William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (17 page)

The garbage heaps and junk piles have disappeared; the creek, down which the hearse and limousine traveled a parallel route, winds through a lovely meadow. Only the gas tanks, rising from the adjacent marsh, and the remnants of a deserted brewery, disturb the peacefulness of the scene. From here as far as the eye can see stretch the bay, the river and, obscured by a curtain of smoke, the distant sea. In the heat of midday, among the surrounding inlets and shallows, boys go hunting for shrimp; the marshgrass and cattails are motionless; the bleached ribs of a discarded rowboat lie half-buried in the sand, among driftwood, shells, seaweed like crumpled green banners. There is a tarry odor here, a strong smell of sea; above, the flaunting wings of seagulls tilt and recover, over the passing ships, the sound of bell-buoys and the sea itself, where dead men wash and turn and tremble and yield up to remote fathoms—perhaps on a summer noon like this—their inhabiting bones. The meadow is windless and peaceful, insects make a fitful drowsing sound; in August all the Negroes gather here with Daddy Faith, who drives down once a year from Baltimore, to find peace, redemption, the cleansing of the sea.

As the limousine rolled through the meadow Dolly watched the gas tanks approach; they frightened her, and again the monstrous thought rose up fearfully in her mind: He doesn’t love me anymore. An act only of desperation, she knew—the way he had come to get her this morning, out of habit alone, maybe, and just because Helen wouldn’t come. An awful dread seized her; the car dipped into a depression in the road and instinctively she reached for his arm, as if for support, but held her hand in mid-air, and let it fall on the seat. She closed her eyes: oh, please, God.

Most people in the midst of disaster have yet one hope that lingers on some misty horizon—the possibility of love, money coming, the assurance that time cures all hurts, no matter how painful. But Loftis, gazing out at the meadow, had no such assurance; his deposit, it seemed, on all of life’s happiness had been withdrawn in full and his heart had shriveled within him like a collapsed balloon. He was not philosophical, he had never been trained that way, nor had he ever wanted to be. Emergencies had been things to get shut of quickly and to forget, and because in the past he had always been able to create some gratuitous hope, he had never had to believe in God. But hope. Yes: of course. Helen—she will come back to me. Faint, blurred as a mirage, he thought he saw columns of dust wreathing skyward from the farthest rim of the meadow; reflecting sunlight, huge, they ascended, spiraling: he saw weeds, sky, a ghost. I will cure her, make her well. Today I will tell her: Our love never went away at all. Sweating, he narrowed his eyes, half-shut: a wisp of a smile flew across his lips—
My love—
and the gas tanks rose abruptly out of the marsh beside them. The air was full of coal gas, the odor of fish. The hearse slowed down, steam billowing from the hood. Then the hearse stopped and Mr. Casper, throwing on the brakes with a jerk, halted the limousine behind it. There was a barricade, distant confusion: music, singing, jubilation. A crowd of Negroes in turbans and white robes were milling around a glistening Cadillac convertible.

“What is it?” Dolly said.

Ella Swan leaned forward on her seat. “It’s Daddy Faith,” she whispered. Perched on a seat of the Cadillac, Daddy Faith was bestowing grace upon the crowd. He was smiling; his face, black as night, was greasy with sweat. He made a wide arc with his hand, half a dozen diamond rings spun and glittered, and his shiny opera hat and diamond stickpin made beautiful flashes above the throng. A sigh, vast and reverential, went up from the crowd—Aaaaah!—and a shower of dollar bills, nickels, dimes and quarters cascaded over Daddy Faith, over the car and onto the ground. A band began to play, brassy, jubilant—and a big bass drum.

“Happy am I!” the crowd was singing.

Thump

“In my Redeemer!”

“Happy am I!”

“I am so happy!”

Thump

“Those Negroes,” Mr. Casper said, “are having some kind of revival or something. We’ll have to detour down that road.”

Hearse and limousine dipped toward the marsh, lurching over a cinder road. The Negroes rose up above them, unheeding, exalted, a mass of shifting robes, black arms lifted toward the sky, and Ella, peering out, said in a tone infinitely wistful as she turned, raising her hand to wave: “Hey there, Daddy.”

The limousine heeled alarmingly. “Oh dear,” Dolly said, “where are we going?”

Where indeed? Loftis thought: Does she always have to ask that?

