Set This House on Fire (61 page)

Later, Cass recalled—sometime later that very afternoon—Lonnie stuck his head into the stockroom, with a quick jerk of his neck said: “All right, boy, come on. We got to go out toward Stony Creek and dispossess a radio. Hump it, boy.” Cass humped it. He climbed into the cab of the pickup truck next to Lonnie and they headed out of town. Had Lonnie been afraid, afraid to go through this simple operation alone, so that he required the company and support of a fifteen-year-old boy to redeem a defaulted radio from a Negro farmer who he knew would or could make no protest even if he had been at home; or did he concoct the whole plan beforehand, assuming that the man and his whole family would be in the fields most likely chopping cotton, and needing Cass to bolster him morally not to say physically in an act which already had taken outline in some far fuzzy corner of his brain? Or did what happened occur as a simple impulse of the moment? Cass never knew, nor until that morning he had been awakened in Sambuco by his nightmare had he ever really wondered—but did it matter, after all, since he himself had partaken so inescapably in the blame? He remembered the ride out through the flat hot fields of peanuts and soybean and cotton, and pinewoods blinding-green and tinder-dry, seeming almost to crackle with a parched quality of dryness both dusty and verging on combustion, the stench of gasoline seeping up through the rump-sprung seat as they jounced along, and above all Lonnie, crouched forward bare-elbowed against the wheel, mouthing over the clatter of the unmufflered engine gusts of countrified, come-to-manhood wisdom. “There’s all types of cul-lud, I’ll tell you. Good, bad, and in between. Some like that old Jupe there you could trust with every nickel you got. Almost like a white man.” Blue sky and fields, and a stretch of riverside stagnant, foam-flecked, greenly decaying; and a rickety brindle barn crazily aslant with signs on it: Copenhagen, nehi, bull Durham. “What this nigger Crawfoot is is a crook, criminal type.” Dusty fields, riverside again, a blue Greyhound bus, tires clattering and awhine, roaring southward. “And uppity, boy. He’s got a son lives up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Never saw such monkeyshines… . Most niggers’ll pay, see, give ’em enough time. Get a crooked nigger like this Crawfoot and he just plain don’t
intend
to pay, in no way, shape or form.” A moldering columned mansion, set back from the road among ponderous oak trees; a white metal sign of the commonwealth, glimpsed in a blur: plumtrees. here in april, 1864, union deserters from the army of general burnsides … “Criminal type like this Crawfoot is a disgrace on the whole nigger race.” On a rutted side road they turned off, bumping, toward a grove where a frame church stood with that breezeless, shadowed, weekday air of benison and tranquillity of Negro temples on a summer afternoon: SHILOH A.M.E. ZION CHURCH, REV. ANDREW SALTER, PASTOR,
Matthew V, 6: “Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled!”
visitors welcome. Nearby, with a castoff rubber tire taller than themselves, two Negro children only a shadow beyond babyhood played in the dust of the road, turned in white-eyed apprehension at Lonnie’s command. “C’mere.” Stock-still, they made no move or sign. The truck pulled ahead twenty feet, stopped. “You kids deaf? Where’s a nigger named Crawfoot live?” No answer, only the wide-eyed look part incomprehension, part fear, or more exactly that emotion which is perhaps far less fear than the ordinary mistrust engendered by how many overheard hours of their elders’ bitter and wrathful and despairing complaints of injustices done and afflictions borne only young Negro children know, and which, reflected imperfectly in small black faces, white men mistake for reverence, or at least respect. Neither of them uttered a sound. “Cat got your tongue?
Crawfoot!”
he repeated. “Where’s he live at?” One thin young black arm finally went up, pointed down the road toward a cabin, dimly discerned among the pines and a shimmering gauze of pollen-white dust. “Young’uns near ’bout worse than the grownups,” said Lonnie, grinding gears. “Nits breed lice. That’s what Daddy always says.”

And then the cabin itself, effaced these years from his memory, or if not effaced then only a dim blur amid the congeries of blurs that made up all his boyhood recollections, but now looming like some habitation whose every sagging board and termite-riddled sill and rusted nail he had committed with the solemnity of an oath to his mind and heart.

“Fantastic!” Cass said beneath his breath, hardly aware at all of whom he was talking to now, as he brought forth a vision of this solitary and forlorn and benighted hut, surrounded by hollyhocks and a bumble of bees and tattered washing on a line, with three creaking rickety steps that rose to an unlocked door which Lonnie, shirt sweatily plastered at his back, threw open with a clatter. “Fantastic!” Cass repeated. “What we did!”

