Thomas Wolfe, page 486
Another thing: the Sheppertons had a cook named Pansy Harris. She was a comely Negro wench, young, plump, black as the ace of spades, a good-hearted girl with a deep dimple in her cheeks and faultless teeth, bared in a most engaging smile. No one ever saw Dick speak to her. No one ever saw her glance at him, or him at her, and yet that smilingly good-natured wench became as mournful-silent and as silent-sullen as midnight pitch. She went about her work as mournfully as if she were going to a funeral. The gloom deepened all about her. She answered sullenly now when spoken to.
One night toward Christmas she announced that she was leaving. In response to all entreaties, all efforts to find the reason for her sudden and unreasonable decision, she had no answer except a sullen repetition of the assertion that she had to leave. Repeated questionings did finally wring from her a sullen statement that her husband needed her at home. More than this she would not say, and even this excuse was highly suspect, because her husband was a Pullman porter, only home two days a week and well accustomed to do himself such housekeeping tasks as she might do for him.
The Sheppertons were fond of her. They tried to find the reason for her leaving. Was she dissatisfied? “No’m”—an implacable monosyllable, mournful, unrevealing as the night. Had she been offered a better job elsewhere? “No’m”—as untelling as before. If they offered her more wages, would she stay with them? “No’m,” again and again, sullen and unyielding until finally the exasperated mistress threw up her hands in a gesture of defeat and said, “All right, then, Pansy. Have it your own way, if that’s the way you feel. Only for heaven’s sake don’t leave us in the lurch until we get another cook.”
This, at length, with obvious reluctance, the girl agreed to. Then, putting on her hat and coat and taking her bag of “leavings” she was allowed to take home with her at night, she went out the kitchen door and made her sullen and morose departure.
This was Saturday night, a little after eight o’clock. That afternoon Randy and I had been fooling around the basement and, seeing that Dick’s door was slightly ajar, we looked in to see if he was there. The little room was empty, swept and spotless, as it had always been.
But we didn’t notice that! We saw it! At the same moment, our breaths caught sharply in a gasp of startled wonderment. Randy was the first to speak. “Look!” he whispered. “Do you see it?”
See it! My eyes were glued upon it. Squarely across the bare board table, blue-dull, deadly in its murderous efficiency, lay a modern repeating rifle. Beside it lay a box containing one hundred rounds of ammunition, and behind it, squarely in the center, face downward on the table, was the familiar cover of Dick’s worn old Bible.
Then he was on us like a cat. He was there like a great dark shadow before we knew it. We turned, terrified. He was there above us, his thick lips bared above his gums, his eyes gone small and red as rodents’.
“Dick!” Randy gasped, and moistened his dry lips. “Dick!” he fairly cried now.
It was all over like a flash. Dick’s mouth closed. We could see the whites of his eyes again. He smiled and said softly, affably, “Yes, suh, Cap’n Shepperton. Yes, suh! You gent’mun lookin’ at my rifle?” he said, and moved into the room.
I gulped and nodded my head and couldn’t say a word, and Randy whispered, “Yes.” And both of us still stared at him, with an expression of appalled and fascinated interest.
Dick shook his head and chuckled. “Can’t do without my rifle, white fokes. No, suh!” he shook his head good-naturedly again. “Ole Dick, he’s—he’s—he’s an ole Ahmy man, you know. If they take his rifle away from him, why, that’s just like takin’ candy from a little baby. Yes, suh!” he chuckled, and picked the weapon up affectionately. “Ole Dick felt Christmas comin’ on—he—he—I reckon he must have felt it in his bones”—he chuckled—“so I been savin’ up my money. I just thought I’d hide this heah and keep it as a big supprise fo’ the young white fokes untwil Christmas morning. Then I was goin’ to take the young white fokes out and show ’em how to shoot.”
We had begun to breathe more easily now, and almost as if we had been under the spell of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, we had followed him, step by step into the room.
