William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (187 page)

“Oh, the poor thing,” Margaret said again.

“Ain’t nothing but a turtle, missy,” I said.

“Oh, but it must suffer so.”

“I’ll put it away,” I replied.

She was silent for a moment, then said softly: “Oh yes, do.”

I found a hickory branch at the side of the road and smote the head of the turtle hard, a single time; its legs and tail quivered briefly, then relaxed with a soft uncurling motion, the tail drooped, and it was dead. When I threw the stick into the field and turned back to Margaret, I saw that her lips were trembling.

“ ’Twasn’t nothin’ but an old turtle, missy,” I said. “Turtle don’t feel anything. He’s pretty dumb. They’s an old nigger sayin’ about animals that goes, ‘They that doesn’t holler doesn’t hurt.’ ”

“Oh, I know it’s silly,” she said, composing herself. “It’s just—oh, suffering things.” Suddenly she put her fingers to her forehead. “I’m kind of dizzy. And it’s hot. Oh, I wish I could have a sip of water. I’m so thirsty.”

I kicked the turtle into the ditch.

“Well, they’s a brook that runs along back in those trees there,” I said. “Same brook that goes by yo’ mama’s place. It’s fit to drink here, I know, missy. I’d fetch you some water but I don’t have a thing to carry it in.”

“Oh come, we’ll walk,” she replied.

Her spirits brightened again as I led the way across a scrubby parched field toward the stream. “I’m really very sorry that I spoke of Charlotte Tyler Saunders in that fashion,” she said cheerfully behind me. “She’s really just the sweetest girl. And so talented.
Oh,
did I ever tell you about this masque that we wrote together, Nat?”

“No, missy,” I replied, “I don’t believe so.”

“Well, a masque is a sort of a play in verse—you spell it with a
q-u-e
on the end—and it’s quite short and it has to do with elevated themes—oh, I mean things of the spirit and philosophy and poetical matters and such like. Anyway, we did this masque together and it was performed at the Seminary last spring. It was
quite
some success, I can tell you that. I mean after it was performed, do you know, Dr. Simpson told Charlotte Tyler and me that it was the equal of dramas he had seen performed up North on the stages of Philadelphia and New York. And Mrs. Simpson—that’s his wife—told us that rarely if ever had she seen a performance that was so affecting and imbued with such lofty ideals. Those were her words. Anyway, this masque that we wrote is called
The Melancholy Shepherdess.
It’s laid in first-century Rome. In one way it’s very pagan but at the same time it exemplifies the highest aspirations of Christian belief. Anyway, there are these five characters. At the Seminary they were all played by girls, naturally. The heroine is a young shepherdess who lives on the outskirts of Rome named Celia. She is a very devout Christian. The hero is the young manor lord whose name is Philemon. He’s very handsome and everything, you see, and
au fond
he’s very kindly and good but his religion is still quite pagan. Actually, the truth is that his religion is animistic …”

As the dry field gave way to a patch of woods I could hear water splashing in the brook. The sunlight dimmed out as we entered the grove of trees; a ferny coolness enveloped me, there were pine needles underfoot and I smelled the sharp bittersweet odor of rosin. The closeness, the stillness, the seclusion here created once more a voluptuous stirring in my blood. I turned now to guide her by my glance, and for an instant her eyes met mine unflinchingly, not so much coquettish as insistent—inviting, daring, almost
expecting
my gaze to repose in her own eyes while she prattled blissfully on. Although as brief and fleeting as the space of a blink, it was the longest encounter I could remember ever having with a white person’s eyes. Unaccountably, my heart swelled in my throat in a quick ball of fear. I turned away, swept with lust again, hating her guts, now driven close to distraction by that chattering monologue pitched at a girlish whisper which I no longer bothered to listen to or to understand. Years and decades of pine needles made a buoyant sweet-smelling carpet sibilant beneath our feet. I paused to dislodge a pine branch that lay across our path, then rose, and she gave a little murmur of surprise as the fullness of her breast bumped the flesh of my arm in soft collision. But she paid it no notice, continued talking while we walked down toward the stream. I was oblivious of her words. The place where her breast had met my arm was like an incandescence, tingling; again I was smothered by remorseless desire. Insanely, I found myself measuring the risk.
Take her,
a voice said.
Take her here on this bank by this quiet brook. Spend upon her all afternoon a backed-up lifetime of passion. Without mercy take your pleasure upon her innocent round young body until she is half mad with fright and pain. Forget your great mission. Abandon all for these hours of terror and bliss
… I felt my virile part stiffen again beneath my trousers, and I was suddenly and absurdly torn between fear that she might see my state and an impulse to expose it to her—oh God, forget it, forget it! Never could I remember having been so unhinged by desire and hatred. Trying to settle my emotions I said in an uncertain voice, too loud: “There’s the water!”

