Set This House on Fire (41 page)

PART TWO

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.

What falls away is always. And is near.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

I learn by going where I have to go.

THEODORE ROETHKE

V

One day on our riverbank in South Carolina, Cass said to me: “I always figured you knew I had killed him. Not that it worried me too much, for some reason. I remember blabbing to you that night, running off at the mouth, but I never could remember just how much I said. I thought I’d given myself away, though. The funny thing is that it really didn’t bother me. Maybe it was because I knew the Italians had closed up the case, it was a suicide, and that was that. You couldn’t much blame them. Two people found dead like that—almost at the same time, you know—and there sure wasn’t much reason to look around for a culprit, much less to pin it on the Deacon Kinsolving, who was the soul of rectitude.” He
paused.
“Anyway, I didn’t ever have any worry about your going and spilling the beans. Put that out of your mind. Maybe the simpie fact of the matter is that when it was all over nothing really mattered any more. I’d gone the limit, and what anybody might do or say meant nothing. See this gray old head?” He stroked the side of his brow and there was neither pride nor self-pity in the gesture. “I guess it was kind of small of me to keep up the pretense with you down here for so long. Somehow I knew you knew. But it’s a tough thing to come out and say. To admit. It puts you in the position of having to explain the whole bleeding miserable business, and that hurts. Do you understand?”

“Of course I understand,” I said. “But one thing. I didn’t ever
know.
I suspected it. You had said some rather odd things. So I suspected it. And those few days there, when you didn’t
come back,
and I stayed and—well, helped out Poppy and the kids, it really weighed heavy on my mind. You were suffering, and—well, if this doesn’t sound too embarrassing, I cared for you. You’d done something to me, opened my eyes about a lot of things, and I just didn’t want you to drift out of sight. So when I left Poppy and the kids finally and came back to New York without having seen you again, without ever having known what the real story was—how you stayed alive and all, much less stayed out of jail—I just kept wondering about you, that’s all, wondering how the hell you made out. And wondering what the real story was. Yet it’s strange how one rationalizes. When I wrote you, when I invited myself down here that first time, it was really I thought just out of the hugest curiosity, about Mason and what he’d done that summer to bring himself to such a—a godawful end, and knowing that you’d probably be able to tell me something about him. Still saying to myself that it was a suicide, after all. Yet I know that part of my reason was—well—” I found it difficult to say the word, or words.

“The suspicion that I’d killed him,” he said, somewhat morosely. “Don’t be bashful, my friend. Say it. It’s not as hard for you to say it as it is for me.”

“All right, that you’d killed him. Understand,” I began to explain, “I wasn’t snooping. I wasn’t being any bloodhound. You could have done away with five hundred Masons, for what he did, and as far as my moral position in the matter—”

“God sake, boy, you don’t have to tell me. I knew you weren’t
after
anything.” He paused. “On the other hand, maybe you can understand why I didn’t send an answer to that other letter of yours. There’s some things you’d just as soon forget.”

“I shouldn’t have stuck my big—”

“Don’t get yourself in a sling about it,” he put in. “I shouldn’t have said that. These things you’ve told me. They’ve made me mighty glad we’ve thrashed this out after all. You’ve lightened some dark spots.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, about Mason, for one thing—what kind of a man he was, and so on. Outside of Sambuco, that is. And then—as I’ve said—about that night. What was going on in the midst of my black, blind, grizzly, suffocating darkness. It’s made me see things that I really didn’t know before. Wild things.” He halted for an instant. “Terrible things, really,” he added in a bleak unhappy voice. “Things that shift it around somehow. Things I’ve always suspected, had hints about, but never really knew—due to the aforesaid darkness. Whoo!” He shivered a little and rubbed his eyes. “Not that anything can really be changed,” he went on, “being so completely over. But you might say it’s fascinating.”

“What, for instance?”

“Oh, like when I came up and fell over the piano and you and Cripps salvaged me. You see, it comes back to me now. It came back to me when you told me about it. Remember that drug—that bleeding wonder-drug antibiotic?
That’s
what I’d come up there for that time; it sure wasn’t to babble any Sophocles. That’s what was on my mind.”

“So—”

“Well, so if I’d managed my slick little bit of thievery
then,
the whole crazy evening would have been changed. I’d have gotten down to the valley and gotten back and—” But he stopped and threw up a hand. “Bugger it, you just can’t trifle with fate, I guess.”

