The Web and the Root

by Thomas Wolfe

  John Chapman heard the shots and ran forward. He came up to the corner by Joyner’s hardware store just as Dick’s shot sent poor Jim McIntyre sprawling to the ground. Mr. Chapman took up his position there at the corner behind the telephone pole. From this vantage point he took out his revolver and shot directly at Dick Prosser as he came up the street.

  By this time Dick was not over thirty yards away. He dropped quietly upon one knee and aimed. Mr. Chapman shot again and missed. Dick fired. The high-velocity bullet bored through the post a little to one side. It grazed the shoulder of John Chapman’s uniform and knocked a chip out of the monument sixty yards or more behind him in the center of the Square.

  Mr. Chapman fired again and missed. And Dick, still coolly poised upon his knee, as calm and steady as if he were engaging in a rifle practice, fired again, drilled squarely through the center of the pole, and shot John Chapman through the heart. Mr. Chapman dropped dead. Then Dick rose, pivoted like a soldier in his tracks, and started back down the street, right down the center of the car tracks, straight as a string, right out of town.

  THIS WAS THE story as they got it, pieced together like a train of fire among the excited groups of men that clustered there in trampled snow before the shattered glass of Joyner’s store.

  And the rifle? Where did he get it? From whom had he purchased it? The answer to this, too, was not long in coming.

  Mark Joyner denied instantly that the weapon had come from his store. At this moment there was a flurry in the crowd and Uncle Morris Teitlebaum, the pawnbroker, appeared, gesticulating volubly, clinging to a policeman. Bald-headed, squat, with the face of an old monkey, he protested shrilly, using his hands eloquently, and displaying craggy nuggins of gold teeth as he spoke.

  “Vell,” he said, “vhat could I do? His moaney vas good!” he said plaintively, lifting his hands and looking around with an expression of finality. “He comes with his moaney, he pays it down like every-bodies—I should say no?” he cried, with such an accent of aggrieved innocence that, in spite of the occasion, a few people smiled.

  Uncle Morris Teitlebaum’s pawn shop, which was on the right-hand side of South Main Street, and which Dick had passed less than an hour before in his murderous march towards town, was, unlike Joyner’s hardware store, securely protected at night by strong bars over the doors and show windows.

  But now, save for these groups of talking men, the town again was silent. Far off, in the direction of the river and the Wilton Bottoms, they could hear the low and mournful baying of the hounds. There was nothing more to see or do. Mark Joyner stooped, picked up some fragments of the shattered glass, and threw them in the window. A policeman was left on guard, and presently all five of them—Mr. Shepperton, Mark Joyner, and the three boys—walked back across the Square and got into the car and drove home again.

  BUT THERE WAS no more sleep for anyone that night. Black Dick had murdered sleep. Towards daybreak snow began to fall again. It continued through the morning. It was piled deep in gusting drifts by noon. All footprints were obliterated. The town waited, eager, tense, wondering if the man could get away.

  They did not capture him that day, but they were on his trail From time to time throughout the day news would drift back to them. Dick had turned east along the river to the Wilton Bottoms and, following the river banks as closely as be could, he had gone out for some miles along the Fairchilds road. There, a mile or two from Fairchilds, he crossed the river at the Rocky Shallows.

  Shortly after daybreak a farmer from the Fairchilds section had seen him cross a field. They picked the trail up there again and followed it across the field and through a wood. He had come out on the other side and got down into the Cane Creek section, and there, for several hours, they lost him. Dick had gone right down into the icy water of the creek and walked upstream a mile or so. They brought the dogs down to the creek, to where he broke the trail, took them over to the other side and scented up and down.

  Towards five o’clock that afternoon they picked the trail up on the other side, a mile or more upstream. From that point on they began to close in on him. He had been seen just before nightfall by several people in the Lester township. The dogs followed him across the fields, across the Lester road, into a wood. One arm of the posse swept around the wood to head him off. They knew they had him. Dick, freezing, hungry, and unsheltered, was hiding in that wood. They knew he couldn’t get away. The posse ringed the wood and waited until morning.

