William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (151 page)

“Yah, yah,” Cobb muttered, “yah, great God, the logical outcome …
the ultimate horror!”
He had begun to hiccup again and the sound came forth in intermittent gasps, almost like sobs. He started to say something else, thought better of it, turned away, whispering over and over again:
“God, God, God, God, God.”

“Now about this here,” I explained. “Like I say, Hark’s most dreadful feared of high places. Last spring the roof leaked and Marse Joe sent Hark and me up to fix it. But Hark got halfway up and he just froze there. Begun to whimper and mumble to hisself and wouldn’t go an inch further. So I had to fix that roof myself. Anyway, Marse Putnam and Miss Maria caught ahold of this fear of Hark’s—you might say they found out his weak spot. Like I said, Marse Joe won’t tolerate anyone to mistreat his niggers, to beat them or anything like that. So whenever Marse Joe’s away, and Marse Putnam and Miss Maria figger they can get away with it, why, they run old Hark up a tree.”

Which is what they were doing even as I spoke, their voices muffled, remote, indistinct now on the blustery wind. Putnam propping the long ladder against the tree trunk, then jerking his arm furiously upward as he bade Hark to climb. And Hark began climbing, reluctantly, at the third rung turning his frightened face imploringly back as if to see whether they might not have had a change of heart, but this time Miss Maria’s arms jerked upward—
up, nigger, up
—and again Hark continued his climb, knees quaking beneath his trousers. At last arrived at the lowermost branch, Hark swung himself off the ladder, clutching the tree so tightly that I could see even from this distance the veins standing out against the muscles of his arms, then with a sort of scrounging, sliding motion of his rump, deposited himself in the crotch formed by trunk and branch, and sat there embracing the tree with his eyes squeezed shut—dizzy, windy yards above the earth. Then Putnam removed the ladder and laid it flat on the ground beneath the tree.

“Five, ten minutes will go by, mastah,” I said to Cobb, “and then old Hark will commence crying and moaning. Just wait and see. Then pretty soon he’ll start swaying. Crying and moaning and swaying there on that branch like he’s about to fall off. Then Marse Putnam and Miss Maria’ll set that ladder up against the tree and Hark’ll climb down. I reckon they get scared Hark will fall off and break his neck, and they wouldn’t want that to happen. No, they just want to give old Hark a poor time for a while.”

“Yah, yah, yah,” Cobb murmured, distantly now.

“And that for Hark is a poor time indeed,” I said.

“Yah, yah, yah,” he replied. I don’t know whether he was listening to me or not. “Great God! Sometimes I think … sometimes …
it is like living in a dream!”

Then suddenly, without another word, Cobb was gone, limping in gaunt strides toward the house, the empty brandy flask still clutched in his hand, cloak flapping, shoulders hunched against the wind. I crouched down again above my rabbits, watching Cobb limp and sway across the lot and up to the front porch, his voice faint and weary as he called out: “Hallo, Miz Travis, think I’ll come in and set a spell after all!” And Miss Sarah’s voice way off within, high and full of cheer, and the sound of the door slamming as Cobb vanished inside the house. I stripped the white translucent inner skin from a rabbit, separating it from the pinkish flesh, and plunged the corpse into the cool water, feeling the guts squirming wet and slimy beneath my fingers. Blood mingled with the water, turning it a muddy crimson. Gusts of wind swept through the cotton patch, whistling; an army of dead withered leaves marched along the edge of the barn, rolled with a husky scrabbling noise across the vacant yard. I gazed down into the bloody water, thinking of Cobb.
Go through the midst of Jerusalem, and set a mark upon the foreheads of the men that sigh and that cry for all the abominations, that be done in the midst thereof
…
Slay utterly old and young, both maids and little children, and women: but come not near any man upon whom is the mark
…

Suddenly I found myself thinking: It is plain, yes, plain, plain. When I succeed in my great mission, and Jerusalem is destroyed, this man Cobb will be among those few spared the sword …

Across the roof of the woods the wind rushed in hissing, majestic swoop and cadence, echoing in far-off hollows with the thudding sound of footfalls. Gray and streaked, boiling, in ponderous haste, the clouds fled eastward across the lowering heavens, growing darker now in the early dusk. After a bit I heard Hark begin to moan, a soft disconsolate wordless wail, filled with dread. For long minutes he moaned, swaying high in his tree. Then I heard the
tap-tap-tapping
of the ladder as they set it against the tree trunk and let him down.