“Yes, suh,” Dick chuckled, “I was just fixin’ to hide this gun away twill Christmas Day, but Cap’n Shepperton—hee!” He chuckled heartily and slapped his thigh. “You can’t fool ole Cap’n Shepperton. He just must’ve smelled this ole gun right out. He comes right in and sees it befo’ I has a chance to tu’n around. . . . Now, white fokes”—Dick’s voice fell to a tone of low and winning confidence—“now that you’s found out, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. If you’ll just keep it a supprise from the other white fokes twill Christmas Day, I’ll take all you gent’mun out and let you shoot it. Now, cose,” he went on quietly, with a shade of resignation, “if you want to tell on me, you can, but”—here his voice fell again, with just the faintest yet most eloquent shade of sorrowful regret—“ole Dick was lookin’ fahwad to this; hopin’ to give all the white fokes a supprise Christmas Day”
We promised earnestly that we would keep his secret as if it were our own. We fairly whispered our solemn vow. We tiptoed away out of the little basement room as if we were afraid our very footsteps might betray the partner of our confidence.
This was four o’clock on Saturday afternoon. Already, there was a somber moaning of the wind, gray storm clouds sweeping over. The threat of snow was in the air.
Snow fell that night. It came howling down across the hills. It swept in on us from the Smokies. By seven o’clock the air was blind with sweeping snow, the earth was carpeted, the streets were numb. The storm howled on, around houses warm with crackling fires and shaded light. All life seemed to have withdrawn into thrilling isolation. A horse went by upon the street with muffled hoofs. Storm shook the houses. The world was numb. I went to sleep upon this mystery, lying in the darkness, listening to that exultancy of storm, to that dumb wonder, that enormous and attentive quietness of snow, with something dark and jubilant in my soul I could not utter.
A little after one o’clock that morning I was awakened by the ringing of a bell. It was the fire bell of the city hall, and it was beating an alarm—a hard fast stroke that I had never heard before. Bronze with peril, clangorous through the snow-numbed silence of the air, it had a quality of instancy and menace I had never known before. I leaped up and ran to the window to look for the telltale glow against the sky. But almost before I looked, those deadly strokes beat in upon my brain the message that this was no alarm for fire. It was a savage clangorous alarm to the whole town, a brazen tongue to warn mankind against the menace of some peril, secret, dark, and unknown, greater than fire or flood could ever be.
I got instantly, in the most overwhelming and electric way, the sense that the whole town had come to life. All up and down the street the houses were beginning to light up. Next door, the Shepperton house was ablaze with light from top to bottom. Even as I looked, Mr. Shepperton, wearing an overcoat over his pajamas, ran down the snow-covered steps and padded out across the snow-covered walk toward the street.
People were beginning to run out of doors. I heard excited shouts and questions everywhere. I saw Nebraska Crane come pounding down the middle of the street. I knew that he was coming for me and Randy. As he ran by Sheppertons’, he put his fingers to his mouth and whistled piercingly. It was a signal we all knew.
I was all ready by the time he came running down the alley toward our cottage. He hammered on the door; I was already there.
“Come on!” he said, panting with excitement, his black eyes burning with an intensity I’d never seen before. “Come on!” he cried. We were halfway out across the yard by now. “It’s that nigger. He’s gone crazy and is running wild.”
“Wh-wh-what nigger?” I gasped, pounding at his heels. Even before he spoke, I had the answer. Mr. Crane had already come out of his house, buttoning his heavy policeman’s overcoat as he came. He had paused to speak for a moment to Mr. Shepperton, and I heard Shepperton say quickly, in a low voice, “Which way did he go?”
Then I heard somebody cry, “It’s that nigger of Shepperton’s!”
Mr. Shepperton turned and went quickly back across his yard toward the house. His wife and two girls stood huddled in the open doorway, white, trembling, holding themselves together, their arms thrust into the wide sleeves of their kimonos.
The telephone in the Sheppertons’ house was ringing like mad, but no one was paying any attention to it. I heard Mrs. Shepperton say quickly, as he ran up the steps, “Is it Dick?” He nodded and passed her brusquely, going toward the phone.