  At seven-thirty the next morning he made a break for it. He almost got away. He got through the line without being seen, crossed the Lester road, and headed back across the fields in the direction of Cane Creek. And there they caught him. They saw him plunging through the snowdrift of a field. A cry went up. The posse started after him.

  Part of the posse were on horseback. The men rode in across the field. Dick halted at the edge of the wood, dropped deliberately upon one knee, and for some minutes held them off with rapid fire. At two hundred yards he dropped Doc Lavender, a deputy, with a bullet through the throat.

  The posse came in slowly, in an encircling, flank-wise movement. Dick got two more of them as they closed in, and then, as slowly and deliberately as a trained soldier retreating in good order, still firing as he went, he fell back through the wood. At the other side he turned and ran down through a sloping field that bordered on Cane Creek. At the creek edge he turned again, knelt once more in the snow, and aimed.

  It was Dick’s last shot. He didn’t miss. The bullet struck Wayne Foraker, another deputy, dead center in the forehead and killed him in his saddle. Then the posse saw the negro aim again, and nothing happened. Dick snapped the cartridge breech open savagely, then hurled the gun away. A cheer went up. The posse came charging forward. Dick turned, stumblingly, and ran the few remaining yards that separated him from the cold and rock-bright waters of the creek.

  And here he did a curious thing—a thing that in later days was a subject of frequent and repeated speculation, a thing that no one ever wholly understood. It was thought that he would make one final break for freedom, that he would wade the creek and try to get away before they got to him. Instead, arrived at the creek, he sat down calmy on the bank, and, as quietly and methodically as if he were seated on his cot in an army barracks, he unlaced his shoes, took them off, placed them together neatly at his side, and then stood up like a soldier, erect, in his bare feet, and faced the mob.

  The men on horseback reached him first. They rode up around him and discharged their guns into him. He fell forward in the snow, riddled with bullets. The men dismounted, turned him over on his back, and all the other men came in and riddled him. They took his lifeless body, put a rope around his neck, and hung him to a tree. Then the mob exhausted all their ammunition on the riddled carcass.

  BY NINE O’CLOCK that morning the news had reached the town. Around eleven o’clock the mob came back, along the river road. A good crowd had gone out to meet it at the Wilton Bottoms. The sheriff rode ahead. Dick’s body had been thrown like a sack and tied across the saddle of the horse of one of the deputies he had killed.

  It was in this way, bullet-riddled, shot to pieces, open to the vengeful and the morbid gaze of all, that Dick came back to town. The mob came back right to its starting point in South Main Street. They halted there before an undertaking parlor, not twenty yards away from where Dick had halted last and knelt to kill John Chapman. They took that ghastly mutilated thing and hung it in the window of the undertaker’s place, for every woman, man, and child in town to see.

  And it was so they saw him last. Yes, they all had their look. In the end, they had their look. They said they wouldn’t look, Randy and Monk. But in the end they went. And it has always been the same with people. It has never changed. It never will. They protest. They shudder. And they say they will not go. But in the end they always have their look.

  Nebraska was the only one of the boys who didn’t lie about it. With that forthright honesty that was part of him, so strangely
wrought of innocence and of brutality, of heroism, cruelty, and tenderness, he announced at once that he was going, and then waited impatiently, spitting briefly and contemptuously from time to time, while the others argued out their own hypocrisy.

  At length they went. They saw it—that horrible piece of torn bait—tried wretchedly to make themselves believe that once this thing had spoken to them gently, had been partner to their confidence, object of their affection and respect. And they were sick with nausea and fear, for something had come into their lives they could not understand.

  The snow had stopped. The snow was going. The streets had been pounded into dirty mush, and before the shabby undertaking place the crowd milled and jostled, had their fill of horror, could not get enough.

