William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (168 page)

Presently I felt Willis stir on the seat and sensed the other boys moving about behind me; then I woke with a start and realized that the mules had stopped. Here in the moonlight at the end of the trace I saw the log road stretching east and west through the weeds and now against the trees the outline of the Vaughans’ wagon, huge and canvas-covered and motionless, the floppy white roof making it look like the picture of a sailing ship, foundered now upon the edge of the forest. The figures of two white men disengaged themselves from the shadows of the wagon, and one of them—a portly gentleman with a plump aging face beneath a shiny wide-brimmed planter’s hat—approached as we sat there, and said to me in a not-disagreeable voice: “You Abraham?”

“Nawsuh,” I said. “I’se Nat. I’se de numbah-two driver. Abraham he done took sick, yassuh, ’deed he took real sick.” Nigger gabble.

He drew closer to the wagon and all of a sudden a tinkling musical sound and a jaunty little tune interrupted the silence, sending a spooky chill up my back, and then I saw that the man had taken from his vest a silver watch and had opened it, and that it was from this watch that the music was coming, in miraculous plinkety notes, as if he held a tiny spinet piano and tiny pianist—I thought of one of the berib-boned Turner ladies—imprisoned in his hand. My wonderstruck eyes must have betrayed me, for the man said then: “Quite a little timepiece, no? A triumph of the watchmaker’s art. That, my boy, is Loodwig van Beethoven.” He snapped the watch shut, strangling the music in mid-passage. “And you are no more than ten minutes late and deserve praise for your promptitude. Look alive, boy!” He tossed up at me a plug of chewing tobacco, which I caught in midair. “Now then, Abe—or what’s your name—you have four young hands for the Vaughans here, right? And a paper for me to sign which you will take back to your master.” He turned aside from me for an instant and called in a breezy, amiable voice toward the back of the wagon: “All right, boys! Up now into the other wagon! Hop to, lads! We’ve nearly to Greensville County to go tonight.” Willis and the other boys scrambled down off their perch and moved somnolently toward the Vaughans’ great white wagon across the road. “Sleepyheads, I see!” he said with a chuckle. “Well, you’ll find the Major’s wagon a cozy enough place for a snooze. Hop to now, me young bucks I Hurry up and we’ll be on our way!”

“Good-bye, Nat,” Willis said, starting across the road.

I made a silent, parting wave to Willis and watched as the man spread the paper which Abraham had given me against the footboard beneath my legs and scratched something across it with a stubby quill, humming to himself in a breathy, hoarse voice the same tune he had just let loose from his watch.
“Todd,”
he whispered,
“Jim, Shadrach, Willis
… There, boy,” he added finally, “You take that receipt back to your master, and mind that you don’t lose your way. Go home straight away, do you hear me? Good night, laddie.”

“Good night, massah,” I said. I watched him cross the log road and mount the wagon with slow and corpulent difficulty, seating himself next to the other white man, a shaggy blur in the moonlight, who tapped all four mules into an ambling start, then gave the hindmost mule a sharp and savage stroke with his whip, causing the wagon to sway out of the ditch, groaning as it picked up a ponderous sluggish speed and continued to totter and sway in a precarious lopsided angle above the log road and with a great noise like the collision of countless barrels gained a final momentum, the uproar diminishing as the white shape passed westward through the moon’s relentless glare and out of sight.

The Vaughans’ ain’t west, I thought. The Vaughans’ place is east.

I sat there without moving. One of my mules stamped wearily, setting the traces to jingling. Around me in the woods the sound of frogs was deafening, shrilling in a ceaseless insensate choir like wind through a million reeds. Almost imperceptibly the moon sank slowly behind a thicket of cypress trees, and the log road was shadowed in a tangle of bent silhouetted limbs and branches, black as human arms. From the south a gentle breeze sprang up and I heard a whispering and a stirring across the leafy roof of the forest.

“Lord?” I said aloud.

Still I listened to the soft and sibilant rustling among the moonlit treetops, and I held my breath as if waiting for the sound of some immanent, hovering voice.

“Lord?”
I called again. But as I sat listening the wind died, and along with it the whispering and rustling, the unspoken voice, and the night once again was enveloped in a shrilling of frogs, the ripe hot chirruping of katydids among the trees.