They asked no permission, permission being not only unneeded but beyond remotest contemplation. “Jesus Christ, smell it!” said Lonnie, as the stench—of dirt and sweat and rancid fat cooked up a multitude of times and of too many human bodies in one place, of bathless crotch and armpit, of poverty naked and horrid and unremitting—struck them in the face; Cass drew back gasping. “Nigger house stinks worse than a whorehouse!” Lonnie bawled. “Whoop! Let’s get that radio and get out of here!” The radio was not directly found; every country nigger had spies in town, Lonnie explained as they tramped through the deserted cabin; they knew when you’re coming to get something, and they hid it. Crawfoot had hid it well. Remorselessly Lonnie searched, with Cass trailing indifferently after, behind the woodstove, beneath the bed and beneath the single stained and reeking mattress, down behind the soot-smeared sills underneath the roof, in the privy outside and in the tiny lime-smelling chicken coop and, backtracking, in the house again, where Lonnie, stubbing his toe against a sprung floorboard, finally reached down behind the planking and, triumphant, fished up the pathetic radio —white, plastic, already cracked, not much larger than a box of salt or rice, which had brought witchery in the night and tinny bright sounds of singing and laughter. “Hid it!” said Lonnie. “The
wise
sonofabitch.” A great slanting beam of yellow sunlight, trembling with dust, gushed through the door and filled the house with hazard, with immensity, with flame; Cass remembered this, and the buzzing flies, and joining indissolubly with the whistle of a train in the pine barrens far off, high and rending in that captured moment of South and summer, the single photograph on a table which caught his eye—the family, the man and his wife and his many children and two quizzical white-haired old matriarchs of some other generation, all solemn and standing stiff and straight in cheap Sunday-go-to-meeting, the two-for-a-dollar snapshot already fading and taking on the bluish hue of age but imprisoning still behind its cracked pane of glass one sweetly gentle, calm-visaged mood of solidarity and pride and love. He remembered, too, how this dissolved—or splintered, rather, right before his eyes—as Lonnie (spying the crack on the radio’s plastic side he let out a wounded yell which broke in on Cass’ reverie like the sound of broken glass) in a frantic swing of rage and frustration and unstoppered resentment thrust his hand violently forward, sweeping with his arm every jar and bottle and can of beans off the shelf above the stove, the momentum carrying him on so that in a sort of final flick or encore of wrath he lighted upon the photograph and sent it spinning across the room, where it tore apart—frame, glass, and all—into two raggedly separated pieces. “Shit!” Cass heard him cry, in a voice pitched near hysteria. “Not only he don’t pay for it, he went and broke it, too!” Nor was this the end, it was only the beginning. For as Cass, struck now with horror (though with a queasy visceral feeling of excitement, too), looked at Lonnie, saw the mashed-in face break up into a commotion of pink patches like rouge, he made an involuntary step to retrieve the picture but was fetched up short by Lonnie’s voice again: “Well, we’ll see about who breaks what!” And then pivoted on his toes, and with the other leg outthrust like a fullback punting a football shot a cowboy-boot-shod foot out against the flimsy kitchen table, hard, and brought the whole clutter of china cups and plates and saucers, sugar in cans, flour and meal and bacon fat, down to the floor in one monstrous and godawful detonation. And from then on he was quiet, giving forth only the faint asthmatic wheezes of a man possessed and in extremity as he went through the cabin upturning chairs, yanking from their moorings the dingy curtains, raking to the floor all such gimcrack mementos as had brought to this place color and loveliness—china dolls, a plaster bulldog brightly enameled, picture postcards (one of which Cass snatched up:
Hello All Haveing fine time up hear Love Bertrim)
and a pennant, he strangely, wrenchingly recalled, which read University of Virginia. These came to the floor, as did a maple Grand Rapids chiffonier, a patent heirloom, which Lonnie pried away from the wall and toppled earthward with a squeal of sliding drawers and the snapping uproar of sprung joints and pegs and corners. “That’ll teach him!” Lonnie howled. “Where you goin’?” Cass, panicky, had raced already to the open door, froze in mid-stride at the sound of Lonnie’s voice. “Come on!” he commanded. “This’ll teach every black son of a bitch in this county!” But,
“Ain’t you done enough! Ain’t you done enough!”
These words, Cass recalled, hung unspoken at the back of his throat—troubled, horrified, but unspoken—and therein, he knew, lay his ponderous share of the blame. For although he was sickened to his entrails in a way he had never been, his newborn manhood—brought to its first test—had failed him. Not only did something within him refuse to allow him to give voice to the monstrousness he felt at his heart and core, but this—

