Financially, he had no visible means of support. The natural tendency when one encounters a person in that position is to dismiss him as one of the world’s incompetents. But in that direction, my inclinations are thoroughly unnatural. The basic battle in all spiritual survival as far as I am concerned is to beat the nine-to-five rap. Therefore, my immediate reaction when faced with a person who combines a seeming freedom from regimentation with a lack of self-justificatory harangues is one of excitement and curiosity rather than contempt and dismissal.
Clyde affected a hillbilly accent to which he was not legitimately entitled as a literate, moderately well-read man. He felt, I believe, that it was good protective coloration and in truth it suited him and was a working adjunct to his essentially secretive nature. And in certain aspects of his nature, he was a hillbilly; the shy, ingrown backwoods people were the only human beings with whom he felt even vaguely at home. There was also a quite discernible aura of violence which surrounded him; rarely did I encounter him when he did not have on or about his person a hand gun of some description. Readers of southern gothic literature will recognize Clyde immediately; he could have walked straight out of the pages of any William Faulkner story. And yet I must confess at the outset that in spite of the fact that I believe I am the only human being to whom Clyde ever gave his entire confidence, I cannot say with conviction that I know the truth about him even to this day. The following story is a case in point.
It was told to me by Fred Cline who was an imaginative man and not above invention when he wished to embroider a given person’s legend. And Fred Cline found Clyde eminently legendworthy; it was the sense of violence within Clyde that Fred Cline found so fascinating. I cannot say with accuracy that I know this story to be true. But it checks out psychologically and I believe it.
According to Fred Cline, he accompanied Clyde one day on a trip to Roanoke on some mysterious errand. It was a summer day and they made the trip in Clyde’s aging, topless Jeep. En route, they were passed by a carload of teenagers who were apparently mischief-prone and well tanked up on beer. The teenagers had evidently been picnicking and they had a basket containing a substantial amount of litter. As they passed Clyde’s Jeep, one of them up-ended the basket of litter and dumped it over Clyde and Fred Cline. Without an instant’s delay between concept and execution, Clyde calmly picked up a forty-five caliber automatic pistol which was, as always, within reach and fired the weapon through the engine of the teenagers’ automobile. This story made my hair stand on end but it pleased Fred Cline no end. He would chortle with glee when he told it and say, “Mister Cherry, them boys’ faces turned dead white and that ole engine jus’ coughed and fell apart, you shoulda been theah”. I thank providence that I was not. One thing is certain: if the story is true, there is somewhere in Virginia a group of ex-teenagers who presently counsel their children with inordinate firmness against acts of malicious mischief.
Take Outsider, outlaw, puritan, free-thinker and rigid ascetic who neither smoked nor drank and whose body contained not a single ounce of superfluous flesh and add to it a nature both secretive and devious, mix and stir with attitudes of total disdain for society and humanity, and fundamental contempt for nearly every human being he had encountered in his life, fold in a depth of animalistic fear to bind all the other ingredients together and serve topped with an intellect as hard as a chisel: you will have Clyde. Is it any wonder that it became almost habit with me to wonder about his whereabouts when I read in the newspaper of any successful bank robbery within a hundred miles. Yet these, things and other knowledge of Clyde came slowly.
Like a timid animal, he made his first tenuous overtures to me that winter. His Jeep began to pass more frequently. The casual wave was replaced by a short chat between us as he sat in his Jeep with the engine running. Finally, he began to halt, dismount and chat a little longer. Clearly, he had me so much on his mind that he was nervous and, like a wild animal, perpetually poised for flight.
Urged on by unused energy, I went more and more frequently to Wrenchum’s in the evenings to drink. The actor in me required some sort of stage and Wrenchum’s was the nearest thing to one available. I was deep that winter in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and the ideas of those two formidable maniacs tend to produce a dangerously euphoric glow. However, intellectual excitement engenders its own climate of receptivity and the gaunt, taciturn backwoodsmen who made up Wrenchum’s clientele seemed to take pleasure in the spate of largely incomprehensible and poorly digested ideas which came pouring out of Farmer Sherry night after night. Wrenchum himself was in seventh heaven; being usually on the edge of a dangerous precipice of boredom, he was correspondingly ready to grapple with ideas and abstractions large and small. I could not help reflecting as I held forth in Wrenchum’s gas station that the scene was uncomfortably close to the sort of play written by the late Maxwell Anderson during the thirties. Or, for that matter by Inge, during the fifties.