“Lord, if I had known—”

“Forget it. How the hell
could
you have known?” He gazed at me gently, with a sort of sad benign tolerance all over his face, “You’d think that you had something to do with it all. I’ve got enough guilt about it to equip a regiment of sinners and now you want to horn in with your own. What’s the matter with you, boy, anyway?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing much. Small clues. Little items like the fact that I knew something mean and ugly was going on between you and Mason. That note of yours for one thing. That was one of those things that was in the back of my mind for months. And—oh, I don’t know—some of the things you said. I should have gotten Cripps or someone—That is, somewhere along the line there I should have just waked up and taken hold of myself and tried to get you strapped down in some position where you couldn’t do anybody any harm.” I paused. “I’m working on the assumption, of course, that you wish it hadn’t happened, in spite of what Mason did. Right?”

“You’re right,” he said, and the look of sorrow on his face was abruptly so total and painful that I turned my eyes away. “Boy, you’re sure right.”

“Tell me something, Cass,” after we were both silent for a long time. “What
was
it between you and Mason?” I hesitated for a moment. “I don’t mean to sound stupid. All right, there was the girl. Francesca and—You—well, you know what I mean. He ravished her, killed her. And for that you finished him off. All that’s evident and plain. But what were these other things? That horrible act he made you go through, and—”

“Ahhh!” he said. “How do you know? How can you ever tell? How can you ever know where the blame lies? What part was Mason’s and what part was mine and what part was God’s. Sometimes I’ve had nightmares about it—or I used to, before I got ahold of myself—and in these nightmares someone or something told me that it wasn’t Mason who was the culprit—wasn’t Mason who was the wicked party—but only your old friend the preacher here, who was the evilest man who ever walked. Sometime I’ll let you look at my journal, and read the story as she is writ. It didn’t start in Sam-buco, either, if you really want to know. It started—a lot of it any-way—in my own heart, on the day I was born. It started—” He paused for a long while, then rose up on his elbow and looked into my eyes. “I’m going to ask you a funny question. Do you believe in —well, what they call the supernatural? I know that’s a queer word.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Neither do I,” said he, “not one bit. But do you want to know something? When I look back on it—or at least take it back as far as I can, to Paris, say, where you know Poppy and the kids and I were before we went to Italy—when I look back there and try to get a perspective on it, I can’t help but believe that something
forced
me to go to Sambuco. These nightmares I had. I put them in my journal, too. Strange ones. Half out of the devil, half out of paradise. They forced me,
drug
me there—do you understand what I mean? It was as if I had to go there—and that what happened there, to be fancy, was some sort of logical end-product of what had been prefigured in these dreams. Shithouse mouse! This is hard to get at. Do you follow me?”

“I don’t know if I do or not,” I said. “Things that are not strictly of this world tend to give me the creeps. Tell me this. Did you like Mason at first? I mean when you first met him down in Sambuco, did he—”

“It didn’t
start
with Mason, I’m telling you,” he insisted, emphatic now, earnest. “It started in me, early, way back. I suppose it started on the day I was born, like I say. But it really started in Paris the year before, when I was sick and these here nightmares began to come upon me. It began
then,
and without knowing about that you couldn’t know how and why it ended with Mason. Do you understand?”

“I don’t really—” I began. I only dimly realized that he was prompting me for a blast.

“Get this clear,” he said. He had risen to his feet, I thought somewhat agitated; his voice even more than before was heavy with emphasis, urgency. “This has got to be made clear, because, Peter, I don’t really think you quite understand about Mason. Beast, bastard, crook, and viper. But the guilt is not his! I been asking and asking and asking it from you, hoping you would show me he was
evil.
But no. He’s still just scum. Don’t you see? Nossir! The guilt is not his!”

“No, I don’t see,” I said positively.

There was a long silence. Then he said, more gently now: “No, there’s really no reason why you should. There’s just no reason why you should at all.” And he stopped, then said: “He
didn’t kill
Francesca, that’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

It came as quick as that.

“No, goddammit,” he said, “don’t look at me like that. Straighten up, boy. Do you want to get the facts now? Or the truth?”

“The truth,” I managed to say, somehow, straightening up.

