Of Time and the River (66 page)

Sometimes it would reveal the brown and dusty stubble of the cotton-fields, a stretch of ragged pine, a lonely little wooden church, a shack, a cabin, the swift and sinuous forking of another road that spoked into their own, flashed past, and curved away—was gone for ever—leaving an instant and intolerable pain and memory— a searing recognition and discovery—a road once seen but never followed and now for ever lost with all its promises of a life that they had never known or explored, of faces they had never seen.

And again, out of this huge and mournful earth, out of the limitless mystery of this continent of night, the lights upon his brother’s car would for an instant pick out faces, shapes, and people, and they, too, would blaze there for a moment in their vision with an intolerable and lonely briefness, and then be lost for ever—and in that moment of instant parting and farewell was written the history of man’s destiny—his brother’s life, and that of all men living on the earth around him.

Once their lights picked out the figure of a country negro: his weary plodding figure loomed up for an instant dustily—a mournful image of bowed back, shapeless garments stained with red field earth, and clumsy brogans coated with the red dust of the road, plodding along against a terrific and desolate landscape of brown cotton-fields, clay, and lonely pine, as much a part of it as the earth he walked upon, fixed instantly into it in a vision of labour, sorrow, and destiny, that was eternal.

And again they passed by negroes coming from a country church, and for a moment saw their white eyes and their black and mournful faces staring towards the light, and lost these, too, for ever, and passed into a little town and out again, and saw far-off, and at its edges, a pollen of bright light above a little travelling carnival, and heard the sad wheeling music of the carousal, the mixed and woven clamour of the barker’s cries, the shouts, the people’s voices, and all far-faint and lost and mournful as a dream; and then the earth again—the two back wheels, clay-caked and rattling, of an ancient buggy, the lifting hooves of an old bone-yard nag, that slowly turned away from the road’s centre to make way for them, the slow, staring, stupid looks of wonder and astonishment of a young country fellow and his girl as they went by them—and finally, always and for ever, nothing but the earth—that mournful, desolate, and lonely earth of cotton-fields, and raw red clay and lonely pine, wheeling past for ever in rude and formless undulations, immemorable, everlasting, and terrific, above which the great stars blazed their imperturbable and inscrutable messages of deathless calm.

And as they rushed ahead into the dark, he thought of the hundreds of times his brother had hurled himself along this road at night alone, going furiously from nowhere into nowhere, rushing ahead with starlight shining on his knit brows and his drawn face, with nothing but the lonely, mournful, and desolate red clay earth about him, the immense, the merciless emptiness and calm of the imperturbable skies above him. And he wondered if there was anywhere on earth a goal for all his frenzy and unrest, some final dwelling-place of certitude and love for all his wandering, or if he must hurl furiously along in darkness beneath these stars for ever—lost, unassuaged, and driven—until the immense and mournful earth should take him once again.

The ride back up into the hills with Luke was cold, dark, bleak, and desolate—the very painting of his own sick soul. Black night had come when they had reached the mountains. The stars were out, and around them the great bulk of the hills was barren, bleak, and wintry-looking, and there was the distant roaring of demented winds upon the hills, the lonely preludes of grim winter among the barren trees. Already, it seemed, the same landscape which only a day or two before had flamed with all the blazing colours of October, and with the enchantment which his hope and joy had given it, had been sorrowfully transformed by the mournful desolation of coming winter. The earth was no longer beautiful and friendly: it had become a waste, a desert, and a prison bleak and bare.

During the ride up the mountain into Old Catawba the two brothers spoke seldom to each other. Luke, who had made that dark journey up into the hills a thousand times—for whom, in fact, this ceaseless hurtling along dark roads had become the very pattern of the unrest and fury that lashed his own life on for ever—drove hard and raggedly, communicating perfectly to the machine he drove the tension and dissonance of his own tormented spirit. This wordless instrument of steel and brass and leather seemed, in fact, to start, halt, jolt, stammer, and lunge fiercely onward as if it had a brain and spirit of its own that was in anguished sympathy with the tortured nerves that governed it. His brother drove, bent forward tensely, his large clumsy hands gripped hard and nervously upon the steering-wheel, as he peered out upon the ribbon of road before him, which bent and twisted in a bewildering serpentine that curved constantly upward along the slopes and flanks of the dark mountain-side. The boy sat cold and numb and sick at heart, hands thrust in pockets, his hat pulled low across his eyes, his overcoat turned up around his neck. He glanced at his brother once or twice. He could see his face drawn and taut and furrowed in the dim light, but when he tried to speak to him he could not. The sense of ruin, shame, and failure which filled his spirit seemed so abysmal and complete that there was nothing left to say. And he faced the meeting with his mother and his sister with a sick heart of dread.