Clyde soon realized that I could be found there most evenings and, more and more often, he began to turn up at Wrenchum’s also. Within a very short time, it became apparent that he was as athirst for a certain kind of morally serious idea-prone intercourse, as I. In those early days, as we worked our way slowly towards friendship, getting Clyde to open up was a job for a truly expert psychological safe-cracker. Never have I encountered a more closed human being. Only the fact that we shared certain basic similarities of outlook made the growth of our association possible. Like me, he had a deep and abiding distrust of society and the causes associated with society. Unlike me, this had led him to a belief that life was a battlefield on which one was primarily concerned with doing in the other fellow. He had no generic interest in people and he found my hopelessly hooked position in this respect almost impossible to understand. We shared a passionate interest in money but Clyde’s interest was limited to the techniques of its amassment rather than its possible meaning or use. The only genuine interest I ever saw him display in actual individual human beings, living or dead, during the early days of our friendship, was in men who had displayed extraordinary acumen and vigor in putting together great fortunes. He was extremely well-versed in the minutiae of the lives of men like Morgan, Frick et al. Whenever, he spoke of these gentlemen and their various coups and setbacks, he came alive as at no other time. Several times, I jokingly suggested that he had the makings of a tycoon but at each mention of this he would change the subject. With my fundamental premise of those years—namely, that the world was an eternal hodge-podge—he was in total agreement. My corollary conviction of the possibility of growth with the individual minds and spirits of the race, he found totally strange at first but he was curiously, almost hungrily receptive to it. I knew nothing then of the actual facts of his life and protest again that I know very little more in terms of actual truth now. But I was aware as I talked with Clyde that winter that I had encountered a genuinely strange man who, in some way, was ready to face the fact that the loneliness and secrecy of his life was leading him up a dead-end street.
In those early days, he seldom visited our house. Thus Dorothy had far less direct exposure to him than I. Nevertheless, her few brief conversations with Clyde and my reports to her of our discussions together brought her interest in him to the same pitch as mine. His attitude towards Dorothy was advertently simple but psychologically complex. It was an attitude I have frequently encountered in fundamentally crippled men. He simply did not consider any woman as a fellow human being and, instead, accorded her a recognition based solely upon her associations. Thus, as my wife, Dorothy was treated with unfailing courtesy and respect but, as an individual human being, she had little if no existence whatsoever in Clyde’s cosmos. Later on, this changed as he became a familiar of the house and I think he gave Dorothy a considerable amount of thought; but only as an adjunct to me. That I must be in some measure as much an adjunct to her as she was to me was a concept beyond his reach. He was not misogynistic; in fact, at bottom, I believe he longed for some kind of relat
ionship with a woman. But in the light of all the things which happened later on between us and the loneliness of his essential nature, I am inclined to believe his mistrust of other human beings has been compounded so as to preclude such an event.
In a materialistic sense, Clyde had fewer needs than anyone I have ever encountered. Food, drink, trappings of style and all the other things with which most of us preoccupy ourselves were supremely unimportant to him. His abiding need for proximity to firearms was clearly an obvious commentary upon the duality of fear and hunger for power which ruled his being. He had also one other curious passion: fire engines. Initially, this struck me as being comically jejune; later on, it would become a prime factor in our relationship. But early on it seemed to have no more importance than any other Tom Swift-type hi-jinks. The depth of his feeling for fire engines, however, could be measured by the fact that he, who had nothing but disdain for all social organizations, was a proud and dedicated member of the local volunteer fire-fighting unit.