“So he told me to come on,” he said, gazing out over the river, as if to summon up all of that bereaved moment entire—ravaged hut wrapped in its stench of poverty and decay, and summery afternoon, and flies buzzing, and bumblebees. “He told me to come on. What was I standing there for? We had to teach every crooked nigger in the county. So we went over to the stove. It was one of those big black cast-iron jobs, I remember, and it was heavy. And what I mean is this. It was wrong, I knew. No, not just wrong—awful, monstrous, abominable. I knew this to my very soul. That goddam picture, and that postcard I’d picked up where he’d thrown it, with this scrawl on it—and that broken plaster bulldog—my heart was near about torn from its roots. But what, for God sake? What made me do it? What?

“That bleeding stove. It was a heavy bugger, see? And on top of it I remember there was a big dishpan filled with dirty water. Well, what happened was, Lonnie grabbed hold underneath, and so did I, and we began to heave and heave until it started to tilt and the dishpan began to slide off. And then you know I remember this, see, how as we stood there bent over heaving and sweating a tremendous warm excitement came over me, a feeling that—well, it was almost a feeling of anger, too, as if I’d picked up some of this young lout of a maniac’s fury and was set on teaching the niggers, too. By God, this feeling, you know, I remember it—it was in my loins, hot, flowing, sexual. I knew it was wrong, I knew it, I knew it—bestial, horrible, abominable. I knew all this, understand, but it was as if once I’d lost my courage anyway, once I’d given in—like some virgin, you see, who’s finally stopped struggling and said to hell with it—then I could actually do what I was doing almost even with a sense of righteousness. All the cliches and shibboleths I’d been brought up with came rolling back—a nigger wasn’t much more than an animal anyway, specially field niggers, crooked niggers like this Crawfoot—so I heaved and pushed there with Lonnie, and the legs of the stove became unstuck and it tilted more and more and finally the whole bleeding mess went toppling over with one hell of a roar and a crash, water and all, stove and stovepipe and dishpan, until it turned that poor little house into what looked like something hit by a tornado… .”

He fell silent and although I waited for him to speak again, he said nothing.

“Well, what happened then?” I said finally.

“That was all,” he said. “All. We left then. At least it was all I ever heard about it. Oh, maybe Crawfoot complained, I don’t know, but if he did nobody ever said anything to me or Lonnie. Of course Crawfoot
should
have complained—he’d probably have gotten a fair shake from the sheriff—but there was that radio, after all. I don’t know. I went back anyway, soon after that, back to Carolina. But you know it’s true,” he added after a pause.

“What?” I said.

“Until all those well-meaning people up North understand characters like Lonnie, and characters like this young Epworth Leaguer Cass Kinsolving, this downy Christian who was age fifteen and pure of heart and mind, and didn’t mean no harm, really, to nobody, but was cruel and dangerous as almighty hell —until they understand about such matters and realize that they’ve got as many Lonnies and as many young Casses in dear old Dixie as they’ve got boll weevils, they’d better tread with care. It’s
those
two guys that’s going to make the blood flow in the streets.” He paused. “But what I’m getting at is something else, you see. It was bad enough to do what I did. Certain things are so monstrous there is no atonement for them, no amends. I reckon I should be able to tell you a nice redemption story, about how I maybe robbed the auto store at night and went back to that cabin and laid a hundred dollars on the doorstep, to pay for all the wreckage. Or ran down Lonnie with a truck. Something clean and honorable like that, very American and all. But of course I didn’t. I went on back home and put the whole thing out of my mind.” He fell silent for a moment again, then said: “Except I didn’t put the whole thing out of my mind at all.” He rose from his seat against the pine stump, and stood erect, gazing out over the river.

“No, there are no amends or atonement for a thing like that. But there is another thing, and though it won’t bring back any busted stove or plaster bulldog or picture either, it’s something, and it’s strong. What I mean is, you live with it. You live with it even when you’ve put it out of your mind—or think you have—and maybe there’s some penance or justice in that.