Once going up the mountain-side his brother stopped, jamming his huge flat foot so rudely on the brake that the car halted with a jarring shuddering thud. They had just passed a road of unpaved clay which led off from the mountain road towards the right, and towards a farmhouse and a light or two which were clearly visible.

Now, looking nervously and uncertainly toward this house, Luke muttered, almost to himself, thrusting his hand through his hair with a distracted movement as he spoke: “Wy-wy-wy-I fink we could g-g-g-get a drink in here wy—if you’d like one. Wy-wy-I know the old fellow who lives there . . . he’s a moonshiner—wy-wy-I fink— would you like to stop?” he said abruptly and then, getting no answer from the younger one, he gave another worried and uncertain look in the direction of the house, thrust his fingers through his hair, and muttered to himself: “W-w-w-well, perhaps you’re right— maybe it’s j-j-j-just as well if we g-g-g-get home wy-wy-wy-I guess that Mama will be waiting up for us.”

When they reached town the hour was late, the streets had a wintry, barren, and deserted look, and the lights burned dim: from time to time another motor car would flash by them speedily, but they saw few people. As they drove across the Square it seemed almost to have been frozen in a cataleptic silence, the bulbous clusters of the street lamps around the Square burned with a hard and barren radiance—a ghastly mocking of life, of metropolitan gaiety, in a desert scene from which all life had by some pestilence or catastrophe of nature been extinguished. The fountain in the Square pulsed with a cold breezeless jet, and behind the greasy windows of a luncheon room he could see a man in a dim light seated on a stool and drinking coffee, and the swart muscular Greek leaned over the counter, his furrowed inch of brow painfully bent upon the columns of a newspaper.

As they turned into the street where stood his mother’s house, and sloped swiftly down the hill toward home, his brother, in a tone that tried in vain to be matter of fact and to conceal the concern and pain which his own generous spirit felt because of the feeling of defeat, failure, and desperation which was now legible in every word and gesture of the younger one, began to speak to him in a nervous, almost pleading voice:

“N-n-now I fink,” he began, thrusting his big hand through his hair,—“I—wy I fink when we get home wy—I just wouldn’t say anything to Mama about—wy-wy about that trouble—wy—that we had in Blackstone—wy—at all!” he blurted out. “Wy—f-f-f-frankly, I mean it!” he continued earnestly, as he brought the car to a jolting halt before the house. “Wy-wy—if I were in your p-p- place, Gene—wy I’d just forget it. . . . It’s all over now—and it would only worry M-m-m-mama if you t-t-told her about it—Wy-wy— the whole f’ing’s over now . . . those—wy—those cheap nigger- Baptist South Car’lina sons of bitches—wy-wy—just saw the chance of m-m-making a martyr of you—so I’d j-j-just forget about it— It’s all over now—Wy-wy—f-f-f-forget it!” he cried earnestly. “I—I--wy I wouldn’t fink about it again!”

But the younger one, seeing the light that burned warmly behind the drawn shades of the parlour, set his sick heart and his grim face desperately towards the light, shook his head silently, and then walked grimly towards the house.

He found his mother and his sister seated together in the parlour before the fire. In another moment, almost before their first startled words of greeting were out of their mouths, he was blurting out the story of his drunkenness, arrest, and imprisonment. As he went on, he could see his mother’s face, white, serious, eagerly curious, fixed upon him, and her powerful, deliberate, and curiously flexible mouth which she pursed constantly, darting her eyes at him from time to time with the quick, startled attentiveness of an animal or a bird, as she said sharply: “Hah? . . . What say? . . . The police, you say? . . . Jail? . . . Who was with you—hah? Emmet Blake? . . . Weaver? . . . How much did they fine you—hah?”

Meanwhile his sister sat listening quietly, with an absent yet intent look in her eyes, stroking her large cleft chin in a reflective manner with her big hand, smiling a little, and saying from time to time:

“Ah-hah? . . . And what did Blake say then? . . . What did you say to the nigger when you saw him in the cell? . . . Ah-hah. . . . They didn’t abuse you, did they? . . . Did they hurt you when they hit you? . . . Ah-hah. . . . And what did Luke say when he saw you looking through the bars?” She snickered hoarsely, and then, taking him by the hand, turned to her mother and in a kindly yet derisive tone said:

“Here’s your Harvard boy. . . . What do you think of your baby now?” And seeing the gloomy and miserable look upon his face, she laughed her high, husky, and derisive falsetto, prodding him in the ribs with her big finger, saying: “K-k-k-k! . . . This is our Harvard boy! . . . Hi, hi, hi, hi, hi! . . . Here’s your baby son, Miss Eliza!” Then, releasing his hand and turning to her mother, she said in a good-natured tone, in which yet a kind of melancholy satisfaction was evident: “Well, you see, don’t you? . . . It just goes to show you, doesn’t it? . . . I knew it all the time. . . . It just goes to show that we’re all the same beneath the skin. . . . We’re all alike. . . . We all like the stuff . . . with all his book education and going off to Harvard, he’s no different from Papa, when you come down to it,” she concluded with a note of sombre brooding satisfaction in her voice.

