The Accursed
Page 66
IN THIS WAY NOT ONLY STRIKERS WERE KILLED BUT WOMEN AND CHILDREN AS WELL.
THUS, MY SERVANT WINSLOW SLADE, IN WHOM I AM WELL PLEASED.
SOON THEN THE GOVERNOR RETIRED FROM PUBLIC OFFICE, SICKENED IN HIS GUTS. FOR THE STINKING STEW OF POLITICS HE COULD NOT STOMACH, EVEN HE WHO DWELT IN SIN. RETIRING FROM PUBLIC LIFE WITH A CLAIM OF WISHING TO RETURN TO THE MINISTRY AND TO THE CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE; TAKING REFUGE AT THE MANSE, AND ATTEMPTING SOME HUMAN ALIGNMENT AT LAST, WITH HIS GRANDCHILDREN.
FOR THERE WERE FOUR GRANDCHILDREN, WHOM HE LOVED MORE THAN LIFE ITSELF, AND FAR MORE THAN HE LOVED HIS OWN TAINTED BEING.
JOSIAH, AND ANNABEL, AND TODD, AND ORIANA—THESE BLESSINGS THE LORD GOD HAD GIVEN ME, I KNEW NOT WHY; BUT KNEW THAT I DID NOT DESERVE.
KNOW THEN, MY BRETHREN, MY COMPANIONS IN CHRIST, THAT THE CHILDREN OF MAN ARE MOST CHERISHED BY GOD WHEN THEY GROVEL IN DESPAIR—WHEN THEY TAKE NO SOLACE IN HUMAN LOVE, NEITHER LOVING NOR RECEIVING LOVE; BUT ARE IN MORTAL TERROR OF THE BEAST WHO SETS HIS CLOVEN HOOF UPON THEM, TO TRAMPLE THEM INTO DUST.
KNOW YE, MY BROTHERS AND SISTERS, THAT THE CHILDREN OF MAN ARE MOST RESENTED BY GOD, WHEN THEY BASK IN THE BEAUTY OF THE EARTH, AND PARTAKE OF THE FRUITS AND SPLENDORS OF THE EARTH, OFFERING NO SACRIFICE TO THE LORD, AND TURNING FROM HIM ENTIRELY. THEY ARE IN MOST DANGER OF HIS WRATH WHEN THEY REGARD NAUGHT BUT THE EARTHLY PARADISE, AND ONE ANOTHER, IN MORTAL LOVE.
SO AT LAST THERE CAME THE HOUR WHEN THE LORD GOD PEERED INTO MY HEART AND PERCEIVED THE SEED OF LOVE THEREIN; AND SAW THAT I HAD LONG DECEIVED HIM, IN MY CRAVEN REVERENCE FOR HIM, AND WOULD HAVE REVOLTED IF I’D HAD THE COURAGE.
AND THE LORD GOD COULD NOT FORGIVE ME, THAT I LOVED MY GRANDCHILDREN BEYOND HIM; BEYOND EVEN MY SONS, AND MY DEAR MISUSED WIVES; AND HOW THUNDEROUS HIS WRATH, WITH SUCH KNOWLEDGE.
AND HE SAW TOO THAT FIFTY YEARS HAD PASSED; AND HIS SERVANT WINSLOW SLADE WAS NOW AN OLD MAN GIVEN TO SOLITUDE, AND TO MELANCHOLY BEHIND THE HABITUAL SMILE ETCHED INTO HIS FACE; AND NO LONGER HAD THE POWER TO PERPETUATE EVIL, SHOULD HE HAVE WISHED TO DO SO. AND IN HIS HEART THERE BUDDED THE MODEST WISH THAT HE BE ALLOWED THE BLISS OF THE COMMONPLACE, AND HUMAN LOVE, AND OBLIVION ITSELF—WHICH IS TO SAY, THE ERASURE OF HIS SIN.
SO THE LORD GOD TIRED OF HIS SERVANT, AND JUDGED THAT THE CHALICE BE TAKEN FROM WINSLOW SLADE. AND THE FURIES OF HEAVEN, THE AVENGING ARCHANGELS, WERE RELEASED AT LAST FOR THE ANGRY CREATURES HAD HUNGERED FOR MY BLOOD THESE MANY DECADES BUT HAD BEEN HELD IN CHECK BY THE COVENANT OF OLD.