It is curious how sometimes our most vivid dreams take place when we are but half asleep, and how they occupy the briefest space of time. In the courtroom this day, dozing off for several seconds at the oaken table to which I had been bound by a length of chain, I had a terrifying dream. I seemed to be walking alone at the edge of a swamp at nightfall, the light around me glimmering, crepuscular, touched with that greenish hue presaging the onslaught of a summer storm. The air was windless, still, but high in the heavens beyond the swamp thunder grumbled and heaved, and heat lightning at somber intervals blossomed against the sky. Filled with panic, I seemed to be searching for my Bible, which strangely, unaccountably I had left there, somewhere in the depths and murk of the swamp; in fear and despair I pressed my search into the oncoming night, pushing now deeper and deeper into the gloomy marshland, haunted by the ominous, stormy light and by a far-off pandemonium of thunder. Try desperately as I might, I could not find my Bible. Suddenly another sound came to my ears, this time the frightened outcry of voices. They were the voices of boys, hoarse and half grown and seized with terror, and now instantly I saw them: half a dozen black boys trapped neck-deep in a bog of quicksand, crying aloud for rescue as their arms waved frantically in the dim light and as they sank deeper and deeper into the mire. I seemed to stand helpless at the edge of the bog, unable to move or to speak, and while I stood there a voice echoed out of the sky, itself partaking of that remote sound of thunder:
Thy sons shall be given unto another people and thine eyes shall look, and fail with longing for them all the day long, so that thou shalt be mad for the sight of thine eyes
… Screaming their mortal fright, black arms and faces sinking beneath the slime, the boys began to vanish one by one before my eyes while the noise of a prodigious guilt overwhelmed me like a thunderclap …
“The prisoner will …”
The sharp rapping of a mallet interrupted the horror, and I snapped awake with a start.

“If the court please …” I heard the voice say, “it is a crying outrage. Sech behavior is a
crying outrage!”

The mallet cracked down again. “The prisoner is cautioned to stay awake,” said another voice. This time the voice was more familiar: it was that of Jeremiah Cobb.

“If the court please,” the first voice continued, “it is a disgrace to these assizes that the prisoner goes to sleep, and in the full view of this honorable court. Even if it is true that a nigger can’t stay awake any longer than—”

“The prisoner has been duly cautioned, Mr. Trezevant,” Cobb said. “You may proceed with the reading of the deposition.”

The man who had been reading my confessions aloud now paused and turned to stare at me, obviously relishing the pause, his own sparkling gaze, the total effect. His face was filled with hatred and disgust. I returned his gaze without faltering, though with no emotion. Smooth-featured, bull-necked, squinty-eyed, he now turned back to the papers, leaning forward aggressively on thick haunches and poking the air with a stubby finger. “ ‘The aforementioned lady fled and got some distance from the house,’ ” he recited, “ ’but she was pursued, overtaken, and compelled to get up behind one of the company, who brought her back, and after showing her the mangled body of her husband, she was told to get down and lay by his side, where she was shot dead. I then started for Mr. Jacob Williams’s …’” I ceased listening.

There must have been two hundred people in the jammed courtroom: in holiday finery, the women in silk bonnets and tasseled shawls, the men in black morning suits and patent leather shoes, stern, aggrieved, blinking and blinking, they crowded together on the straight-backed benches like a congregation of owls, silent now and attentive, breaking the steaming stillness with only a sneeze or a strangled, rattling cough. The round iron stove sizzled and breathed in the quiet, filling the air with the scent of burning cedar; the room grew stifling warm and vapor clung to the windowpanes, blurring the throng of people still milling outside the courthouse, a row of tethered gigs and buggies, distant pine trees in a scrawny, ragged grove. Somewhere in the back of the courtroom I could hear a woman sobbing softly, but hoarsely and bitterly and with that particular rhythmic scratchy persistence of a female close to hysteria. Someone tried to shush her up, to no avail; the sobs continued, heartbroken, rhythmic, unceasing.