  Within, there was a battered roll-top desk, a swivel chair, a cast-iron stove, a wilted fern, a cheap diploma cheaply framed, and, in the window, that ghastly relic of man’s savagery, that horrible hunk of torn bait. The boys looked and whitened to the lips, and craned their necks and looked away, and brought unwilling, fascinated eyes back to the horror once again, and craned and turned again, and shuffled in the slush uneasily, but could not go. And they looked up at the leaden reek of day, the dreary vapor of the sky, and, bleakly, at these forms and faces all around them—the people come to gape and stare, the pool-room loafers, the town toughs, the mongrel conquerors of earth—and yet, familiar to their lives and to the body of their whole experience, all known to their landscape, all living men.

  And something had come into life—into their lives—that they had never known about before. It was a kind of shadow, a poisonous black-ness filled with bewildered loathing. The snow would go, they knew; the reeking vapors of the sky would clear away. The leaf, the blade, the bud, the bird, then April, would come back again—and all of this would be as if it had never been. The homely light of day would shine again familiarly. And all of this would vanish as an evil dream. And yet not wholly so. For they would still remember the old dark doubt and loathing of their kind, of something hateful and unspeakable in the souls of men. They knew that they would not forget.

  Beside them a man was telling the story of his own heroic accomplishments to a little group of fascinated listeners. Monk turned and looked at him. He was a little ferret-faced man with a furtive and uneasy eye, a mongrel mouth, and wiry jaw muscles.

  “I was the first one to git in a shot,” he said. “You see that hole there?” He pointed with a dirty finger, “That big hole right above the eye?”

  They turned and goggled with a drugged and feeding stare.

  “That’s mine,” the hero said, and turned briefly to the side and spat tobacco juice into the slush. “That’s where I got him. Hell, after that he didn’t know what hit him. The son-of-a-bitch was dead before he hit the ground. We all shot him full of holes then. The whole crowd came and let him have it. But that first shot of mine was the one that got him. But, boy!” he paused a moment, shook his head, and spat again. “We sure did fill him full of lead. Why, hell yes,” he declared positively, with a decisive movement of his head, “we counted up to 287. We must have put 300 holes in him.”

  And Nebraska, fearless, blunt, outspoken, as he always was, turned abruptly, put two fingers to his lips and spat between them, widely and contemptuously.

  “Yeah—we!” he grunted. “We killed a big one! We—we killed a b’ar, we did!…Come on, boys,” he said gruffly, “let’s be on our way!”

  And, fearless and unshaken, untouched by any terror or any doubt, he moved away. And two white-faced, nauseated boys went with him.

  A DAY OR two went by before anyone could go into Dick’s room again. Monk went in with Randy and his father. The little room was spotless, bare, and tidy as it had always been. Nothing had been changed or touched. But even the very bare austerity of that little room now seemed terribly alive with the presence of its recent black tenant. It was Dick’s room. They all knew that. And somehow they all knew that no one else could ever live there again.

  Mr. Shepperton went over to the table, picked up Dick’s old Bible that still lay there, open and face downward, held it up to the light and looked at it, at the place that Dick had marked when he last read in it. And in a moment, without speaking to them, he began to read in a quiet voice:

  “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for Thou art with me….”

  Then Mr. Shepperton closed the book and put it down upon the table, the place where Dick had left it. And they went out the door, he locked it, and they went back into that room no more, forever.

  THE YEARS PASSED, and all of them were given unto time. They went their ways. But often they would turn and come again, these faces and these voices of the past, and burn there in George Webber’s memory again, upon the muted and immortal geography of time.

  And all would come again—the shout of the young voices, the hard thud of the kicked ball, and Dick moving, moving steadily, Dick moving, moving silently, a storm-white world and silence, and something moving, moving in the night. Then he would hear the furious bell, the crowd a-clamor and the baying of the dogs, and feel the shadow coming that would never disappear. Then he would see again the little room, the table and the book. And the pastoral holiness of that old psalm came back to him, and his heart would wonder with perplexity and doubt.