The brewery towered over them, brick spires and battlements tumbling into decay. Trumpet vines and Virginia creeper and honeysuckle trailed over the parapets. Loftis looked upward. Now on fine Saturday afternoons amid the damp odor of hollyhock and dandelion, the glow of sunlight on crumbling stone, small boys would throw rocks, shatter what windows were left after all these years and shout fearfully through the echoing, deserted halls.

“Where are we going?”

Where indeed. We are going to bury my daughter, whom I loved.

The gas tanks rose up enormously; the Negroes, all singing, vanished behind those lordly, rustling forms. The Negroes would reappear. The gas tanks were old; God knew how ancient they were. Venomous weeds grew here, and tatterdemalion flowers, white, blue and rose; among crevices in the rust and tangled ancient iron a lizard would peep out drunkenly at the burning sun. Loftis looked upward. Gas tanks as old as time, here in the marsh and weeds, seaward-facing, ageless, from the lovely Virginia shores.

Salt air blew through the car; from the floor arose a thousand motes of dust. The gas tanks swept past. The Negroes reappeared, singing.

Happy am I

In my Redeemer!

Oh, Helen, come back to me.

A
LL
the way over to Helen’s, indeed the entire morning, the Reverend Carey Carr had been thinking: Poor Helen, poor Helen. That and nothing more, for a predicament, overwhelming and hopeless, such as this one, couldn’t be helped by piety, or prayers, either; it was the human condition alone that he must minister to, and by flimsy human means, and so it was nothing but poor Helen, poor Helen that he thought, over and over. He drew up near the curb beneath a stoplight. Downsloping, the highway reflected sunlight, shimmering heat, and his automobile, a Chevrolet coupe, began to drift across the pedestrian walk. He pulled the emergency brake, looking around him. There was a clock above a corner barbecue stand, neon-blue in the midday sun. It was after eleven-thirty, and he would be late.

Carey Carr wore spectacles and he had a cleft chin. At forty-two he still looked very young, with round plump cheeks and a prissy mouth, yet to people who knew him this air of cherubic vacancy and bloodlessness, at first so apparent, quickly faded; one knew that this face could reflect decision and an abiding passion. As a very young man, he had tried to embrace all of the beauty of the world, and had failed. At sixteen he was a poet, convinced that the fact that he wasn’t very masculine was still somehow tragic, noble even, and born of a fatal necessity. He was an only child. His mother, a widow, had fine liquid eyes, lovely skin which curved tautly over the fragile arch of her cheekbones and drew her lips outward and down, so that it always looked as if she were sorrowing a little over something. But it was really not sorrow. She was actually a sweet, thoughtful woman, with a certain old-fashioned gaiety about her, and she loved Carey more than anything. She encouraged his sensitive nature. When he was seventeen she packed him off to Washington and Lee where an old, famous poet was in residence. But it was a mistake. Beguiled to a certainty of his own genius, Carey wrote a sonnet a day for nearly a year and finally, hopeful but exhausted, took them to the poet—three hundred sonnets in a purple binder—not so much for appraisal as for admiration. What a mistake it was! The poet was a petulant and whalelike man who had resolved most of his problems in eating and in waspish, continual chatter about boys on the campus whom he suspected of perversion. He wrote poetry no longer, and had in fact developed a contempt for poetry in general, except his own, which he recited on Saturday nights to the half-dozen young men who sat languidly on the floor around him drinking sherry. He tried to be gentle with Carey, but only succeeded in brutally telling the truth: the sonnets, the boy knew finally, were miserably bad. He had staked too much upon them, and his failure shattered his health and his wits. He had what was then known as a “nervous breakdown” and was hurried off by his mother, who lived in Richmond, to a Blue Ridge mountain sanitarium.