“Well, visualize the Kinsolvings in Paris, if you please.” (In the fishing shack again, another night, after my mind had slowly adjusted itself to a lot of things.) “We’d been there a year, I guess. We were cramped together enough, God knows, in the palace, but what we had in Paris wouldn’t have accommodated a proper clutch of dwarfs. Two only halfway-big rooms for the six of us—Nicky had just been born—and a two-by-four John and a huge big window that covered the entire wall. Sometimes I think if it hadn’t been for that goddam window I really
would
have gone nuts. What I mean is, a big elephant vine had grown up on the outside and it covered the entire window, so that in the spring and summer and fall when the light streamed through, it passed through these huge green translucent leaves and filled the whole room with a kind of shimmering jade light. That sounds like it might be annoying but it wasn’t: it was quite marvelous in a way and sometimes it kept my mind off of—well, off these
fleas
of life that were constantly biting my back. You know what I mean: Poppy, bless her heart—for-ever blameless Poppy—and Nicky’s colic and not painting and lack of money, and so on et cetera. And my miserable ulcer, though it was fairly quiet at the time. Sometimes when I think back I wonder which flea was the biggest—lack of money, I suppose. Well, Poppy had some money coming in from Delaware, from some trust fund her father had set up, but it wasn’t a hell of a lot, for my type of menage. And I had a little coming in from that disability pension—not much, either, but altogether we got along somehow. No, I don’t guess that was the big flea after all. I guess the real monster was—well, my
condition
at the time, if you want to put it that way.

“You know, you can’t work without faith, and, boy, I was as faithless as an alleycat. Godalmighty, the rationalizations I used, and the lies! I told myself I had no talent, you see; that was the first evasion. Yet, hell, I knew I had talent, knew it in my soul, knew it as well as I know my own name. I
had
it, there was no getting around it, and the knowledge that I had it and wouldn’t use it or was afraid to use it or refused to use it just made my misery that much worse. Hell, I knew I could paint rings around anyone —at least of my own age and experience. Anyone! Yet in front of a sketch pad or a canvas I was like a man who had suddenly had both hands chopped off at the wrist. Completely paralyzed, I was. And I’d go snooping around the galleries or a modern show at the Orangerie and sneer and snicker and pooh-pooh all the amateurish stuff I saw—just like some miserable little fag or a dilettante—yet deep down I was hurting: boy, I was hurting! For at least they had produced something, and I was still a mean little cesspool of bitter, pent-up, frustrated, hopeless desires. Well, you know you still have to have reasons. So, when I examined myself and found that the no-talent excuse wouldn’t go, I dreamed up all sorts of other answers: the time was out of joint, society was against me, painting had been supplanted by photography anyway, all of that. Boy, Kinsolving pitted against Kinsolving, what a dreary battle! Anyway, I couldn’t work. I was perfectly blocked, dammed up like the inside of some miserable, pussy eardrum, and hurting like crazy. But it would have taken all the
flics
in Paris to drag me to a brain-healer, which I guess is what I needed.”

“We Christians have to stick together,” I said facetiously.

“It’s not a matter of being Christian,” he said, “it’s a matter of common sense. Unless a man’s gone completely berserk, he’s got to work out these problems for himself, that’s all. It’s a matter of pride. Besides, I knew a nut doctor once—not Slotkin, but a real phony—on the psycho ward of that naval hospital I told you about I was in, right after the war. This guy, I’ll swear before God, could barely count to ten. He had a tiny little brow about a quarter of an inch high and a red nose and hair sticking out of his ears, and the only other thing I remember about him is that he had never even
heard
of Daumier. Pronounced it Dow-Myer, like some bleeding psychological test. Jesus, how could a guy like that ever get together with somebody who had my problems—at least the ones I had in Paris? Anyway, to go back to where it all started: all this pressure was in me, as I’ve said. There I was in the most beautiful —no, second most, Florence has the edge—city on earth, all in a sweat and fever to capture something, to get it down, to crystallize it, to preserve it, leave a record or something, and I had no more ability to do it than some blind old dropsical eunuch of ninety-five. What a setup, what a perfect way to become a whiskey-head! Well, I plunged in head-on. And that started me off on this jag—well, you know how it ended. I don’t know how it came on—gradually, I guess, but the first thing I knew it had me squarely by the balls. You should have seen me, boy—no, I remember you did. But if I was bad in Sambuco, in Paris I was even worse, maybe because it hadn’t beaten me down yet and I could just take on a bigger load. I was like some bleeding camel who’d just staggered in off the Gobi with a big hump waiting to be filled to the brim. God, the stuff I put away! If there’s such a thing in lushdom as being a nymphomaniac about booze, I was it—a regular hard-on I had for the stuff, half-insane, I guess, like some fat repulsive little kid turned loose in a soda fountain.
Ah,
I don’t even want to think about it.”