left their scar upon the lives of all of
us, the body of my grandfather. Bill Joyner, lay there in the house and rotted—
rotted
!” his voice broke in a sob, and he struck his gaunt fist blindly, savagely into the air, “rotted in Summer heat until the stench of him had got into our breath, our blood, our lives, into bedding and food and clothes, into the very walls that sheltered us—and the memory of him became for us a stench of shame and horror that nothing could wash away, that filled our hearts with hatred and loathing for our blood and kind—while my father, Lafayette Joyner, and that damned, thick-lipped, drawling, sanctimonious, lecher of a nigger-Baptist prophet—your great-uncle, Holy Rance!” he snarled savagely, “sat there smugly with that stench of rotting death and man’s corrupt mortality thick in their nostrils—calmly discussing, if you please, the lost art of embalming as it was practiced by the ancient Egyptians—which
they
, they alone, of course, of all men living,” he snarled bitterly, “had rediscovered—and were prepared to practice on that rotting and putrescent corpse!”

Then he was silent for a moment more. His face, gaunt and passionate, which in repose, after its grotesque contortions of scorn, rage, humor and disgust, was so strangely, nobly tranquil in its lonely dignity, burned with a stern and craggy impassivity in the red, wintry glow of the late sun.

“And yet there was some strangeness in us all,” he went on in a remote, quiet, husky tone that had in it the curious and haunting quality of the distance and passion which his voice could carry as no other the boy had ever heard, “something blind and wild as nature—a sense of our inevitable destiny. Oh! call it not conceit!” his uncle cried. “Conceit is such a small thing, after all! Conceit is only mountain-high, world-wide, or ocean-deep!—This thing we had in us could match its will against the universe, the rightness of its every act against the huge single voice and bitter judgment of the world, its moral judgments against God himself.—Was it murder? Why, then, the murder was not in ourselves, but in the very flesh and blood of those we murdered. Their murder rushed out of their sinful lives to beg for bloody
execution at our hands. The transgressor assaulted the very blade of our knives with his offending throat. The wicked man did willfully attack the sharp point of our bayonet with his crime-calloused heart, the offender in the sight of God rushed on us, thrust his neck into our guiltless hands and fairly broke it, in spite of all that we could do!…

“My dear child, surely you must know by now,” his uncle cried, as he turned on him with the fixed, blazing glare of his eyes, his set grimace of scorn and fury—“surely you have learned by now that a Joyner is incapable of doing wrong. Cruelty, blind indifference to everything except oneself, brutal neglect, children criminally begotten in casual gratification of one’s own lust, children born unwanted and untended into a world of misery, poverty, and neglect where they must live or die or sicken or be strong according to their own means, in a struggle to survive as barbarously savage as the children of an Indian tribe endure—why, these are faults that might be counted crimes in other men, but in a Joyner are considered acts of virtue!—No, he can see the starved eyes of his children staring at him from the shadows as they go comfortless and famished to their beds, and then go out upon his porch to listen to the million little sounds of night, and meditate the glory of the moon as it comes up across the hill behind the river! He can breathe the sweet, wild fragrance of a Summer’s night and dreamily compose a lyric to the moon, the lilac, and his lady’s hair, while his daughter coughs her life out from the darkness of the wretched house—and find no fault or error in his life whatever!…

“Oh, did I not live and know it all?” his uncle cried, “that agony of life and death, blind chance, survival or extinction—till the mind went mad, man’s heart and faith were broken, to see how little was the love we had, how cruel, vile, and useless was the waste!—My brother Edward died when he was four years old: there in the room with all of us he lay for a week upon his trundle bed—oh! we let him die beneath our very eyes!” his uncle cried, striking his fist into the air with a kind of agony of loss and pain—“he died beneath the very beds we slept in,
for his trundle bed was pushed each night beneath the big bed where my mother and my father slept. We stood there staring at him with the eyes of dumb, bewildered, foolish oxen, while his body stiffened, his heels drew backward towards his head in the convulsions of his agony—and that damned sanctimonious, well-pleased voice drawled on and on with the conceit of its interminable assurance, ‘giving it as my theory,’” snarled the boy’s uncle—“though all things else were lacking in that house, there never was a dearth of theory—that unplumbed well of wisdom could give theories till you died. And Edward died, thank God, before the week was out,” his uncle quietly went on. “He died suddenly one night at two o’clock while the Great Theorist snored peacefully above him—while all the rest of us were sleeping! He screamed once—such a scream as had the whole blind agony of death in it—and by the time we got a candle lighted and had pulled his little bed out on the floor, that wretched and forsaken child was dead! His body was as stiff as a poker and bent back like a bow even as the Noble Theorist lifted him—he was dead before our eyes before we knew it—dead even as that poor woman who had borne him rushed screaming out of doors like a demented creature—running, stumbling, God knows where, downhill, into the dark—the wilderness—towards the river—to seek help somehow at a neighbor’s when the need for help was past. And his father was holding that dead child in his arms when she returned with that unneeded help….

“Oh, my child,” his uncle whispered, “if you could have seen the look on that woman’s face as she came back into that room of death again—if you could have seen her look first at the child there in his arms, and then at him, and seen him shake his head at her and say, ‘I knew that he was gone before you went out of the door, but I didn’t have the heart to call you back and let you know’—oh! if you could have heard the sanctimonious, grief-loving unction of that voice, that feeding gluttony and triumphant vanity of sorrow that battened on his own child’s life and said to me, as it had said a thousand times, more plain than any words could do: ‘
I! I! I!
Others will die, but I remain! Death, sorrow, human agony,
and loss, all the grief, error, misery, and mischance that men can suffer occurs here for the enlargement of this death-devouring, all-consuming, time-triumphant universe of
I, I, I!
’—Why, damn him,” said his uncle huskily, “I had no words to nail him with a curse, no handle to take hold of my complaint—he had escaped as always like oil running through my fingers, speaking those unctuous words of piety and sorrow that none could challenge—but I hated him like hell and murder in my heart—I could have killed him where he stood!”