Eventually his beleaguered soul took strength. He began to read the Bible, at his mother’s prompting. The mountains soothed him; his mind soared again, but in a different way: he knew, with the same gathering ardor which had produced the sonnets, that God dwelt in the high slopes. He had had a vision which, it seemed to him in retrospect, had lasted many months. Feverish, his imagination took flight, lifted up into unearthly realms, high valleys, smoky with the spirit of the eternal; a blaze of light enveloped him and he knew later it was a glorious thing, for this radiance, surely, had been the light of heaven itself. But then to earth, gently, he was borne on the billow of light—shaken, immolated and vaguely unsatisfied. He resolved to become a minister, to retrieve his vision through a life of hard work and prayer. His mother encouraged him. “Carey, darling,” she would say, and her deep liquid eyes would grow soft and her mouth draw down, lovely and sad, “your grandfather was a man of the cloth and his father before him. Oh, it would make me so happy.” Perhaps she thought that through the mysteries of theology she could get an even stronger hold on him, keep him for her very own. But here, too, she was mistaken. For when Carey got out of the seminary in Alexandria a few years later he was a changed man. He had put on thirty pounds and through a violent struggle had learned how to swim and play softball, and had in general cast out his womanish failings, even realizing, in this new pleasing maturity, a passionate affair with a girl who worked as secretary in one of the seminary offices. He married her quickly. A year later his mother died, crying in her last delirium that somehow she had been all her life tricked and cheated—of what, no one could presume to say—and imploring Adrienne, who was Carey’s bride, to take care of him and love him, as she herself had done.

He had been in Port Warwick for eighteen years, as assistant rector and then rector of St. Mark’s Protestant Episcopal Church. He had three daughters, to the youngest of whom, Linda Byrd, age five, he gave a moment’s thought now as he paused at the stoplight, since yesterday had been his birthday and he could smell the odor of a shaving lotion which she had presented to him, rising faintly from his cheeks. And as he thought of the little girl—just for a moment intruding upon his thoughts, which all morning had been largely dark and full of melancholy—he smiled, and smelled the shaving lotion. Then he remembered Helen Loftis, and his face became solemn once more, filled with the same youthful, abiding passion—a passion which, though he hadn’t ventured to think it such, was partly the strange and tragic sorrow he felt at never having been able to attain a complete vision of God, and partly devotion—devotion to his duty, a small thing, but which he performed as well as he could.

The light remained red for what seemed minutes. A laundry truck swerved out from behind his car and the driver, a youth with bare skinny arms and an underslung jaw, halted the truck with insolent dexterity beside him. The two of them exchanged listless glances and although Carey made the faintest beginning of a smile, the boy turned to study a clipboard with surly concentration. Carey turned, too, sweating, watching the light, still red, and the intersection where a suburban bus labored sluggishly through the heat, borne westward and out of sight as if upon the poisonous violet waves of its exhaust.

The light blinked “Go”; the laundry truck lurched forward, and with a peevish squealing of tires hurtled in front of him, past him, disappearing around behind the barbecue stand. He started forward; the air, circulating around his face, cooled him off a little, and, because of the heat, because of the urgency of the situation, he thought: I’ve just got to. And he began to speed down the highway at fifty miles an hour.

Carey lived at the opposite side of town from the Loftises. He rarely took this route to the section where the Loftises lived: although a faster way, if one wanted to speed, it was an ugly road, and he was partly conscious of it now: an asphalt highway traversing low marshland, neither industrial nor residential, but occupied by decrepit garages and hot-dog stands and the waterlogged tents of itinerant Madam Olgas and Doreens—palmists mostly—unhappily pitched between the visits of poor, inflamed, neurotic women, astray from God, and the monthly raids of the county sheriff. He saw such a tent now—set off in a grove of trees, with an old foreign woman in apron and spangled bandanna, turning beneath the pines with dim uncertain eyes to watch him. Then she was gone.

But Helen. What would he say to Helen? He feared seeing her, yet at the same time he knew that of all people it was he himself from whom she must draw the greatest strength today. Carey was confused by sorrow. Although he was certain that he felt and saw as deeply as any man, he
was
conservative and diffident by nature, and even after all these years he felt tongue-tied in the presence of those stricken by grief. He was made uneasy by unbraked hilarity and by extremes of sorrow alike, especially the latter; he preferred life to sail along pleasantly and evenly, and this, he knew, was for him a minor sort of tragedy. For, being so guarded and reserved, how could one ever hope to become a bishop?

Across the pinewoods the shadow of a hawk fled, a wraith, as black as smoke; the pines seemed to shake and tremble but the hawk vanished, sailing up over the roof of a filling station, a dusky shadow, wings outspread like something crucified. Carey looked at his watch: he’d have to hurry. He blew his horn, wheeled past another car recklessly, in spite of a third car, oncoming, looming ahead. His heart gave a leap but the maneuver was finished; the driver of the third car, which was not a car at all but a pickup truck, shook his fist as they passed and shouted something obscene. Trembling, he slowed down a little, thinking: That was close, and again: Poor Helen, poor Helen.