“Oh, I’m so
thirsty!”
she exclaimed. Fallen trees made a little rapids here, and the water foamed over the logs cool and green. I watched as she knelt by the brook and brought pale cupfuls of water up to her face in the curved hollow of her hands.
Now,
the voice said,
take her now.

“Oh, that’s better!” she said, drawing back. “Don’t you want some, Nat?” And without waiting for an answer, went on: “Anyway, Nat, after this wicked Fidessa kills herself in remorse, then Philemon takes his sword and kills Pactolus, the evil old soothsayer. I played Philemon in our performance and that part was such fun, I mean with wooden swords and all. Then Philemon is converted to Christianity by Celia and in the very last scene you see them as they plight their troth. And then there are these last lines, I mean what is known on the stage as curtain speeches. That’s where Philemon holds his sword up in front of Celia like a cross and says:
We’ll love one another by the light of heaven above
…”

Margaret rose from her knees and turned, standing at the edge of the brook with her arms outstretched to the air, transfigured as if before a crowd of onlookers, her eyes half closed. “Then Celia says:
Oh, I would fain swoon into an eternity of love!

“Curtain! That’s all!” she said brightly, proudly, looking toward me. “Isn’t that a wonderful masque? I mean it has a very poetical, religious quality, even if I do say so myself.”

I made no reply, but now as she moved from the side of the stream she tripped, gave a little cry, and for the briefest instant fell against me, clasping my arms with her still-wet hands. I grabbed her about the shoulders—only as if to prevent her falling—and as quickly let her go, but not so quickly that in the intervening space I did not smell her skin and her closeness and feel the electric passage across my cheek of strands of chestnut-colored hair. During that moment I heard her breathing and our eyes met in a wayward glint of light that seemed to last much longer than any mere glance exchanged between two strangers journeying of a summer afternoon to some drowsy dwelling far off in the country.

Could it be, too, that I felt her relax, go the faintest bit limp, as she slumped against me? This I would never know, for swiftly we were apart; a cloud passed over the day, bringing shadows and a breeze which teased the loosened, wanton edges of her hair. The flicker of an instant then, no more, but she was frozen in an attitude of stiff, still death. As the wind rose there was a clatter in the trees like the noise of cataclysmic strife, and I was suddenly—without reason—inconsolable with an emptiness such as I have never known.

Then she trembled as if with a chill, saying gently, “We’d better hurry back, Nat.” And I, walking beside her now, replied, “Yes, missy,” and this was the last time—but for one—that I ever looked into her face.

We were ready. I knew that the exodus of many of the Baptists of the county to their camp meeting down in Carolina would commence on Thursday the eighteenth of August, and they would not return until the following Wednesday. And so for close on to a week Southampton would be deprived of a large portion of its white population, and the armed enemy would be considerably fewer both in Jerusalem and the outlying countryside. I hit upon Sunday night as the time to begin my assault, largely on the advice of Nelson, who pointed out with his usual shrewdness that Sunday nights were habitually the nights when Negroes went hunting for coon or possum, at least during the leisurely month of August; those evenings always resounded until dawn with a great commotion in the woods—hoots and shouts and the yapping of dogs—and so our own disturbance would be less likely to attract notice. Furthermore, it would be simply easier to assemble on Sunday, normally the Negroes’ free day. Seizing an early advantage by slaying all at Travis’s, equipping ourselves with his several guns and two horses, we should then be able to proceed along the lower loop of the great “S” I had laid out on the map and (after invading the properties in between and slaughtering all therein) arrive sometime the next day at the middle of the “S” and thus at what I had long since termed my “early objective“—Mrs. Whitehead’s home with its rich store of horses, guns, and ammunition. I would have by then a goodly body of troops. Including the Negroes I had “spotted” at the intervening houses (plus two of Miss Caty’s boys, Tom and Andrew; them I had easily recruited during my final stay), I calculated that upon leaving Mrs. Whitehead’s our force should number more than a score, apart from another four or five whom out of instinct I had not trusted enough to take into my earliest confidence but who I expected would join us when we appeared. Provided that we took the most extreme care to prevent anyone from escaping and raising an alarm, we should be able to sweep the rest of the country and arrive, triumphant, in Jerusalem by noon of the second day, our force swollen into the many hundreds.