In the beginnings of our friendship and for a year after its fruition, my attitudes towards him and my motives regarding him were totally without tinge of any self interest beyond the normal sense of gratification involved in the relationship of teacher to pupil. There is no question in my mind that a near-mortal hunger for intellectual companionship was assuaged for him by our concourse. When a book would come up as, for example, “Thus Spake Zarathustra Tharathustra,” I would invariably find that he would seek the book out and read it. Continuing to use that work as an example, this is not such an easy thing to do. There is truth in Nietzsche’s warning that the book had been written in blood and must be read in blood; to my mind, there is no more dangerous mixture of lifegiving wheat and poisonous chaff between covers and only a hard, morally serious, self-conscious mind can extract the sustenance by distinguishing between the two. Many times, I watched Clyde perform this feat and it never failed to impress me; his mind was wholly unburdened by the flab of Utopian preoccupation. He was not fooled by the shibboleths of the age; he understood and did not depart from the stern standard implicit in the dictum: “Man is the measure of all things”. Long before I encountered Clyde, he had smelt the possibilities of synthesis between consciousness and experience. And he had formulated an ingrained need to judge himself and his actions according to his performance in regard to those possibilities.
And now, I shall leave him for a time and at the same time ask, if I may, that the reader consider him as someone who had become part of the fabric of our lives. So that, as I speak of other matters, he may perhaps be imagined as present in the day to day conduct of our lives, speaking to me of my affairs and, more frequently as time goes by, of his. And tending more and more to use the pronoun, we in reference to both.
As winter wore on into the spring that year, the date of my lawsuit against the timber cutter and sawmill man crept up. A preliminary hearing was held in the chambers of a Judge in an attempt on the part of the defendant to prove that my suit was not justified. I confess I found the entire business highly enjoyable. I was accompanied by Lawyer Bean as my attorney while the defendant was represented by one of those legal figures of fun so beloved in rural southern districts complete with long locks, florid speech and an IQ of about 10. This monstrous advocate placed me on the stand in an attempt to discredit my accusations by using the basic technique of showing me as a foreigner and non-hillbilly suspect in all my contentions because I did not really understand the mores of the locality. The lawyer was barely literate and given to the embellishment of his questions with complicated Biblical allusions of whose meaning he had an infirm mastery. I had about as much trouble with him as Goose Tatum would with a member of the Junior Varsity and both Lawyer Bean and I had a fine time. The Judge gave the opposition short shrift and the case was scheduled to come to trial about a month later.
The few times I had encountered O’Hara during the winter had proven that his decision to sever our friendship had been firmly and consciously taken. Even in a town as small as Wytheville paths need not cross except through coincidence. O’Hara and I passed each other occasionally but always on opposite sides of the street. The single occasion on which we did come face to face, we went no further than a momentary exchange of small talk. It was as if we each tacitly acknowledged the end of our friendship but at the same time awaited the proper moment for some ritual celebration of its passing.
Therefore, I was not terribly surprised to find O’Hara seated in the forefront of the courtroom spectators on the day my lawsuit came to trial. In no sense could my lawsuit be described as anything other than piddling; this in itself convinced me that O’Hara’s presence there that day indicated that his depth of preoccupation with our breach was at least as grave as my own.
In the finest tradition of anti-climax, the case failed to come to trial. At the last possible moment, the defendant offered settlement in an amount which struck a nice balance in satisfying both honor and purse, and I accepted. The Judge ordered a recess before proceeding with the next case on the docket and the spectators filed out of the courtroom. O’Hara, however, hung back, waiting to speak to me; whether out of curiosity as to the reasons for the lawsuit’s disposal or more complex motives I could not tell. We chatted for a few minutes in friendly enough fashion while I explained that I had, in effect, won the legal proceedings. When O’Hara suggested that we buy a bottle of Sherry and share it in his office, it never occurred to me to refuse. He was afoot so we climbed into my car, drove to the liquor store and thence to the room he used for writing located up over a store on the main street of the town. It was then midafternoon, about half-past two.
Strangely enough, there was not an instant’s edginess between us that afternoon. Nothing, after all, could mitigate the fundament of our common experience and we shared much laughter that day in remembrance of it. The first note of strangeness came as I looked at my watch and found that it was half-past four, the hour when I had to leave to get back to the farm for the evening milking. We had reached the end of the bottle of sherry by then and I rose to announce that I must leave. O’Hara scoffed at this and suggested that I forget my cows for once. I replied to the effect that those cows were the bread and butter for my family and must be dealt with according to schedule. I then suggested that he was perfectly welcome to come to the farm and that we could pick up another bottle of Sherry, drive to the farm and resume our drinking after I had finished taking care of my cows. He pretended to find this plan inconceivable and said with a disparaging smile, “What makes you think I’d go out to that Goddamned farm?” Underneath his disparagement, he so clearly wanted to accompany me to the farm that I made no reply but simply continued putting on my coat in preparation for leaving. He reached for his coat also and when I left he left with me.