At this moment Nebraska whistled piercingly again upon his fingers, and Randy Shepperton ran past his mother and down the steps. She called sharply to him. He paid no attention to her. When he came up, I saw that his fine thin face was white as a sheet. He looked at me and whispered, “It’s Dick!” And in a moment, “They say he’s killed four people.”
“With—” I couldn’t finish.
Randy nodded dumbly, and we both stared there for a minute, aware now of the murderous significance of the secret we had kept, with a sudden sense of guilt and fear, as if somehow the crime lay on our shoulders.
Across the street a window banged up in the parlor of the Suggs’s house, and Old Man Suggs appeared in the window, clad only in his nightgown, his brutal old face inflamed with excitement, his shock of silvery white hair awry, his powerful shoulders, and his thick hands gripping his crutches.
“He’s coming this way!” he bawled to the world in general. “They say he lit out across the square! He’s heading out in this direction!”
Mr. Crane paused to yell back impatiently over his shoulder, “No, he went down South Dean Street! He’s heading for Wilton and the river! I’ve already heard from headquarters!”
Automobiles were beginning to roar and sputter all along the street. Across the street I could hear Mr. Potterham sweating over his. He would whirl the crank a dozen times or more; the engine would catch for a moment, cough and putter, and then die again. Gus ran out-of-doors with a kettle of boiling water and began to pour it feverishly down the radiator spout.
Mr. Shepperton was already dressed. We saw him run down the back steps toward the carriage house. All three of us, Randy, Nebraska, and myself, streaked down the alleyway to help him. We got the old wooden doors open. He went in and cranked the car. It was a new one, and started up at once. Mr. Shepperton backed out into the snowy drive. We all clambered up on the running board. He spoke absently, saying, “You boys stay here. . . . Randy, your mother’s calling you,” but we tumbled in, and he didn’t say a word.
He came backing down the alleyway at top speed. We turned into the street and picked up Mr. Crane at the corner. We lit out for town, going at top speed. Cars were coming out of alleys everywhere. We could hear people shouting questions and replies at one another. I heard one man shout, “He’s killed six men!”
I don’t think it took us over five minutes to reach the square, but when we got there, it seemed as if the whole town was there ahead of us. Mr. Shepperton pulled up and parked the car in front of the city hall. Mr. Crane leaped out and went pounding away across the square without another word to us.
From every corner, every street that led into the square, people were streaking in. One could see the dark figures of running men across the white carpet of the square. They were all rushing in to one focal point.
The southwest corner of the square where South Dean Street came into it was like a dog fight. Those running figures streaking toward that dense crowd gathered there made me think of nothing else so much as a fight between two boys upon the playgrounds of the school at recess time. The way the crowd was swarming in was just the same.
But then I heard a difference. From that crowd came a low and growing mutter, an ugly and insistent growl, of a tone and quality I had never heard before. But I knew instantly what it meant. There was no mistaking the blood note in that foggy growl. And we looked at one another with the same question in the eyes of all.
Only Nebraska’s coal-black eyes were shining now with a savage sparkle even they had never had before. “Come on,” he said in a low tone, exultantly. “They mean business this time, sure. Let’s go.” And he darted away toward the dense and sinister darkness of the crowd.
Even as we followed him, we heard coming toward us now, growing, swelling at every instant, one of the most savagely mournful and terrifying sounds that night can know. It was the baying of the hounds as they came up upon the leash from Niggertown. Full-throated, howling deep, the savagery of blood was in it, and the savagery of man’s guilty doom was in it, too.
They came up swiftly, fairly baying at our heels as we sped across the snow-white darkness of the square. As we got up to the crowd, we saw that it had gathered at the corner where my uncle’s hardware store stood. Cash Eager had not yet arrived, but, facing the crowd which pressed in on them so close and menacing that they were almost flattened out against the glass, three or four men were standing with arms stretched out in a kind of chain, as if trying to protect with the last resistance of their strength and eloquence the sanctity of private property.