Late that Sunday morning my four inmost followers gathered themselves for a final barbecue in the dense woodland ravine beyond my sanctuary. At the last moment, the night before, I had sent Hark up the road to the Reese farm with instructions for him to tell one of the Reese Negroes, Jack, to join the barbecue and so become a member of our initial striking force. I had felt the need for a strong arm to augment our first blow, and Jack fitted the requisite details—weighing well over two hundred pounds and by luck boiling at a high pitch of resentment and wrath: only one week before, Jack’s woman, a butter-skinned, almond-eyed beauty, had been sold to a Tennessee trader scrounging quite openly he allowed to planter Reese (and within Jack’s hearing), “for likely-looking pussy for gov’mental gentlemen in Nashville.” Jack would go with me to the far ends of the earth; certainly he would make quick work of Reese.

All morning and most of the afternoon I withdrew from my followers, remaining near my sanctuary, where I read from my Bible and prayed for the Lord’s favor in battle. The weather had become sultry and close, and as I prayed a single locust shrilled somewhere amid the trees, playing like an incessant tormented fiddle-string on my eardrums. After my long prayers I set fire to my tabernacle and stood aside from the clearing as the pine logs which had for so many years sheltered me went up in blue smoke and a roaring and crackling of flames. Then when the ashes had cooled I knelt amid the ruin and made a final prayer, beseeching God for his protection in the coming struggle:
The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?

It was just after I had risen from my knees that I heard a rustling in the underbrush behind me and turned to see the demented, murderous, hate-ravaged, mashed-in face of Will. He said nothing, merely looked at me with his bulging eyes and scratched at his naked black scarred belly below which a pair of gray jeans hung in tatters. I was seized by reasonless fear.

“What you doin’ here, boy?” I blurted.

“I seed de smoke. Den I done seed dem niggers down dere in de gully,” Will replied coolly. “Dey done gib me some barbecue. I heered dem talkin’ ’bout startin’ a ruction an’ killin’ de white folks. When I ax Sam an’ Nelson if’n I could jine up dey
tol’
me to ax you.”

“Where you been all these yere weeks?” I asked. “Nat Francis see you an’ he’ll shoot you dead.”

“Don’
shit me ’bou
t no Nat Francis,” Will retorted. “I shoot
him
now!”

“Where you been?” I repeated.

“Aroun’,” he replied. “All aroun’.” He shrugged. His eyes caught the light in disks of malign fire, and I felt anew the old dread his presence always caused me, as if I had been suddenly trapped like a fly in the hatred he bore toward all mankind, all creation. His woolly head was filled with cockleburs. A scar glistened on his black cheek, shiny as an eel cast up on a mud bank. I felt that if I reached out I could almost touch with my fingertips the madness stirring within him, feel a shaggy brute heaving beneath a carapace of scarred black skin. I turned away.

“You git on out of here,” I said. “We don’ need no more men.”

Abruptly, in a single bound from the underbrush, he was at my side. He brandished a knobbed fist beneath my chin. “Don’
shit
me, preacher man!” he said. His voice was the hiss of a cornered cat. “You try an’ shit me, preacher man, an’ you in
bad
trouble. I isn’t run in de woods all dis yere time fo’ nothin’. I’se tired of huckaberries. I gwine git me some meat now—
white
meat. I gwine git me some dat white cunt too.” For weeks he had hidden in the woods, grubbing for berries and nuts and earthworms—even carrion—stealing an occasional chicken in between times of pursuit by white men and dogs; he had lived like an animal and now, streaked with mud, stinking, fangs bared beneath a nose stepped upon and bent like a flattened spoon, it seemed to me that he
was
an animal—a wicked little weasel or maddened fox—and the blood ran chill in my veins. I felt that he might at any moment leap for my throat. “You shit me, preacher man,” he said hoarsely, “an’ I fix yo’ preacher ass! I knock you to yo fuckin’ black knees! I isn’t gwine hang out in de swamp no mo’ eatin’ huckaberries. I gwine git me some
meat.
I gwine git me some
blood.
So, preacher man, you better figger dat Will done jined de ruction! You maybe is some fancy talker but you isn’t gwine talk Will out’n dat!”