IT CAME ABOUT THEN, THESE ANGELS OF THE LORD WERE GIVEN THEIR FREEDOM TO APPEAR ON EARTH, IN OUR MIDST, AND WREAK SUCH HAVOC AS THEY WOULD, TO PROPAGATE TERROR, REVULSION, AND DESPAIR—THESE ANGELS YOU MAY HAVE MISTAKEN FOR DEMONS, MY TOWNSPEOPLE.
THAT THE FIRST VICTIM TO BE BORNE AWAY WAS MY BELOVED GRANDDAUGHTER ANNABEL COULD NOT HAVE BEEN A SURPRISE TO ME THOUGH IN TRUTH HER ABDUCTION CUT ME TO THE BONE AND I DIED THAT MORNING IN THIS VERY CHURCH BUT A YEAR AGO THIS MORNING.
YES, WINSLOW SLADE DIED THAT MORNING. BUT SUCH IS THE CRUELTY OF THE LORD GOD, ANNABEL’S WAS BUT THE FIRST OF NUMEROUS INNOCENT DEATHS, AND A LAPSING OF OUR COMMUNITY INTO SUCH DESPAIR THAT LANGUAGE CANNOT EXPRESS.
NOW I TAKE LEAVE OF YOU, MY DEAR TOWNSPEOPLE. I CONFESS THAT I AM GUILTY NOT ONLY OF THAT DESPICABLE SIN AND CRIME COMMITTED A HALF-CENTURY AGO BUT I, WINSLOW SLADE, AM GUILTY AS WELL OF ALL OF THE MANIFESTATIONS OF THE CROSSWICKS CURSE, AS IT HAS BEEN KNOWN TO YOU. FOR THE ANGEL-DEMONS WERE BY WAY OF ME AND COULD NOT HAVE UNLEASHED SUCH MISERY UPON YOU SAVE BY WAY OF ME,
WHICH IS TO SAY, I AM MYSELF THE CROSSWICKS CURSE.
WHICH IS TO SAY, I AM GUILTY OF ALL THE CRIMES, DISORDER, RAMPANT MISCHIEF AND HORROR THE DEMONS HAVE COMMITTED THIS TWELVE-MONTH, AND MORE—AS IF THIS VALE OF TEARS WERE BUT A CRAZED DREAM THAT MIGHT ERUPT IN LAUGHTER AS READILY AS IN TERROR AND THE ANGUISH OF SUFFERING MANKIND OF NO MORE SIGNIFICANCE THAN THE ELUSIVE FLIGHT OF A BUTTERFLY.
AND THOUGH I MIGHT BEG FORGIVENESS OF YOU, AS FROM THE MURDERED PEARL, I MUST NOT BE FORGIVEN. IT IS MY FATE TO BE UNMASKED AND STRIPPED AND EXPOSED AND CAST FROM YOUR MIDST FOREVERMORE.
FOR MY SIN BEING AGAINST MANKIND, AND NOT AGAINST GOD, IT IS ONLY MANKIND THAT CAN FORGIVE ME; AND MANKIND, THAT MUST NOT FORGIVE ME.
AMEN.
SO BY THIS AGED HAND, ON THE SABBATH MORNING OF 4 JUNE 1906 I HEREBY DESIGNATE:
THE END
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The truths of Fiction reside in metaphor; but metaphor is here generated by History.
Among the books consulted in the composition of this novel are:
Woodrow Wilson: Life and Letters, volumes I and II, by Ray Stannard Baker, 1927.
Woodrow Wilson, The Academic Years by Henry Wilkinson Bragdon, 1967.
My Aunt Louisa and Woodrow Wilson by Margaret Axson Elliott, 1944.
Woodrow Wilson of Princeton by McMillan Lewis, 1952.
Woodrow Wilson: A Brief Biography by Arthur S. Link, 1963.
The Priceless Gift: The Love Letters of Woodrow Wilson and Ellen Axson Wilson, edited by Eleanor Wilson McAdoo, 1962.
When the Cheering Stopped: The Last Years of Woodrow Wilson by Gene Smith, 1964.
Woodrow Wilson: A Medical and Psychological Biography by Edwin A. Weinstein, 1981.