“Wy-wy-wy—” he could see Luke teetering nervously from one huge flat foot to another, thrusting his huge hand distractedly through his flashing hair as he attempted to stammer out an earnest and excited defence and justification for his disgrace:

“Wy-wy-wy I don’t believe that Gene was drunk at all!” he stammered. “Wy I fink wy—that he j-j-j-just had the bad luck to wy to f-f-f-fall in with that gang when they were drinking and and and—wy I f’ink those wy those B-B-B-B-Blackstone bastards just saw a chance wy of collecting a wy a little graft and and and wy j-j- just made Gene the goat. Wy f-f-f-frankly I don’t believe he was drunk at all. . . . Wy I doubt it very much,” he said, thrusting his fingers through his hair. “F-f-f-frankly, I do.”

“I was drunk!” the boy muttered sullenly and miserably. “Drunker than any of them. . . . I was the worst of the lot.”

“You see, don’t you?” his sister said again to her mother in a weary, kindly, yet triumphant tone. “You see what happens, don’t you? . . . I’ve known it. . . . I’ve known it all the time,” she said with sombre satisfaction. “. . . No, sir,” she shook her head with a movement of emphatic conviction, as if someone had disputed her argument, “you can’t change them! . . . You can’t change the leopard’s spots. . . . Murder will out. . . . You can’t tell me!” she cried again, shaking her head in a movement of denial. “Blood is thicker than water. But you see, don’t you?” she said again with this curiously kindly yet triumphant satisfaction; and then added illogically: “This is what comes of going to Harvard.”

And his mother, who had been following this broken and almost incoherent discourse of his brother and sister with the quick, startled darting and attentive glances of an animal or a bird, now said nothing. Instead she just stood looking at him, her broad worn hands held at the waist for a moment in a loose strong clasp, her face white and stern, and her mouth pursed in a strong pucker of reproach. For a moment it seemed that she would speak, but suddenly her worn brown eyes were hot with tears, she shook her head at him in a strong, convulsive and almost imperceptible tremor of grief and disappointment, and turning quickly with a rapid awkward movement of her short figure, she went out of the room as fast as she could, slamming the door behind her.

When she had gone there was silence for a minute, save for the gaseous flare and crumble of the coal-fire in the grate and the stertorous, nervous and uneasy labour of Luke’s breath. Then his sister turned to him and looking at him with eyes which had grown dead and lustreless, and in a tone that was full of the sombre and weary resignation that was now frequent when she spoke, she said: “Well, forget about it. She’ll get over it. . . . You will, too. . . . It’s done now, and it can’t be helped . . . So forget it. . . . I know, I know,” she said with a sombre, weary, and fatal resignation as she shook her head. “We all have these great dreams and big ambitions when we’re twenty. . . . I know. . . . I had them, too. . . . Don’t break your heart about it, Gene. . . . Life’s not worth it. . . . So forget it. . . . Just forget about it. . . . You’ll forget,” she muttered, “like I did.”

Later that night, when his sister had departed for her home and his brother had gone to bed, he sat with his mother in the parlour looking at the fire. Blundering, stumbling incoherently, he tried desperately to reassure her, to tell her of his resolution to expiate his crime, to retrieve his failure, somehow to justify her in the faith and support she had given him. He spoke wildly, foolishly, desperately, of a dozen plans in progress, promising everything, swearing anything, and sure of nothing. He told her he was ready to go to work at once, to do any work that he could find— like a drowning man he clutched wildly at a dozen straws—he would get a job on the paper as a reporter; he would teach school; there were great sums of money to be made from advertising, he had a friend in that profession, he was sure he would succeed there; he felt sure that Professor Hatcher could get him placed at some small college teaching drama and play-writing courses; someone had told him he could find employment editing the little magazine or “house organ” of a department store in the city; a friend at college had secured employment as librarian of an ocean liner; another made large sums of money selling floor-mops and brushes to the housewives of the Middle West—he blurted out the foolish and futile projects feverishly, clutching at straw after straw, and halted abruptly, baffled by her silence and by the sudden sickening realization that he no longer had a straw to clutch at—how foolish, futile, feeble all these projects were!