Will Hendershot was mayor at that time, and he was standing there, arm to arm with Hugh McNair. I could see Hugh, taller by half a foot than anyone around him, his long gaunt figure, the gaunt passion of his face, even the attitude of his outstretched bony arms, strangely, movingly Lincolnesque, his one good eye blazing in the cold glare of the corner lamp with a kind of cold inspired Scotch passion.
“Wait a minute! You men wait a minute!” he cried. His words cut out above the clamor of the mob like an electric spark. “You’ll gain nothing, you’ll help nothing, if you do this thing!”
They tried to drown him out with an angry and derisive roar. He shot his big fist up into the air and shouted at them, blazed at them with that cold single eye, until they had to hear. “Listen to me!” he cried. “This is no time for mob law! This is no case for lynch law! This is a time for law and order! Wait till the sheriff swears you in! Wait until Cash Eager comes! Wait—”
He got no further. “Wait, hell!” cried someone. “We’ve waited long enough! We’re going to get that nigger!”
The mob took up the cry. The whole crowd was writhing angrily now, like a tormented snake. Suddenly there was a flurry in the crowd, a scattering. Somebody yelled a warning at Hugh McNair. He ducked quickly, just in time. A brick whizzed past him, smashing the plate glass window into fragments.
And instantly a bloody roar went up. The crowd surged forward, kicked the fragments of jagged glass away. In a moment the whole mob was storming into the dark store. Cash Eager got there just too late. He arrived in time to take out his keys and open the front doors, but as he grimly remarked, it was like closing the barn doors after the horse had been stolen.
The mob was in and helped themselves to every rifle they could find. They smashed open cartridge boxes and filled their pockets with the loose cartridges. Within ten minutes, they had looted the store of every rifle, every cartridge, in the stock. The whole place looked as if a hurricane had hit it. The mob was streaming out into the street, was already gathering round the dogs a hundred feet or so away, who were picking up the scent at that point, the place where Dick had halted last before he had turned and headed south, downhill along South Dean Street toward the river. The hounds were scampering about, tugging at the leash, moaning softly with their noses pointed to the snow, their long ears flattened down. But in that light and in that snow it almost seemed no hounds were needed to follow Dick. Straight as a string, right down the center of the sheeted car tracks, the Negro’s footsteps led away until they vanished downhill in the darkness.
But now, although the snow had stopped, the wind was swirling through the street and making drifts and eddies in the snow. The footprints were fading rapidly. Soon they would be gone.
The dogs were given their head. They went straining on softly, sniffing at the snow; behind them the dark masses of the mob closed in and followed. We stood there watching while they went. We saw them go on down the street and vanish. But from below, over the snow-numbed stillness of the air, the vast low mutter of the mob came back to us.
Men were clustered now in groups. Cash Eager stood before his shattered window, ruefully surveying the ruin. Other men were gathered around the big telephone pole at the corner, pointing out two bullet holes that had been drilled cleanly through it. And swiftly, like a flash, running from group to group, like a powder train of fire, the full detail of that bloody chronicle of night was pieced together.
This was what had happened. Somewhere between nine and ten o’clock that night, Dick Prosser had gone to Pansy Harris’s shack in Niggertown. Some say he had been drinking when he went there. At any rate, the police had later found the remnants of a gallon jug of raw corn whiskey in the room. What happened, what passed between them, was never known. And, besides, no one was greatly interested. It was a crazy nigger with “another nigger’s woman.”
Shortly after ten o’clock that night, the woman’s husband appeared upon the scene. The fight did not start then. According to the woman, the real trouble did not come until an hour or more after his return.
The men drank together. Each was in an ugly temper. Shortly before midnight, they got into a fight. Harris slashed at Dick with a razor. In a second they were locked together, rolling about and fighting like two madmen on the floor. Pansy Harris went screaming out-of-doors and across the street into a dingy little grocery store.