I must have waited there for an hour or more. Then slowly I started back—with an emptiness such as I had never felt before—knowing that I did not have to read the paper in my hand to make me sure of what I already knew, thinking miserably, fiercely: Willis. And those boys! Gone, Lord. Plain gone for good! Listen, Lord. Not hired out, not Vaughan’s, not anything but that man with the watch who was nothing but a nigger trader. Simple as that, yes, Lord! Not hired out but Jesus Christ Almighty sold … Sold, Lord, sold!

And he was saying: “One might think I was a blockhead not to know why you’ve been moping around for so long and regarding me so accusingly. But though I will take the blame for poor management of an already bungled transaction, I will have to still steadfastly defend myself from any charge of insensibility. For is that not what you find me guilty of?”

“I don’t understand what that word means,” I said. “The charge of—something.”

“The charge of insensibility. The charge that I somehow blithely allowed you to arrange to take the boy to a camp meeting while fully aware that he was to be sold before you ever got to Jerusalem. Which brings me to another matter that I should mention in passing. And that is the camp meeting itself. I was in Jerusalem that Friday, which as you may remember was the first day of the revival. I believe I counted no more than twenty-four of the faithful, not including several stray cats and dogs, at the meeting grounds. They packed up and left the next day, and had you gone there with your wagonload of wild-eyed apostles you would have been greeted by a deserted field of grass. Which only goes to show that this benighted countryside cannot sustain a religious revival any more than it can feed itself. So I mention in passing that I saved you from a bad disappointment. But as for the lad in question, I must only repeat that I had no more idea that you were taking
him
to that camp meeting than I had knowledge that the two of you were what you describe as inseparable friends. Lacking eyes in the back of my head, or a seventh sense, I can scarcely be asked to mark the relationship between every human being among the eighty or so of all colors that exist on this property. And I think it was a great Frenchman, Voltaire, who said that the beginning of wisdom is the moment when one understands how little concerned with one’s own life are other men, they who are so desperately preoccupied with their own. I knew
nothing
about you and that boy, nothing at all.”

I remained silent, wetting my lips with my tongue and feeling desolate and miserable, gazing at the library floor.

“I have told you more than once now that had you come to me the next day and stated your case—had you made yourself immediately clear instead of for two weeks casting me these looks of
canine
reproach—I should have taken steps to get the boy back, buy him back even though that might mean money and travel to an extent quite out of the ordinary. But I must try to convince you that surely by now he has passed through the Petersburg market—though even of the place I cannot be really certain, it may be that he was taken to a sale in Carolina—whatever, that he has been passed on into some buyer’s hands and must now be on the way to Georgia or Alabama, though one can hope that a kindly providence has seen fit that he somehow remain in Virginia. This, however, I sincerely doubt. The fact remains that he would now seem to be all but irrecoverable. I am in no way blaming you for lacking the presence of mind to come to me earlier when I may have been able to do something about it. I am only asking you now to try to understand the impossibility of my position. Do you see what I mean?”

“Yes,” I said after a moment. “Yes, I do but—”

“Yes,
but
again,” he interrupted, “you are still eaten up about that one thing that will not let you alone. Even though you say you told him of your own surprise, you are devoured by the terrible idea that the boy for the rest of his life will think that you were a party to, an accomplice in, his disposal. Am I correct in this? Isn’t that what you said you are unable to shake from your mind?”

“Yes,” I replied, “that’s right.”

“Then what can I say? Say that I too am sorry? I’ve said that over and over to you before. Perhaps he will think that, perhaps not. Possibly it would be better for your peace of mind if you envisioned him thinking charitably of you—if indeed it occurs to him to think of you as being involved in his disposition at all—envisioned him thinking of you only as an unwitting and ignorant dupe in the whole transaction, which you were. But if he thinks otherwise, I can only repeat again and for the last time that I am sorry. There is nothing else that I can say. Understand again: I had no idea that Abraham would fall ill and that you would become the—the instrument by which those boys were delivered into—into other hands.” He halted then and looked at me, lapsing into silence.

“But—” I began slowly, “but I—”

“But what?”

“All right,” I went on, “I see pretty well, I guess, about Willis, you didn’t know about him and I. How I was teaching him and all. But this other thing I don’t understand. I mean, going out at night like that and thinking they was going to be hired out at the Vaughans’.” I paused. “I mean, everyone was going to know what really happened anyway, by and by. Or not by and by. Soon.”