  For he had heard another song since then, and one that Dick, he knew, had never heard and would not have understood, but one whose phrases and whose imagery, it seemed to him, would suit Dick better:

  Tiger! Tiger! burning bright

  In the forests of the night,

  What immortal hand or eye

  Could shape thy fearful symmetry?

  What the hammer? what the chain?

  In what furnace was thy brain?

  What the anvil? what dread grasp

  Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

  When the stars threw down their spears,

  And water’d heaven with their tears,

  Did he smile his work to see?

  Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

  What THE HAMMER? What the chain? No one ever knew. It was a mystery and a wonder. It was unexplained. There were a dozen stories, a hundred clues and rumors; all came to nothing in the end. Some said that Dick had come from Texas, others that his home had been in Georgia. Some said it was true that he had been enlisted in the army, but that he had killed a man while there and served a term at Leavenworth. Some said he had served in the army and had received an honorable discharge; but had later killed a man and had served a term in the state prison in Louisiana. Others said that he had been an army man but that he had “gone crazy,” that he had served a period in an asylum when it was found that he was insane, that he had escaped from this asylum, that he had escaped from prison, that he was a fugitive from justice at the time he came to them.

  But all these stories came to nothing. Nothing was ever proved. Nothing was ever found out. Men debated and discussed these things a thousand times—who and what he had been, what he had done, where he had come from—and all of it came to nothing. No one knew the answer.

  He came from darkness. He came out of the heart of darkness, from the dark heart of the secret and undiscovered South. He came by night, just as he passed by night. He was night’s child and partner, a token of the wonder and the mystery, the other side of man’s dark soul, his nighttime partner, and his nighttime foal, a symbol of those things that pass by darkness and that still remain, of something still and waiting in the night that comes and passes and that will abide, a symbol of man’s evil innocence, and the token of his mystery, a projection of his own unfathomed quality, a friend, a brother, and a mortal enemy, an unknown demon—our loving friend, our mortal enemy, two worlds together—a tiger and a child.

 
CHAPTER 9

  Home from the Mountain

  The winter when he was fifteen years of age, on Sundays and in the afternoons after school, George would go for long walks with his uncle on the mountains above the town and in the coves and valleys on the other side. There had always been a quality of madness in his uncle, and his years of living bound to Mag had sharpened it, intensified it, built it up and held it to the point of passion and demonic fury where at times he shook and trembled with the frenzy of it and had to get away, out of that house, to calm his tortured soul. And when this happened to Mark Joyner, he hated all his life and everything about it, and sought the desolation of the mountains. There, in bleak and wintry winds, he found as nowhere else on earth some strange and powerful catharsis.

  THESE EXPEDITIONS WROUGHT upon the spirit of the boy the emotions of loneliness, desolation, and wild joy with a strong and focal congruence of desire, a blazing intensity of sensual image, he had never known before. Then as never before, he saw the great world beyond the wintry hills of home, and felt the huge, bitter conflict of those twin antagonists, those powers discrete that wage perpetual warfare in the lives of all men living—wandering forever and the earth again.

  Wild, wordless, and unutterable, but absolutely congruent in his sense of their irreconcilable and inexplicable coherence, his spirit was torn as it had never been before by the strange and bitter unity of that savage conflict, that tormenting oneness of those dual and contending powers of home and hunger, absence and return. The great plantation of the earth called him forth forever with an intolerable longing of desire to explore its infinite mystery and promise of glory, power, and triumph, and the love of women, its magic wealth and joy of new lands, rivers, plains, and mountains, its crowning glory of the shining city. And he felt the strong, calm joy of evening for doors and fences, a light, a window, and a certain faith, the body and the embrace of a single and unwearied love.