For many years it had been my habit, when situated in a position where time grew heavy on my hands, to pray—often not so much beseeching God for special favor (for I had long since come to believe that He must surely frown upon too many pesky requests) as simply out of some great need to stay in touch with Him, making sure that I never strayed so far away that He would be beyond hearing my voice. The Psalms of David I knew by heart, almost all of them, and many were the times each day when I would stop in the midst of work and recite a Psalm half aloud, feeling that by so doing I did not bother or harass the Lord yet magnified Him all the same by adding one voice to the choir of ascending praise. Yet again as I sat in the courtroom, listening to the restless stir and fidget of bodies on the benches, the hacking and coughing, the woman’s persistent sobbing like a single thread of hysteria, the same feeling of apartness from God which I had felt early that morning, and for past days in numbers beyond counting, washed over me in a chill, desolating gush of anguish. Beneath my breath I tried to murmur a Psalm, but the words were flat, ugly, without meaning. The sense of His absence was like a profound and awful silence in my brain. Nor was it His absence alone which caused me this renewed feeling of despair, absence itself might have been endurable: instead it was a sense of repudiation I felt, of denial, as if He had turned His back on me once and for all, vanished, leaving me to mouth prayers, supplications, psalms of praise which flew not upward but tumbled hollow, broken, and meaningless into the depths of some foul dark hole. As I sat there I felt again almost overwhelmed by weariness, the weariness of hunger, but I forced my eyes to stay open and my gaze drowsed across the room toward Gray, still scribbling at his writing box, pausing now and then only to splash tobacco juice, with a dull pinging sound, into the brass spittoon at his feet. Nearby in the crowd an old hatchet-faced man sneezed enormously, again and again, the sneezes exploding violently from his nose in a shower of mist. My mind turned inward upon my abandonment. I found myself thinking of some lines from Job:
Oh that I were as in months past, as in the days when God preserved me; when his candle shined upon my head, and when by his light I walked through darkness …

Then suddenly, and for the first time, with the same kind of faint shivery chill at my spine and shoulders that announces the commencement of a fever—a prickle at my neck as if from the lighest passing touch of icy fingers—I began to fear the coming of my own death. It was not terror, it was not even panic; it was rather an apprehension and a faint one at that, an airless mounting sense of discomfort and uneasiness as if, knowing that I had eaten a piece of tainted pork, I was awaiting the cramps and the griping flux to come, the sweats and the gut-sickness. And somehow this sudden fear of death, or rather this tremulous and hesitant emotion which was more like a dull worry than fright, had less to do with death itself, with the fact that I must soon die, than with my inability to pray or make any kind of contact with God. I mean, it was not that I had wanted to beseech God because I was afraid of dying; it was rather that my own failure in praying to Him had caused me now this troublesome fear of death. I felt a trickle of sweat worm its humid way down the side of my forehead.

Now I could tell that the man they called Trezevant was approaching the end of my confessions, the voice at once slowing its pace and rising in tone on a note of dramatic finality: “ ‘… I immediately left my hiding place, and was pursued almost incessantly until I was taken a fortnight afterwards by Mr. Benjamin Phipps, in a little hole I had dug out with my sword, for the purpose of concealment, under the top of a fallen tree. On Mr. Phipps’s discovering the place of my concealment, he cocked his gun and aimed at me. I requested him not to shoot and I would give up, upon which he demanded my sword. I delivered it to him forthwith. During the time I was pursued, I had many hairbreadth escapes, which your time will not permit me to relate. I am here loaded with chains and willing to suffer the fate that awaits me …’”

Trezevant let the paper slip from his hand onto the table beside him and wheeled toward the six magistrates at the long bench, speaking quickly, almost without a pause, his next words surprisingly quiet but coming in such a rush that they seemed almost a continuation of my confessions: “If it may please this honorable court, the Commonwealth rests its case. All this here is self-evident and self-explained. It would be very unseemly to indulge in a prolixity of words after the simple fact of sech a document—each bloody and horrifying phrase of which reveals the prisoner setting here as a fiend beyond any parallel, a hell-born and degenerate mass-murderer the likes of which has been unknown to Christendom. Now, this is no elaboration on the truth; this is truth itself, your Honors. Search the annals of all time, uh-huh, pry into the darkest and obscurest chronicles of human bestiality and you will search in vain for the equal of sech villainy. Attila the Hun that they aptly called the Scourge of God—him that ransacked Rome and held the very Pope in thrall—the Chinese Khan, nicknamed Genji, that with his rapacious Mongol hordes laid waste to the great empires of the Orient; the nefarious General Ross, all too well known to most of those older people here still living, the cruel Englishman that in the conflict of 1812 devastated our capital of Washington, D.C.—
vipers
in human clothing
all,
yet not a man amongst them that does not tower as a pillar of virtue and rectitude along- side the monster setting here this day, right here, in this court of law …”