We stopped at the liquor store again and bought another bottle of Sherry. At that point, there was not the slightest vestige of drunkenness in O’Hara’s behavior. However, he opened the second bottle of wine as soon as we got back in the car and began to drink from it as we drove to the farm. He was clearly under a tremendous amount of strain because by the time we had completed three-quarters of the twenty-minute trip, he had managed to get outside fully half of the bottle. As we reached the farm, he was showing definite effects of drink but he was still far from advertent drunkenness.
O’Hara and I entered our house by the back door which led into the kitchen where Dorothy was preparing dinner. Dorothy’s eyes widened as she caught sight of him but the greeting they exchanged showed no particular strain on either hand. I took O’Hara into the living room where Linda was playing with the baby and settled him down with a glass for his sherry before changing into my rubber boots and setting out for the dairy barn. Later on, Dorothy told me that there was nothing overtly dramatic in his behavior after I left for the barn. She went in and joined him in a drink for a while and then returned to her tasks in the kitchen, leaving O’Hara playing with the children. She also told me that he was working very hard on th
e remains of the bottle of wine but that he showed no pronounced ill effects at the time she returned to the kitchen.
I was about half way through with the milking when O’Hara appeared at the dairy barn. It took only one glance to see that he was drunk and dangerous. The scene which followed was as eerie a performance as I have ever witnessed.
All three of the dairy barn stalls were occupied as O’Hara entered; one by a bad acting cow on whom I had to employ an anti-kicking device, a contraption which fitted over the cows back and clamped to the cow’s hip muscles, constricting her so as to make her stand quietly. Before I could stop him, O’Hara opened the gates of two of the stalls, allowing the cows within them to tear loose from the milkers and make good their escape through the open exit door of the barn. One of them was, of course, the cow wearing the anti-kicking device. Cows are creatures with an ingrained fealty to habit; anything unusual excites them. An ordinary visitor to the barn during milking will make them nervous but the presence of this drunken madman drove them absolutely berserk. O’Hara’s actions following the release of the cows were the most peculiar of all. He reached up and got both hands around the glass milk pipeline in the manner of a man about to chin himself. This was an essential and expensive component of the barn which was terribly fragile and difficult to replace at short notice. My first thought was to knock him out so that he could do no real damage. For until that point he had caused pandemonium but no actual breakage. Then, as I started for O’Hara, another force within me took control: curiosity. O’Hara’s interior wires had clearly crossed, shorted and blown some sort of fuse but what was really at the bottom of it? I stopped in my tracks to watch; what followed was genuinely spooky. As I mentioned the glass pipeline was exceedingly fragile; so fragile in fact, that a small child could have broken it with one pull. Now, as O’Hara pulled on the pipeline seemingly with all his might, precisely nothing happened. The tendons in his neck and the veins in his forehead stood out with the force of his effort to break the pipe but he was unable to effect its breakage. Quite obviously, a terrible war was going on within his mind: a deep, raging desire to destroy was being balanced in some way by a desperate desire to hold that desire for destruction in check. Looking back, I don’t believe it would be possible for anyone to sustain such an intensity of emotional crisis for any length of time. And, in truth, I do not believe O’Hara’s attempt (or non-attempt) to break the pipe could have lasted more than thirty or forty seconds. When the crisis passed, his collapse was sudden and complete. He relinquished his grip on the glass pipeline and sank to the floor like a poleaxed steer. He was out absolutely cold. I stood staring down at him for a long moment experiencing one of the most complicated mixtures of emotions it is possible to describe: naked fear, anger, revulsion, pity and love were all boiling around in my mind together. I could not bear to touch him immediately so I went out and re-captured the two cows he had allowed to escape and put them back in the holding pen. By then, I had calmed down somewhat and I was no longer frightened of O’Hara. It seemed clear that his capacity for mischief had been totally spent. I picked him up and staggered up the road to my car where I spread him out in the back seat. The depth of his sleep was a mixture of drunkenness and the aftermath of a concentrated expenditure of psychic energy the like of which I have not encountered before or since.
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