Modern Battles of Trenton: Being a History of New Jersey’s Politics and Legislation from the Year 1868 to the Year 1894 by William Edgar Sackett, 1895.
Jack London by Richard O’Connor, 1964.
Scott of the Antarctic by Elspeth Huxley, 1978.
The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair by Upton Sinclair, 1962.
Stories of New Jersey by Frank Stockton, 1961.
The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James Cone, 2011.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOYCE CAROL OATES is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the Chicago Tribune Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.
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NOVELS BY JOYCE CAROL OATES
With Shuddering Fall (1964)
A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967)
Expensive People (1968)
them (1969)
Wonderland (1971)
Do With Me What You Will (1973)
The Assassins (1975)
Childwold (1976)
Son of the Morning (1978)
Unholy Loves (1979)
Bellefleur (1980)
Angel of Light (1981)
A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982)
Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984)
Solstice (1985)
Marya: A Life (1986)
You Must Remember This (1987)
American Appetites (1989)
Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (1990)
Black Water (1992)
Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (1993)
What I Lived For (1994)
Zombie (1995)
We Were the Mulvaneys (1996)
Man Crazy (1997)
My Heart Laid Bare (1998)
Broke Heart Blues (1999)
Blonde (2000)
Middle Age: A Romance (2001)
I’ll Take You There (2002)
The Tattooed Girl (2003)
The Falls (2004)
Missing Mom (2005)
Black Girl / White Girl (2006)
The Gravedigger’s Daughter (2007)
My Sister, My Love (2008)
Little Bird of Heaven (2009)
Mudwoman (2012)
CREDITS
Cover design by Allison Saltzman
Cover art: Profile of a Young Woman by Giovanni Boldini
© by Christie’s Images Ltd./SuperStock
Illustrated map by Laura Hartman Maestro © 2012
COPYRIGHT
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
THE ACCURSED. Copyright © 2013 by The Ontario Review, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
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* Which diary, included in the Firestone Library Special Collections, was provided for my perusal by the kindly curator who had no idea, for how could he have known?—that I alone, of the numerous researchers who have contemplated five tons of Wilsonia, managed to crack the ingenious code.
* In order to give shape to my massive chronicle, that has been assembled from countless sources, I intend to "leap ahead" in time whenever it seems helpful. Also, I should note here that Thomas Woodrow Wilson, born 1856, soon saw the advantage, as an ambitious young man, of a more distinctive-sounding name: Woodrow Wilson. It was a proud if somewhat fantastical claim of Woodrow's that his lineage extended back to one "Patrik Wodro" who had crossed the English Channel with William the Conqueror; and that no one of significance had yet asserted himself in American politics who was not of Scots-English origin—a somewhat contradictory claim, it would seem.
* Grover Cleveland, twenty-second President of the United States, had retired to Westland Mansion in Princeton after leaving office in 1897; a considerable presence in Princeton, both by repuation and by girth, Cleveland lived scarcely a half-block from Crosswicks Manse, on Hodge Road; he too was a trustee of the university and, as Woodrow Wilson feared, a supporter rather of Dean West than of Woodrow Wilson. It was invariably a social coup to include Grover and Frances Cleveland in any gathering, despite Grover's uncouth manners and buffoonish laughter, and the disappointment of his second term in office; worse yet, as many knew, Grover Cleveland had, as sheriff of Erie County in upstate New York in his early career in politics, personally executed, by hanging, at least two condemned men, rather than pay a hangman ten dollars.
* As Annabel Slade’s surprising words are sure to puzzle the reader, as, initially, they puzzled me, I am obliged to note that, so far as I have been able to learn, the young woman had not ever personally gazed upon “foreign” or “exotic” individuals, whether female or male; but she had avidly read many books, of a more fancifully romantic cast than those read by her brother Josiah, namely novels by the Brontë sisters, of which her longtime favorite was Wuthering Heights as well as verse by Byron and Shelley; she had been told of a fabled colony of Russian and Polish Jews—the Alliance Israélite Universelle—which had settled in Woodbine, New Jersey, some years ago. (This settlement, too, had been threatened by zealots costumed in white sheets, to disguise their identities: very likely, these anonymous individuals were neighbors of the colony, as well as local law enforcement officers. A cross was burned, as a warning; when the warning was not obeyed, the main house of the Alliance Israélite Universelle was set on fire the following night, and its inhabitants routed into the wintry dark with what fates awaiting them, I do not know—the incident, or incidents, was not recorded in any detail in newspapers of the era.)