He looked away from me and when he spoke at last his voice was faint and faraway; suddenly I realized how weary he seemed, how gaunt were his cheeks and how red-rimmed and vacant were his eyes. “I will be truthful with you. I was quite simply troubled—afraid. I got confused, lost my bearings. Only twice do I recall darkies ever being sold away from here—both times by my father, both of the darkies, I’m afraid, crazy people who were a threat to the community. Furthermore and aside from that, there has never until now been any need. So I had never sold off hands before, and as I have readily admitted, it was a bungled transaction. I had not wanted the word to get around, I was afraid of the trouble and unrest that would ensue once the darkies knew that some of the people were being sold. So in my confusion I conceived the idea of disposing of the first four under the cover of night and in the guise of a fortnight’s hire to Major Vaughan. I thought that somehow the shock would be less this way, that it would be easier for the place to become accustomed to their absence. Worst of all, I conspired with a trader. It was folly to expect anything to come of this method. It was devious and cowardly. The duplicity I The masquerade! I should have done it in broad daylight with all the plantation as gaping onlookers to a plain and simple sale, with money changing hands in full view. Of the entire proceedings the only redeeming feature may be that at least I tried to make certain that my first sale would involve no separation of families. It was unfortunate for you, perhaps imponderably unfortunate for your young friend, that my resolve to pick only boys who were old enough to make the break, boys who additionally had already been orphaned and who thus had no family ties to sever—well, it was unfortunate that
he
was one of four who answered to that description.” He halted again, remaining silent, then said in a faint voice: “I’m sorry. God, how sorry I am, that Willie …”

“Willis,”
I said. “And so you just had to sell them. There just wasn’t any other way.”

His back was to me now, he stood facing the great high window open to the spring garden, and his voice, dim enough at the outset, was barely audible and I had to strain to hear it, as if it belonged to someone so infirm and depleted, or so lacking in spirit or hope, that whether the words could be understood was at last a matter of indifference. He went on as if he hadn’t heard me.

“Well, soon all of them will be gone—everything—not just the land now utterly consumed by that terrible weed, not just the wagons and the pigs and the oxen and the mules but the men too, the white men and the women and the black boys—the Willies and the Jims and the Shadrachs and the Todds—all gone south, leaving Virginia to the thorn bushes and the dandelions. And all this we see here will be gone too, and the mill wheel will crumble away and the wind will whistle at night through these deserted halls. Mark my word. It is coming soon.”

He paused, then said: “Yes, I had to sell those boys because I needed the money. Because anything non-human I had to sell was unsellable. Because those boys were worth over a thousand dollars and only through their sale could I begin to make the slightest inroad upon those debts I have accumulated for seven years—seven years during which I have lied to myself night and day in an effort to believe that what I saw around me was an illusion, that this mutilated and broken Tidewater would survive in spite of itself, that no matter how wrecked and eaten up the soil, no matter how many men and chattel began to move south to Georgia and Alabama, Turner’s Mill would forever be here grinding out timber and meal. But now it is timber and meal for ghosts.” He ceased speaking for a moment, then again the weary voice resumed: “What should I have done instead? Set them free? What a ghastly joke! No, they had to be sold, and the rest of them will be sold too, and soon Turner’s Mill will stand a dead hulk like the others on the landscape, and somewhere in the far South people may remember it but it will be remembered as if it were the fragment of a dream.”

For a long time now he fell silent and then finally he said (or I
think
he spoke my name, I was straining so hard to hear),
“Nat
…” And when he spoke again, his voice was the barest murmur as if whispering from the far bank of a stream against a rising wind. “I sold them out of the desperation to hang on pointlessly a few years longer.” He made an abrupt gesture with his lifted arm, and it seemed that he passed his hand in a quick angry motion across his eyes. “Surely mankind has yet to be born.
Surely
this is true! For only something blind and uncomprehending could exist in such a mean conjunction with its own flesh, its own kind. How else account for such faltering, clumsy, hateful cruelty? Even the possums and the skunks know better! Even the weasels and the meadow mice have a natural regard for their own blood and kin. Only the insects are low enough to do the low things that people do—like those ants that swarm on poplars in the summertime, greedily husbanding little green aphids for the honeydew they secrete. Yes, it could be that mankind has yet to be born. Ah, what bitter tears God must weep at the sight of the things that men do to other men!” He broke off then and I saw him shake his head convulsively, his voice a sudden cry: “In the name of money!
Money!”