As for the basilisk reference—how perverse that a young, virginal girl from a highly sheltered background should seize upon so unlikely, and so ugly, an image; for the lizard of the genus Basiliscus resides in the more tropical zones of the Americas, and not in central New Jersey. Yet, the other day, while examining a carton of aged and mildewed books in my study, I came upon The Castle of Kashmir—a child’s book published by Lippincott Publishers, 1884, that had once belonged to Annabel Slade and her brother Josiah; the title page being inscribed with both their names. (It was a wild stroke of good luck, that, at an estate sale in Hopewell, I was able to buy this carton of books, among other prized items, for a mere eight dollars!) On the cover of this much-worn little picture book there is a (faded, but still stirring) illustration of a young knight on his steed, doing battle with a legendary species of basilisk, or dragon, possessed of cruel talons and teeth, and fiery breath, and eyes of glaring topaz: the very stare of Axson Mayte; as Axson Mayte is the very image, in corporeal form, of the demonic—wholly unguessed-at, at this time, by poor Annabel.
* This quote from Teddy Roosevelt’s letter to his Secretary of State John Hay was not, to be precisely accurate, a matter of public record in April 1905 and would not become known to historians until years after his death in 1919.
* The Clevelands remain a fascinating couple, seven decades later. Grover Cleveland, twenty-eight years older than his wife, was reputed to have first glimpsed her as an infant; after the death of her father, who was one of Cleveland’s oldest friends, Cleveland became the guardian of the eleven-year-old girl to whom, hardly a decade later, when she was an undergraduate at Wells College for Women, he proposed. At twenty-one, Frances was the youngest First Lady in history, as she remains the youngest to this day. The Clevelands had five children, of whom the firstborn, Ruth, died of a childhood illness in 1904, at the age of thirteen. Growing up in Princeton, I saw Mrs. Cleveland often—that is, as a widow—for her corpulent husband did not long survive the vicissitudes of the Crosswicks Curse, though an innocent victim of the scourge, it seems. My mother was a friendly acquaintance of Mrs. Cleveland both before and following her second marriage, at the age of forty-nine, to an archaeology professor at Princeton University; I wish I could claim to having spoken with her but I have only blurred memories of this striking dark-haired and dark-complected woman, rumored (by female detractors in Princeton) to have been a distant relative of an Indian chief in the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma!
* The Jersey Devil is a legendary creature whose natural habitat is the Pine Barrens of South Jersey, reputedly a seven-foot predator bird/reptile with a long neck and a long, very sharp beak and sharp talons. Historically, the Jersey Devil is said to be the thirteenth child of a witch named Mother Leeds, or, in some documents, Mother Spags, living in the Pine Barrens at the time of the Revolutionary War
. (Yes, it is a coincidence, this repetition of the name “Spags”—the sort of awkwardness historians encounter more often than the layman would suspect. But there is no “meaning” to most coincidences, as I am sure there is no meaning here.) The Jersey Devil has been sighted hundreds of times in the twentieth century alone, and has been the object of many amateur searches; the Devil leaves behind enormous bird-feet prints in snow and mud, and mounds of scat so vile-smelling, dogs have been known to vomit, even to convulse and die, that have come imprudently too near. In 1909, the Jersey Devil was sighted in numerous areas in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, near the New Jersey border; most frequently in Camden, where, according to newspaper reports, the Devil “attacked” a group of worshippers at the First Methodist Church of Camden; and later, in another part of Camden, a social club. (By which is meant a gentlemen’s private club? Or, perhaps, “social club” was a journalist’s euphemism, indicating a tavern or saloon.) Camden police officers allegedly fired upon the Devil at this second sighting but the Devil escaped by taking flight over the Delaware River, resulting in such panic in South Jersey, schools and government offices were officially shut down for several days, until it appeared that the Jersey Devil had returned to the desolate swamp of the Pine Barrens. At the time of this writing, in 1984, the Jersey Devil endures still in legend, but has not been sighted, except by unreliable children and adolescents, in some time. For a detailed history, see The Jersey Devil by James F. McCloy and Ray Miller, Jr. (Middle Atlantic Press, 1976).